Repped Week – Duty

Posted on May 11, 2010 | by admin

For the month of May, Scriptshadow will be foregoing its traditional reviewing to instead review scripts from you, the readers of the site. To find out more about how the month lines up, go back and read the original post here. Last week, we allowed any writers to send in their script for review. This week, we’re raising the bar and reviewing repped writers only. The caveat is that they cannot have a sale to their name. The idea here is to give aspiring writers an idea of the quality of writing it takes to have a professional manager or agent take an interest in your work. Yesterday, Roger reviewed the Western, “Quicker Than The Eye.” Today, I’m reviewing the first comedy of May, a story about lifeguards!

Genre: Comedy
Premise: When the Chanute, Kansas public swimming pool is going to be shut down by the uppity assholes at the country club, it’s up to lifeguards Austin and Lawrence to save the day. Welcome to the shallow end of the pool.
About: Kevin Brennan and Doug Manley are managed by Chatrone. This is the second script of Repped Week.
Writers: Kevin M. Brennan and Doug Manley
Details: 104 pages


I mean, it’s like, so obvious. They NEED to make a movie about lifeguards. Public pools are bizarre never-ending parties where every demographic comes together to celebrate the gift of water. It’s 99% chaos 100% of the time. And there those life guards are, perched on top of their tall chairs like Greek Gods, seeing everything, coming to the rescue of those of us stupid enough to try the one-and-a-half flip belly flop 30 seconds after a full lunch (tried it – loved it). They’re H2O supermen. A movie about these guys seems like a foregone conclusion. So why hasn’t it been done? Well, if Kevin and Doug have their way, it WILL be done.

25 year old Austin Travis doesn’t have the commitment gene, nor is he interested in acquiring one. The guy just likes to get drunk, get laid, and do a little work in the meantime. Austin is a life guard at a local public pool. It may be the easy life, but he takes a surprising amount of pride in his job. This is in stark contrast to Austin’s best friend however, the eternally moronic Lawrence. Lawrence is your garden variety fuck-up. There was a time, long ago, when the man was the fastest swimmer in the state. Now, the only thing he’s fast at is the pre-party beer choice – you know what I’m talking about. Standing there at the convenience store, looking at all the beer choices, wondering how the HELL you’re going to decide which one to buy. In short, Lawrence is the breast stroke to Austin’s butterfly (6 years of swim classes here baby. Hellz yeah).

The carefully constructed universe these two live in is about to be thrown for a 300 pound cannonball though because the owner of the pool, Leon, DIES! In his will, Leon leaves the pool to Austin, and tells him to never let go. This pool is the one thing that keeps this community together. If it dies, the community dies… Problem is, the economy’s a bitch and Leon’s left something else with Austin – 20,000 dollars worth of debt! Since the pool’s value is 50,000, it’s all of a sudden a tempting proposition for Austin to just sell the thing and live the high life.

In fact, there’s even a ready buyer. The high rolling James Merkin and his “young preppy asshat” of a son Tyler, want to purchase the pool and make it a part of their country club. This would, of course, prevent the public from having access to the pool, and that would be bad. But if Austin doesn’t come up with the 20 grand soon, they’ll have to go into default anyway, and the Merkins will be able to steal the pool away by way of the back door. The only solution, of course, is to have the pool party of the CENT-UR-RAY!!! And raise enough money to save the pool!

Okay, first thing’s first. Cause I know you’re probably wondering this yourself. How can there be an owner of a public pool? Aren’t public pools owned by the city? Good question. And I was wondering that myself. The writers can correct me here, but I think that Leon bought the pool for himself and then made it open to the public. But that’s neither here nor there. Let’s get to the main event.

First, the good. The structure here is solid. The motivations are clear. The story is properly laid out. They’re going to lose the pool in “X” amount of days unless they come up with the money. This may seem obvious to some, but I still encounter tons of comedies where I have no idea why any of the characters are doing what they’re doing. Or, in worst case scenarios, I don’t even know what they’re trying to do. If we don’t know what your characters are doing or why they’re doing it, you’re not telling a story. This goes back to the “what I learned” section in my review of “Bad Teacher.” One of the simplest but most effective plots available to you, is to give your character a clear and important goal and have them try to achieve it by the end of the movie. And that’s exactly what Kevin and Doug do here. So far, so good.

