Watch Scriptshadow on Sundays for book reviews by contributors Michael Stark and Matt Bird. We won’t be able to get one up every Sunday, but hopefully most Sundays. Here’s Matt Bird with his review of “Gone!”

Yup, it’s another teen novel. I never intended to be the “teen guy” around here, and I had a list of adult books to choose from for this article, but then something happened that hadn’t happened in a while: I finished a novel not because I should but because I wanted to, and the whole time I was thinking “You know, this would really make a pretty kick-ass movie.” So I figured “screw it, that’s the one I should write-up, even if it is teen again.” I am afraid, however, that I’m going to lose most of you with the cover. If you read a few teen novels, one thing you realize is they’re sometimes plagued by cheesy covers. This book is very much written at the same level of sophistication as a Stephen King novel, but it’s got a very Gossip-Girl-y cover. Another reason why I was pleasantly surprised at how bad-ass it was.

I’ve been reading a lot of first chapters of novels recently. (Full disclosure: in addition to my screenwriting, I’m writing a teen novel myself.) I do it to see a lot of different styles, but also because I rarely feel the urge to keep reading. I’m a tough crowd in general, and I’m not the intended demographic for these books anyway. Then something funny happened with Gone. After I read the first chapter, I felt the urge to read the second, just to find out what happened. And then I pretty much ate the whole thing up.

In the movie world, we worry a lot about ideas getting used up, but the book world is much more “live and let live”. The premise of this book is basically “What if Stephen King wrote a book about a small town that suddenly gets sealed within a force field and degenerates into civil war.” (Grant wears his inspirations on his sleeve: the national park inside his bubble is called Stephano Rey National Park) Then, just after this came out, Stephen King himself revealed that he’d been toying with just such a novel for years, and released his own version.

Problem? Nope. They both blurbed each other. But then there’s the other half of this book’s premise: every adult inside the bubble has blinked out of existence! Well, a year later, another big teen novel came out in which everybody over fifteen becomes a zombie: The Enemy by Charles Higson. Once again, what could have been a problem was turned into a friendly blurb-exchange. And why not? We overprize ideas in the screenwriting world. Yes, this book has a wild high-concept, and that’s what got me to read the first chapter, but I kept going because the dialogue felt authentic, the characters’ motivations were compelling, and it was well-written in a way that “beach read” books like this rarely are. Movies worry so much about ideas because they’re really only interested in getting you in the door. Books aren’t overly-bothered about that because they know the real challenge is to get you to finish the thing. They make their money over customer loyalty.

So why would this make a great movie? Because it tackles the same themes as a lot of other popular books, but in a much more cinematic way. There’s a ton of Post-Apocalyptic Dystopian titles out there right, led by The Hunger Games. Roger recommended The Hunger Games for adaptation in the very first of these columns, and I do have to agree, because it combines a high-concept action premise with a huge fan base. They’re mounting a big-budget adaptation now, and the pre-existing fans alone may be enough to sell it, as was the case with the Twilight movies, but if they’re hoping to actually win new fans without making the sort of adaptation decisions that alienate the existing ones, I think that they’re going to run into problems, with both the world-building and the ending.

I have a theory: post-apocalyptic movies only work if no new society has arisen. The Mad Max movies work because it’s still like our world except that it’s gone straight downhill. But as soon as another world has replaced ours, you get into trouble. Zardoz territory. Why has there never been a good movie of 1984, or Brave New World, or Fahrenheit 451, or The Time Machine? It’s the nature of cinema. Novels can talk to you directly and tell you what’s going on in the new world, but in movies all the information is conveyed through characters’ experiences and they’re only going to react if they’re encountering something for the first time. Both Gone and The Hunger Games, for instance, have mutated animals in their apocalyptic settings, but in the latter book, the heroine already knows what they are and describes them within the narration strictly for the reader’s benefit. And so on throughout every aspect of that futuristic world. How will that work in the movie? Gone, on the other hand, is cinematic: we start in our world, then the apocalypse happens on page one and we and see it swiftly become a bad world, step by step, and we see the logical reactions of our heroes to each change.

