You may not have asked for it. But you’re sure as heck getting it. Another Star Wars article! (Hey, at least this time I tied it to screenwriting)

The Mandalorian Season 3 is just around the corner. And the most recent trailer has gotten me thinking about Star Wars.

I actually liked the trailer. As of today, The Mandalorian remains the closest we’ve gotten to Lucas’s original vision since Disney took over Lucasfilm. And a big reason for that is that Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni understand something about Lucas that many of these other people who have gotten Star Wars movies and shows don’t have a clue about.

Whimsy.

“Whimsy” just means playful, quaint, fanciful humor. It’s a surface-level component of storytelling. There’s no deeper meaning to it. But the more you watch Star Wars, the more you realize that whimsy is its secret sauce.

A perfect example of whimsy is the MSE-6 mouse droid, the thing that scoots away in the Death Star when Chewbacca roars at it. Another would be the giant frog creature outside of Jabba’s hut that snaps up kitten sized creatures with its tongue.

These things don’t have any deeper significance to the story. But they subconsciously make the world feel richer, which, in turn, tricks the mind into thinking these alien civilizations really do exist. Not to mention, they add that element of weird fun that differentiates Star Wars from all the competition.

It’s why you get the shot of Salacius B. Crumb’s cousin up there in the tree in the newest Mandalorian trailer. These guys understand the importance of Lucas’s obsession with whimsy.

But The Mandalorian is still Star Wars Lite. Which is scary when you consider that it’s the best thing Star Wars has to offer post-Disney acquisition.

Why do I call it “Star Wars Lite?” Because what are the stakes? They used to be getting Baby Yoda to safety. But they got him to safety, and apparently, safety gave him back. So what’s so important about this latest journey? I’m sure the writers will come up with something. But stories never work well when you have to add stakes retroactively. The stakes need to be baked into the concept.

This is what made the original Star Wars!  Stakes. There was a planet-destroying moon run by an evil Emperor going around the galaxy blowing up planets. How do stakes get any bigger than that?

That’s been a curse Star Wars has been unable to outrun. They’ve had to consistently come up with stakes that match or exceed the Death Star. And so far, they’ve failed.

Indeed, it is why Obi-Wan was such a dud. At least The Mandalorian could claim that Baby Yoda was the secret to the future of the Force throughout the galaxy. The only stakes in Obi-Wan seemed to be to get an annoyed Baby Leia back home before dinner.

Yet another reason Star Wars continues to flounder is the archetype problem.

For those who don’t know, George Lucas built the original Star Wars around Joseph Campbell’s, “The Hero’s Journey.” It’s actually quite astounding the way that material inspired him because he basically wrote the original Hero’s Journey and just crossed out the characters’ names and replaced them with Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. It’s a reminder of how getting the right inspiration at the right moment can be the key to writing something great.

But the thing about The Hero’s Journey is that each character plays a very specific role. There’s the hero, there’s the mentor, there’s the trickster, there’s the guardian. Those characters are constructed to fit a very narrow purpose in the story. The mentor, for example, is there to offer guidance and wisdom to the hero.

Therefore, when you try and extrapolate these smaller side-characters into their own shows and movies, with these bigger storylines and larger character demands, it never quite works. Maybe this is a weird analogy but I just made cookies last night, so go with it – it would be like making cookies, only for you to realize after you cooked them that you forgot to add sugar, so you then went and sprinkled sugar all over the cookies. No matter how much sugar you add, they’re not going to taste right.

The Boba Fett show bumped up against this issue head on. Boba Fett was Star Wars’s biggest bada$$. And that’s exactly who they showed us in the teaser for the show at the end of The Manadlorian Season 2. They showed Boba Fett walk into Jabba the Hutt’s palace, heartlessly shoot his successor, Bib Fortuna, then take the throne.

It was the perfect representation of Boba Fett’s archetype. But when they actually had to make a show, and spread Boba Fett’s plotline over six episodes, having a ruthless cold-hearted killer didn’t work anymore. They had to make him softer. So that’s exactly what they did. And, in doing so, THEY MOVED AWAY FROM THE ARCHETYPE.

This is why these characters don’t work in expanded roles. Because you have to move away from the things that people liked so much about them. The same thing happened with Han Solo, albeit on a smaller scale. In Star Wars, Han Solo’s archetype, the Trickster, reveled in its edge. Of course, the character could be edgy because he only had to serve as an accomplice to the hero. As soon as you took him away from that archetype, he lost what we loved about him.