Also, these guys bring the funny. The dialogue, in particular, is really snappy in places. And that’s probably the script’s biggest strength. Most of the scenes are geared towards the dialogue between Austin and Lawrence, and while it gets repetitive in places, it’s usually pretty good. Speaking of Austin and Lawrence, I liked most of the characters here. My favorite is probably the moronic Tyler. In one of his more classic moments, when they’re trying to figure out how to thwart Austin’s pool party, he suggests to his father that they “burn down the pool.” His father just looks at him. Did he say “burn down the pool?” Just in general, there’s a lot of funny lines like that.

My big issue with Duty is that it’s too safe and too predictable. In the very first scene, Austin wakes up in a girl’s bedroom after a night he doesn’t remember. The scene does a great job of setting up the main character (I knew exactly who Austin was after that scene), but I’ve seen that scene in movies close to 300 times before. This predictability bleeds into the character of Lawrence as well. I’d seen the goofy fuck-up who’s always striking out with the girls more times than I can count. The character didn’t have anything new to him. One of the things I loved about The Hangover was the character Zach Galifianakis’ played. I remember reading that character before the movie came out and thinking, wow, I’ve never seen the goofy sidekick portrayed quite like this before. It was different. We also get a scene with boys peeking in on the girl’s locker room. But there was nothing new to it. There were too many times, like this, where I felt “Duty” was playing it safe.

Take the aforementioned “Bad Teacher” as another example. Look at how daring that plotline was. It’s about a pissed off teacher trying to steal money from children to buy herself a new pair of boobs so she can land a sugar-daddy. I’ve never seen that movie before. That’s why it was such a fun read. And I’m not saying that “Duty” can’t get there. I just think these guys need to take a few more chances, get crazier, and do something different. They do it with the dialogue in places, but not with the plot and characters.

I also would’ve liked a little more complexity out of Austin. The thing that makes characters in these kinds of comedies interesting is their inner conflict. What are they wrestling with inside their heads? Austin is a tad too content with his life here. There’s no OPPOSING CHOICE. You want to TEMPT your character with something else to draw out the drama within him. What if Austin had a true passion, something he’d always wanted to do, but couldn’t because he never had the money to do it? Well now the sale of this pool has some serious consequences. With that 30 grand, he could finally pursue his dream. All of a sudden, your main character has something substantial going on. Help himself or help the community? And I know this is only a comedy, but I think you need complex characters no matter what genre it is. So I was hoping for a little more of that.

These guys have comedy chops. Check out some of the videos on their site for proof (see links below). What I’d like to see is more of that offbeat humor brought into this script. Throw some more twists and turns into the plot. Give us that demented version of Duty you were afraid to try. Like Trent says in Swingers: “I don’t want you to be the guy in the PG-13 movie everyone’s realllllyy hoping makes it happen. I want you to be like the guy in the rated R movie, you know, the guy you’re not sure whether or not you like yet. You’re not sure where he’s coming from. Okay? You’re a bad man.”

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

What I learned: The 70% screenplay isn’t enough. And what I mean by that is, you can’t execute your script to 70% of its potential and expect it to sell. Remember, comedy is the most competitive spec market out there because it’s one of the last genres you can still sell original material in. So you have a lot of fucking competition. For that reason, make sure to always ask yourself: Have I really made sure every scene is unique? Is my premise beyond awesome? Did I take any scenes off? Does every character in my story arc? Am I pushing the limits of comedy? Does my story feel predictable? Am I trying new things? Are there enough surprises to satisfy the reader? If you honestly feel like you’ve pushed yourself to the limit in all these categories, then get your script out there. But if you’re not, clean up the gaps until you get it right. Because I promise you, there’s someone else out there right now writing a similar script who WILL get all those things right.

Wanted to give these guys a shout out cause they have some really great videos on their website. Here’s one of my favorites.

