On the last Friday of every month, I choose an amateur script submitted by you, the readers of the site, to review. If you’re interested in submitting for Amateur Fridays, send the genre, the title, the premise, and the reason I should read your script to Carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Note that your script will be posted online and that you shouldn’t submit if you’re allergic to criticism. :) This month’s script is The Assassination Of George Lucas by Aaron Michael Thomas.
Genre: Comedy
Premise: When George Lucas announces a third trilogy, Mac and his group of ragtag friends hatch a plan to assassinate him in the name of preserving the purity of Star Wars.
About: This is the third amateur script in my monthly Amateur Script review series.
Writer: Aaron Michael Thomas
Details: 105 pages
So why did I choose The Assassination of George Lucas over all the other entries for Amateur Friday? Well duh, because the title is “The Assassination of George Lucas!”
But seriously, the title made me smile. And the premise made me laugh. Sometimes that’s all it takes. When you read a lot, there are periods when you want to get away from the serious stuff and just rattle the belly a little bit. I needed some belly-rattlin.
The Assassination Of George Lucas is about four friends: Mac, our conflicted hero, Sarge, the result of a one night stand with a nameless army Sargent, Casey, a home schooled Star Wars nut, and Joanna, who became a lesbian after seeing Princess Leia in Return Of The Jedi.
These childhood friends endure the same devastating disappointment all of us went through when we sat through the debacle known as the prequels. With cinematic perfection forever ruined, the group tries to come to terms with their favorite movies ever never being the same.
And then the unthinkable happens. At Comic-Con, George Lucas makes a surprise appearance to announce that he will be making a third trilogy – episodes 7, 8 and 9. Within minutes, Star Wars costumed geeks are staging a protest. But Mac is so sickened by the announcement, he’s thinking of something much more dire. If Lucas were to make a third trilogy, it would destroy the memory of Star Wars forever, and Mac can’t risk that. Hence, the only way to save Star Wars…is to KILL GEORGE LUCAS.
The only actor in the world who can turn the word “course” into two syllables.So he and his buds draw up a flimsy plan to drive up to the Lucas Ranch and poison the goitered one. Along the way they run into a slew of people, including a real life bounty hunter, a frantic Mark Hamill, and a long in hiding Lawrence Kasden. In the meantime we see that Lucas has become so reclusive and paranoid that he can’t even go to the bathroom without body guards. This is a man who will be hard to kill.
There’s some funny stuff in this script. My favorite character was Casey, who’s the only person on the planet who loves the prequels (the guy incorporates Jar-Jar quotes into everyday conversation). In a world where hating on the prequels has become as ubiquitous as pictures of Zac Efron on Perez Hilton, it was funny to watch a character who unapologetically loved them. I also loved the Lawrence Kasdan stuff, as it’s well-known that Lucas didn’t exactly flip over Kasdan getting so much credit for Empire Strikes Back. Seeing him holed up so that Lucas can’t get to him was pretty funny.
The rest of the stuff is hit or miss. There’s a trivial recurring joke about gummy bears, a random scene dedicated to observations about Super Mario Brothers, and probably my least favorite bit, George Lucas being an alienated asshole.
When you write a comedy, you want the jokes to be fresh. And Lucas being a reclusive dickhead has been done to death. I think there’s even a South Park episode dedicated to it. I was hoping for a more complicated original take on the character, not unlike what’s done with Casey. For example, what if Lucas was actually the nicest guy ever? What if they got there and were all ready to kill him and he made coffee for them and sat them down and started telling them stories? How are you going to assassinate the nicest guy ever? That’s a butchered “off the top of my head” idea and I’m not saying it’s great, but the point is, we needed something fresh here.
But the real problem with The Assassination of George Lucas runs much deeper, and that’s the characters. None of these characters have any substance. They have no flaws, no problems, nothing they’re trying to overcome. Each character is exactly the same at the ending as they are at the beginning. And that’s not going to cut it in a comedy spec.