And that’s the other thing I want to praise about this book: the structure is just rock solid in a very popcorn-movie way. My wife always alerts me when there’s a new book with a really exciting premise, and I used to get excited until I realized that most high-concept best-sellers just don’t build the way that movies do. They might contain a high-concept idea, but they rarely ramp up to a big conclusion where the personifications of those ideas have a mana-a-mano smackdown. I hate to keep picking on The Hunger Games, but the conflict in that book, for all that it seemed cinematic, was actually way too internalized to easily adapt into a movie (a few spoilers here): The government orders a girl to kill a bunch of people, and she does, and then they order her to kill her friend, and she figures out a way to get out of that, and so she wins the games and then goes home. Since we’re inside her head, we knew that she hates the government now, but you would never know it from anything she does. She never takes any anti-government action. It’s still basically an internal book: about a girl coming to a secret realization about her government.

In Gone, on the other hand, every internal secret leads to an external confrontation. The ending is just as sequel-riffic as a lot of these other books are, but along the way each character grows and changes and settles their conflicts, at least temporarily, out loud. The biggest obstacle to adapting Gone would be that the underlying situation doesn’t really resolve at the end (two more novels have come out and there will be six overall), but the civil war storyline does totally resolve in a very satisfactory way, making this feel like a complete story.

I still haven’t really gotten around to explaining the story of the novel, which is pretty simple and nothing we haven’t seen before, but it’s an effective variation on a theme: A small town in California had an accident at the nuclear power plant fifteen years ago. The kids born since are starting to get mutations that give them superpowers. An autistic kid’s powers go haywire and cut the town off from reality, banishing or killing all the adults. It’s sort of the action movie version of the old Jerome Bixby short story (turned Twilight Zone episode) “It’s a Good Life”. The teens left in town have to take care of the little kids and grow up quick. Then the violent kids from the reform-boarding school on the hill come down into town and take over. Our heroes have to lead a counter-revolution, all while discovering their individual powers and trying to figure out how one of them caused this in the first place.

Have these books been optioned? They don’t show up on IMDB pro, but here’s a video of the author talking about how some discussions are ongoing. I wouldn’t be surprised if, as Hollywood deals with the problems of building some of these post-apocalyptic worlds, they don’t start to seek out novels like this one instead, where we get the pleasure of seeing the world turn apocalyptic onscreen.

Matt Bird bloviates about movies (and occasionally comics) everyday over at Cockeyed Caravan.

Okay, so Amateur Month is officially OV-AH. That was fun. And at times scary because some of you are terrifying. It’s appropriate that today’s script is about nightmares because I think I’ll be having plenty due to Estrogen Deprived and Effscottfitz. If this is your first day back to Scriptshadow in awhile, you can go to Amateur Week here, Repped Week here, Favorites Week here, and of course, don’t forget to sign up for a tracking board if you haven’t already. I fixed the damn pricing thing I screwed up on, so it really is $44.25 now. I promise. — Hope you guys enjoyed this month as much as I sometimes did. We’ll have to do it again sometime. :)

Genre: Adventure/Children’s
Premise: A young boy teams up with a nightmare hunter to help him catch a monster that escaped from his dreams.
About: In 2002, Spielberg/Dreamworks picked up this very hot spec. The project unfortunately fell into a nightmare of its own (known as Development Hell) and unlike in the script, there was no one to save it. But Spielberg was a huge champion of the writers and tabbed them to write a couple of adaptations, including author Scott Lynch’s fantasy epic “The Lies of Locke Lamora,” about a likable con artist and his band of followers, and an original idea of Spielberg’s, “Charlie Dills.” (Don’t know what this is about – maybe It’s On The Grid knows???). But their adaptation with the best title by far, is the script they wrote for 1492 Pictures, titled: “Carpe Demon: Adventures of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom.”
Writers: The Brothers Hageman
Details: 99 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).