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Repped Week – Quicker Than the Eye

Posted on May 10, 2010 | by admin

For the month of May, Scriptshadow will be foregoing its traditional reviewing to instead review scripts from you, the readers of the site. To find out more about how the month lines up, go back and read the original post here. Last week, we allowed any writers to send in their script for review. This week, we’re raising the bar and reviewing repped writers only. The caveat is that they cannot have a sale to their name. The idea here is to give aspiring writers an idea of the quality of writing it takes to have a professional manager or agent take an interest in your work. The number of submissions was about 1/10 that of the Amateur week, so only around 90 repped writers submitted. Surprisingly, there weren’t a lot of high concepts to choose from. Maybe you Reppeders were too afraid to send me your pole position titles. I dont’ know, lol. Still, I’ve read my four scripts for the week and there’s a couple of good ones. But it’s Monday, so let’s let Roger will kick us off with his review. Take it away Mr. Balfour…

Genre: Western Adventure
Premise: An Old West magician is forced to break an outlaw from a Mexican prison.
About: Chosen out of the Repped Week Pile because I was hooked by the logline. All I know about this script is that the writer, Jamie Nash, is repped by Chad Marting of Elements Entertainment. To my understanding, although Nash has representation, he hasn’t made a big spec sale yet, which qualifies him for Repped Week.
Writer: Jamie Nash

Magicians, man.

