Genre: Dark dramaPremise: A haunting erotic tale about a student who drifts into a unique form of prostitution.
About: Starring Emily Browning and currently in post production, this script landed somewhere in the middle of the 2008 Black List. The writer, Julia Leigh, is making her writing and her directing debut. Have to give her props for that. Not many people can swing that their first time out. This is the original draft that ended up on the Black List two years ago. But I’m betting it’s been reworked and fleshed out since then.
Writer: Julia Leigh
Details: 66 pages (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time of the film’s release. 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).

Browning

Staying with yesterday’s theme, I have yet another script which laughs at widely accepted screenwriting practices. As you can see, it’s only 66 pages long! Let’s not get ahead of ourselves though. The writer, Julia Leigh, may have been writing this as sort of an extended scriptment, a la James Cameron, for herself. Since she directed the movie as well, a lot of the heavy literal description may have just been her preparing for the visual task of each scene. Either way, it appears this unique draft got out and gained a cult following.

The story follows a young woman named Lucy. We meet her as she’s subjecting herself to a trivial medical experiment. We understand right away that Lucy needs money. After working an additional waitress job that evening, she goes out for the night, does some coke with a strange woman, and sleeps with a man she just met. Apparently Lucy’s moral compass is a little out of whack. This young woman is detached from just about every emotion available.

Then one day she answers a mysterious ad in the paper, travels to a mansion in the countryside, and is offered a job by a “Madame” named Clara. Lucy will be a “waitress” at high end events. The pay will be $250 an hour. However, it’s understood that men may “choose” her. This is where things get interesting. If she’s chosen, she’ll be taken to a room and drugged so that she will have no memory of the events. The men may do anything they want to her as long as they don’t leave any marks, and as long as there’s no penetration. When she wakes up, she leaves and goes on with her everyday life.

Obviously, the story begins focusing on these events. We watch hesitantly as a nervous Lucy goes through the meeting process with the men, takes the “forget” pill, then wakes up the next day with no memory of anything. Like her, we don’t get to see what happens. We don’t get to see what these men do. This throws our curiosity into overdrive and is the big hook of the movie. In our minds, we’re thinking: “No penetration. No marks. What in God’s name are these men doing?” The possibilities are endless and the longer the story goes on, the more curious we get.

Of course, the story *doesn’t* go on for very long (it’s only 66 pages!), and the lack of an extensive middle act prevents an opportunity to get into why Lucy chose this bizarre lifestyle, how she’s become so absent and detached from life. We only get glimpses into these past windows, such as her friendship with a dying alcoholic, and it never quite feels like enough. We want more.

However, in the end, it doesn’t matter. Once she starts the “sleeping beauty” job, we’re entranced. We want to know what’s happening when those men come in and how it’s all going to fall apart. Because it has to fall apart, doesn’t it? I mean, if you’re subjecting yourself to sleeping beauty fetishes, it can’t end well, right?

Despite the bizarre structure, the curious first act, and some strange characters whose point I’m still trying to figure out, Sleeping Beauty excels in two categories. The first is tone. The tone here is dark, dreary and unsettling. The way Lucy subjects herself to life’s worst situations is just a sad empty experience. But it’s consistent and it’s real and it works. It hits us hard enough that we want her to find happiness. We want her to find a way out of it. The second is the big one. This script’s central mystery – what happens during those sleeping beauty sessions – is so powerful as to make you forget every other misstep in the script. It’s just such a compelling question. What are these crazy men doing to her??

I know there are some people who are going to hate this script. One of my friends I recommended it to wrote back, “What the fuck was that?” But that’s its strength. It’s a weird polarizing story that doesn’t follow any sort of structure, and I’m betting that’s why it caught the imagination of enough people to vote it onto the Black List. Step into this one cautiously. It’s an odd but strangely entertaining journey.

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

What I learned: This does NOT negate the 13 Things that make a great script post. In my opinion, following that list still gives you the best chance at writing something great. I’m merely showing you that there are other ways to do it, even if these other ways are a huge gamble. If you can blow someone away with one aspect of your script (in this case – the mystery), you can make people forget about a lot of its weaknesses.