A lack of whimsy, a complex relationship with stakes, and an archetype problem, have placed Star Wars inside an iron lung machine, made it the Bubble Boy of franchises. And it looks like it’s only going to get worse from here. This upcoming Acolyte series is built around what the Star Wars community universally agrees is the worst thing about Star Wars, the High Republic Era. Ashoka is based on a cartoon character who only serious die-hard fans care about. I like Jon Watts but a show built around children (Skeleton Crew) probably isn’t going to cater to long-time Star Wars fans.

The High Republic

And this says nothing about the actual feature film plan, which seems to be non-existent. Kathleen Kennedy keeps scrapping everything she greenlights because she knows the truth – that there is no Star Wars feature film plan. They screwed up the Skywalker saga. So there are no more trilogies to mine from that. Which means you have to make one-offs.

But Star Wars isn’t a one-off franchise. It goes back to stakes. If you’re making one movie in one little part of the universe, the stakes are going to be low and people aren’t going to care. Making some offbeat Taika Waititi Star Wars movie set on the bantha origin planet of CousCoux sounds fine if you’ve got two healthy garguatun trilogies running concurrently. But if The Battle of CousCoux is the only Star Wars movie you have? You’re going to lose Star Wars. You are. Cause people are going to be like, “That’s it? A fun harmless little Star Wars movie? I was expecting more.”

So what’s the solution?

This is where things get scary.  There may not be a solution.  Star Wars may soon end up being one of those franchises that picks at the bones of its carcasses, like The Terminators and Aliens of the world.  It’s hard to write a good story period.  But it’s harder to write a good story when all the good stories in your franchise have been used up.

You’ve used up your Hero’s Journey template since you’ve built two trilogies off it. So now what? Can you introduce a Mad Max like hero? Or a Tony Stark like hero?  Make them the face of a trilogy? I don’t think you can.  Star Wars, at its heart, is about wonder. It’s about having these outsized dreams of doing something bigger with your life, like Luke Skywalker wanting to fight for the Rebellion. And that requires a younger “stars in their eyes” protagonist.

I know one thing for sure, though.  You gotta stop making TV shows.  Star Wars is using television to ignore the elephant in the room, which is that Lucasfilm is terrified to make movies.  They’re terrified because they know if they screw up two more times, Star Wars, as a top tier franchise, is dead.  Lucasfilm knows they can better hide failures on the TV side, which is why they keep making all these shows.

But sooner or later, they have to make movies because Star Wars IS A THEATRICAL FRANCHISE.  Movies = high stakes. Playing in television is like playing in the kiddie pool. It’s fun and it’s safe. But you’re just treading urine-infested water.

So I’ll ask you again, what’s the solution?

You need to go back to the source.  The source is The Hero’s Journey.  But since you can’t do a Hero’s Journey anymore, you have to go back even further, to the things that inspired The Hero’s Journey.  We’re talking about the wide range of cultural myths and legends from ancient Greece, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Native American cultures, that gave you those story components that make up The Hero’s Journey.

A good example is the Star Wars video game, Knights of the Old Republic, which is basically a take on Cain and Abel.  Two brothers were raised and each one went off on a different path, one to the Dark Side and the other to the Light. I could see a franchise being built around this dual-protagonist rivalry between brothers. And it would work because its bones are built from the same matter the original Star Wars was built from.

But, look, nobody said this stuff was easy. If I could easily come up with a great Star Wars idea, I’d be busy writing the next Star Wars movie for Lucasfilm (assuming they could get over me ripping them all the time). But I do think the Star Wars franchise needs to be built on top of a feature spine. It’s not a small potatoes franchise. It can have TV shows, but they should be supplementary, not the whole shebang.

You can dance with the TV devil for another year or two. But sooner or later, this franchises collapses if you don’t put a trilogy out there.

Genre: Horror
Premise: A drug addict returning from rehab kidnaps her daughter from her father then tries to skip town, only to end up at an old BnB chased by an evil tooth fairy determined to take her daughter from her.
About: This script finished in the bottom 25% of last year’s Black List. Chris Grillot had one other script on the Black List several years ago called “Bella.” Grillot is using his former job as a crime journalist in New Orleans as inspiration for much of what happens in today’s script. Except for the tooth fairy demon stuff, I’m assuming.
Writer: Chris Grillot
Details: 100 pages on the dot!

It’s been a while since we’ve reviewed a horror script on Scriptshadow so I thought, let’s bring the site back into equilibrium.

There have actually been some cool horror films that have come out lately. We had M3gan. We had Barbarian. We had Smile.

What I like about horror is that it’s very flexible tone-wise. You can take the exact same premise and construct three very different experiences depending on the tone you choose.  While older viewers dismiss the genre as a jump-scare fest, you can write some pretty dramatic horror movies. Which is definitely what we get today.