Wow, I don’t review many children’s scripts on the site. But I love a good high concept idea and this is about as high concept as they come. So hey, why not change it up?

I mean we were all kids once. I remember as a young tyke, watching “Tales From The Crypt” and one of the tales was about a dead guy who came back to get his birthday cake. He kept repeating the phrase, “I waaaant my caaaaake,” as his deteriorated skeleton of a face oozed worms and slime. That night, I sat scrunched up in the corner of my room with a hockey mask, a baseball bat, and any sharp object I could find, staring at my door til the sun came up, convinced Mr. I-Want-My-Cake Man was going to burst through that door and take me to Deathville.

Which is the perfect segue into today’s script, which is all about nightmares. Hugo Bearing is an 11 year old orphan (that’s old in orphan years btw) who’s plagued with horrifying dreams every night he goes to sleep. In his nightmares is the sickly evil spider-ish monstrosity known as Mister It. Mister It doesn’t just scare Hugo, he psychologically burrows into him, reminding him that no parents will ever come to adopt him, and that he will always be alone…forever.

Hugo’s best friend is the pudgy tag-a-long known as Asmus Fudge (note – All of the names in this screenplay are absolutely brilliant). There’s also the twins, Eye-Patch Pete, and the eternally cranky Benny. As Hugo is the oldest, he’s the one they all look up to. And for that reason, he’s reluctant to tell them about his secret – that his nightmares still haunt him.

So what’s the only thing worse than a nightmare? A nightmare that comes to life of course! And unfortunately for Hugo, Mister It escapes from his dreams into the real world. After he slithers away, Hugo meets 70 year old Atticus Marvel, a green trench-coated Nightmare Hunter. A cross between “Sherlock Holmes and Don Quixote,” Atticus is quite the badass for someone who gets a senior discount. He informs Hugo that they have a problem. Nightmares aren’t allowed to exist in the real world, and it’s their job to capture his nightmare and put it back where it belongs.

As their journey unfolds, Atticus explains the rules of Nightmare Hunting. Nightmare Hunters are kind of like Jedi. They’re called in when a nightmare gets unruly. Old stories you hear about dragons and goblins? Those were simply nightmares who escaped from people’s dreams. Nightmares are identified by their class. The higher the class, the more dangerous they are. For example there’s a Class 2 Trundle Trotter, there’s a Class 3 Obesian Snackpacker, and so on and so forth. (did I tell you these names were great or what?)

The reason it’s so important to find Hugo’s nightmare is that he’s a class 10, and class 10’s are capable of spawning other nightmares, which is exactly what starts happening. If they don’t get Mister It back into the dreamworld soon, the entire planet will be invaded by a nightmare army.

The first thing that popped out at me here was the sheer breadth of imagination. It really feels like these guys thought this world through. The mythology, while occasionally silly, is easy to buy into. I mean the whole “monsters throughout history being escaped nightmares” thing was really clever. I also loved the whole class system and how it operated. For example, nightmare class is dependent on how extraordinary the subject’s fear is. Mister It is a Class 10 because Hugo is so terrified of him.

I think this leads to my only beef, which is that maybe the characters aren’t as deep as they could be. I mean, Hugo’s situation is a perfect setup for a major character flaw. Hugo somehow needs to overcome his fear of Mister It in order to take him down. But I was never really sure what Hugo’s flaw was (what caused his fear), other than the very basic: he was scared of Mister It. Therefore, the character arc (Hugo overcoming his flaw) doesn’t resonate. Then again, this is a kid’s story. So maybe it doesn’t matter.