Genre: Western
Premise: A group of bandits use the cover of a torrential thunderstorm to rob the occupants of a small town.
About: The Brigands Of Rattleborge was the number 1 Black List script back in 2006. Warner Brothers later optioned it. It has since gone through some revisions but is still waiting to be made.
Writer: S. Craig Zahler
Details: Original 2006 draft (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time of the film’s release. 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 can’t believe it’s taken me this long to review Brigands. It’s one of my favorite scripts. Better late than never, right? Before I get to the actual review, let me give you a little backstory on my mindset when I read it. I knew this was a highly rated Black List script, but I was far from a Western fan. Something about that era and that time is just hard to relate to for me. And let’s be honest, Westerns aren’t exactly burning up the box office. The system will take a shot with one every few years (Jonah Hex – albeit a stylized Western – is an example), but they’re usually considered a risky bet. However, this is the very reason I wanted to read Brigands. I figured if this many people liked a Western, one of the hardest genres to sell, then there must be something special about it.

Part of the reason I wanted to review it today was because we’ve been talking about what a “great script” is these last couple of weeks and I’ve been giving you examples of scripts that perfectly fit my “13 Keys To A Great Script,” but I wanted to show you the other side of the coin. I’d consider Brigands a great script and yet it DOESN’T follow a lot of the “great script” protocol. It’s 137 pages. It definitely doesn’t start off fast. So I thought it would be interesting to look at why it still works.

Brigands begins with two cowboys asking an Indian Chief to perform a fierce rain dance to bring a lethal storm down on a nearby town. What we’ll later find out is that the rain storm is a cover for our baddies to go in and steal from the town’s richest residents. This is where Brigands deviates heavily from convention. It uses the next few days and 60 pages (SIXTY!) to introduce us, in exquisite detail, to each and all of the main characters who live in the town. These, of course, are the people who will later get robbed.

Now 60 pages of character work and no plot are akin to strapping a REAL ticking time bomb to yourself and jumping off the Sears Tower. In short, it’s a quick recipe to el scripto destructiono. But what we find out is that Zahler is a master at creating characters, from their picturesque descriptions to their inner and exterior conflicts. Every single person in this script has something interesting going on.

More importantly, there’s a reason he decides to take so long in this part of the script. Zahler knows you won’t care about any of these characters dying if you don’t know them intimately. This is why we spend so much time with them. When these people do end up getting murdered, you feel it. It hits you because you know them so well. You’ve just spent 60 straight pages with them!

The story is anchored by three of these characters. You have Billy Lee, the heartless gunslinger who would shoot his own child if it got him an advance on his paycheck. He’s the man who will be doing all the killing. You have Pickett, the 50-something by-the-books Sheriff whose only concern is keeping the peace. And finally you have Abraham, the dark mysterious doctor/drifter who somehow knew the town was in trouble before they did. He’s here to settle a score, a score that goes back a long ways.

When the storm finally hits, Billy Lee and his gang slip in and out of the houses, leaving a trail of ruin wherever they can. The gang tortures, rapes, and murders anyone in their path. Most of this is described in horrific detail. We truly feel the horror of what’s happening. When it’s all over, when they’ve got the money and have hightailed it out of there, Pickett receives devastating news. Someone very close to him has been killed by the bandits. As a result, he’ll have to put all that moral highground aside, and team up with a most unlikely adversary – Abraham.

The reason the script works is simple. Its character goal, the driving force behind the story, is the strongest character goal I think I’ve ever read. Revenge on its own is an incredibly powerful driving force. But here, we got to know the person who was murdered. We know how much it hurts our hero. We felt that love between them. For that reason, we desperately want retaliation. This isn’t just his revenge story, it’s ours.