29 year old drug addict, Celia, has just finished her latest court-ordered rehab. Celia lives in the heart of New Orleans and on this particular night, the night she goes to get her daughter back, it’s raining like hell.

Celia picks up her 10 year old daughter, Imani, from the girl’s father. Imani has a cast on her arm. Celia knows what that means so she storms back in the house and all we hear is a gunshot. She races back out and tells Imani that they’re going to California. TONIGHT.

They don’t get very far, though. The rains are so intense that Celia’s Corolla gets stuck in 3 feet of water. The two have to practically swim over to the nearby gas station, where Celia asks the checker for a ride. He laughs at her but a couple minutes later, a local Louisiana swamp lord zooms up to the station on his boat!

The man, David, says he’s got a B&B down the street and Celia can stay there the night then get their car fixed tomorrow. Without any other options, Celia is forced to accept and, oh yeah, the home also happens to be an Antebellum plantation! As if they didn’t have enough to worry about.

Once there, Imani’s tooth pops out, and one of the maids at the B&B, Jeanine, tells her to *make sure* she puts that tooth under her pillow tonight. Celia shakes her head. Now they’re dealing with crazy weirdos obsessed with the tooth fairy? Can this night get any worse!

But after the two fall asleep, the night does get worse. The tooth fairy creature, nicknamed “Le Feu Follet,” nearly snatches Imani. Celia storms up to Jeanine and asks her what’s up. Jeanine tells her the whole backstory of this thing, that amounts to if you don’t offer your tooth, it takes your kid.

So what do they do now?? Jeanine says they’re lucky in that all of the candles here at the home are blessed by Jesus or something. And since the tooth fairy won’t go near them, they just have to stay in the light. Except that these weak candles won’t last the whole night. Which means they have to escape.

The team gears up to make a run for it, but then the crafty tooth fairy snatches Imani away! Now, the plan changes. They have to go find the only person left in town who knows where this tooth fairy creature lives. Then Celia is going to save her daughter!

Here’s the way I look at horror scripts these days.

You’ve got your horror monsters.

And you’ve got your horror scripts.

If you’ve got a horror monster, you have to create a short film proof-of-concept.

If you’ve got a great horror premise that doesn’t rely on how your horror monster looks, then you can still get away with trying to sell the script by itself.

In other words, if you’re writing “Mama,” which is entirely dependent on how the “Mama” creature looks, you need to do a proof-of-concept short. You even need to do that for simple monsters, like the shadow monster in Lights Out.

But if you’re writing something like The Sixth Sense, that’s not a horror script where you need to put a monster on the poster. So that’s one that can get by on the script alone.

What’s interesting about Chatter is that it’s somewhere in between these two options and I don’t know if it’s good enough to get traction as a script alone. You probably need to do a proof-of-concept short on the tooth fairy creature.

With that said, the character work here is intense. And dark. This isn’t some light-hearted funzo horror movie, like M3gan.

We feel Celia’s addiction. We feel the physical abuse in her relationship, as well as the abuse from the father towards the daughter. We feel this “all hope is lost” vibe as they’re trying to start a new life. It’s intense, man!

That’s probably the script’s best quality. Its darkness. These people felt like they were genuinely at the end of their rope.

The script probably would’ve been a lot better, though, if the writer had patched up his mythology. We’re told that this creature used to steal children all the way back in the Civil War. But once word got out that it was doing so, everybody made sure to always put their teeth under the pillow.

Apparently, only one person didn’t do this in the last 50 years, and that was Jeanine, who didn’t do it for her son, which is why the tooth fairy took him. I’m trying to do the math here.  How many teeth fall out of a child as they grow up? 15? Okay, now how many children have grown up in New Orleans in the past 50 years. 10 million? So we’re looking at 150 million teeth, and only once did someone not put a tooth under their pillow? I’m not sure I’m buying that.

I think a good question is, does stuff like this matter?

Does it really matter to a reader if that aspect of the story doesn’t pass muster?

It’s a good question. And the answer is, “It depends.” If I’m super invested in the characters and the storytelling and the script is really good, then I probably don’t care about it. But If I’m where most readers are when they’re reading a script, which is they think it’s pretty good and are hoping for a big exciting ending that’s going to put the script over the top. If that’s where a script is, then anything that’s shaky in the script could be the deciding factor that makes the reader give up.

That’s why details, in and of themselves, don’t matter. But taken in totality, with all the other details of the story, one lazy detail could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

For example, you have these candles. These candles are special god-approved candles that scare away the tooth fairy. Well, hold on here a second. These candles won’t last the night? Then what good are they? And does that mean you have to go to the church every morning to relight the candles? That seems like extremely specific mythology. Or are you saying they last for a long time but Celia and Imani just happened to show up on the night where they were running out of wax? If that’s the case, then that’s a bit coincidental, don’t you think?