Take the characters in the recently reviewed “Crazy Stupid Love,” for example. Jacob (the womanizer) is emotionally incapable of opening up to women so he engages in an endless streak of one-night stands, not realizing that it’s making him miserable. Watching him resist conquering that flaw is what made his character so interesting. Or take Cal (Steve Carell’s characer), who’s trying to come to terms with his wife leaving him. He doesn’t know whether to embrace the singles scene or fight to get his wife back. In both cases, the characters are fighting an inner battle. None of the characters here are battling anything. In fact, three of the characters are built on a joke. Casey is home-schooled, Sarge is a one-night stand, and Joanna turned into a lesbian after seeing Princess Leia. That’s as deep into the characters as we get. And Mac, our protagonist? His big problem is that he wants to preserve Star Wars. I’m sorry but that’s just not deep enough to keep us engaged for 2 hours.
Instead, what if Mac had a choice tugging at him? What if he’s at a point, 26 or 27, where he has an opportunity to take a job, to start being an adult with responsibilities, or continue this arrested development lifestyle where he’s obsessed with a children’s movie. Now there’s something actually going on with Mac. He has a choice. He has depth. If you want to see this exact flaw in action (and done well), rent The 40 Year Old Virgin and pay attention to Steve Carell’s character.
Another problem I had was that the script didn’t take advantage of its premise. If you look at a movie like Fanboys, which covers similar terrain, there were all these moments where Star Wars serendipitously intruded upon their journey, leading to a lot of funny in-joke situations. The Assassination Of George Lucas is actually about a piece of Star Wars – the prequels – that hasn’t been explored in cinema extensively. There’s a TON of funny situations Thomas could’ve drawn from these movies but instead we keep focusing on the old stuff. For example, why are we bringing in Mark Hamill, who’s already been done to death? Instead, what if they run into Ahmed Best, the actor who played Jar-Jar? Let’s look at how that role ruined his life and how he hates Lucas as a result. What the hell is Jake Lloyd doing nowadays? Maybe he’s a drugged out misfit who actually thinks he’s Darth Vadar. There’s a moment here where our characters walk into a car dealer. Why not make the dealer like annoying nonsensical Watto? In other words, let’s make their journey to kill Lucas turn into their own Prequel Hell. The current comedic choices here are too obvious and deal with territory that we’ve already seen. Let’s explore something new.
The final issue here is that The Assassination of George Lucas probably couldn’t get made. It paints Star Wars and Lucas in a negative light and even though Lucas would whore out the Star Wars brand to flesh lights if it added to the bottom line, the one thing he does still care about is his personal image, which The Assassination of George Lucas…well…assassinates. That would mean you’d have to make this movie without any Star Wars paraphernalia whatsoever, which I don’t think is possible. That’s not to say all is lost, however. Pretty much all scripts are calling cards anyways, so if this made the right people laugh, it could open the door to a career.
The Assassination of George Lucas was a cute script. But if it’s going to compete in the ultra-competitive spec comedy market, it will need to dig deeper.
Script link: The Assassination Of George Lucas
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Your comedies, even the goofiest ones, should contain some sort of theme – some sort of statement you’re trying to get across with your story. When I finished The Assassination of George Lucas I felt…empty. Without a larger statement, the story experience dissolved as soon as it was over. One of the reasons Toy Story 3 was so great (and all of Pixar’s movies – which put a heavy emphasis on theme) was that it kept harping on the theme of “moving on.” That there are phases in your life where you have to move forward, even if you don’t want to. In Liar Liar the theme was obviously “truth” and the consequences of not telling it. Even in the seemingly depth-less Dumb and Dumber, the theme is “taking a chance.” Refusing to be held back by the rules and restrictions of society. There’s an opportunity in The Assassination of George Lucas to write a movie about people who are afraid to grow up. Had that been explored here, this script would’ve lingered in the reader’s mind, instead of disappearing into space like the opening crawl.
Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: A group of time-travellers jump back to 12th Century China in search of a rare gene that will save mankind. Problems arise when they find themselves in the direct path of Genghis Khan’s army.
