Genre: Horror
Logline (from writer): A home-invading female serial killer stalks a true crime author whom she wants to write her bloody life story.
Why You Should Read (from writer): The most famous home invader in all of fairy tale history has never gotten her own movie. This is a modern take on one of the most globally recognized public domain characters that Hollywood hasn’t cracked. The script was a Finalist in two screenwriting contests: Fresh Blood Selects & Search for New Blood 3. For this new Amateur Friday draft, I took the AOW notes to heart and trimmed down the opening pages and minimized the early voiceover.
Writer: Brett Martin
Details: 99 pages (note: This is a new draft that was sent to me tonight! So it’s hot off the presses and different from the drafts you guys read on Amateur Offerings).

Today’s Amateur Offerings winner got a big reaction out of me.

At times I was impressed. Other times I was angry. Sometimes I was intrigued. A number of times I was disgusted. A lot of times I was frustrated.

Whichever way you look at it, I was feeing something while reading this.

The important question, however, is “Was the ultimate feeling a good one?” And I’m still not sure I know the answer to that. Because there were times where I felt this script was more about the writer than it was about the story being told. It felt like Brett so badly wanted to put his mark on this that the story may have ended up playing second fiddle.

Despite that opinion, the script definitely has a voice. It doesn’t fall victim to the “Seventy-Five Percenters” curse, which is a term I use to describe the 75% of scripts I read that are so average, I forget about them the second I put them down. Goldie does what a script should do – it makes you remember it.

But remember it how?

The plot follows our title character, Goldie, a 20-something hot blonde who likes to murder families in her spare time, particularly units with a mom, dad, and blonde daughter. So, suffice it to say, she has issues.

Goldie’s latest obsession is a woman named Sara Berenson, the author of a best seller who’s reached a bout of writer’s block so crippling that she hasn’t written a word in months. Sara likes to do the Stephen King thing, leaving her family in the city while she writes at a remote cottage. And right now, she’s up there trying (and failing) to force out her next masterpiece.

Goldie google maps Sara, pitches a tent in the forest, and starts watching her from afar, learning her routine and looking for a way to integrate herself into Sara’s life. She finds a local hunter, Peter, and pays him to scare Sara while she’s out riding her bike. Then, just before Peter and his buddies can “hurt” Sara, Goldie comes swooping in and “saves” her.

Once back at Sara’s place, Goldie admits she knows Sara is a best-selling novelist and came up to these parts looking for her. Sara is predictably creeped out, but this Goldie girl did save her, so she allows her to stick around. Eventually, Goldie pitches a book to Sara about a young woman who goes around killing families.

For reasons that remain unclear, Sara doesn’t consider the possibility that the creepy weird fan who admitted she stalked her up into the woods might be the very psychopath Goldie’s “story” is about.

In the interim, the girls must fend off a slew of horny men who include Sara’s secret lover, Rick, and Peter’s hunting buddies. Rest assured, there is a lot of bloody slaughtering that goes on. All of which needs to be taken care of before Sara’s family comes to visit and she can finally finish this book and move on.

Brett’s done something I’ve been telling everyone to consider – take the fairy tale genre and flip it on its head. Now, to be honest, this isn’t what I imagined when I said that. But maybe that’s a good thing. If it’s what I expected, then the idea probably isn’t fresh enough.

Brett also takes a lot of chances here. I mean, things get weird. We’ve got a fairy tale heroine who masturbates to photos of happy families. And that’s just the appetizer. I’m not surprised at all that this kicked ass in a couple of horror screenwriting contests. The writing is bold and strong.

With that said, a couple of issues kept popping up while I was reading. The biggest of which was that the writing felt like it was trying too hard. This script became more about shocking you than it did about telling a good story.

The family photo masturbation is one example. There’s also a moment where Goldie breaks the fourth wall and tells us she’s going to kill us if we tell anyone her secret. There’s a moment where we inhabit the body of someone Goldie brutally slaughters. There’s a moment where Sara, who, up until that point was, at worst, a cheater, becomes sexually turned on when she sees Goldie torturing a man to death.

I just felt like the writer was asking the question: How can I best shock the audience in this moment? Rather than: How can I milk the most drama out of this sequence? How can I illicit the most emotion out of this scene?

