It’s been a good 4-5 months since we did our first polling of reader favorites. Since I constantly update my list, I think it’s only right that that list gets updated as well. So if there are some screenplay reads you’ve been putting off, get to them, cause in about three weeks, I’m going to ask everybody, once again, for their top 10 favorite unmade screenplays. Get that list figured out!

TITAN WEEK 5 OF 5

If you’ve been following Titan Week, here are the first four titans we reviewed: 1) Shane Black 2) David Benioff 3) Kurtzman and Orci 4) Frank Darabont – Today, we’re calling in the Big Kahuna, Steven Spielberg…sort of. I don’t have an actual Spielberg script, but I do have a script he developed with John Sayles titled, “Night Skies.”

Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: A rural family must fight off a group of pesky aliens who invade their house.
About: Who’s a bigger titan than the man himself? Steven Spielberg! As has been the theme this week, I’m cheating a little, because Spielberg didn’t actually write Night Skies. The studio wanted him to come up with a sequel to Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, but he was putting Raiders together, so he didn’t have the time. But instead of allowing the studio to screw up his franchise the way they did with Jaws, he commissioned John Sayles to write a script from an idea of his based off of a “true” story he heard. The thing was, Spielberg wasn’t into it, and the project never really had a shot. He did however read it to Harrison Ford’s future wife on the set of Raiders, and she was taken by the relationship between one of the characters and an alien. This connection inspired Spielberg to come up with the idea for E.T. In a funny twist, Universal was desperate for Spielberg not to make some schmaltzy kiddy Disney movie, and tried to get him to ditch the project. He ignored their wishes and made it anyway. And we got glowing fingers, the power of reeses pieces, and 7 year olds calling each other “penis breath” as a result. John Sayles is no slouch. He’s been nominated for two Oscars, 1996’s “Lone Star” and 1992’s “Passion Fish.” But seeing as he doesn’t have a single additional sci-fi flick on his resume, I wonder if he was the right man for the job.
Writer: John Sayles (based on an idea by Steven Spielberg)
Details: 100 pages (this is the only draft ever written)

John Sayles

Oh Priscilla. How did we end up here? Three foot tall aliens “terrorizing” a local farm family? I know this supposedly “happened” in real life (it’s since been criticized as one of the most blatant hoax attempts in history) but man, I’m not sure Spielberg ever sized this idea up. It’s such a neutered idea, in fact, that if I were a betting man, I’d guess that Spielberg put this in development with the sole intention of preventing someone else from making a Close Encounters Of The Third Kind sequel. Speaking of interesting screenplays, how bout that one for you? If you ever want to watch a film that seems to follow no sort of structure or rules whatsoever, and whose entire story depends on our desire to see the aliens at the end, go watch that. In the meantime, let me try and break down Night Skies for you.

Tess in an 18 year old hot country girl who lives with a really fucked up country family. There’s her always angry father, her bible-thumping mother, her ganja-smoking little brother, her slightly deranged grandmother, and, of course, her retarded youngest brother, Jaybird.

Although not a lot happens in Bumblefuck, Nowhere, it’s been unusually busy as of late. There have been a series of cow mutilations making their way up the state, and the latest one has happened right over on their neighbor’s plot. But this isn’t any normal mutilation. The cow’s face seems to have been seared off with geometric precision, its brain plucked out as if a surgeon himself had done it. This gets the locals up in a tizzy, cause rural folk have a lot of patience, but one thing they don’t like is when people mutilate their cows. Trust me, I know from experience.

Once the cow-killing chatter calms down, the characters spend a whole lot of time doing zippity-zilch. Tess cares after Jaybird because no one else will. The father complains a lot, especially about the fact that he has a retarded son. The mother says little unless a lesson from the bible is needed. The brother, keeping it real, protests that his parents are too strict. This is all about as exciting as you’d expect it to be. And we’re jonzeing for something – anything – to happen.