About: Details are scarce about this one, but it was acquired by Sony earlier in the year. David Gleeson is an Irish writer-director who wrote and directed a couple of small features in his home country.
Writer: David Gleeson
Details: 116 pages – Feb 10th 2010 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).
When trying to find out more about this low-key project, I made a call out to my Facebook peeps for more information. A Scriptshadow reader chimed back, “This sold?!! I thought this was going to be the Amateur Week special on Friday. It is so f**kin’ bad!”
To you, Mike, I say….I couldn’t disagree more!
The End Of History starts out much like the sci-fi darling “Children Of Men.” It’s the near future and less than 5000 women in the world are pregnant. Something is preventing the human race from procreating, and if it continues, in about 90 years, earth will look like downtown Pyongyang.
Cool-headed Nathan Scott, however, is going to make sure that doesn’t happen. No place should look like Pyongyang dammit. The Colonel is leading a combination military/scientist team back to 12th Century China, where they’ve located a band of warriors that contain the extinct gene which can reverse the procreation problem.
Scott has a vested interest in the mission. His baby daughter is fighting the killer disease, and won’t live without a gene transplant.
The mission is supposed to be simple. The clan they’re targeting is militarily formidable for the 12th Century, but their weapons might as well be toothpicks compared to what the Americans are packing. Actually, there’s a specific reason the Americans chose this clan. In 100 years, Genghis Khan will wipe every single one of them out on his march through China, permanently erasing any historic influence their presence may have had.
Indeed, when they jump, the sailing is smooth. They infiltrate the fortress without much resistence and the sci-tech team quickly goes to work extracting the gene. But after sending up a quick satellite to get a lay of the land, a horrifying video plays back. An army of 100,000 soldiers is marching DIRECTLY TOWARDS THEM.
Genghis Khan’s army.
There was a malfunction in the jump. They jumped back 100 years LATER than they were supposed to. Which means they’re right in the path of that Ghegis Khan massacre that was the whole reason they chose this location in the first place. Ahh, the irony.
To make matters worse, the hastily scrapped together tech starts malfunctioning in bunches, and after a major explosion, their time travel apparatus is all but toast. The group realizes they can salvage a small piece of the flux-capacitor, but only enough to send a message into the future, not to jump. Their plan is to fix it as fast as possible and send out an SOS. But even under the most optimistic time frame, Genghis Khan is going to arrive before they finish. And that means the unthinkable. A group of rag-tag 21st Century American soldiers is going to have to hold off the most ruthless army in history.
Will they be able to do it?
I have to give it to Glesson. This script straddles the line between ridiculous and awesome so finely that at first I wasn’t sure which side it would land on. But after it got going, I decided on awesome. Usually, in these sci-fi/historic hybrids, either the sci-fi is shoddy and the history is exceptional, or the history looks like it was researched by an 8 year old and the sci-fi is brilliant. Rarely do you find a script where both are handled well, but that’s exactly what happens here, and why I liked the script so much.
And believe me, this isn’t easy to do. One only needs to “travel back” a few years to the abombination that was Timeline to see how to royally fuck up an idea like this. I don’t think I’ve ever heard, read, or seen a time travel story as bad as that monstrosity. There were two castles. People were running back and forth between them for no reason. The time travel had 16,814 rules you had to remember. It was embarrasingly bad.
What The End of History wisely does is it keeps the time-travel plot simple. There’s never a moment where you don’t know exactly what the portagonists’ goals are, and that’s important in a script like this.
I also loved the technology of the war. Oh, I’m not talking about the 21st century technology. I’m talking about all the wacky weapons Khan had in his arsenal. This guy had rudimentary Napalm at his disposal. He had early versions of dirty bombs. He even had an ancient version of the damn Predator (the pilot-less airplane). Watching him unleash these toys on a shell-shocked 21st century army was, in a word, sweet.