Remember that shock is just that – shock. It lasts for a second then it’s gone. So it’s not a great screenwriting tool to utilize. As a screenwriter, you want to look for tools that keep the reader’s interest over an extended period of time. That’s why suspense is such a great concept to learn. You can use it to draw a reader in over 20-30 pages if you do it right.

Another thing I had an issue with was that the characters didn’t act like real people. They acted like movie characters.

I’ll give you a couple of examples. Why would Goldie immediately tell Sara that she knows who she is and drove out into the wilderness to find her? You’ve just put your “target” on Terrorist Threat Alert Level 10. You might as well have worn a shirt that said, “I’m a crazy stalker who might kill you.” It would’ve made a lot more sense for Goldie to feign ignorance about who Sara was, then work her scheme in once she gained Sara’s trust.

As for Sara, I repeatedly asked why she was allowing this girl who was clearly a psychopath to stay with her. Goldie would scream at Sara, threaten her family, tell Sara she wished she had been gang-raped by Peter and his friends. Yet one scene later, Sara would be allowing Goldie back into her good graces.

True, there were times where there were extenuating circumstances (Goldie rushing to Sara’s defense when the man she was having an affair with was trying to rape her) but those scenes were so manufactured (How did Rick go from a casual affair to an obsessed rapist?) that you knew the only reason they were there was to create a scenario by which Sara giving Goldie another chance made sense.

This is something we don’t talk about a lot because these are the nuances of screenwriting and the nuances of screenwriting don’t have fancy names like “inciting incident” or “mid-point twist.” They’re mostly about feel. And where the mistakes are made in “feel” is when the writer wants something to happen so badly that he’s willing to look past a truthful moment in order to get the plot to where he needs it to go.

And that’s the thing that ultimately kept me from investing in this script. It was more about the writer than it was about writing a believable great story.

My advice to Brett, if he wants to write another draft, is to drop the gimmicks and the shocks. Instead, focus on writing a great story. Even if you made that one change of Goldie not telling Sara she knew who she was, you’d have a good 20-30 pages driven entirely by dramatic irony – the fact that we know Goldie is dangerous but Sara does not.

And really get into your characters’ heads and try to be truthful. Don’t write the movie scene. Write what people would really do. Because, right now, the swings in emotion (a character hates another character one second, then four dialogue lines later, they’re best friends again) just aren’t realistic. And the reason for that is you’re not treating these characters like real people. You’re treating them like pawns.

I hope you take all this to heart, Brett. You’re one of the most positive guys out there. And you clearly have talent. It’s just tweaks in the way you approach the writing that are going to pay dividends. Good luck!

Script link: Goldie (newest draft)

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

What I learned: One of the biggest problems I notice in the amateur scripts I’ve read lately is writers don’t treat their characters like real people. If a character is about to get shot, they’d rather write a cool move line (“Go ahead, do it”) than ask what that character would really feel and really say in that moment. In other words: THE TRUTH. Look, you have some creative license to massage reality in storytelling. And there are certain projects that are built around being unrealistic. But for the most part, you should look to be truthful. Because the more you manipulate reality to fit your writing agenda, the less we’re going to believe in what’s happening.

Genre: Drama
Premise: The true story of the kidnapping of the richest man in the world’s grandson, and the subsequent refusal by John Paul Getty to pay the ransom.
About: If you got the feeling after Alien Covenant that Ridley Scott wasn’t interested in making an Alien movie, today’s project may be the reason why, as this film is set up to win Scott some Oscars. The “All The Money in the World” package just sold at Cannes, and will star Mark Wahlberg, Kevin Spacey, and Michelle Williams. The script is written by long-time scribe David Scarpa, whose most recent credit is The Day The Earth Stood Still (2008) and whose script for this film landed on the upper half of the 2015 Black List.
Writer: David Scarpa
Details: 120 pages

The most I knew about J. Paul Getty before today was that he built a museum in Los Angeles that’s a bitch to get up to.

So it was fun to learn all about the Citizen Kane’esque figure. Getty was the man who figured out how to get oil out of the Saudi Arabian desert. He negotiated rights to the land the oil was on, built the super tankers that would transport the oil to other countries, and built gas stations wherever those tankers would sail to.

You can imagine how much money someone would make owning the rights to oil the second it came out of the ground to the second it entered your gas tank.