Well later that night we get our wish because when everyone’s back home, the lights cut out and the family starts seeing little heads and arms zip past the windows. Not taking any chances, they lock down the house, but it isn’t enough, cause whatever was outside finds a way inside. We come to find out that they’re being…I wouldn’t say “attacked”…but maybe “hassled” by 3 foot tall aliens. And these aliens are really good hasslers. They bang on the windows and sneak through the cat doors. They make funny faces and leap out of shadows. We’re not really sure what they’re doing, but their actions cause a lot of screaming and overall confusion. Soon everybody gets split up, and each character has an individual experience with an alien. Tess, for example, is taking a bath (why she’s taking a bath when there are aliens in the house I’m not sure) when an alien darts out from the corner and does the alien equivalent of yelling “bugga bugga bugga.” This may have been a mating tactic for the alien, I don’t know, but whatever it was, it doesn’t work, cause Tess runs out of the bathroom.

In general, the aliens act the way I’d expect drunken Wizard of Oz munchkins to act. There’s no real method to what they’re doing, outside of darting and dashing from one shadow to the next. Since they pose no danger, their presence feels a little like a traveling stage show. Jump in, do a little dance, jump back out. On to the next town! It’d be funny if it weren’t so odd.

Aliiiiiien!!!

Eventually there’s some connection between the aliens and Jaybird, and, I think, the aliens tell the humans that they’re killing themselves and that everyone on earth is really sad. After that, they leave, and Tess’s family is left to wonder the same thing we are: WHAT THE HELL JUST HAPPENED??

Night Skies is plagued by that most troubling of script problems: It’s un-engaging. The people are boring. The relationships are boring. And the story’s boring. Now part of this is because of the 18 million alien films we’ve seen since the 80s. We demand more creativity from our sci-fi today than we did then. But that’s only part of it. The characters in particular don’t have enough going on. They all have their own angle (angry, retarded, religious), but they’re essentially townsfolk with absolutely nothing going on in their day-to-day lives. It’s as if these characters were written specifically to wait for this moment, and will cease to exist as soon as the moment is over. They don’t have any life. Even Jaybird, the most original character here, feels DOA. I was hoping to experience more of a connection with the characters. But it never happened.

But the biggest issue of all is that there are no stakes in the script. Now that’s a term we hear bandied about a lot in screenwriting . “Stakes.” But what does it really mean? I try to explain it by asking a question: What consequences does the situation driving your story have on the characters? Are the consequences big? Or are they small? In the case of Night Skies, the situation driving the story is a group of midget aliens badgering a rural family. Not trying to kill. Not trying to injure. Just badgering. What are the stakes of badgering? The worst thing that can happen is for the family to get a little spooked. Is that really so terrible? Of course not. And for that reason, we’re never truly invested in the story. Take Paranormal Activity on the other hand, where the antagonist was an invisible malevolent entity that had a connection to the devil. A horrifying death for both of our protags was a possibility at any moment. Or take Spielberg’s own “Poltergeist.” In that film, the girl is taken from the family. So the stakes are that they may never get her back, and that any one of them could be killed. In both those cases, the stakes were extremely high, and as a result, the tension was high, and the conflict between the characters was high. Now I’m not saying every movie has to have a life or death scenario, but if you’re not aware of the stakes of your story and how to increase them, you’re not going to have a lot of success in the screenwriting world.

I wouldn’t say this script was awful, but it’s pretty uninspired. And I think Spielberg and Sayles would admit as much. If this was a jumping off point, I’m sure they would’ve improved a lot of the bland choices in subsequent drafts. And there are some fun moments that give us glimpses into the origin of E.T. (an alien’s finger lighting up for example). But it’s pretty obvious why this was never made.

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

What I learned: This is proof that no screenplay is a waste. Outside of every script being a learning experience, many writers mine stories, characters, or scenes out of their old failed screenplays. Part of the progression of becoming a writer is identifying what the most interesting thing about your idea is, and then mining it for everything it’s worth. Beginner writers, for whatever reason, tend to focus on the least or only the mildly interesting aspects of their story, leaving their script feeling like a bowl of untapped potential. As writers begin to intrinsically understand conflict (outside of just making two people fight) and which concepts provide the best opportunity for conflict, this problem goes away. So head back to those old ideas with your new mindset and see if you can’t find that nugget of a concept you overlooked.

TITAN WEEK 4 OF 5 OF 1

We’re 4 days into the Titan Theme Week. We started with Shane Black. Moved on to Amanda Peet’s husband, David Benioff. Then we tackled the dynamo writing duo of Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. And today, we’re reading ourselves some Darabont.

Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: In a dystopian future, Firefighters start fires instead of put them out.
About: I don’t think there’s any question that Darabont is a true titan in this business. The Shawshank Redemption is one of those examples of screenwriting perfection. It does a lot of things most writers would tell you not to do. Its tone is depressing, it’s long and drawn out, probably has too many characters, depends too much on voice over, and doesn’t have a female lead. Yet it’s pure unadulterated awesomeness, and while credit obviously goes to Steven King, what Darabont did by taking one of King’s most unmarketable ideas and turning into an Oscar-nominated screenplay was pretty amazing. Darabont is easily one of the most respected writers in town. If a script needs fixing – not pampering or gloss, but actual fixing – this is the man that will come in and do it. – This particular script, Farenheit 451, has been in development for something like 25 years. Darabont’s adaptation of the material is believed to be one of the best unmade screenplays in Hollywood.
Writer: Frank Darabont (based on the novel by Ray Bradbury)
Details: 121 pages (September 2005 draft)

I have a secret.

I’ve tried to read Farenheit 451 on three separate occasions and couldn’t get past the first 10 pages. I’m sure you want to know why, so I’ll just come out and say it.

Robot dogs.

I’m sorry but I just can’t wrap my head around robot dogs. And I’m a sci-fi geek! Why would robot dogs ever need to exist?? If you need something that only dogs can do, why not get a real dog? But if something is so complicated as to require a robotic equivalent and you have the technology to create that robot equivalent, why not just create a robotic human instead? Doesn’t it make more sense in the context of what the human robot would be able to do? I understand this was part of the original novel, but in a post-Transformers world, robot dogs sound kinda lame.

The truth is, I chose this theme week specifically for this script, as I’ve wanted to read it for a long time, despite the robot dog issue. Lots of people who I’ve talked to love it, and I really wanted to at least say that I’d read the thing. So here goes.

Guy Montag is a fireman. But not the kind of fireman you and I know. Montag likes to start fires, not end them. In fact, all the fire departments we depend on when we accidentally throw a Wendy’s Chicken Club with the tin foil wrapper still attached into the microwave, have no interest in putting out fires anymore. Their purpose is to find people who still like to read a good John Grisham novel, and BURN THEIR HOUSE DOWN.

Cause in this future, the government hates books. Thinks they corrupt us. Brings out impulses we wouldn’t otherwise have. Man, if only these guys would’ve come around before Peter Jackson read The Lovely Bones.

Firefighters in this far off future, which by now is probably the far off past, since Bradbury wrote the novel back in the 1600s, are basically militarized. Their operation is honed and disciplined to take down offenders quickly, and to evoke a sense of fear in the community. We watch as they storm into houses, tear down walls and burst through ceilings to find these compilations of devil paper. And then burn them! If you don’t like it, you’ve got an angry robot dog to deal with.

Eventually Montag gets curious what all the fuss is about and sneaks home a copy of Lord Of The Flies. Even though he watches Lost every Tuesday at 9, the book is a revelation to him, and it feeds his curiosity for more. So now when Montag goes in with the crew to burn a house down, he stashes more books down his pants than The Situation stashes phone numbers. And the more he reads, the more enlightened he becomes.

Unfortunately, the Firefighter Chief starts getting suspicious of Montag, whose book reading has brought about a moodiness that didn’t before exist. People Montag has conspired with start getting caught, their houses burned and their families taken away. Montag’s wife pleads with him to get rid of the books, but he refuses. Eventually, Montag can’t run anymore, and must face the consequences for his actions.

The problem with Fahrenheit is that the world has changed so much since 1953. As I listen to these characters confide in each other about how important or how scary books are, their plight doesn’t resonate on any level. I suppose there are some places in the world where Fahrenheit’s themes are actually still relevant, but America isn’t into burning books anymore and hasn’t been for a long time.