Another potential problem is the world the story takes place in. Even before the nightmares arrive, the town is described in a very fairy-tale like manner. I would imagine that throwing nightmares into that world wouldn’t provide enough of a contrast to take advantage of the concept. In other words, we may feel the impact more if the town were realistic. Throwing a dream into a world that’s already dreamy prevents them from sticking out, right? But again, this is a choice they went with and it’s not like it’s a dealbreaker.

I’m not easily won over by children’s movies. Whenever Harry Potter pops up on my boob tube, I can’t help but wish I’d run into him one day in a dark alley so I could punch that little zig-zag mark off his noggin. But this was cute. It won me over.

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

What I learned: So we’ve talked a few times about the mid-point and what a good mid-point achieves. Usually – not always, but usually – a midpoint is where you raise the stakes of the main goal. So if it’s a story about trying to get to the moon to save 3 astronauts who are trapped and running out of supplies, the midpoint might be the shuttle that’s going there blowing up a day before launch. Time’s running out. Their predicament is a thousand times worse than it was a day earlier. The stakes have been raised. The Nightmare Of Hugo Bearing has a nice midpoint. Initially the goal is to capture Mister It and put him back into the dreamworld. Difficult but still doable. Exactly halfway through the story (the midpoint) we learn that Mister It is a Class 10, which means he can spurn other nightmare creatures into existence. Talk about raising the stakes. Now, they not only have to capture THIS nightmare, they have to capture ALL of the nightmares he’s created. Go to the middle of your script right now. Do you dramatically raise the stakes of your story?

I’ve been receiving this question a lot lately so I thought I’d write an article about it. The question is, “Really? This script sold?? This is what passes for worth half a million dollars these days?? Are you f’ing kidding me??” Loose translation: “Why do bad scripts sell?” I think it’s a fair question to ask. But I don’t think it’s the right way to ask it.

Almost every single spec sale script I’ve read shows a basic understanding of how to tell a story. What I mean by that is they have a beginning, a middle, and an end. And they understand that the beginning is their setup, the middle is their conflict, and the end is their resolution. 90% of amateur screenplays I read do not possess this understanding. The story usually stumbles, rambles or wanders because the basic notion of what’s supposed to happen in each of these sections hasn’t been learned yet. This accounts for a percentage of the confusion of why people don’t understand why “bad” scripts sell.

But the remaining portion may be perfectly valid. The script is simply, technical skill or no technical skill, not very good. So how does this happen? Don’t I (and everyone else) always preach that in order to sell a script you have to write something GREAT? How can that be true when all these mediocre scripts are getting snatched up for hundreds of thousands of dollars each year?

To answer this question, let’s look at a few examples for why a bad script might sell.

Example 1: A company is looking for a specific kind of script for their slate. Maybe it’s a teen sex comedy. Maybe it’s a Halloween’ish horror flick. Maybe it’s an erotic thriller. So they put out some feelers to agents they have relationships with, who in turn speak with the writers they represent, who in turn find old scripts that sound close enough to what the company is looking for, which they then clean up and send to the company. The company reads all the submissions and ends up buying the one that best fits their needs. Is the script always great? No. But it’s close enough so that, with a little development, they’re confident they can get it into good shape.

Example 2: Company D is looking around and realizing that the whole graphic novel craze, the one they thought would be over in two minutes? Well, it’s obviously here to stay. And while they were asleep at the wheel, their competition snatched up all the best properties. Feeling the pressure from inside and outside their company, they need a cool graphic novel to compete. So there’s a savvy intern who has a writer friend who just adapted a cool but obscure graphic novel. Does the boss want to read it? Of course! He needs a graphic novel property yesterday. Because the pressure’s on, he bypasses his reader and reads the script himself. Through the filter of desperation, even though he knows the script needs a lot of work, it takes care of a very important need, so he buys it.