However, there were things that kept this from becoming the next Source Code. First, I’m getting tired of these serviceable but ultimately unimaginative motivations for main characters. Yes, Scott has a daughter affected by the killer disease, and that makes his mission personal, but it’s such a derivative motivation that it doesn’t resonate with us. We’ve seen it so many times before. Contrast that with Leo’s character in Inception. Sure there were some problems with the kids storyline, but I have to admit, I don’t remember seeing a character with that particular motivation before, which made it original and therefore powerful.
Also, to echo my sentiments on Layover, there needed to be more dissention inside the group! There’s a troublemaker here, Decker, who adds about as much conflict as an agitated Abe Vigoda. There was so much potential for his character to stir things up, but instead he observes Scott pull off a couple of neat military maneuvers and becomes his BFF. Dissention inside the group – conflict – always makes a mission/goal more interesting, because there’s more for the hero to overcome. If you want to see it how this can help a screenplay, read The Grey.
I also thought Gleeson missed a couple of opportunities. One thing he doesn’t adequately address is what happens if they destroy Khan’s army. Obviously, all of history would change. If they had to fight off this army, but only enough to keep from getting killed, and not enough to become a part of the history books – that’s the kind of unique obstacle that could’ve introduced some interesting challenges. There’s also a female character on Scott’s team who’s half-Asian. What if she were a direct descendent of someone in Genghis Khan’s army? What if killing them wiped her out of existence? Even better, what if she was the romantic lead (a surprisingly absent piece of this puzzle). That would create quite a dilemma as well.
But hey, that’s neither here nor there. Sure the script has some problems (like all time travel stories – there are some holes) but it’s a great spec premise. Contained area. Contained time frame. High concept. These are the kind of scripts that sell when written well, so I’m not surprised that it did.
Still needs to be developed, but overall, enjoyable.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Whenever you write a time travel flick, you have to deal with one specific problem: “Why can’t they just go back and do it again?” The End of History, unfortunately, doesn’t deal with this question satisfactorily. But this is exactly why a franchise like The Terminator is dying. If they fail in killing Sarah Connor or her son, they can just send back another Terminator a few weeks later (or earlier). There’s no end to how many times they can try to assassinate our heroes.
The recommended solution to this isn’t as difficult as you might think. You simply have to make clear that this is a one-shot deal. Maybe the technology is unproven. Maybe the time machine is so expensive that if it breaks, that’s it. Maybe there’s something in your own time travel design that simply doesn’t allow them to jump more than once. If you do it this way, the mission actually means something. Because everyone knows that there are no second chances here. Ignore that rule, and you have a bunch of sophisticated fanboys (the core fanbase for this kind of film) in the audience thinking, “None of this matters cause they can just do it again.”
Genre: Fantasy
Premise: Conan The Barbarian becomes a reluctant king and fathers a son, who is then groomed to become the future King.
About: It should be noted that this is NOT the draft of the script they used for the new Conan project, but rather the famous 2001 John Milius draft that many geeks have fallen in love with. Alas, it was not to be, as this draft was assuming Ah-nold would be in it, and Ah-nold decided to instead bankrupt Caleefohneeya. Little known fact. Oliver Stone got a writing credit on the first Conan The Barbarian.
Writer: John Milius
Details: 166 pages – May 24, 2001 draft
For those put off by the 60 pages of character development in Brigands Of Rattleborge, I hereby warn you, do NOT read King Conan. King Conan scoffs in the face of screenplays that only use 60 pages to set up their characters. Why, you ask? Because King Conan uses one *hundred* pages to set up its characters!
I realize this is a losing proposition. Those who don’t care about Conan won’t give a shit what I rate it, and those who do care, care so much that they’ll tear me to pieces for even implying it’s not genius (I’m looking at you JJ) but holy schnikies, this script is so incredibly boring!
Yes, I said it. It’s boring. I feel almost liberated as I write that.
For 100 pages, NOTHING HAPPENS.
Well that can’t be, Carson, you say. *Something* must have happened. Okay, let me tell you what happened and you can be the judge if anything happened.
Conan The Barbarian impregnates a woman named the Daughter Of The Snows. This evil nasty woman tells Conan she doesn’t want to hang out with him until his child is born and kicks him out of her crib. Women.