Again, by themselves, these things don’t matter much. But when added up, they definitely matter. Because the reader is asking these very same questions in their mind as they’re reading your script INSTEAD OF doing what they’re supposed to be doing, which is enjoying your story.

With that said, there’s a teensy bit more good to Chatter than bad. Like I always say, get the main characters right and that will act as deodorant for many of your script’s weaknesses. I felt that Grillot got the characters of Ceilia and Imani right. And then I always love when writers take a goofy idea and treat it really seriously. It always creates an unexpected tone.

So, much like Monday’s movie review (You People), this one squeaks by with a ‘worth the read.’

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

What I learned: Early in the script, Celia walks into the dad’s house. We stay outside so we can’t see anything. We hear a gunshot, we see her hurry out of the house, and then her and Imani make a run for it. However, later in the story, we learn that she didn’t shoot him. She merely fired a warning shot. I believe that the audience would rather you imply something bad DIDN’T HAPPEN only to later reveal IT DID, than imply that something bad DID HAPPEN only to later reveal THAT IT DIDN’T. Because it’s a letdown. Celia is bada$$ if she killed him. The stakes are much higher, since now they must completely disappear in order to survive the rest of their lives. Whenever something cool happens in your script and you later say, “Psyche!” the reader doesn’t like you.

Genre: Sports Thriller
Premise: A desperate cyclist and his charismatic new team doctor concoct a dangerous training program in order to win the Tour de France. But as the race progresses and jealous teammates, suspicious authorities, and the racer’s own paranoia close in, they must take increasingly dark measures to protect both his secret and his lead.
About: This script finished in the Top 10 of last year’s Black List. The writer, Haley Bartels, seems to have been destined to get to this point. She received her MFA in Screenwriting from AFI. She got a BA in English from UCLA. She studied at the Lee Strasberg Theater and Film Institute in New York. She studied at Russia’s premiere school for the dramatic arts, the Moscow Art Theater (МХАТ).  She made last year’s Blood List. And this script won one of the Nicholl fellowships.
Writer: Haley Bartels
Details: 109 pages

Quoting Macbeth on page 1!

Been a while since I’ve encountered that.

This is just my own personal opinion – this is not a script rule or anything – but I have never, in my life, read a pre-story quote, in a screenplay or a novel, that has enhanced my reading experience. They seem a bit pretentious to me.

Curious to hear what you guys think about pre-script quotes. Share your thoughts in the comments. Actually, wait up! You gotta read my review first.

Taylor Mace lives in Boulder, Colorado and is a professional bike racer. Just not a very good one. He’s 35 years old and in denial about the fact that each year that passes, he’s getting worse. At the moment, he’s barely clinging to the bottom rung of the team he races for, Inverness.

Meanwhile, his best friend on the team, Duncan, is riding better than ever. He has the kind of talent that Taylor could only dream of. Actually, everybody on the team has more talent than Taylor. Taylor is a work horse. And his horse shoes are starting to splinter.

But Taylor is given a second chance when 40-something Andrea Lathe joins the team. Andrea is one of these medical sports doctors who look for ways to improve athletes by checking their blood, their heart, their entire circulatory system.

Andrea puts the team through a series of tests, including an updated version of The Pit of Despair’s death machine in The Princess Bride. No, I’m not kidding. It’s really the same device. The machine’s purpose is to determine each rider’s threshold to pain. You stay in it for as long as you can.

Taylor finishes last in every single test EXCEPT THE MACHINE. Where he crushes everyone else. He makes it an entire two minutes. Nobody else made it more than 15 seconds. His show-stopping result leads to Andrea Lathe becoming obsessed with him. In her experience, the people who win the big tours in racing are the ones who can endure the most pain.

So Lathe makes Taylor her pet project. Which also means that Taylor needs to start taking steroids. Lathe is extremely manipulative and easily able to talk Taylor into doing drugs. And as soon as Taylor does, he begins racing up the ranks within the team. By the time they get to Spain for the big next tour, Taylor is awarded the number 1 spot on the team.

But Lathe doesn’t stop there. She demands that Taylor LITERALLY give her his blood. That blood is then sent off to a secret lab where it’s super-metasticized or something, and comes back where it’s re-injected into him, turning him into a super soldier. Once on the mega-blood, he becomes unstoppable. That is until another racer on the team starts challenging him, a rider who may also be under Lathe’s tutelage.

This is a very good script.

Whenever I come into a sports screenplay, what I’m immediately worried about is cliche. Especially if it’s a racing script. I mean how much more cliche can you get than, “I’m going to win this race.” Let me guess. You’re going to be trailing with 10 seconds to go before your second wind magically kicks in and then you’re able to pass him at the turn and beat him in a photo finish.