I’m not saying this couldn’t have been fascinating 50 years ago when people rode around on chariots. But today? The internet is essentially one giant book that we have access to 24/7. If Iran can’t keep its citizens from using Twitter, we ain’t going to be able to stop people from ordering the latest Dan Brown novel on Amazon. Not to mention Facebook! Can you imagine the outrage from the community if we destroyed Facebook?? The implications of a world without Farmville are too much to bear. The day I don’t know when my friend Alandra just planted a patch of strawberries is the day that civilization is dead my friend. The day it is dead.

But seriously, it’s an issue. Darabont doesn’t even mention the internet here, which implies we’re observing this through some sort of alternate future. And from what I understand, this is why lead actors like Mel Gibson and Tom Hanks keep dropping out. Trying to imagine a future without internet is like trying to imagine a future without cars and airplanes. How do you make that leap? This is not to mention music, TV and movies, which essentially pose the same problem as books, and yet for whatever reason aren’t held to the same standards.

Despite that, there’s still a lot of care that went into this script, a lot of love. And you can feel it on the page. The prose and the attention to detail are all top notch, and as a result, you’re able to ignore some of the problems. But in the end, the logistical issues run too deep, and I can’t see this being made without a major rewrite.

How would you rewrite it? I think you’d have to embrace technology instead of ignore it, and probably focus the script on the government wanting to destroy our access to all information, from the internet all the way on down to the written word, a true modern-day telling of the story. That could be interesting. Just please, for my sake, don’t include any robot dogs. :)

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

What I learned: What I like about Darabont is he doesn’t write to impress you. He writes to tell the story, yet ends up impressing you in the process. So whereas a lesser writer might over-write their descriptions to try and impress the reader, Darabont makes sure that everything he describes is motivated. For example, here, he describes the fire truck starting: “The ENGINES START, a turbine WHINE exploding to a DEEP BASSO ROAR. Like a dragon waking up. Ready to breathe flame.” So descriptive. But not gratuitous. Remember, descriptions don’t sell screenplays. Concept, story, characters, and plot do. So resist that 8 line poetic description of how your character walks from his house to his car, and just tell the story instead.

TITAN WEEK 3 OF 5

Day 1 we brought you Shane Black. Day 2 we tackled questionable titan David Benioff. And now on our third day of Titan Week, we bring in the two highest paid writers in the business, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman! This oughta be fun. :)

Genre: Thriller
Premise: A widowed social worker receives a strange message that forces him to reevaluate what happened the day his wife was murdered.
About: How can you have a Titan Week without Kurtzman and Orci!! The two most beloved and respected writers in Hollywood!? Heh heh. You knew I had to pull these guys out. They’re the highest paid and most sought-after writers in town. And absolutely nobody thinks they should be but the people who hire them. Kurtzman and Orci first came on the scene in 2005, when they wrote Michael Bay’s “The Island.” They followed that with the second Zorro film, Mission Impossible 3, Transformers, Star Trek, and of course, the single greatest movie to ever be made, Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen. But “Tell No One” is the script they wrote before all that success, all the way back in 2002. Now some of you may already be familiar with “Tell No One” as a French film that made some waves on the independent circuit in 2008 (it was released in France in 2006). I didn’t see it because I’d been burned too many times by supposedly groundbreaking French Films which turned out to be mind-numbingly horrible. I don’t think there’s anything worse than sitting through a bad French film. I’m glad I ignored it, because it allowed me to have this amazing reading experience. Now a few of you have probably noticed that the dates don’t quite match up. How can Orci and Kurtzman have adapted a 2006 film in 2002? Simple. Orci and Kurtzman have a time machine. It’s what allows them to know what we’re going to like before we like it. I’m just kidding. Or am I??? Actually, the French film was an adaptation of a novel written by American writer, Harlan Coben. I’ve never read a Harlan Coben book before, but people tell me “Tell No One” was one of his lesser efforts. Anyway, Kurtzman and Orci adapted the book before the French did. The French just beat them to the theaters. I still think this deserves the Hollywood treatment though. It’s a can’t miss baby.
Writers: Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (based off the novel by Harlan Coben)
Details: 122 pages (5th Draft, 2002)

Warning: If you know nothing about this script or this movie and you like thrillers, stop now, download the script, and read it. You’ll thank me.

At Transformers premiere. “Proud” is not the adjective I’d use to describe these expressions.