Like most obscenely rich people, Getty was a quirky dude. He didn’t trust anybody, as he believed they were all after his money. And he was a notorious penny-pincher, going so far as to clean his own clothes at hotels, refusing to pay the dollar the hotel charged to do it.

J Paul Getty had lots of children (the man had 5 wives) so he didn’t have time to be close to all of them. One of his first sons, Paul, was discarded like a cheap sweatshirt, and grew up poor.

When Paul’s wife, Gail, got sick of living day to day, she demanded Paul get in touch with his father and ask for money. When Paul refused, Gail wrote the letter herself. Surprisingly, Getty welcomed them in with open arms, and the family went from Baltic Avenue to Park Place.

But the money went to Paul’s head, destroying his marriage with Gail, leaving Gail alone with their children, the oldest of whom was (also named) Paul. Gail settled down in Rome with the kids. Then one night, when teenage Paul was out partying, a group of men grabbed him off the street and kidnapped him.

They would later call Gail with what, they believed, was a bargain asking price. 17 million. The world went running to Getty. What was he going to do?? Getty shocked the media by stating simply, “I’m not paying it.” Instead, he hired a fixer, Fletcher Chace, to look into the kidnapping, then went back to operating his business.

Meanwhile, Gail was in a no-win situation. The kidnappers assumed she was rich, yet she barely had enough money for her own living expenses. When a police investigation uncovered information that Paul might have faked his kidnapping to con money out of his grandfather, everyone went their separate ways, assuming Paul would eventually come back home.

This led to Paul being stuck in his kidnapper’s lair for months, his mother the only one who believed he was in any danger. But her reach was so limited, that there was nothing she could do but wait. Wait to find out if her son would come home dead or alive.

All The Money In the World (a reference to Gail saying she couldn’t pay the ransom and the kidnapper replying, “Get it from your father-in-law. He has all the money in the world.”) starts out strong, with a clever first act that begins with the kidnapping.

This is followed by a flashback that explains who J. Paul Getty is, and how his estranged son, Paul, and Paul’s wife, Gail, came to work for him, which then led to their divorce, which then led to Gail raising the children on her own.

This section solidified the relationship between Gail and Paul, which was necessary since she’s the only person in the story who cares about his return.

However, the script stalls once Getty refuses to pay his son’s ransom since there’s nowhere left for the story to go. Nobody’s pursuing anything anymore. As a result, the majority of the second act amounts to people waiting around.

The only characters with active goals are the kidnappers. Their desire to get their money is the only thing left pushing the story along. And yet their scenes lack any notable drama, since they remain cordial with Paul all the way up to the final act.

The fixer, Chace, has the potential to be a cool character, but since Getty cuts his balls off, he’s relegated to being an emotional support system for Gail.

All of this leaves the story in a perpetual state of waiting. And, to be frank, it was difficult to care. We’re essentially watching a kidnap story where no one wants to save the victim. You know what it reminded me of? That weird Angelina Jolie movie, The Changeling? You know the one where you weren’t sure what you were supposed to be feeling or what was really going on? This story leaves you with that same type of feeling.

True life may be stranger than fiction, but it’s also less dramatic. Building a story around a kidnapping where no one goes after the victim is, literally, the most undramatic thing you can do.

The lone standout character in the script is Getty himself. And you can smell Spacey chomping at the bit to play a penny-pinching billionaire. He’s also one of the most dialogue-friendly characters you can write.

For newbies out there, the “professor” character is a great device to inject awesome dialogue into your story. “Professor” characters are characters who are always using history to make a point. These little stories not only add an element of suspense to each interaction, but a splash of fun as well.

For example, late in the script, Saudi Arabia ups the price of oil tenfold, making Getty ten times richer than he already was. Chace comes to him and says, surely you’ll pay the ransom now. Instead of saying, “I don’t have the money to spare at the moment,” Getty points out that he’s over-leveraged, offering, “Do you know how Jesse Livermore died? He was the greatest speculator in stocks ever to work on Wall Street. He blew his brains out in a coat check room after he lost every penny he had. That’s how fast a man’s fortune can turn. Don’t you see? I’ve never been more vulnerable financially than I am right now.”

So add a professor character if you want some cool dialogue.

Unfortunately, none of the other characters were as interesting as Getty. I couldn’t figure Chace out. He didn’t seem to be as good at his job as was advertised. Gail did look for ways to save her son, but you always felt like she could be doing more.