Pumping Black is anything but cliche. Remember that movie about wrestling called Foxcatcher with Channing Tatum? This reminds me a lot of that movie. But it’s actually good. The reason it’s good is because the central relationship is really sharp.

You’ve got Taylor, who’s so desperate, at the end of his career, that he’ll do anything to win. And then you have Lathe, who’s one of the better characters you’ll read in a script all year. She’s this manipulative evil sex demon who is not afraid to use her sexual dominance to make these men do what she needs them to do.

One of the early scenes is her needing to check Taylor’s muscles so she tells him to strip. He strips down into his boxers and she says, “No, the boxers too.” Then in one of the most inappropriate scenes you’ll read in 2023, she “inspects” him.

It’s weird but it’s also one of the things that sets the script apart. Whenever Lathe and Taylor are alone, the scene is charged with this intense negative sexual energy brokered by an inappropriate power dynamic.

I liked how Bartels also drip-fed the steroids. At first, it was a just a pill. And you could’ve ended there. Only given our protagonist these pills. But the art of writing screenplays is such that you constantly want to add new things to the story. If it’s just this pill the whole time, we’ll be bored by the pill within 20 pages. So ten pages later, we introduce injections. And then 15 pages later, we introduce the big dog – blood swapping.

And what was so great about the blood-swapping was that now you’re introducing the element of death. It’s explained to us that this mega-blood gets a lot thicker, so much so that riders will set alarms to get up at four in the morning to move around to get their blood flowing so it doesn’t get clogged up in their system and kill them.

I love stuff like this. I love when you add multiple consequences and those additional consequences get bigger each time. At first, it’s just getting kicked off the team. Then, it’s possibly getting caught by the doping federation. Then, it’s death!

As I’ve told you guys before, I often judge the quality of a script on the choices that weren’t made. You could’ve easily made Lathe a nuts and bolts male team member. Just by making Lathe a female, she becomes different. Making in her 40s makes her different. Making her Machiavellian makes her different. Having her use her sexuality to manipulate riders makes her different. This could’ve been a lame character in another writer’s hands. It’s a super memorable character in this writer’s hands.

The only reason the script doesn’t get an Impressive is because of suspension of disbelief issues regarding some of Lathe’s more outlandish behavior. Even though I liked a lot of things about her, I don’t know if I bought that she could just make guys strip completely naked, tie them down, attach them to torture devices without warning, and start torturing them. I mean, did #MeToo get lost on the way to the Tour De France?

Still, the actual writing and style is easy to read. Everything here moves fast. The plot developments, while never shocking, always improvedthe story. For example, bringing this young buck, Malcom, in at the end and having him be a potential foil to Taylor’s glory, and also possibly signifying that he’s the one who’s supposed to win and that Lathe may be using Taylor – that whole evolving storyline was very compelling. There’s this terrifying late development of a bad bag of blood that Taylor injects into himself that may kill him. It’s good stuff.

This is, most definitely, a worthy entry onto the Black List.

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

What I learned: Pumping Black shows us the power of an X-Factor character. An “X-factor” character is often someone who doesn’t act predictably. And that makes them very exciting to watch. I mean, one of the key scenes here is when Lathe asks Taylor to consider getting injections as well. Taylor says no. She says fine, sorry for bringing it up. And then, when he turns, she plunges the needle into him anyway. Lathe is the definition of unpredictable. You can’t really use your protagonist as an x-factor character. But you can use secondary characters, like Lathe.

Genre: Comedy
Premise: A white Jewish accountant falls in love with a black clothing designer and the two must deal with their parents’ unique perspectives on their relationship.
About: Kenya Barris, the creator of Black-ish, is finally getting into the feature film game with this script he wrote with Jonah Hill. The movie premiered on Netflix this Friday. The film has a killer cast. Jonah Hill, Eddie Murphy, Julia-Louise Deyfuss, David Duchovny.
Writer: Kenya Barris and Jonah Hill
Details: 2 hours long

COMEDY!

They say it’s dead.

At least at the box office.

But maybe not at the streaming office.

This is one I’ve been looking forward to since I saw the trailer, which I thought was great. I loved the casting. Fun premise. What could go wrong?

Ezra is a 35 year old Jewish accountant who hates his job. The only respite he gets from it is through the podcast he shares with his black lesbian plus-sized best friend who he discusses black culture with. In Ezra’s dream world, he would quit his job and podcast full time.

But first Ezra would like to fix his love life, or, I should say, his lack of one. Although the Jewish community fixes Ezra up with a lot of girls, he can’t seem to find one that he vibes with.