Example 3: A writer coming off a recent sale delves back into his library of scripts, does a quick rewrite on one of them, hands it to his agent who packages it with a hot actor and producer, and sells it a week later. Is the script good? Maybe. Maybe not. So why did it sell? Because the writer had heat. Because being able to flaunt a script from the “hot new writer in town” brings attention to a company. Because in the business world, people aren’t very good at measuring the value of art. So they go by track records. If the script is from the guys who wrote The Hangover, starring Jim Carrey with Wes Anderson attached to direct…that’s a package they can trust. From a business perspective, if you include the script as one of the four elements being sold (script, writers, actor, director), which of those elements do you think carries the least weight? Obviously the script. This kind of thing happens quite often.

Example 4: A production company is developing a movie about an overweight Casanova. They hear that a new script is hitting the market about an overweight seductress. Uh-oh, if that movie’s made, their movie’s dead. So what do they do? They buy the script to bury it! Yes, this really happens. They will buy the script, whether it’s great, okay, or terrible, just to eliminate the competition.

So now you know Hollywood’s dirty little secret. Bad scripts do sell! But here’s the thing about all of the above examples: THEY DON’T APPLY TO YOU. Go back and read that capped sentence a dozen times. None of those examples apply to your situation. You don’t have agents or managers or the luxury of pitching movies over lunch to people who can actually make them. The ONLY thing you have…is your screenplay. And that’s why YOUR screenplay DOES have to be great.

And this goes back to what I was saying earlier. It takes time to even understand what “great” is. It takes writing half a dozen screenplays, studying all the major screenwriting books, reading at least 500 spec scripts, getting 100 people to give you feedback. It’s a humbling reality but learning how to write something awesome TAKES TIME.

I think the problem is that we hear these once every decade stories about Quentin Tarantino and Diablo Cody and we think that’s the only way to break in. “Nobody” to “Household Name” in less than 24 hours. Sure, if you’re singing on American Idol. But that’s not the way most screenwriters succeed in this business. Diablo Cody and Quentin Tarantino are the lotto winners. The rest of us have to earn our millions the old-fashioned way – through hard work and perseverance.

That means writing your first spec, making a million mistakes, writing another one, making half a million more, writing your third one, then entering it in contests, then sending query letters to managers who never get back to you, and even though you really don’t want to because you know it’s going to be awkward, calling that friend of a friend of a gaffer because he’s the only person you know in LA and begging him to read your script, and doing all that shit for two years until a manager finally calls you back and wants to hip-pocket you. It includes taking any meeting (in person or on the phone) and selling the shit out of yourself and finally getting a lousy $1500 re-rewrite on an awful independent horror film even after your manager disappears with the money and you’re forced to do it for free. Then taking more meetings and landing a few more small gigs and through the connections you’ve made, finding an agent. Then getting some even bigger jobs, and maybe becoming a jr. writer on a TV show that ends up becoming a cult hit, and using that buzz to rewrite some direct-to-DVD sequel for a movie you actually watched in the theater, and then, through this vast network of connections you’ve created during all this time, going to your top 5 contacts when you’re finally convinced that your action-adventure masterpiece in the vein of Indiana Jones is ready, and pitching it to them. And having them all say no to you, and then seriously considering giving up this crazy business because all it is is a bunch of heartache and then getting a call from someone you don’t remember and having them explain that you sent them a script seven years ago when they were a gaffer, and now they’re a producer at Warner Brothers and they just read your script and thought it was amazing, but it’s not quite what they’re looking for, but oh by the way, do you happen to have anything in the action adventure genre? Maybe something like Indiana Jones?…………And somehow, one week later, you did it. You sold a fucking screenplay.

And if that sounds like the most miserable experience ever to you, then I’m going to be honest here. You probably aren’t cut out for screenwriting. Because this is how people usually find success in this business. And for those who stick around, it’s wonderful, because you realize at some point that it was never about the spec sale in the first place. It was about your love of writing.