Then there was Paul. Clearly, Paul was a mess in real life. He did drugs. He partied all night. He hung out with sketchy people. I suspect this is the real reason nobody looked into Paul’s kidnapping. Because he was a deadbeat loser who brought it upon himself. But Paul’s sketchy lifestyle is never revealed to us, I suspect because, if it was, you wouldn’t have a movie. Since the concept is predicated on us sympathizing with Paul, we must erase all traces of Paul being a bad person. It all felt a bit manipulative.

There’s a movie in here somewhere. But I couldn’t find it in this draft.

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

What I learned: Sandwich your boring parts. Any time you have a section filled with exposition or backstory, a smart move is to sandwich that section. For example, the first act here is backstory on the Gettys. Instead of immediately jumping into that section, Scarpa wisely SANDWICHES it between the kidnapping. We see the kidnapping right away, we then get the full backstory, then afterwards, we’re right back to the kidnapping.

Genre: True Story
Premise: How the best-selling autobiography of all time, The Diary of Anne Frank, navigated an endless number of rejections to get published.
About: This is one of, if not the, most prestigious spec sale of the year so far. It sold to Fox Searchlight in January after a bidding war. The spec comes from the writing team of Samuel Franco and Evan Kilgore, who leapt onto the scene last year with their spec, Mayday 109, about a lesser known heroic tale from John F. Kennedy’s youth.
Writers: Samuel Franco & Evan Kilgore
Details: 107 pages

I have a feeling Natalie Portman will play Barbara.

Today’s script is part of a new growing trend of specs about deeper weightier historical subjects. The trend is seen as an evolution of the biopic craze dominating the market these last few years. There are only so many cradle-to-grave (or young man-to-crowning achievement) stories you can tell before audiences rebel. So writers have adapted and are giving us true stories that are more contained, and as much about the story as the person.

The reason this is happening is because movie stars need vehicles. The blockbusters have become bigger than them, leaving their only route to prestige and notoriety the Oscars. How do you win Oscars? True stories about real people that resonate with audiences. Hence why this spec trend is growing.

Do I like this trend? Not really. At heart, I’m a sucker for a great idea born purely out of a talented writer’s imagination. But until one of you Scriptshadow readers blows the doors off of Hollywood with some killer fictional spec and start a new trend, I’m stuck with what we’ve got.

And, truth be told, when these scripts are good, they can be really good. I actually reconnected with Anne Frank’s diary recently. It itself is a masterful demonstration of the power of simplicity in writing. So I’m curious to see where Franco and Kilgore take this.

Keeper of the Diary follows two main characters. The first is Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank. We meet Otto when he and his family are first found by the Nazis in the Annex, then when he’s released from his concentration camp a year later. Otto is devastated when he finds out that his wife and daughter, who were at a different camp, are dead.

Five years later and an Atlantic Ocean away, we meet 23 year-old Barbara Zimmerman. Barbara was set to marry a wealthy man and live a comfortable life when she realized she didn’t want to be comfortable. She wanted to make a difference. So she canceled the wedding and ran off to New York to be a publisher at the prestigious Doubleday & Co. Unfortunately, because she’s a woman, she’s thrown in the typing room and forgotten about.

Meanwhile, Otto has zero reason to live. Everything he held dear has been taken away from him. But that changes when he reads his daughter’s diary. He sees a side of his daughter he never knew, one who was painfully insightful and impossibly optimistic. After he finishes it, he has purpose again – he must publish his daughter’s work. He must bring this same hope to others.

Back in New York, Barbara, while looking for a manuscript in the discarded bin, comes across The Diary of Anne Frank, which had already been discarded by two of Doubleday’s most trusted readers.

Barbara decides to give it a shot and is transported by the writing. She falls in love with Anne and her message, and she, too, makes it her destiny to publish her work. There’s only one problem, the two men who rejected the manuscript are her boss’s personal assistants. It seems that men don’t understand what a little girl could possibly know about war.

Otto isn’t having much luck with publishers in Europe either. Everyone seems to think that the book is too mature for kids and too juvenile for adults. The only publishing house even considering publishing it wants Otto to cut out 50,000 words and pay to produce the book himself.

Will Barbara finally convince the bigwigs at Doubleday to give the manuscript a chance? Will Otto give up spreading his daughter’s message? We all know the answer. But what we don’t know is how it all came together, a question that Keeper of the Diary answers.