What I loved about Brigands though, is it adds this second mysterious element in Abraham. This man who dresses in all black, who makes his own bullets, who’s a doctor (what’s a doctor doing here??). The evolving mystery behind his character is the perfect counterpart to Pickett’s revenge story. We need something to balance the relentless horror of that thread, and he does it perfectly. Not to mention, the actual revenge scene, the way Abraham takes care of one of the bad guys, is probably the most memorable revenge moment of any movie in the history of film. Yes, I just said that. It’s that good!

So the closeness we feel to these truly unique characters combined with the unstoppable driving force of a relentless revenge story are the reasons this script has always hit me on a deep level. It will stay in my Top 5 until it gets made. It’s just a great script.

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

What I learned: Very simple. I learned from The Brigands Of Rattleborge how important it is to have a great villain. Billy Lee is so evil, so despicable in this script, that all we can think about for 2 hours is him getting his just due. You’d be surprised at just how into your script a reader will be just to see the villain fall.

Genre: Horror
Premise: A 1930s expedition to Antarctica results in a slew of horrifying discoveries.
About: So in light of Del Toro recently dropping out of The Hobbit, I decided to review one of his older and more beloved scripts, At The Mountains of Madness, based off of H.P. Lovecraft’s 1931 novella. But before I do, can we all just agree that MGM shouldn’t be responsible for anything that involves money. I think I have more money in my checking account than these guys do in their entire 2010 budget. The Hobbit is going to be locked up for decades unless someone pries the property away from this black hole of a studio.
Writers: Guillermo Del Toro and Matthew Robbins
Details: 107 pages – undated (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time of the film’s release. 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 can’t say I peruse through 1930s literature much. These days, the only literature I have time for is entertainment blogs. Oh, and the occasional screenplay of course. As a result, I didn’t know much of anything about “At The Mountains Of Madness.” I knew Del Toro co-wrote it and that meant there’d be at least half a dozen monsters with eyes in weird places in it, but other than that, zippo. That’s not to say I don’t like Del Toro. He’s a gifted director. But I think he’s got Tim Burton syndrome, where he cares so much about his creatures and set design that he kind of forgets about the story. So as I joined this exhibition, I really had no idea if I’d enjoy it.

It’s 1939 in Tasmania when the whaling ship “The Arkham” appears seemingly out of nothingness, abandoned and barely aflaot. An inspection team finds dead bodies, mummified dogs, and one lone survivor, a crazed man named William Dyer. Dyer is adamant about keeping “them” away, whatever “them” is. He is clear that if they get out, the world will become a living hell. I hear the same threats on an average Santa Monica street corner, but something tells me Dyer’s spittin truth.

He explains to the men that nine years ago he agreed to be a part of the biggest Antarctic expedition in history. Two ships, The Arkham and The Miskatonic, would take with them the biggest portable drill in the world, two dog sledding teams, three planes, dozens of team members and thousands of pounds of food to the ice-ridden continent. Their goal? To explore the last known frontier.

The leader of this expedition, the bullyish but determined Gilman Lake, recently discovered the fossilized remains of an odd creature, a creature never before seen by man. This trip to Antarctica may finally prove where the creature originated. And, if they’re lucky, it might lead them to more of them, possibly still alive.

So after months of, you know, floating forward, they finally make it to Antarctica, and when the morning fog lifts, they’re baffled to find themselves surrounded by huge mountains. And when I say huge, I mean “dwarf Mount Everest” huge. Everyone is a mixture of confused and fascinated. At the top of these mountains, the men believe they can make out…structures. But that can’t be. How could anybody get up that high to create anything, let alone live there?

Complicating things is the funky way their location plays with time. By some strange coincidence, all their watches and clocks have stopped at exactly 6:14 am. Chalking it up to polarity and magnets, the team sets their sites ashore. But almost immediately, they’re met with the first strange creatures of this world, 8 foot tall blind albino penguins that just…stand there.

Lake could care less about all the weirdness. He wants to explore and he wants to do it pronto. So onto shore they go. If they thought things were weird on the boat, that was like a creep appetizer. This is the whole damn creepy food chain.