So I’ll say it again. The one thing that you have 100% control over in this crazy industry, is writing the best script you’re capable of writing. That’s it. Don’t get caught up in whether some shitty script sells and what that means for your writing. That doesn’t have any bearing on you whatsoever. You just need to write the BEST SCRIPT you’re capable of writing. That’s it. And if you keep doing that, over and over again, at a certain point, you just may write something amazing…that sells…to a gaffer.

A lot of you guys write in asking me where I get my scripts, where I find out about new scripts, and where I get my information in general. Well first of all, I can read minds. So a typical afternoon finds me hanging outside CAA and just psychic-ly stealing information. When I’m too lazy to do that though, I get my info from the miracle of tracking boards.

Tracking boards are private online sites that provide insider industry information. They tell you which spec scripts are being sent around town, which specs are selling, which are failing to sell, which writers are picking up assignments, which scripts are getting heat, what studios they’re getting heat at, etc. etc. As a writer, this is really valuable information. Being able to track which genres and concepts are flooding the market, and where they ultimately end up (or don’t end up), is an essential component to choosing how you want to approach the market with your screenplay.

Tracking boards also update you on job openings (i.e. a personal assistant job for a producer, assistant at an agency), new project attachments, TV pilot happenings, festival info, private screenings, and a whole bunch of other info. What can you do with this information? It’s up to you. For example, it you’re a sci-fi writer and you’re getting ready to query some agents, it would be nice to know which agents are sending out a lot of sci-fi specs.

If you’re serious about the craft of screenwriting (or becoming an agent, manager, producer, etc), if you want to excel in not just the writing side of this business, but the selling side, it’s a good idea to join a tracking board. The one I live and die by is “The Tracking Board (www.tracking-board.com).” Now one of the great added benefits of this specific board is that besides all that other stuff, they also have over 12,000 scripts in their library. That’s about 30 times as many scripts as I’ve reviewed on the site. So if you can’t get enough reading like me, that alone is reason to join. The normal price to sign up is $59.00/yr. but I’ve reached out to these guys to get Scriptshadow readers a 25% discount for the months of May and June (via the button below). This is a super deal so I wouldn’t wait.

We’re wrapping up “Amateur Month” this week. The first week, we allowed any writers to send in their script. The second week we had repped writers only. Last week we had Favorites Week. This week is going to be wonky but all you need to know is I’m throwing in one more Favorite. Welcome…to The Incident!

Genre: Sci-Fi/Paranormal Thriller
Premise: A small documentary team goes back to a Russian mountain, the site of one of the world’s most famous unsolved mysteries, to try and figure out what really happened there.
About: This is an interesting situation. Russ was somewhat reluctant to let me review “The Incident” on the site. Not for any SS related reasons though. Even though the script secured him his first manager a few years ago, he sees it as more of a “stepping stone” than anything else. He doesn’t think it’s good enough. I think he’s way off course. We tend to get bored with our ideas after we’ve worked on them forever. But we forget that each time someone reads our script, it’ll be their very first time. He may have been discouraged by The Nichol Contest, of where The Incident didn’t even make it out of the first round! Normally, my experience has been that if a script doesn’t advance in a contest, it doesn’t deserve to. But this flat out shocks me. I mean, even if you didn’t like the story, you can’t argue that the writing’s solid as hell. This may have more to do with Nichol’s notorious obsession with weighty fare, but it’s a great reminder: Don’t let the Nichol contest (or any contest) be the end all be all to gauging your screenplay or your writing. Keep fighting.
Writer: Russ Bryant
Details: 103 pages

Russ is an old-fashioned guy who believes in hard work and perseverance. Like a lot of the people who’ve been featured on Favorites Week, he’s been writing for a long time, becoming a student of the craft and steadily getting better. It’s something I remind every screenwriter. This is a marathon, not a sprint. You’re probably going to write five scripts before you write anything good. Embrace that process instead of trying to circumvent it. If you try to hit a home run on the first pitch, it will only lead to a lot of misses and a lot of frustration. I want to talk more about that tomorrow. But for right now, let’s discuss his script.