In the meantime, Conan meets a man named Metallus who teaches him the importance of “fighting in a line.” You can’t break the line ever or you lose. This is obviously symbolic for many things throughout the story, but since I could never get into the story, it just became annoying that it came up so frequently.
After learning the line stuff, Conan heads back to Snowzilla to grab his son, Kon. Yes, Conan is now a father. The Conan line will live on.
Eventually, Conan becomes king of a country called Zingara, which, as many of you know, becomes famous for creating Farmville. You might say, “How is that ‘nothing’ Carson? He destroyed an entire country to become king! That’s epic. That’s exactly why we want a Conan sequel.” Well yeah, if that HAPPENED, I’d be right with you. But Conan doesn’t have to do anything to inherit the kingdom. It’s just handed to him.
Even better, once he gets it, he doesn’t even want it. Conan is about as reluctant of a king as there is – constantly sulking and complaining that being a king isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
After awhile, Conan’s handlers suggest sending Kon off to the king version of preparatory school. Kon will study. Kon will fight. He will learn everything there is about becoming a king.
For the next 50 or so pages, we cut back and forth between Kon and Conan – Kon as he grows up and learns the ways of being a king, and Conan as he rules his kingdom. Very little happens during this period. Kon has a rivalry with one of his classmates, Fortunas (the Emperor’s son), and Conan grows so bored of being king that he pulls a Princess Jasmine, dressing up like a peasant, and hanging out with the peasant folk. Here he eventually meets a peasant woman that he falls for.
Where I officially gave up on King Conan though, was when Fortunas finds out that Conan and Kon are trading letters. The mischievous Fortunas then secretly intercepts and throws away those letters, making each believe that the other has forgotten about them.
Okay…REALLY???
I can go ahead and buy that plot point in, say, The Notebook or Beverly Hills 90210. But in a Conan sequel??
After this point I found it very hard to stay focused because everything in this script was soooooooooo drawwwwwwwn ouuuuuuuut. From what I could gather, Conan’s boredom leads to him strengthening ties with neighboring countries. But the plan backfires when one of these countries benefits from Conan’s weapons trade, strengthening their army and giving them a decided advantage over a third country. This third country starts bitching at Conan, and he realizes he’s inadvertently created a quagmire in the region.
So outside watching Kon grow up and a king attempt to stave off boredom, we now introduce into the mix… politics? Did we not learn anything from the Star Wars Episode 1 debacle?
Eventually (and I’m talking a good 100 pages into the script here when I say “eventually”) Kon comes back home, and the two try to resolve their artificially fractured relationship. This leads to an assassination attempt on Conan and finally – thank God – something actually starts happening in the script.
But let’s be honest. By that point it’s too late. You are never more drained and more frustrated as a reader than when you’re trying to keep track of a complicated screenplay that you care nothing about. It’s really the worst experience you can have. You want to get it over with, but there are 30-some names like “Lord Gobaniior” along with complicated subplots and reemerging dormant story threads that force you, against all your will, to pay attention. Ugh! I was so drained after I read this.
To Milius’ credit, it’s hard to keep people interested on the page with a story that’s so cinematic – that depends so heavily on actors, costumes, and set design. But that doesn’t excuse the 160 pages, the 100 page first act or the baffling absence of story for long stretches at a time. I remember in the first Conan, which Milius also wrote, Conan pushing that spindle as he grew from a boy into a man. That little montage was a minute long and told me more about that character (how difficult his childhood was) and drew me more into that world, then every single Kon school scene here combined.
I was going to give this a “What The Hell Did I Just Read,” because I just found nothing to grab onto in the story whatsoever. But there’s no denying Milius is brilliant with words. Combined with the extensive mythology he’s created, there’s too much skill on display for me to rate this at the bottom of the barrel, but it was so un-engaging and slow and self-important that I had no joy whatsoever reading it.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Build characters through action. Not through 18 scenes that essentially tell us the same thing. I’m referring, of course, to that scene in the original Conan I just mentioned where we see him pushing the spindle into adulthood. That simple action tells us more than any dialogue ever could. Think about your favorite movies. All of the characters have moments of action that tell us who they are. We see it when Han blasts Greedo. We see it when Neo gives up on the ledge while running from the agents. We see it when Andy Dufrane DOESN’T cry that first night in Shawshank. We see it in how meticulously Wall-E takes care of the city. Those ACTIONS will always be the best way to convey a character to an audience. Favor them wherever you can.