Let’s start with the first question that most people who’ve read this script will have – What’s up with the prose?? The prose here is thick. Like really really thick. If you told me to count how many times light was described reflecting off surfaces in Keeper of The Diary, I’d probably lose count.

What’s the deal, Carson? I thought you said we couldn’t write thick prose. Especially on the first page!

A couple of things are going on here. First, this is an historical weighty true story. And when you’re writing one of those, you have more leeway to thicken up the prose. It’s important when you’re writing about history to transport us there. That requires more detail, more description, more atmosphere. So I get it. Still, there was a TON of prose here. And I think the same thing could’ve been achieved with 20% less of it.

Another thing to keep in mind – and I know it’s something amateurs hate hearing – is that these guys had recently sold a big spec. This gives them a lot more leeway with reads. As an unknown, you simply don’t have that leeway, and therefore need to write for shorter attention spans.

Despite this, it’s important to keep in mind that there’s one rule that supersedes all others. If you do this one thing right, you can break every rule you want. And that’s write a great story. If your story is interesting, if it has great characters and suspense and mystery, and you’ve managed to create a big question (Will the diary get published??) that we want answered, that’s the most important thing.

To help drive this point home, imagine a flying saucer came down and beamed some guy into its ship then flew away. Then imagine you showed up literally one minute later and had missed the whole thing. It wouldn’t matter if the least qualified person to tell you that story – a drunk homeless man slurring every word – you would still be riveted by his story.

However, if you happened to run into JK Rowling at Starbucks and she began to tell you about a woman a second ago who almost spilled her coffee, you’d be like, “That’s great J.K. But I gotta get to work now.”

Keeper of the Diary was a great story. What’s so great about it is it doubles up in the underdog department. Underdogs are obsessively likable. Even more so if their cause is noble. Even more so if they’re good people. And that’s the case with both Otto and Barbara. These two are basically impossible not to root for. And when you’ve got that, you’ve got the foundation for a great script.

The script also does a clever job of integrating dramatic irony. We, of course, know that The Diary of Anne Frank is one of the most important books ever published. So whenever somebody tells our heroes “no” or that the book “sucks,” we’re screaming through our screen: “Are you guys f&*%ing idiots!!??? This is the freaking Diary of Anne Frank! The most important autobiography ever!”

I call this “breaking the fourth wall” and it’s a clever way to approach well-known true stories because it engages the audience’s knowledge of the event and, sort of, uses it against them. James Cameron did the same thing with Titanic. We all know the ship is going to sink. So every time some smarmy oil magnate says it’s unsinkable, we’re screaming, “No it isn’t! Slow the damn thing down!”

Above all, Keeper of the Diary does the thing I always tell you to do: FIND A UNIQUE ANGLE INTO THE STORY. Had they simply adapted Anne Frank’s diary, it probably still would’ve been good because it’s a fascinating story. But it wouldn’t have been FRESH. And that’s why I’ll continue to bring this up whenever I see it. One of the biggest mistakes rookie writers make is they don’t find a fresh angle into their stories. They’re always giving us retreads of their favorite movies or favorite genres. Find that unique point-of-view and tell your story from it. It makes a huge difference in setting your script apart from the pack.

You’re going to want to bring your tissues to this read. It was really good. And despite debuting in January, it will probably finish atop this year’s Black List.

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

What I learned: You can break rules if you offset them by more important rules. In our opening page, the writers do something I tell you not to – provide a wall of text. However, they also follow a far more relevant rule – SOMETHING IS HAPPENING. The Nazis are charging towards the secret Annex and are about to find Anne Frank and the other families.

There’s an old saying in baseball. “You can’t win the pennant in April. But you can lose it.” For the uninitiated, a baseball season is 162 games long. The first month of the season is April. And what that saying means is this: Even if you win every game in April, you haven’t won the pennant. You still have 140 games to go. BUT. If you lose 17 of your first 20 games, no team ever comes back from that. You’ve ensured that your team is screwed.