Chances are, if you’ve written a screenplay about a magician, I am going to find it, and I am going to read it.
Can’t help it. You can blame Professor Stark, who got me hooked on magician stories two years ago when he handed me his own nasty little revenge tale that featured a magician as a hero. I guess we can never foresee our addictions, but once we’ve had our first hit, it’s game over, man.
Which is why I chose “Quicker Than the Eye” out of all the other scripts that were submitted for Repped Week.
Yep, sometimes it’s as simple as that. Look at that fucking logline. It’s so simple, yet it tells me everything I need to know.
So who’s our magician, Rog?
Max Harding is The British King of Cuffs. We meet him at the turn of the century, 1899 to be exact, and he’s performing the infamous Bullet Catch at a tumbleweed theater somewhere in the Old West. We learn that this trick has not only been the death of other magicians, but Max’s own father. Right away, we understand that Max is trying to live up to his father’s legacy.
He’s helped by his lovely assistant Anabelle, probably my favorite character in the script. What I like about these two is that they seem to have their own language. They’re great performers, and they know each other so well, they seem to communicate in their own silent, mentalism code.
The other cool thing about Anabelle is that she’s not only a dynamo with throwing knives, she’s multidimensional, generally someone you don’t want to cross, especially if you’re a gunslinger plotting against her.
Anyways, the Marshall certifies the lethalness of the forty-five Anabelle is going to shoot at Max. But to raise the stakes, as the trick demands, an old-timer in the audience stands up, demanding that they use his lethal long-barreled revolver. Max acquiesces, to which Anabelle says, “This is suicide.”
“This is theater.”
With much drama, perhaps with some crocodile tears from Anabelle, they successfully perform the Bullet Catch. An entertaining scene of a trick we all know about, but it gets interesting when the theater owner tries to cheat Max and Anabelle out of their ticket sales.
Max holds a single coin in his hand and says, “The audience was nearly thirty.”
“You questioning my ethics?” the theater owner replies.
And now we’re getting a taste of the West as the theater owner threatens them with bullets if they push the point. Of course, this is when Anabelle steps in with her throwing knives, indicating to the cheat that it’s not Max he should be worrying about.
In their stage coach, Anabelle informs Max that there’s going to be an addition to the act. “Cards? Mentalism?”
“Conjuring. I’m with child.”
And here’s the point of conflict between these two: Anabelle is being maternal, and as such, she expresses that she needs to get out of this lawlessness.
Because of Max’s flaw, this causes enough friction to make the conflict between these two compelling.
What’s Max’s flaw?
Max is driven by his father’s legacy. He’s picked up his mantle to make a mark in the world as a great magician, and it’s something he won’t let go of. He can’t. To complicate matters, he’s not making enough money to support Anabelle, much less her and a child.
Anabelle’s view on carrying his father’s legacy?
“Legacies are burdens penniless parents leave to their sons.”
So what happens next?
Right when Anabelle is about leave Max, their stage coach is attacked by a group of bandits. Even though our heroes are outnumbered, they’re not going down without a fight. Things start to look up when the old-timer from their show comes to their aid, but appearances are deceiving. A nice reversal as we discover he’s working in cahoots with these outlaws. He betrays them and Max and Anabelle are whisked off to Mexico.
It’s in Mexico that we meet the antagonist, Last Rites Lowry, a gunslinger and bounty hunter who has been a murderer for a long time. He saw Max’s show in San Antonio and was enlightened by the magician’s acts of “self-liberation”. He remembered Max’s prowess getting in and out of handcuffs, shackles, locks.
He needs Max to break into Los Cryptos, a Mexican prison run by bandits, where the prisoners are kept in dungeons, shackled to the walls.
So who’s Max supposed to break out?
Max is supposed to find a man named Little Bill Pickford and break him out of the converted army base turned jail. Lowry claims to be amigos with Pickford, and he wants to rescue him from the firing squad which will take place on the next day or so.
Max tries to refuse, saying that his skill is all an act. To prove the magician wrong, Lowry has his goons try to hang him, but of course he survives the noose and impressively escapes.
He makes it clear to Max.
Successfully break Pickford out of prison, or he’s going to kill Anabelle, who we also know carries Max’s child. His legacy.
So the second act of the script is the prison break?
Pretty much. It’s quick and dirty as Max is escorted to the prison by Lowry’s men with the corpse of Antonio, one of the Warden’s boys who tipped Lowry off to Pickford’s imprisonment in Los Cryptos.
Max shackles himself to Antonio’s lifeless body and says, “There isn’t a key in the world that can open this shackle.”
At the prison, the Warden isn’t too happy to see that one of his men has been murdered. He tries to unshackle Max and the boy, only to get frustrated, so he sends them to the blacksmith. Only problem is, the sadistic blacksmith is Antonio’s brother.
A tense tableau as the blacksmith is going to do more than unshackle Max.
He puts his arm in a vise.
He’s going to saw his hand off.
But Max escapes the shackle and the vise and he uses magic and fire to defeat the blacksmith, escaping into the bowels of the prison.
What about Anabelle?
We cut between Max’s mission and Anabelle’s predicament with Lowry. We’re treated to an entertaining dinner. They talk about Max. Lowry cuts to the quick. “I’m implying old Max is too busy with what’s up his sleeve to see what’s in his sights.”
More is revealed about Lowry, who also seems to care about his own legacy, an interesting juxtaposition to Max. “Man gets to my age, he thinks about what he’s left behind. I’ve had some scraps. Brought in my share of bad guys. But I’m hardly a house hold name.”
We’re hitting our thematic beats.
The threat of rape is present, but Anabelle is apt at defending herself and keeping violation at arm’s length. The dinner turns into a stand-off between a man with a gun and a lady armed with steak knives.
It takes Lowry’s goons to get him off death’s doorstep and away from the woman who can throw a knife quicker than he can draw a gun.
How does Max escape the prison?
It’s pretty simple, but daring nonetheless. Max captures a prison guard, who takes him to Pickford. Pickford is a brute of a man who isn’t afraid of violence, but is scared of enclosed spaces. He has claustrophobia, which creates complications for Max when he tries to talk the outlaw into hiding inside a coffin.
They scuffle, and Max finally manages to best the behemoth and stuffs him into a coffin that will be carried out of the prison by the unsuspecting Undertaker.
Max has to get past the Warden and his army of men, which he does by engaging in a swashbuckling fight with the Warden and his saber, defending himself with two canes.
What I liked about Max’s escape sequence is that he manages to escape by sparing lives, even when he gains control of a Gatling gun on the prison walls. This could have turned into a massacre, and in most Westerns influenced by Peckinpah, this would have. But Max escapes by attacking the Warden’s pride.
This was a smart, refreshing choice, or that’s how it struck me, as I’ve read lots of scripts with scene upon scene of ruthless killing.
But everything’s not as it seems, right?
Of course, we have another twist at the act turn going into the finale, which involves Pickford’s relationship with Lowry. They may or may not be amigos at all.
And it might turn into a race to discover the whereabouts and head of Ten Thousand Dollar Tackett, a dead gunslinger who carries a ten thousand dollar bounty.
And Lowry might be interested in acquiring a legacy where he’s the man who’ll be remembered for bringing down a character such as Tackett.
Sounds pretty cool. How was it?
I like this script a lot. It’s a great concept with a solid execution. Clocking in at a sleek ninety-three pages, this is a really fast page-turner full of great dialogue with an entertaining cast of likeable characters.
It’s Elmore Leonard-ish in the way that even the villains have their likeable moments.
I think the speed and pace, while being the script’s strength, is also its weakness. There are moments where it goes too fast, as I wish there was more to the escape. Feels like it needs an extra sequence, as I’d like to see Max be put in more peril when he first enters the prison. I feel like he just needs more screentime to settle into his predicament, where both him and the audience can process the terror of his imprisonment.
The ending is especially harsh, and I wonder if the tale has earned the blunt bloodshed and revenge angle it goes for in the finale. It’s heartbreaking, and it felt like a cruel turn of events. I was moved nonetheless, but I wonder if there was another route for Max and his story.
But alas, “Quicker Than the Eye” is an inventive Western, refreshing even. It melds the wonder and world of the stage magician with the mystique of the Western, and it does so successfully. It’s a small, little adventure movie that deserves to be on screen.
Hollywood, take note.
When else are you going to find a Western that features a magician as a hero?
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Screwball Banter. Well-written screwball banter in adventure scripts between the protagonist and the heroine is always entertaining. Always. The dialogue between Indy and Marion in Raiders, the rapid-fire repartee in the Iron Man movies, the wacky witticisms in any Joss Whedon adventure. Where do you think it all came from? Screwball Comedy, mein friends. If you want to learn how to write original and fun dialogue, go gorge yourself on everything from The Lady Eve to Bringing Up Baby. Absorb it all like a sponge, then filter the style in the way only you can do it, distilling it through your own unique personality and sensibility for story and character. Combined with complex characters and thrilling adventure, you have, at the very least, the ingredients to keep a reader like me entertained.
To get in touch with Roger, you can e-mail him at: rogerbalfourscriptshadow@gmail.com
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Sunday Book Review (DMZ)