I have never had to do this. But considering I’ve received upwards of 500 e-mails asking for it, I can’t take it anymore. I’m officially mildly ticked off. I don’t have Inception! Nolan has kept it under wraps so they can publish it in book form. So please no more e-mails.
Genre: Thriller/Crime/Revenge
Premise: (from IMDB) A father is forced to confront his past when his teenage daughter is kidnapped during a layover in Las Vegas.
About: Zach Dean was teaching film and writing at a New York high school when he wrote the “Simple Plan’esque” Kin, a script he wanted to write after being on the infamous Jet Blue flight in 2005 whose landing gear malfunctioned, forcing the entire flight to watch in horror on their in flight TVs as major new agencies predicted their doom. The now 35 year-old Dean was so rattled by the experience he promised to write a film about family if he lived, and thus Kin was born. This is Dean’s second script, Layover, which sold a couple of months ago to Endgame Entertainment. You can read more about Dean and that experience in a recent LA Times article here.
Writer: Zach Dean
Details: 108 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).
When we meet the deceptively conniving Theron Turner, he’s amongst a couple dozen convicts on a transport bus. The bus is twisting and turning its way through the snowy mountains, and as you might suspect, something bad is about to happen. As the bus rounds the corner, the innocent outline of a snowman appears in the middle of the road. One of the guards hesitantly steps out to clear the obstruction, and is promptly greeted with a bullet to the head.
A team of three men bursts onto the bus and free their target, Theron. He smiles, marches out, and heads to Nevada to prepare for the biggest job of his career.
Meanwhile, in the most isolated middle-of-nowhere town in all of Nebraska, tow-truck driver Doyle Green is managing the aftermath of yet another brush with the law by his rebellious daughter, Nikki. The bearded homebody is the exact opposite of his daughter, and the 17 year old troublemaker is so fed up with her boring life and her boring dad that she’s willing to do anything to escape.
It kills Doyle that his daughter doesn’t love him, or even like him, and he’d do anything in his power to change that. But Doyle has a secret he’s never told his daughter. He lives here because the witness relocation program made him live here. Doyle’s past is packed with more secrets than a prom after party.
However, when Nikki’s birthday rolls around, Doyle is so desperate to please her, that he tells her he’ll do anything she wants for her birthday. Her wish? To see the ocean. Against his better judgment, Doyle allows her to book a trip to California for the two of them.
With a quick layover in Vegas.
Hasn’t anyone told Doyle? Layovers are never as smooth as you think they’ll be.
Sure enough, in the 20 minutes they’re at the Vegas airport, Nikki sneaks into a bathroom and makes a run for it. She leaves Doyle a letter, explaining that her mother finally contacted her online, that they’ve been planning this for weeks, and that she’s running off to live with her. Doyle knows something Nikki doesn’t though. Her mother is dead. Which means someone lured her here. He knows who that person is. And so do we.
Theron has some big plans for Nikki. He’s holding her hostage until he gets the 13 million dollars Doyle helped him steal a dozen years ago, right before he sold him out to the feds. Theron will do anything to get that money back, and that’s exactly why Doyle knows he must do everything in his power to find Nikki as soon as possible.
Yes, I know. Taken.
There’s no place for Layover to escape its “father save daughter” premise, however, Layover excels in a lot of the areas Taken was criticized for. The story is really about two old friends, now enemies, trying to stay one move ahead of each other, as each tries to get something they desperately want. It’s not going to inspire Inception like discussion afterwards, but this is more of a chess game than a footrace, and that twist on the idea is what sets the script apart.