Then, one day, after work, he gets in an Uber that isn’t his Uber, which is where he meets Amira, a young black fashion designer. Amira is angry that Ezra would get in her car, assuming she must be an Uber driver because she’s black, until he shows her the picture of his driver, who she admits looks exactly like her.

The two start joking around and, before we know it, they’re dating! Months pass, Ezra is head over heels. So he asks her to marry him. She’s totally down but before that can happen, they must meet the parents.

First, Ezra meets Akbar and Fatima, Amira’s parents, and right away there are issues. Neither of them like the fact that their black daughter is marrying a white man, particularly a Jew, with Akbar leading the charge. When Ezra asks Akbar for his blessing, Akbar simply says, “If you want to marry my daughter, you can try.”

Ezra’s parents are the opposite. They are beyond excited that they are about to up their “progressive” street cred. Ezra’s mom, Shelley, is particularly thrilled that she will have half-black grandchildren. Shelley and Arnold (Ezra’s dad) start to creep Amira out with just how much they love her blackness.

Things get even crazier when the parents have to meet EACH OTHER. Right away, they’re debating who had it worse, slaves or Holocaust survivors. And now we’re off to the races. The friction gets so intense that maybe it’s going to prevent Ezra and Amira from living happily ever after. Ultimately, the couple will have to decide what’s more important, their happiness or their families’ approval.

I have never experienced a Kenya Barris production before. And after watching this, I’m on the fence whether I’ll do so again.

It’s not that You People is bad. It’s that it’s frustratingly uneven.

At times it’s cheesy. Other times it’s awkward. And at certain times it feels so much like a sitcom that I forgot I was watching a movie. There is one scene where there are 6 chairs set up in a perfect U-shape and every character is sitting in a chair and they have one long conversation. No movement at all. Just people on a set saying their lines. It truly felt like Barris was learning on the job.

Luckily, the script works well whenever it’s leaning into its concept, an interracial couple facing both overly skeptical and overly accepting parents. Ezra’s attempt to get to know Amira’s parents by scheduling a meeting at Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles (a popular black eatery in Los Angeles) was pretty darn funny.

But my favorite scene was Amira meeting Ezra’s parents. Shelley’s intense desire to impress Amira with how much she loves black people was hilarious. And Arnold’s bizarre obsession with his favorite rapper as a teenager, Xhibit, begins one of the best running gags in the movie.

I think my favorite joke was when Ezra left the room to calm his mother down only to come back to find Arnold [badly] serenading Amira on the piano, which he clearly never used until this moment.

Unfortunately, whenever the movie moves away from that premise, it falls apart. The ‘falling in love’ scenes, in particular, are hard to watch. I struggle to think of a more inauthentic example of two people falling in love. From cheesy R&B tunes to 1980s dissolves to some pretty lousy “I love you, no I love you” dialogue.

One thing that stuck out to me as a considerable blemish on the film was Ezra’s dream to become a professional podcaster. He has this podcasting partnership with a black lesbian (or potentially non-binary person?) that felt about as authentic as Kanye West running a self-help seminar.

Nothing about their partnership rang true. You didn’t buy into their friendship. You knew there wasn’t any scenario by which Ezra would’ve ever met this woman. The only reason it existed is because the writer wanted it to. And when you, as the writer, prioritize your ‘wants’ over writing the actual truth, that’s when the pillars holding your script up start to splinter.

Worse, turning this podcast into a profession as opposed to a hobby didn’t seem representative of the character at all. Ezra didn’t appear to have any other black people in his life before Amira arrived. Based on his friend group we meet later at the bachelor party, he hung out in exclusively white circles. So why was he interested in black culture to the point where he went out and found a black non-binary podcasting partner to talk about black culture??

Why am I getting all nerdy about this? Because you never want to force things into your story to begin with. But you especially don’t want to do it in comedy, where you’re avoiding anything that can restrict the oxygen breathing air into your comedy. Forced storylines and the exposition that comes with them can inject a clunkiness into scenes that then becomes the dominant attribute we’re noticing.

Which is exactly what happens here. Every time Seth’s talking to his podcasting partner, all we’re thinking is, “These two have no chemistry. Where did they meet and why are they friends? Their podcast is lame. There’s no future in this.” And if we’re thinking about that, guess what? We’re not laughing.

Hollywood’s been getting character jobs and character job motivations wrong for decades. The main reason for this is that writers never have real jobs. So they have no idea how the real world works. This leads to them giving characters jobs *they would like to have* or whatever job is hot at the moment (why so many 80s characters in rom-com scripts were architects).