The 6:14 time dilemma morphs into a full blown breakdown of the laws of physics. When they bust out the planes and start flying around, mountainous cliffs a full five miles away, all of a sudden appear less than 100 feet in front of you, all within a matter of seconds.

More creatures, increasingly weirder, are discovered on the mainland, along with something so terrifying it will change the very way we view life on this planet. This is the kind of place that could put a permanent end to the phrase “When hell freezes over.” Because by all accounts, it just has.

The idea here is to grab every bit of information they can find and get the hell out in one piece because it’s only getting colder and the boat isn’t going to survive in this weather forever. Of course, as we already know, most of them don’t make it. Which leaves us with the question – how did the group meet their fate?

I’m always blown away when someone’s imagination takes me to a place I’ve never been before, so count me a thousand-times blown away that this particular story was conceived by someone 80 years ago. Outside of the tentacles jutting out of people’s bodies (which obviously reminded me of The Thing), half the stuff here was more imaginative than what I’ve read in every horror script in the past two years. There’s something beyond disturbing about 8 foot tall blind penguins that just stand there and do nothing. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get that image out of my head.

I also loved the idea of fragmented time and space. It added a layer of complexity that made every potential circumstance they encountered even more unpredictable than it already was. I loved the revelation of how the creatures got there, what giant secret ultimately rests in the region — I even loved the simple but effective setup – two huge ships packed to the gills with equipment and men, looking for new life on the last unexplored continent.

The only area where At The Mountains of Madness falters is in how it handles its dozens of characters. When we get to Antarctica, we get splintered into about five separate storylines. My issue is that none of the characters in the groups seems to know about or care about any of the other characters or what they’re doing. As a result, the storylines feel self-contained, almost like vignettes, instead of parts of a larger whole.

This is a problem for me because it’s so easily remedied. You need those carefully placed scenes in a story like this where the leader of the group, whoever she/he may be at the moment, makes it clear to both the characters in the story, and to us, the audience, what the current plan is, how long it’s supposed to take, who’s doing what and why, and where they plan to meet back up after it’s over. It’s only natural that a team would approach a problem in such a manner. That way, the story has a destination for every character, and even if everything goes to shit, there’s still form to it. There’s still a spine in place for the characters to latch onto.

Aliens does a great job of this. Despite the characters constantly getting split up, we’re always kept in the loop about what everybody’s plans are (i.e. “Bishop crawls to the far bunker to remotely fly in a second ship – we barricade the area so the aliens can’t get in”) so we’re never confused about where anyone is or what anyone’s doing. Here, that’s not the case. Certain characters just go off on their own and everybody else be damned. It feels sloppy, and as a result, the story misses that focus that all great multi-character movies seem to have.

But that doesn’t negate the fact that this is still a blast. Even if the storylines aren’t as dependent on each other as I would’ve liked, they’re all, for the most part, interesting. There’s usually a new surprise around every corner and most of those surprises are engaging and/or satisfying. So in the end I really dug this, and see why it’s become somewhat of a cult classic in the screenwriting world. Del Toro is wondering what to do next. Why the hell doesn’t he go back to this? It sounds more interesting than the other projects he’s playing with.

Script link: At The Mountains Of Madness (This script is meant for educational purposes only. If you are the writer or copyright holder of this script and would like it taken down, please e-mail me at Carsonreeves1@gmail.com and I will do so immediately)

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

What I learned: Sometimes the most benign things in a movie can be the scariest. I’ve noticed this trend in horror films where we’re trying to make the creatures bigger, badder, and more frightening than anything that’s come before them. It’s for this reason that something that SHOULDN’T BE SCARY AT ALL can be as horrifying as anything we’ve ever seen. Case in point, the scariest thing in At The Mountains Of Madness is based off a cute cuddly universally loved animal – the penguin. They may be 8 feet tall here, but they’re immobile and blind, essentially harmless. Yet it’s that harmlessness that makes them so terrifying. The lesson? Don’t always go with the obvious choice. Do a 180 and go in the opposite direction. You may find yourself with the scariest creature/situation of all.