Posted on May 9, 2010 | by admin

Read 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 the graphic novel DMZ!

It started with Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Sandman established a certain model for adult-aimed comics epics (especially those published by DC Comics): The creators put out a monthly series, broken up in to 5-7 issues storylines, which get collected into trade paperbacks along the way, and the whole thing builds to a big conclusion around issue 70, meaning that you end up with ten graphic novels on your shelf, comprising the whole saga. And then Hollywood starts trying to adapt it, though they can never decide whether to make it into an HBO miniseries or a movie. And then they enter development hell, never to emerge again.

It happened with Sandman, then James Robinson’s Starman, then Garth Ennis’s Preacher, then Brian K. Vaughn’s Y, The Last Man, and so on and so on. The one example that actually seems to be crossing the finish line is a similarly epic series that wasn’t made by DC (coincidence?), Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead, which Frank Darabont has set up as a series at AMC. Will this finally provide a repeatable model for how to port a creator-owned comics epic over to another medium?

Most of the above books were published by DC’s creator-owned imprint Vertigo. My favorite ongoing Vertigo book is one that I’ve never heard any rumbling at all about adapting: Brian Wood’s DMZ. Neither the book nor the creator get any mention at IMDB Pro. I did find this quote, from a recent interview with Wired Magazine: “I don’t write comics to see them turned into films since the odds of yours being one of the very, very few that get turned into movies is so small you might as well just play Lotto. But there’s always something going on: options, meetings and treatments being written for some of my books. I’ve learned with bitter tears not to feel like it’s something that’s supposed to happen. I think of it as free money.” So it sounds like he’s up for it if he someone can make it work. So what are you waiting for?

The monthlies started coming out in November 2005. Issue 51 comes out this month. The ninth book collection, Hearts and Minds, comes out next month.