This is why, of course, Seth is a podcaster. Because everybody’s a podcaster these days. It’s “relevant.” I cannot emphasize enough that this is not how you should choose your hero’s job. Your character’s job (as well as whatever dream job they might want to quit their current job for) should always stem from who *your character* is, not from who *you* are.

With comedy, you have two options. One is to lean exactly into who your character is. Two is to give them an ironic job. So let’s say your character is an overly relaxed person who’s good with people. He could be a therapist. Or, if you wanted to be ironic, he could be a chef at a very intense kitchen where he’s screaming all day. But what he wouldn’t be is a bitcoin market analyst, aka some random trendy job that doesn’t match his character at all.

They say comedy is reacting and both Joanh Hill and Lauren London’s reactions are probably the best thing about this film. Julia Louise Dreyfuss’s Shelley wants so desperately to be accepted by the black community that she is constantly over-stepping and saying stupid stuff. At one point, after learning that many black women wear wigs, she does some research so that the next time she sees Amira, she can say, “I love your hair. It’s so pretty.” “Thanks.” “Is that a roller set?” The look on Amira’s face as she stares back at her is just priceless.

But the best is Ezra listening to his mom and dad try to sound hip when he first brings Amira around. Arnold, for reasons that nobody understands, starts to share his love for Xhibit, a rapper from the late 90s, the last time he listened to rap. Watching Ezra fall apart as his dad goes further and further down the Xhibit rabbit hole was one of my favorite parts of the movie.

I hate grading on a curve but I feel like the world of comedy has fallen so drastically that we’re lucky when we get a comedy that even kind of works. Which is how I’d categorize You People. It kind of works. And it did make me laugh out loud over a dozen times. That’s something, right? So, if you’re looking for a little cheer-up, this movie will probably do the trick.

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

What I learned: When you have a good concept, structure as many scenes around that concept as possible. You People is best when the characters are around their parents. That’s where all the conflict and fun is. It’s at its worst in almost every other scene.

Hey, Jordan didn’t make the cut of his high school team either.  So if you’re on this list, it may be a good thing!

This is a reminder that on the second to last Friday of every month, we’ll have a logline showdown here on the site. Send your title, genre, and logline to me at carsonreeves3@gmail.com. I’ll vet the best five, put them up on the site for competition. Winner gets a review the following Friday (so your script has to be written!). The next deadline is Thursday, February 16th, 10pm Pacific Time.

Unfortunately, not every logline can be a winner. So in the spirit of both teaching and making sure that everyone doesn’t keep sending me loglines that have no chance, I’m featuring 7 loglines that will not make the Amateur Showdown cut. If you entered with one of these, learn from your mistakes, and enter another showdown with a fresh concept. We’re doing these all year long so you have time!

Title: HAVE YOU SEEN ME?
Genre: Thriller
Logline: Disturbed by the disappearance of a pretty blond white girl overshadowing that of her black best friend, an 11-year-old white girl fakes her own disappearance in hopes of it leading authorities to her friend.

Analysis: I sort of understand what’s going on here but it’s one of those ideas that’s not quite formulated when you lay it out. And this is a challenge that a lot of writers run up against. These ideas that *kind of* sound like movie ideas. But if you actually break down the logline, they don’t make sense. In this case, we’re exploring the well-documented phenomena that the news only reports on pretty young white girls that go missing, never black girls. So our hero fakes her disappearance… to make people look for her black friend. Wait, hold on, what?? How does her going missing get people to look for her friend? Aren’t they only going to look for her? And doesn’t that only solidify the ‘missing young white girl’ phenomena? Maybe she leaves messages for the cops like, “Don’t forget my friend who’s also missing!” I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense to me. And a logline MUST MAKE SENSE. Let me say that again. A logline MUST MAKE SENSE. You don’t get to explain your logline to someone. They just read the logline. So IT MUST MAKE SENSE.

Title: Office Murder Mystery
Genre: Mystery
Logline: Waking up in a locked office next to the dead body of his boss, a man suffering from a schizophrenic disorder must find the real murderer by the end of the business day with the help of his five favorite dead mystery writers that only he can see, hear or speak to.

Analysis: This one comes from a longtime reader of the site, Alex, who I really like. But this logline doesn’t work for me. It definitely has a high-concept feel to it. But two things are keeping me away. One, whenever you start talking about schizophrenics, the writing level needs to be 10 times that of a normal writer. It’s a very specific disease and in order for it to come off as authentic, the writer really has to understand it, and in my experience, 999 writers out of 1000 don’t. So it always ends up being lame. Also, the “dead mystery writers” thing comes out of nowhere. One second we have a dead body of a boss and the next we have mystery writers??? Where did these mystery writers come from exactly? I know. They’re in his head. But they’re not set up well. We weren’t told that our hero was a vociferous reader or an aspiring novelist. Just a “man.”  So there’s zero connection to the mystery writers component.  For these reasons, the logline doesn’t work.