Genre: Comedy
Premise: A man is forced to travel cross-country with his annoying brother in order to get to his wedding.
About: Disney picked this spec up back in 2009 for 250k. Kopelow and Seifert have been writing for TV for over a decade, having worked on shows ranging from “Kenan & Kel” to Oxygen’s “Campus Ladies.”
Writers: Kevin Kopelow and Heath Seifert
Details: 98 pages – May 16, 2008 (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time of the film’s release. 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).

My vote for the most annoying person in the world. Who’s yours?

The best “two guys stuck together traveling cross-country” movie is Dumb and Dumber by a mile. The script was actually a bit of a gamble when you think about it. Whenever you write about two people stuck together in any situation, the traditional approach is to make one guy the “crazy/dumb/weird” guy and the other guy the “straight man.” The extreme contrast between the two characters usually provides the most potential for comedy. The Farrelly brothers said screw that and just put two idiots together. Somehow, we got a classic.

The Most Annoying Man In The World goes back to the more traditional pairing of super extreme guy and super straight guy, and proves that it’s still a safe bet when done well. Stuart Pivnick IS the most annoying man in the world, and I have to give it to Kopelow and Seifert for giving us one of the best descriptions I’ve ever read in a comedy. Stuart is described as… “an enthusiastic, hyper, immature, naive, nosy, arbitrarily opinionated, completely un-self-aware, chronic complainer with no sense of personal space.” I love how they not only have fun with the description, but how it perfectly portrays Stuart in the process.

Across the country, finishing his bachelor party in Las Vegas, is Stuart’s brother, Alan. Alan is basically the opposite of everything Stuart is. He always wants to get everything right and boy has that become a problem with his wedding fast approaching. Everything seems to be going wrong and Alan is having to do damage control minute by minute from 2000 miles away.

Alan also hasn’t spoken to his brother in over a decade. Why? Well because he’s the most annoying man in the world! In fact, so relentlessly annoying is Stuart, that Alan’s created a ruse whereby he works at a remote research facility in the middle of the South Pole, one where he’s supposedly unable to communicate with anyone outside of his research operators.

But when Alan gets stuck at O’Hare and all of the day’s flights are canceled, he’s forced to call the only person he knows in town. Stuart.

Stuart, of course, is thrilled! He loves Alan more than anything. And when’s the next time the government is going to let his poor brother out of that research facility? So he welcomes Alan in with open arms, situating a second mattress inside his bedroom so they can both sleep together, then proceeds to read out loud and sing in his sleep all night so that Alan doesn’t get a wink of rest.

Despite being late the next morning, Stuart drives the exact speed limit to the airport, and this leads to a series of problems which result in Alan missing his flight. But Stuart comes up with the wonderful idea that they just drive to Philly together! With options dwindling, Alan agrees. Because Alan can’t tell Stuart *why* he needs to get to Philly so urgently (there’s no way he’s allowing Stuart to come to his wedding), it results in a logistical nightmare, as more and more wedding plans continue to fall apart, and Alan must manage them without letting Stuart on to what he’s up to.

The two take many detours, with Stuart repeatedly screwing everything up as much as humanly possible. He has a medical condition that forces him to eat at EXACT times, flipping out if he’s even a second late. He listens to movie scores in the car and makes up his own words to them (He’ll listen to E.T. and sing “E.T. likes reeses pieeeeces. He’s going home soooon.”) He likes to play games like “Guess a number between one and a million” where Alan picks a number and Stuart keeps guessing which number it is til he’s right. He truly is the most annoying man in the world. And for the most part, it’s really funny.

But like I always tell people who write comedies, you have to have the story and the emotional element up to the level of the comedy, and Kopelow and Seifert do a great job with that here. This is just as much about getting to Philadelphia without letting Stuart in on his wedding as it is about funny scenes. It’s just as much about two brothers reconnecting as it is about making an audience laugh.