Carson has pointed out that there are a dozen variations floating out there of the ultimate “war comes to a big American city” story, and one of them has to get made eventually. I’m convinced that Americans of all political stripes are secretly wracked with guilt about our predilection for turning cities all over the world into war zones. We get angry when the occupied become insurgents, but we also can’t help but wonder: “what would I do if the war came to my town?” That big, fat question needs to be vented onscreen. Various attempts to answer it have come in the form of spec scripts about alien takeovers or invasions by foreign governments. Wood goes for option number three: civil war.


Ironically, when the series started I thought that the set-up was too dated: a militia that starts in Montana quickly wins over all of Middle America, causing the federal government to concentrate in the northeast. When full-scale war breaks out, Manhattan is caught in the middle and becomes the official De-Militarized Zone. When the series started in 2005, America’s actual militia-types had fallen back in love with the federal government and this seemed to me like a very ‘90s idea. Now the militias have come roaring back to life and it all seems downright prescient. Wood mixes up the politics by making the militia into anti-military libertarians and the federal government into pro-corporate sleazebags. Niether side is sympathetic. Instead, our sympathies are with the victims of the war: the hard-scrabble skells left behind on Manhattan, who are dedicated to rebuilding their city every time power shifts and new bombs fall.


The series begins as a New England journalism school graduate named Matty Roth gets the internship assignment of a lifetime: accompany the country’s most famous war reporter on a daytrip into the DMZ. Of course, as soon as they arrive, thing go horribly wrong. Soon, only the intern is left, and he’s horrified to see the under-reported suffering of the civilian population. He cuts a deal with the Fox-News-type organization that sent him in: I’m all you’ve got left, so I’ll be your eyes and ears on the ground from now on if you agree to let me report the truth. Over the course of the fifty issues, he’s had to re-negotiate his power-position many times, as his relationship to the local insurgencies and the two governments keeps shifting, but that’s still the basic set-up.


It’s hard to write about journalists without messing it up. You have the same problems that you have with cop or lawyer movies, but greatly magnified: We all know that a protagonist should be good at their job. We also know that, at some point, as the stakes raise, it has to all become personal. (I talked about this tendency on my blog here and here) But there’s a big problem: for cops, for lawyers, and especially for journalists, this is an inherent contradiction. If you lose your objectivity, you become bad at your job. Journalist movies always build up to that moment where the hero says “Damn your ethics! I’m going to take a side!” That’s terrible journalism.

But DMZ is an ongoing series, and though Matty faces several moral dilemmas and crosses the occasional line, Wood does an amazing job of letting the drama come from Matty’s overall dedication to objectivity. Even when he becomes committed to saving the city, he knows that all of his power derives from his credibility, and that credibility comes from not drinking anybody’s kool-aid. This is a huge real world concern that has been little-dramatized. It’s why DMZ works so well as a comic and it should be the heart of any attempt to turn it into a movie or TV series.

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

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Don’t forget to sign up for The Champion Screenwriting Contest!

Posted on May 8, 2010 | by admin


Remember guys, you have one week left to get the early discounted fee for the Champion Screenwriting Contest. If you missed the original post, check out my interview with Jim here. And if you’re ready to sign up now, just head straight over to his site!

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Amateur Week – The Disappearing World

Posted on May 7, 2010 | by admin

For the month of May, Scriptshadow will be foregoing its traditional reviewing to instead review scripts from you, the readers of the site. To find out more about how the month lines up, go back and read the original post here. This first week, we’re allowing any writers to send in their script for review. We warned them ahead of time that we’d be honest and judge their material aggressively, so put that Kleenex box away. There’s no crying in screenwriting. Actually, there’s lots of crying in screenwriting but that’s besides the point. On Monday, Roger tackled “Hell Of A Deal” by Joe Giambrone. Tuesday , I took on “The Deja Vu Of Sidney Sumpter Stu.” Wednesday was the controversial review of “Blackball.” Thursday the high concept “Premeditated” and today, I’m reviewing the drama, “The Disappearing World.”