And it really does set itself apart.
One of the mistakes I keep seeing in amateur screenplays is that writers don’t surprise the reader enough. They continually choose the first twists and turns that come to mind, not realizing that they’re in their mind only because they’re remembering them from some recent film they enjoyed. As a result, their scripts play out in a straightforward boring fashion. Layover is an example of a story that keeps hitting us with one “didn’t see that coming” after another.
I say there should be a small surprise, twist or redirection every 15 pages or so, something that ups the stakes or makes us reevaluate the story we thought we were watching. Amongst those 6-8 surprises, there should be 2 or 3 whoppers that really shock us. Here, we see Theron broken out of the convict bus right away, which is a nice surprise. We find out Doyle is in a witness protection program. A nice surprise. Nikki makes a run for it in Vegas. Nice surprise. Doyle turns out to be the former leader of Theron’s group. Nice surprise. All of that is packed inside the first 40 pages. In bad scripts these surprises are either uninspired or non-existent.
Another solid move was creating an unresolved relationship between father and daughter. This may seem obvious but you’d be surprised at how many scripts I’ve read which take the opposite route. “I love you daughter,” “I love you too dad.” (the two then go play checkers for 8 hours). The reason you want to avoid this love-fest is because with unresolved relationships, there’s a desire for the audience to see them get resolved. That can’t happen unless the two see each other again, and of course they can’t see each other again unless he finds her.
At first glance, Taken doesn’t seem to have this. There’s genuine love between father and daughter. But the conflict is that he’s been a bad father all his life, and is trying to make up for it. The unresolved part is that he hasn’t proven himself yet, which is really the hidden emotional component of that film that many people overlook. By saving her, he finally proves how much he loves her.
This unresolved conflict extends into the other central relationship in the movie, the relationship between the hero and the villain. Your hero and villain don’t HAVE to have a history, but relationships with history tend to pack more punch than those that don’t (with the exclusion of a budding romance). This unresolved conflict between Doyle and Theron adds an extra layer to the plot and keeps Layover a character piece first, and a revenge/kidnapping piece second.
The only things that don’t work for the script are some of the early dialogue and the relationships between the villains. With the dialogue, some of it was too on-the-nose, particularly early on when the characters and story were being set up. There’s a scene in particular between the U.S. Marshall and his wife that feels like the scene is only there to give the reader insight into the character, and is in no way necessary to the story. This is an easy trap to fall into though. Good screenplays, particularly intricate ones with a lot going on, require a ton of setup, and being able to cram all that setup into the opening act and keep it natural is a constant challenge. So this wasn’t a huge deal for me.
My bigger problem was with the villains in Layover. I felt their relationships with one another weren’t explored enough. We only get the bare-bones details on their connection with one another (one is the girlfriend, one is the brother, one is the drug-addict). Dean hints at the conflict within, but we never get into it, and therefore when their lives are at stake, we don’t care as much as we should. Creating a division in the ranks of either team, the bad guys or the good, is always a fun way to stir up the story because then your characters are fighting battles on two fronts, the outside and the in.
Overall, I thought this was a really well-executed script. Had Taken never been made, this would’ve received a double “worth the read.” But the familiarities in the core idea did hurt it some. Still, it’s a fun smart thriller, and all this praise being heaped on Zach Dean is well deserved. I’ll be reading Kin as soon as possible!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: There’s a feeling you get early on when you’re reading a screenplay. It’s a feeling of “this is going to work” or “this isn’t going to work.” Layover was one of those scripts I knew right away was going to work. The opening scene was interesting and mysterious. The story gets moving right away. The writing was crisp and to the point (1-2 lines for almost all paragraphs). But probably most of all, there’s a confidence in where the story is going. You knew the writer had a plan, that he was building towards something, whereas in amateur scripts scenes are thrown together in an almost searching manner, like the writer is enjoying the process of trying to find the story. Unnecessary scenes, wandering first act, that’s the kind of stuff you see in amateur scripts. Layover is definitely not one of those scripts, and should be studied on how to start a screenplay.