Uhhhhh, can someone tell me WHERE THE HELL THIS SCRIPT WAS HIDING??? What a freaking gangbusters screenplay. I haven’t flown through a story that fast since The Cat In The Hat. And I thought The Grey was a good thriller. This is the executive suite of thrillers. 3000 square feet. Sweeping views of Vegas. TVs that pop out of the floor. Tell No One? Tell everyone!

But I’ll get to that in a second. First, we gotta deal with Orci and Kurtzman.

Every burgeoning writer in town cites these two as the oozing puss-filled sores of the screenwriting world. They point to the Transformers movies as their main argument. Anybody, they say, responsible for writing those movies, cannot be a good writer. And I will say this. The Transformers movies are two of the most incomprehensible mainstream movies I’ve ever seen, especially the second one. The thing is, the fault doesn’t lie squarely with them. These guys were brought in to realize a vision from a director who has no interest or understanding of story, to plug in characters that the toy company forced them to, to come up with a believable scenario by which aliens came to earth taking the form of transforming motor vehicles, to integrate pre-existing action sequences into a story that hadn’t been written yet, and to push all of this together in a few weeks, due to the writer’s strike (on the second one). In short, they were set up to fail. Any single one of us would’ve failed as well. It’s hard enough coming up with a good script when NO ONE is telling you how to write it. But when everyone is? And in a few weeks? There’s no way.

However, I’m not here to try and convince you to like Orci and Kurtzman. I was simply curious about reading a screenplay of theirs before they hit the bigtime. These are the scripts that usually GIVE these writers a shot at the big time, so it’s interesting to see what warranted that shot. And holy shit, this shot hit the bullseye.

David Beck and Elizabeth Parker are in love. They have been ever since they were 12 years old, doing the whole “carve the initials in the tree” thing. There’s only one issue affecting their otherwise bliss-filled relationship. David has seizures. Intense full-on blackouts where he doesn’t remember a thing. And one day, not long after the two are married, David is hit by something, triggering a seizure, and he blacks out. When he wakes up, he learns that his wife has been brutally murdered – the only thing he’s ever loved, stolen from him forever.

Four years later, David, now a social worker for abused children in Philadelphia, is trying to put the pieces of his life back together. He’s even dating a doctor, Anna, who helps some of the kids he brings in. Even though it’s not what he envisioned for himself, it’s a job Elizabeth was passionate about, and he feels a duty to carry it on. But the job is taxing, difficult, and he’s thinking about moving on to something more lucrative, something that’ll give him a cozy life, something that will help him finally move on from Elizabeth.

HUGE SPOILERS – PLEASE STOP READING NOW IF YOU HAVE ANY INTEREST IN THIS SCRIPT

And then David gets a message on his computer. He clicks a link. A live video feed. Of Elizabeth. At a park. Older. Today. Right now! Looking up into the camera!

It can’t be. There’s no way. His wife is dead. Isn’t she?

As David tries to make sense of the nonsensical, a car containing two murdered men is found in the lake next to where Elizabeth was murdered. These men were killed at the same time and with the same weapon that Elizabeth was. There are grave implications to this news. The serial killer who killed Elizabeth was thought to have only killed women. That’s why he supposedly left David alive. But if two men were also killed, why was David’s life spared? David has gone from mourning widow to number one suspect.

The worst thing about that? David’s not sure he *isn’t* a suspect. And actually, he’s not sure of anything anymore. Was the video feed of Elizabeth real? A fantasy? Could his fractured seizure-ridden mind be creating this vision to cope with the fact that he killed his wife?

Forced to go on the run or end up on the wrong side of the death penalty, David must scrape together the pieces of his wife’s secretive life, and find out what really happened to her that fateful day. Old friends, old family members, co-workers – no one can be trusted, and yet he needs all of their help to survive.

Tell No One takes its cues from the best, namely The Fugitive, and actually improves on the formula. Whereas The Fugitive has two gargantuan driving forces – the chase and Ford having to find out who killed his wife, Tell No One adds two additional mysteries: Is David the killer and is his wife still alive? With all these amazing threads going on at once, there isn’t a single sub-standard moment in the script. My admiration for this screaming fast story grew by the page because I’m so used to these things falling apart under their own weight. The twists stop making sense. The character motivations become ludicrous. The finale turns out to be a letdown. But Tell No One is the opposite. Every single story decision here is perfect. In fact, if I were teaching a class on how to write a mystery thriller, this is the script I would use to teach it. It’s that good.