Genre: Drama
Premise: After witnessing a string of suicide attempts, a young doctor quits his job to see if he’s really rescuing people or simply interfering with their free will. He examines the lives of two survivors that he had saved from suicide; a boy in his early teens now without a voice, and a young woman who he begins to fall for.
About: Script 5 for Amateur Week.
Writer: Mark Fleming
Details: 97 pages


How does that old saying go? Cheater cheater pumpkin eater? If so, it’s Halloween here at Scriptshadow cause I cheated. But I’m not ashamed to admit it. Most of you cheated too. I told you exactly how your script submissions had to look but you ignored me and added long paragraphs about why I needed to pick your script anyway. Which I admired of course. You gotta try, right? But now I’m getting back at you.

So I said I was only going to look at loglines, but after some of the comments made in the previous reviews, I really wanted to find a script I could get behind (or, at the very least, a writer I could get behind). There was no way I was going to read scripts all the way through, but I did start peeking through the first few pages to see if the writer had talent. There were actually some great loglines, but the writing wasn’t there yet. For example, Frank Cristelli and Eric Gegenheimer came up with this awesome premise: “The story follows a group of vampire hunters who, thinking they have finally rid the world of vampires once and for all, are forced to get real jobs and confront the terrors of everyday life.” Not bad, right? But when I opened up the first page, it had an 18 line paragraph! Frank and Eric, I’m not saying your script would’ve been bad, but you can’t have 18 line paragraphs. A spec script should be 2-3 lines max!

I leafed through about 80 more scripts until I found this one. And right from the beginning, I could tell the writer had something. One of the mistakes young drama writers make is stringing together like 10 depressing scenes in a row to start their screenplay. They basically bore you out of the story. But here, something interesting was happening right away. So that was a good sign. The prose was also confident and sparse. The writing overall had a sharp quality to it. The only thing that worried me was the premise, which I knew was going to turn a lot of you off (aggh! A boring drama??!). But you have to trust me. This, by far, was the best writing I’d seen out of any of the pages I’d read this week. In fact, if we were going on writing alone (and not story), this probably would’ve finished top 2 in my contest a few months ago. I don’t think there’s any doubt that Mark Fleming has a bright future ahead of him. So what’s his script about?

Allen is a 30 year old emergency room doctor, a professional life-safer. One of the unfortunate side effects of this business is that he’s forced to save a lot of people who don’t want to be saved. Apparently, Emergency Rooms are suicide havens. This is where we find him at the beginning of the story, trying to save 14 year old outcast Peter, who’s swallowed a bottle of Drano. Allen is able to do it, but in the process must sacrifice Peter’s vocal chords. He’ll live, but he’ll never be able to speak again.

Soonafter, Allen must save another suicide attempt, this one the beautiful 25 year old Caroline, whose issues with her bitter live-at-home mother have resulted in her downing a bottle of Vicodin. Allen saves her, but afterwards he begins to question if what he’s doing is right. If a person chooses to take their life, does he have a right to interfere?

So bothered by the dilemma is Allen, that he ups and quits his job. He becomes semi-obsessed with the people he’s saved. What happened to them? Did they continue to be miserable? Did they recover? Did they just try again a few days later? He decides to follow his last two saved patients, Peter and Caroline, who both have no idea he was their doctor, to find out. It starts innocently, with notes and recorded conversations to himself, but soon he’s meeting with and talking to them.

With Peter, Allen is so guilt-ridden for stealing away his voice, that he’s compelled to help him learn sign-language. And with Caroline, he introduces himself as an architect, so she won’t think he’s some crazy doctor stalker. We cut back and forth between these storylines, as well as between each individual person’s life. Before long, Allen is deeply in love with Caroline, but too far gone to admit the truth. In the meantime, Peter meets the smooth-talking Ryan at school, who’s impressed with Peter’s bravery (for his suicide attempt). The two become unlikely friends, and Peter finally starts seeing a purpose to live.

In the end though, we know what Allen’s doing is going to cost him. These two people he’s sought out are troubled souls unsure of their place in this world. His connection gives them hope. So what happens when he reveals that he robbed them of their true wish?

I don’t know what it was about this odd story but it just got to me. The big strength here is the character work, which I’m just not used to seeing in amateur screenplays. Every character had a purpose and their motivations stemmed from deep believable problems/issues. For example, Allen’s obsession with survivors of failed suicides seems trivial at first. But later on, we realize there’s a deep-seated reason for it, which totally legitimizes his plight. Even the secondary characters, such as Peter’s friend Ryan, have an incredible amount of depth and originality.