Serious-as-cancer Hugh Moore investigates incidents, specifically the unsolved kind. This planet has been known to spit out some pretty strange happenings. Hugh is the scientist who goes in and spits them back in. No, this isn’t a goofy episode of Fringe with Pacey mugging for the camera. This is a story about a committed man who seeks out the truth at all costs.

The holy grail of unsolved incidents has always been the Dyatlove Party. In 1959, a group of Russian friends took a ski trek up the notoriously spooky Yural Mountain. Weeks later, they were all found dead. Two were in the trees, three were trying to return to camp, and four others were buried, with massive internal injuries but no external ones. The Russian army quickly closed off the area and investigated, but the case was never solved.

Now an all expenses paid trip with scientific equipment and foreign guides to Yural Mountain isn’t cheap. So when Hugh is offered everything paid in full IF he agrees to allow a documentary crew to follow him, he agrees only because he knows this may be his only shot.

Joining him will be Eli, his sketchy producer, Tara, his old girlfriend and former partner, a 3-man production crew, a hotshot mountain climber named Chad Baker, a beautiful Russian cultural anthropologist named Ania, and 70 year old Yerik, a member of the original search team.

Up to the mountain they go and the tension equals the altitude. The producer wants some meaty conflict for the camera – preferably Hugh and Tara rehashing old problems – but all Hugh wants to do is figure out what doomed those poor souls back in 1959.

Tara, a bit of an eccentric, is leaning towards aliens being involved. There have been numerous sightings of strange crafts around the mountain throughout the years. It’s conceivable they may have attacked the group. Ania believes that a native tribe known as the “Mansi” murdered them. Others believe it was an avalanche. But no single theory can explain all of the deaths, which is why Hugh is here. He thinks a straight-forward scientific approach is the key to finding the answers.

Except he won’t get the chance. Almost immediately, things start going wrong. On the first night, there’s a minor avalanche, which separates the group. Some members spot a light off in the distance. They choose to follow it. Others find footprints, which they also follow, only to find that they abruptly stop. How do footsteps stop?

And then it gets really bad. The group is split up in a way that’s eerily reminiscent of the team from 1959. They’re starting to see things that don’t make sense, do things that defy rational explanation. This isn’t a story about finding out what happened that fateful night. It’s a story about getting off this mountain alive.

The first thing I want to point out here is something that’s so crucial to writing a good screenplay. We get into this story right away. We don’t start off watching our protagonist sit in the park. We don’t see him having a couple of deep conversations with friends and family, updating them on what’s going on in his life. We don’t watch him drive up Highway 1, searching for meaning, wondering if he should continue his career or move on to something else. We don’t wait 30 pages for our hero to start talking to people that actually have something to do with the story.

No. We jump into the story RIGHT AWAY. The very first scene is Hugh explaining to the documentary financers what the Dyatlov Incident is. And it’s such a fascinating story, we’re immediately intrigued. And it doesn’t stop there. We actually GET ONTO the mountain by page 13. Page 13!! An inexperienced writer wouldn’t have us there til page 50. This is such a basic rule, but it’s one I see ignored in almost every amateur screenplay I read. Get to your story RIGHT AWAY. You don’t have time to diddle-daddle.

Now while the entire first half of the script is almost perfect, it starts running into some trouble in the second half. Character motivations get sloppy. Geographically we don’t really understand where everyone is or what’s going on. But most importantly, the explanations behind the mysteries are too vague. The thing I’ve found with this kind of movie is that the more clear your explanations are, the better. If you can explain the movie’s central mysteries in a single sentence, you’re on the right track. But when your explanations start reaching paragraph length, and it sounds more like you’re trying to convince the reader than simply tell them, that’s a really bad sign.