And why is it that good? It’s no different than what we were talking about the other day with Taken. Tell No One gets the emotional component right. In the beginning, we see David and Elizabeth grow up together, fall in love together, get married, and start their life. So when Elizabeth is killed, it’s not just David who’s lost someone. It’s us. We watched this girl grow up. We watched her love. We watched her dream. We loved Elizabeth just as much as he did, and as a result, when she returns, we’re just as desperate for David to find her as he is. But the point is, if you stripped this thing of all its twist and turns, we’d still be pulling for these characters, because we like them that much.

As for the writing itself, it’s pretty solid. Kurtzman and Orci created a nice device that I really enjoyed. In general, I dislike unmotivated flashbacks because of their tendency to feel unnatural. Throughout the script, K and O use David’s seizures as a way to flash back to the day of the murder. It’s a little thing, but it plays nicely because it’s motivated by character (specifically – this character’s seizures). Always look for natural ways to move into your flashbacks, as opposed to just hitting us with them out of nowhere. It makes a difference.

The one thing that drove me crazy were Kurtzman and Orci’s use of underlined dialogue. Normally, this kind of stuff doesn’t bother me. But these two, for whatever reason, underline nearly every word of their characters’ dialogue (I guess to give it emphasis?). But instead of giving it emphasis, it gives us headaches, as we’re forced to change the way we read, starting and stopping so we can mentally annunciate the underlined words. It took me half the script to force myself to ignore it, and man was it annoying.

I’m sure some of you will be comparing this to the French film, and with that film nabbing a 93% approval on Rotten Tomatoes, I’m preparing for the barrage of reasons why this doesn’t match up to it. But I’ve never seen the film, so this was a totally new experience for me, and I think they hit it out of the park. Really great script.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive (Top 10)
[ ] genius

What I learned: The “found key that leads to the mysterious lockbox” device is one of the few things you can count on to ALWAYS WORK in a screenplay. Every. Freaking. Time! Cause we’re inherently curious about what the hell could be in that box. You can never go wrong with this device. (Just try and make sure what’s inside is something unique!).

TITAN WEEK – REVIEW 1 OF 5

Welcome to Titan Week, where we feature five scripts by writers who currently are or at one time were titans in the industry. What constitutes a titan? Maybe they’re that writer every producer in town calls when they need a rewrite on their 200 million dollar film. Maybe they’ve sold multiple million dollar spec scripts. Maybe they’re universally praised and respected. Maybe their style was so impressive they influenced an entire generation of writers. In order to keep things fresh, I’m going to let you suggest the last review of the week, as I haven’t chosen a script for Friday yet. So if there’s a particular script by a huge writer you think I should review, go ahead and suggest it in the comments section. In the meantime, let’s start off with one of the biggest names in screenwriting history – Shane Black. I’ll hand it over to Roger as he takes us back to a simpler time. A time where Pac-Man ruled and when Michael Jackson was cool…the first time. Here he is reviewing “Shadow Company.”

Genre: Horror, Action, Science Fiction
Premise: Jake Pollard is a forever-changed Vietnam vet, a pariah just scraping by in American society. When he learns that the bodies of six MIAs, found sealed in a Cambodian temple, are being shipped back home for a military funeral at the National Veterans Cemetery, he transforms from drifter to man on a mission. When the six MIAs resurrect and start killing everyone in the town of Merit, California, Pollard makes a last stand, revealing both his ties to the townspeople and his shadowy past with the MIAs.
About: Shane Black’s first script. Written in 1984. Got him his first agent. Optioned by Universal. After the success of Lethal Weapon, John Carpenter came on as director (this would have been his follow-up to They Live) and Walter Hill attached himself as executive producer. This draft is dated October 20, 1988 and is co-written by Black’s pal, Fred Dekker (Night of the Creeps, The Monster Squad). I’m not sure if Dekker was always a co-writer or if he came onboard to help Black write this particular draft. Do any of you dear readers out there know?
Writers: Shane Black & Fred Dekker

Shane Black