And this script just did so many quirky things right that aren’t supposed to work in screenplays. For example, you never want to spend a full scene listening to someone drone on about their past. It’s always boring. But during one 5 page scene in the middle of the script here, Allen extensively details to Caroline why he’s estranged from his father, and it had to be one of the most interesting backstories about a father I’ve ever read.

As far as the dialogue in general, it’s really strong. One of the common things I find about good dialogue is that it’s not the dialogue itself that makes it good, it’s the situation built around the dialogue that makes it good. In The Disappearing World, the scenes between Caroline and Allen aren’t normal boring back and forth scenes where two people talk at each other. Allen is hiding something. He’s lying to her about who he is. Caroline is also hiding something, that she tried to commit suicide recently. And of course, Allen already knows that, but he can’t tell her that. So their conversations always have several layers under them. And then with Peter, he can’t talk at all. It’s all one-sided. So you’re dealing with unique or compelling dialogue sequences in almost every scene.

The script is not without its problems though. My biggest concern is all the history-related monologues. Allen, for instance, talks extensively about how there was nothing artificial on this earth until opposable thumbs came around. Caroline explains the surprising history behind contemporary art. And Peter’s friend Ryan knows everything there is to know about Socrates. Individually, I LOVED all these passages. I know you’re probably thinking “Oh god, how pretentious.” But the confident smart writing here easily avoids that pitfall. My problem was that, while fascinating, when every character’s an armchair historian, they start to lose their individuality. Each character has to sound unique, like their own person, and that one quality began to make them all sound the same. However I really liked the Socrates stuff and pretty much anything that Allen talked about. So it might be as simple as losing the Caroline art monologue.

Some other quibbles. Ryan’s abusive stepfather was too cliché. Caroline’s suicide attempt is a little too sudden (all we’ve seen is that her mom is kinda mean). The relationship between Allen and Ryan isn’t nearly as strong as the one between Allen and Caroline. And a few times, I wondered why Allen couldn’t have just approached Caroline from the get-go as the doctor who saved her. It would seem like a more natural starting point for a relationship. But I think all of those fixes, even the last one, are relatively simple.

In the end, this reminded me a lot of Peter Morgan’s script, “Hereafter,” which Clint Eastwood is now directing with Matt Damon. It’s dark and it’s slow and it’s character-driven. And there are definitely a few patchy areas. But I thought this script was MUCH better than that one, to the point where I feel sorry for Eastwood that he didn’t find this first. It explores the same themes in a much crisper way. And I just really enjoyed how different it was. I never knew what was going to happen next. And to do that inside the framework of a cohesive structure isn’t easy. If you’re an agent or a manger out there looking for a new client, I would snatch this guy up. If not for this script than for the next higher concept idea he comes up with.

Great job Mark. You really surprised me in a week I didn’t expect to be surprised. :)

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

What I learned: In the age old debate of how long a script should be, I thought I’d offer up the events that led to me choosing this script. It was getting late and I hadn’t found anything yet. I was tired and running out of patience. As I clicked through the submissions, I noticed something I was doing without realizing it. I was mentally noting the page count and corresponding reading time of each script. In the back of my head, I was saying, “Okay, that will take me 90 minutes to read,” “That will take me 110 minutes to read.” “That will take me 2 hours to read.” The review came down to two scripts. This one, where the writing was better but the concept was weak. And the other one, which had a strong concept but the writing wasn’t as good. That other script was 121 pages. This was 97 pages. I did the math (I’ll save 24 minutes on The Disappearing World) and picked this script.

Now I’m not saying it’s the only factor. Had the writing been better in the other script, I may have picked that one. But to pretend like page count is never a factor is fooling yourself. Everyone in Hollywood is overworked and exhausted by the end of the day. They all have tons of scripts to read and it very well might come down to page count as the determining factor, like it did for me today. I know that page count is kind of thrown out there arbitrarily as an issue. I just wanted to show a real life situation where it came into play.

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