The same thing can be said for a screenplay. You can’t write a great screenplay in one page. But you can prove that you’ve written a bad one. This is why, when a reader or producer says they read “one page of a script” before “throwing it away,” it’s not as asinine as it sounds. There are lots of things a writer can do on that first page to kill a script. And that’s the topic of today’s article.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way. Make sure there are no misspellings on your first page. No misused words. No grammatical errors. No screw-ups when it comes to tense. And make sure the formatting is error-free (easy if you have reputable screenwriting software). If there’s a single spelling or grammar mistake on the first page, I don’t bail on the script, but a huge red flag goes up. If there are two, I know the script is bad. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. That’s right. In the 7000+ screenplays that I’ve read, when there were two errors on the first page, the script was bad 100% of the time. So don’t make that mistake.

The above should be a given. But the rest of this stuff isn’t. Some will depend on your skill level and the amount of time you’ve put into the craft. But don’t let that deter you. This is what I call the “weeding out” process. Those screenwriters who don’t have the stamina to master the craft will eventually drop out during this phase, leaving you with less competition and a better chance to succeed.

ACTIVE VOICE

Writing in the active voice is part of the unique writing-style of this medium. Because it’s so specific to screenwriting, when you don’t see it, you know the writer’s a newbie. “Active Voice” means conveying things as they happen. The idea is, we’ll be seeing it happen on screen, so you should write in the way that it will be seen. “The man cuts the rope,” as opposed to, “The man is cutting the rope.” There is some leniency here, as there will be times when you want something to happen in the moment: “He starts cutting the rope.” But you should be using the active voice 95% of the time.

SENTENCE CONSTRUCTION
The style in which you write is how you distinguish yourself as a writer. However, there is a basic truth that must be present in every style. Your sentences must be readable. They must be smooth and easy to digest. If your sentence construction is clumsy, overlong, too descriptive, wrought with pretentious vocabulary, or confusing, people won’t want to keep reading. To some degree, subjectivity comes into play. A writing style that is pleasing to some may not be pleasing to others. But there’s a mantra here that should serve every screenwriter well: Keep your writing simple and easy to read.

Here’s an example:

He watches Vivian in the adjoining kitchen as her arthritic fingers bring a nub of a cigarette to her angry lips.

VS.

With his mother in the kitchen, he focuses on her, from which he notices her cigarette in her fingers, which are arthritic, but also angry, and which twitch in tiny angry spurts every time she lifts the cigarette to her mouth.

The first is a sentence from the opening page of “Palmer,” a script I reviewed a couple of weeks ago. The second is a butchered version of that sentence which is the kind of thing I’ll see a lot of in amateur scripts. You’ll notice that, technically, the sentence is fine. But it’s overwritten. It’s redundant. It goes about describing things in a roundabout way (“With his mother in the kitchen…”). The first sentence is clean and direct. There is no confusion when you read it. And that’s the important lesson here.

GENERIC WRITING
The other kind of writing you want to avoid is the opposite of the above: GENERIC writing. This is when the writing has no style or character at all. Writing needs some personality. And as long as you don’t go overboard with that personality, you’re good.

Joe opens a coke. He drinks it. He finishes it. He throws it in the garbage can.

If you give me an entire script of that, I’m going to kill myself. Here’s a line from the first page of Juno…

She swigs from an absurdly oversized carton of juice and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.

There’s a little more color here. A little more style. But not TOO MUCH style. Just enough to create an image in your head.

HUGE PARAGRAPHS (AKA “WALL OF TEXT”)
If I see a first page with a TON of description, I’m on high alert. That means any paragraphs that contain 5 lines or more or pages that have multiple 4-line paragraphs (four or five in a row). This isn’t a script-killer. And if the writing is pleasing and smooth, I’ll look past it. But more often than not, this is an indication that a) the script is overwritten and will be a chore to read, or b) this is a newbie screenwriter who doesn’t understand that “less is more” when it comes to description.

DIALOGUE
Since we don’t know the characters yet, I don’t put a whole lot of stock in first-page dialogue. For example, if a character has really boring dialogue, that may be because he’s a really boring character, something I’ll find out once I keep reading. But there are one of two criteria I want met with first page dialogue.

1) I either want to notice that the dialogue is really good.

OR

2) I don’t want to notice the dialogue at all (it’s so natural that it’s invisible).

If I’m reading the dialogue and it’s extremely on-the-nose (“I hate that you abused me when I was a child, father!”) or doesn’t sound anything like how real people talk (in a drama script: “How are you? I haven’t seen you in so long.” “I contracted cancer recently. How are you?”), I know the script is in trouble.