I saw “Get Him To The Greek” this weekend and what baffled me was just how unimportant the story was. Nobody really gave a shit about GETTING TO THE DAMN GREEK! Outside of Jonah Hill half-heartedly reminding Aldous every few scenes, nobody, from the record label to the fans, gave a shit whether Aldous made it to his concert or not. I remember that at least in the original script, Aldous hadn’t played a concert in 10 years. So it felt like the concert actually meant something and was a special event. Here, he plays a fucking concert in the middle of the damn movie!!!, completely sucking dry any of the importance of the concert that’s supposed to be the whole damn point of the movie! – My point is, if we don’t feel the push of the story – If that isn’t completely dominating the narrative – then none of the comedy freaking matters. The Most Annoying Man In The World, much like The Hangover, feels like the characters’ plight actually matters and isn’t just a convenient destination for the movie to end.

My only real complaint here is that the script needs to axe some of the generic situations its characters find themselves in. At first, going to a carnival/theme park sounds funny, but in the end it has very little to do with their specific journey, and therefore feels more like a desperate laugh grab than a logical story sequence. In fact, I think all of the set piece scenes here could use a jolt, except for the car getting stuck on an ice sheet scene – which had me laughing for a good five minutes. I thought The Hangover did this well. In the initial draft of that script, one of the guys wakes up to find out he was at a gay bar the previous night. I couldn’t figure out why they ditched that in the film, but then I realized we’ve seen that before. We’ve never seen characters steal Mike Tyson’s tiger though. It just reminded me how you have to push yourself to come up with original sequences in comedies.

Overall, a solid comedy. And more importantly, one I think could make a great movie.

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

What I learned: Comedies, more than any other genre, allow you to tell your story in the title. 40 Year old Virgin. Knocked Up. This is obviously a huge advantage in an ADD Twitter-obsessed 5-second-version no-fat-allowed world. But don’t just sum up your movie in the title, make sure it’s still funny and/or jumpstarts the imagination for what kind of movie it could be. 40 Year Old Virgin did the best job of this (I immediately thought of all the hilarious scenes you could have of a 40 year old man trying to get laid for the first time) and the 2008 spec sale “I Wanna F— Your Sister” also did a wonderful job. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. There’s still an art to it. “Two Guys, One Who’s Dumb, Roadtrip To Marriage,” may tell us your story, but doesn’t roll off the tongue. So if the opportunity’s there and you come up with something clever, do it. If not, specs like “Due Date” and “Cedar Rapids” are still selling. So don’t sweat it.

Yes! I am so glad Roger’s finally reviewing Kashmir. I’ve been hearing great things about it forever and have repeatedly meant to read it. Plus, as a bonus, he applies my 13 Keys to a great script and sees how Kashmir stacks up. I mean, I have to love this review, right? — This is what happens when you write an awesome spec. You get work. And Weiss has gotten worrrrrrrrrk and then some. Anyway, as promised, I’ll have at least one horror review for you this week – on Wednesday – and let’s just say I was pleasantly surprised. I have a sharp funny comedy review for tomorrow. Thursday and Friday are up for grabs. Enjoy Roger’s review!

Genre: Drama, War, Thriller
Premise: Three ex-mercenaries stumble upon information concerning the whereabouts of the world’s most wanted terrorist. They journey into Kashmir, the dangerous and disputed territory between two nuclear powers in order to claim the $50 million bounty on the terrorist’s head.
About: D.B. Weiss’ “Kashmir” was on the 2005 Black List with 2 votes. In 2008 it was acquired by Relativity Media with Jean-Jacques Annaud (Seven Years in Tibet) attached to direct. Weiss is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and is the author of the videogame-themed novel, Lucky Wander Boy. Back in February, I reviewed a draft of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game adapted by Weiss. Weiss has also penned drafts of the I am Legend prequel for Warner Bros., Halo and an adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones for HBO with David Benioff.
Writer: D.B. Weiss

This is a tale of three men.