Title: Eagle Heart
Genre: Period drama – WWII
Logline: When his father comes home from war without legs and without hope, a nine year old boy believes that by saving a dying bird he can stop his family from falling apart.

Analysis: These are always hard for me to turn down because I can tell the writer has written a very heartfelt story that he cares deeply about. But the logline still has to work. A big problem I’ll see in a lot of loglines is that the writer makes a HUGE leap from one dot to the next. A ton of necessary information in between is skipped over, making the logline seem awkward and disconnected. We start out with a dad coming home from war, injured and hopeless. Okay, so far so good. Then we’re saving a bird. Wait, what??? What about saving dad?? Then we find out he’s saving the bird so that his family doesn’t fall apart. What about saving the bird to save his dad!!?? All three sections of the logline do not operate in harmony, which is why I passed this one over.

Title: SINNERMAN
Genre: Horror
Logline: When a home invasion ends in murder a mother of two young children is ‘haunted’ by the intruder’s malevolent spirit but she soon discovers that she’s the undead and is being held in purgatory…

Analysis: First of all, when a writer hits me up with 4 or 5 submissions, I pretty much don’t trust those entries. As writers, we typically have 1 or 2 screenplays that are RIGHT NOW our best work. We do not have five equally good scripts. Three of those are older work and not nearly representative of what we’re capable of now. So if you’re just spamming people with your five most recent screenplays, chances are you’re not really trying to show someone your best work. Hence, I wouldn’t use this strategy (on my site or anywhere else). As for the logline, it has a bunch of those buzzwords that make it sound like a movie (home invasion, haunted, undead, purgatory) but nothing unique to help it stand out from the pack. A script idea usually needs a unique attractor of some sort. This one doesn’t have one.

Title: WEIRD WAR
Genre: Epic Vietnam War Era Supernatural thriller
Logline: A young grunt in denial about his psychic ability is assigned to an elite squad of spirit hunters and is forced to come to terms with his family’s own supernatural past.

Analysis: If you follow my site, you know that extended genre descriptions take you out of the running immediately. You want one genre descriptor, two at most. In very rare situations, three. But whatever you do, you don’t want to add things into the genre description (Epic, Vietnam Ear Era) that aren’t accepted known genres. Not only does it come off as unprofessional, but it indicates that the script is all over the place. So, what do we see with this logline? Well, it sounds all over the place. Psychic abilities. Spirit hunters. It sounds out there and, based on my extensive experience reading scripts, like it’s going to have a very wonky and muddled mythology. Now, could I be wrong? Of course. But this is what my experience tells me is coming, which is why the script didn’t make the showdown.

Title: Edge of Humanity
Genre: Sci-Fi
Logline: Earth faces the final stages of environmental collapse from climate change. The global government secretly commits genocide to avert human extinction, while rival factions fight to uncover the truth.

Analysis: First of all, this writer sent a nice e-mail saying that he recently received his first “RECOMMEND.” So good on him! But, when it comes to Logline Showdown, the recommends are rarer than snow in Los Angeles. We’re tough graders here, and the problem with Edge of Humanity is that the logline is way too broad. There isn’t a single mention of a character. So who do we connect to? And what’s the actual story, since presumably we’re going to be following someone on a journey? On top of that, the broad strokes are too generalized and don’t set the script apart. More generic buzzwords: “environmental collapse,” “climate change,” “global government,” “genocide,” “human extinction.” It just sounds like a million other scripts, movies, and tv shows. This is your monthly reminder that a logline should not be about what makes your movie SIMILAR to others. It should be about what makes your movie DIFFERENT from others.

Title: Controller
Genre:  Sci-Fi
Logline:  A young fugitive, still traumatized from a high school assault, uses an experimental mind-control device to save a new lover from a jealous techno thief.

Analysis: This logline has several problems. For starters, the high school assault should not be in the logline. That’s backstory. It doesn’t add anything relevant that we *need* to know to understand the story. From there, you have “experimental mind-control” and “techno thief.” These are two major aspects of the logline and they don’t go together at all. The featured words in a logline MUST CONNECT for your logline to feel whole. So, for example, if you say your hero is a vegan, then it works well if, later in the logline, they find themselves in a slaughterhouse. Finally, I don’t really know what a techno thief is. You mean like they steal bitcoin? It feels like a dated word and it’s not clear enough all on its own. If any word in your logline has a chance of being even mildly misunderstood, you don’t want to use it.

Carson gives logline consultations for $25 a pop.  E-mail him at carsonreeves1@gmail.com if interested.