SOMETHING HAPPENING
Okay so, everything we’ve gone over so far is the technical end. The other thing you have to nail in your first page is that something needs to be happening to grab us, to pull us in and make us want to keep reading! What does that mean, “happening?” It means one of these four conditions must be met:

1) Jump into the story immediately.
2) A great intro for your hero.
3) A teaser.
4) A story is told.

Jump right into the story – The first option is the easiest. Introduce your character as soon as the story is ready to begin. So in the example I used above, from Palmer, that first page has Palmer being released from prison. It’s not big. It’s not flashy. But we’ve jumped right into the story. Had we spent 15 pages hanging out with Palmer in prison or fuddy-duddying around the neighborhood before meeting our main character, that wouldn’t have worked. Unless you used one of the remaining three options…

A compelling hero intro – If you’re not going to jump into the story, you better jump into your character. Give us something that makes us interested or excited about your hero. Put them in a scenario that tells us who they are. The classic example of this is Indiana Jones going into the cave. More recently, Deadpool. Juno is a good example. The first Star Trek reboot. This option is a great choice if you’ve got a flashy main character. Throw him and all his glory at us immediately.

A teaser – If your story starts slowly, consider adding a teaser. The cool thing about teasers is they don’t have to linearly line up with your story right away. You could start with a scene from 200 years ago. You could jump to the end of the movie first, showing your main character dead. You can show a drug deal between two characters that gets ugly, despite it seemingly having nothing to do with your story yet. A teaser is an easy way to grab us right away. The Sixth Sense, an otherwise slow movie, starts with an intense break-in from six months ago where an old patient shoots our hero.

A story – This is the hardest thing to do, but the thing that best conveys you’ve written a good script. Write a first scene that’s a mini-movie in itself. Construct a scenario that has mystery or suspense or dramatic irony. Give it conflict or an unexpected twist. Make sure it has a beginning, a middle, and an end, just like a movie. The best example of this, in my book, is the opening scene in Fargo (the movie) where a husband meets two criminals who he’s hiring for an undisclosed crime. There’s mystery (we don’t yet know what he’s there for). There’s conflict (the other guys are pissed off that he made them wait for an hour and he won’t acknowledge it). There’s suspense (we have no idea what’s going to happen here. It could go any way). And an unexpected twist (they reveal that he’s hiring them to kidnap his wife). That last piece is what sets this scene apart from so many others. He’s not hiring them to kill a drug dealer. He’s hiring them to kidnap HIS WIFE. That bizarre request is what makes us want to watch the rest of this movie.

It should be noted that the first page may only carry a portion of the above four options. You don’t have to begin and end the scene in one page. But the point is, that first page will have a purpose, since we’ll see that it has a clear plan. Which means we’ll want to turn the page. And in the end, that’s the goal of screenwriting. To make the reader want to turn the page. As soon as they stop wanting to turn the page, your script is dead to them. And that process begins on the very first page of the script.

EDIT: STRIKE AVERTED! YAYYYYYYY!

Let’s avoid this scenario.

When you look at the impending writer’s strike, this is what you see. An industry making 51 billion dollars while many writers are struggling to pay their monthly rent. At first glance, that doesn’t seem fair. But I also know numbers can be deceiving. 51 billion isn’t the profit margin. It’s the revenue. Let’s not forget how much money goes into prep and production and expenses and advertising. And let’s not forget all the TV shows and movies that fail, costing studios billions of dollars (hits pay for misses). 51 billion dollars is a big number. But it doesn’t tell the whole story.

Also, the writers have to see the studios’ side. If the studios paid everybody – actors, directors, above-the-line, below-the-line – what they wanted, there wouldn’t be any studios left. They’d all be bankrupt. There has to be some acknowledgement that these people are running a business and nobody’s in business to break even.

We also need to take into account perspective. We tend to see problems the way they relate to us and us only. Writers, obviously, feel like they’re vastly underpaid. But it’s not like we’re perfect. Tell me how you’d feel if you just paid an A-list writer a million dollars and they turned in a shitty draft, forcing you to hire another A-list writer with another million dollar quote. I’m assuming you’d feel like you just got screwed. And that happens all the time.