Another issue is that there isn’t enough inter-character or internal character exploration going on. A second act is really less about the plot and more about the issues the characters are experiencing. Them trying to grow and overcome those issues, whether they be within themselves or with someone else, is what keeps us entertained. So in Aliens, for example, the middle act was more about trust than it was about the aliens. Ripley doesn’t trust these marines when they get to the planet. Her skepticism is verified when Burke tries to hide an alien inside of her. When Newt disappears, it’s about living up to the trust Ripley promised her. And in the end it’s about Ripley trusting Bishop to wait for her, even though he signifies the core of her distrust (dating back, of course, to the android deceiving her from the first Alien). That’s a lot of character stuff going on in what’s supposedly a big dumb movie about killing aliens.

There are shreds of character issues here in The Incident, such as past relationship issues with Hugh and Tara, but it’s too ill-defined to warrant any true emotional investment. So I think if Russ would’ve focused more on the characters here in this act, and less on the bells and whistles (mysteries and twists), he would’ve been in better shape.

But the ending here is the real issue. Like I mentioned above, it’s too muddled to satisfy our appetite. And I think the same rules about the second act apply. The concept gets the audience in the door. But the character’s journeys are what keep them around. And I know I’m going to get roasted for this but I don’t care. I thought Lost did a brilliant job in their finale on focusing on the character issues as opposed to the more tempting plot revelations. The entire episode was about characters finding redemption, coming to terms with their faults, and resolving the conflicts between each other. Although it would’ve been tempting to build the ending around one giant twist or revelation, it never would’ve worked. Emotionally, we got way more out of seeing these characters come full circle.

Now I’m not saying you should totally abandon plot in your endings. You still have to conclude your story. Haley Joel Osmet still needed to see dead people. But your focus should always be on the characters first. The plot ending is icing on the cake. I think had Russ taken this approach (or if he does take this approach in the future), he could create something amazing.

It sounds like I’m tearing down the script here but I’m not. I think this script, particularly with Russ’ talent, has the kind of potential to not only get purchased, but to become an actual movie. So I’m curious, after you read it, what your suggestions will be to conclude this in a satisfactory manner. Cause I have a lot of hope for this screenplay. Take a look and tell me what you think.

Script link: The Incident

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

What I learned: How to introduce a character the right way! The Incident isn’t perfect in this respect, but I noticed that more times than not, Russ got it right. Amateur writers make the mistake of thinking they can introduce a character like this: “JOE, tall and skinny,” and we’ll know exactly what they look like, exactly who they are, and exactly what’s going on in their heads, FOR THE ENTIRETY OF THE STORY. We don’t know your character from Adam. Just because you know where he went to school in 3rd grade doesn’t mean we know. We only know WHAT YOU TELL US. So there are two things you can do when you introduce your character to make sure we never forget him/her. First, give us an awesome description. Something that lets us know exactly who the character is. Here’s a description of Colter from Source Code: “Colter looks to be thirty years old. A military buzz cut. A disciplined physique, lean and spare, almost gaunt. Skin burnished by hears of desert sandstorms and equatorial sun. His expression, prematurely aged by combat, is perpetually wary, sometimes predatory, accustomed to trouble.” Now that’s a little longer than I’d prefer, but you tell me you don’t know exactly who that guy is after the description is over. And tell me you don’t know a million times more about Colter than this guy: “JOE, tall and skinny.”

Second, put your character in a surrounding that tells us exactly who they are. This isn’t always possible because the intricacies of your story (and where your characters need to be) may prevent it. But if you can do, do it. For example, if they’re a famous mountain climber, we should meet them on the most dangerous mountain in the world (which is how we meet Chad here). If they’re a ladies man, introduce them at a bar, chatting up a woman, then getting a text from ANOTHER woman. You get the idea. If we SEE the characters in the element that best represents them, that goes way beyond just knowing what they look like.

Always do at least one of these when you’re setting up your characters, but I’d strongly suggest you do both. If you do it right, I promise you the reader will know that character better than he knows his own best friend.