Look no further than Michael Jordan for a lesson on perspective. As a player, he routinely complained about how cheap his owner, Jerry Reinsdorf, was. Jordan’s team was winning Reinsdorf championships yet Reinsdorf was notoriously stingy during negotiations. It infuriated Jordan. Now that Jordan himself owns a team, he’s known as one of the thriftiest owners in the league, eschewing big contracts for his players and, yes, being notoriously stingy during negotiations. The ceiling is the roof.

Perspective is important because unless you understand the other person’s side, you’re convinced you’re getting screwed, and that’s what turns negotiations personal, which is how these things spiral out of control and everyone loses money, or worse. I’ll never forget when a writer told me during the last strike that his friend, who was also a writer and had a mortgage, a wife, and three kids, was thinking of committing suicide. After that moment, I started seeing the strike from a completely different perspective.

With all this said, there’s no question that writers are underpaid. In fact, they’re vastly underpaid. And it’s something I’ve never understood. Without writers, THERE WOULD BE NO ENTERTAINMENT!!!!!! There would be no Star Wars. There would be no Breaking Bad or Sopranos. There would be no Guardians of the Galaxy 2 this weekend. There wouldn’t even be reality TV shows. How is it that the people who give life to every film and TV show are so undervalued? Not to mention, hundreds of people become employed every time a writer writes a good script.

The answer to this question may be that writing is the least visual of all the processes in the medium.

You can watch an actor create a great performance right in front of your eyes. You can see a director organize and block a scene. You can see the cinematographer frame a shot, the gaffer put the lights in place, and the audio guy mic up the talent. But nobody sees a writer write. And if you can’t see something, is it real? If a tree falls in a forest…?


It’s why, whether you like their writing or not, people like Max Landis, Damon Lindelof, Diablo Cody, and (going old school here) Joe Eszterhas, are important to the writing industry, because it reminds the industry that we’re here. Writers are real. I would love for more screenwriters to market themselves in this digital “look at me” age. It’s not a ridiculous proposition. Legendary writers like Truman Capote and Ernest Hemingway were masters at marketing themselves. As is Stephen King today. We need to be visible because out of sight = out of mind.

It doesn’t help that everybody thinks they can do the writer’s job better than the writer. You hear a bad line in a movie and you say, “I can do better than that.” And based on that one bad line, or one bad scene, you’re convinced that you’d do a better job screenwriting than the professionals. That ignorance isn’t limited to the average audience member. The majority of people in production feel the same way.

None of these people realize just how much goes into writing. That it isn’t a line that defines a story, but the 385 choices made that lead up to that line. Look at a show like Breaking Bad. What the average person doesn’t know is that Vince Gilligan’s choice to build the entire story around a dramatically ironic premise (Walter White keeping his meth business a secret) ensured that three seasons down the line, when they had to shoot a quiet family dinner scene, that scene would still have tension and suspense, since Walter is lying to his family every moment he’s with them.

Someone who doesn’t understand screenwriting would NEVER think of that. But this is what screenwriters do. This is what we bring to the table. Knowledge of story, structure, characters, conflict, suspense, theme, dialogue and a million other things! We may not always hit it out of the park, but I guarantee you we’ll do it more than Joe Moviegoer.

We are in an age where screenwriting is more important than ever. On the feature side, instant social media reaction has eliminated the scam of fleecing audiences on opening weekend and riding that box office buzz to a respectable take. The social media rejection of films like Fantastic Four, The Great Wall, Pan, Now You See Me 2, The BFG, Ghost in the Shell, Ben-Hur, and many others, prove that.

On the TV end, what was once being heralded as the golden age of television has now become one of the most competitive arenas in business. There is so much content that the only way to stand out is excellent writing. It’s why shows like Mr. Robot, Fargo, Big Little Lies, 13 Reasons Why, Westworld, Atlanta, The Americans, to name a few, have found success. Great writing. If the people writing these shows can barely pay their monthly expenses, it’s only so long before they move on to something that does pay.

What the writers are asking for isn’t much. They’re asking for more than 1 step deals on the feature side, not to be held hostage all year for a short TV series, and, finally, a better health care package. Nobody’s asking for 5% of the gross of Fast and the Furious 9. I feel like this is totally doable. And I hope it gets done by the end of the day. Because strikes are unpredictable. For us to be a couple of months down the line with no deal in sight would be a tragedy.

Let’s get this thing done today!