Today, I want to introduce you to a friend of mine, David Aaron Cohen. David’s been working as a writer in this business for 30 years. The two of us have bonded over our Chicago deep-dish roots and mutual love of tennis, specifically our fascination with the sport’s newest superstar, Carlos Alcaraz. David was able to see him live in Indian Wells a couple of weeks ago. I’m still jealous.

Recently, David told me about a class he’s been wanting to put together forever that focuses on teaching writers something that’s never taught: how to navigate the business side of the industry. We’re not talking about how to write a good logline or how to nail those first 10 pages. We’re talking about how to pitch, how to get an agent, how to sell to streamers, how TV writers rooms work, how to navigate a writing assignment when you’re dealing with four different producers – the kind of stuff we’ve all wished there was a class for. Well, now there finally is.

It’s going to be a 9 part Zoom course, each session being 2 hours long, and it’s definitely going to fill up fast. So you’ll want to register as soon as possible.  Sign-up details will be at the bottom of the post.

For those of you who don’t know anything about David, he had a movie released last year called AMERICAN UNDERDOG (a 98% audience rating on RT), has two tv series in development – one with Sony, one with Lionsgate, just finished adapting the international best-seller, MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING. Going back deeper into his catalog, he co-wrote THE DEVIL’S OWN, starring Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt. He also wrote one of the great sports movies of all time, FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS.

In order to get a feel for David and what he’s like as a teacher, I asked him to share a few of the biggest lessons he’s learned in the business. But before we get to those, I demanded he tell me (and you) the craziest story he’s ever experienced as a screenwriter.

DAVID AARON COHEN: There have a been a few. LOL. Here’s one. 2017 I get a call from a director friend of mine. He’s been hired to make a 10 million dollar movie with John Travolta. Only catch is, we have to write a script for him to read and sign off on by February 5th. I look at the calendar. It’s January 14th. What the hell? We break the story in 5 days, card it, set our page counts, and work 21 days straight. Deliver it to the producer who gives off the worst vibes. Total hustler. But his check cleared.

Travolta reads and approves the screenplay. Casting happens: Katheryn Winnick, Tom Sizemore (one of his last roles). Pre-production. Shooting in Puerto Rico. I do some rewrites. Jodi, the director (not his real name!), heads off to the island. The day before principal photography starts, the line producer (who’s in cahoots with the shifty producer) announces that instead of the 5 million dollars left in the budget for shooting, there’s only 1.9 million. Have to cut 35% of the script. IN ONE DAY. You can imagine how that turned out. The producer literally STOLE the other 3 million dollars. Against all odds, Jodi kept shooting. Then a hurricane hit Puerto Rico and destroyed all the sets. I kid you not. Somehow, he finished the movie.

I saw bits of it back in L.A. We made a plan to do re-shoots with the contingency budget to make all the plot holes make sense. But the producer had STOLEN that money too. Then he fired the director. Edited the movie himself. Delivered it to the distribution company. I still haven’t gotten drunk enough yet to watch it, although I have read some of the audience reviews. They’re hilariously bad. But here’s the final plot twist. Last summer I log onto Netflix, looking to watch the new Adam Sandler movie HUSTLE, and I see this: “TOP TEN MOVIES STREAMING IN THE U.S.: NUMBER 9 – SPEED KILLS”

As someone once said, “there’s no accounting for taste.” Or chalk it up to a great poster.

CARSON: This is literally my worst nightmare! And yet, my Friday night viewing is set.  Did you see what I did there?  “Friday Night.” :) Okay, let’s jump into the lessons.  Take it away, David!

*************************************************

MAKING MOONSHINE

This is a process critical to every story you ever want to tell. How do you make moonshine? Take your basic still out in the backwoods, fill it with mash. Heat that up with steam. The mash sinks to the bottom, but the vapors that rise are pure alcohol. That’s your job, making those vapors. When they condense back into liquid, you’re drinking moonshine. Which is a really convoluted way of saying, DISTILL YOUR STORY DOWN TO ITS ESSENCE. Distill! Distill! Distill! Put it into the pressure cooker of your heart and soul and guts until those vapors start to rise. All great stories start with essence.

Here’s one example. My big break in Hollywood was getting tapped by director Alan J. Pakula (ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN, SOPHIE’S CHOICE, KLUTE, etc.) to adapt a little-known non-fiction book called FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS. I wrote a first draft which everyone agreed got the tone right, but little else. I kept going. I was flailing around. Six months passed. The studio panicked and so did I, but Pakula didn’t. He pushed me to dig deeper, to find the essence of the story, to go find the core. We talked. We went back and forth. Is it the coach’s story? The quarterback’s? There was a lot of father/son energy. Maybe that was the key. But none of those ideas provided the throughline we were looking for – the central idea that was bigger than any individual character. Without that idea, all I had was mash.

What does it mean on a story level to heat up the mash? It means being curious. Fearless. Letting go of fixed ideas. And doing the research. I had spent a couple weeks in Odessa a year prior, meeting with the players who were on that 1988 Permian Panthers team. They were three years out of high school, but still haunted by their experience, by the feeling they had let everyone down. I could sense the heat there, when I put myself in their shoes, when I opened my writer’s self to what they were feeling.

I remember the moment it all crystallized. I was sitting in a little anteroom of Pakula’s New York City office, next to a pile of old luggage. And then this sentence kind of hit me, like a download. This is a story about a group of high school football players who carry the hopes and dreams of an entire town on their shoulders. That was it. Moonshine in twenty-five words. I sat down and wrote the draft that became the movie, guided by that idea. It poured out of me in like four weeks because I now knew what FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS was about. What every character was feeling. Go watch it. You’ll see that all the scenes serve that master, that controlling idea, that logline – call it whatever you want. I call it MAKING MOONSHINE.

PITCHING IN THE ZOOM AGE

One of the most critical skill sets you need to master to succeed in our business is the art of the pitch. Great stories CONNECT with people. When pitching, you are the CONNECTOR. Think of it like an electric circuit. The story is the current. You’re the switch. When you flip the switch, that story energy must ELECTRIFY your audience. And I’m not talking about reaching their heads. The jolt of your story has to hit them right in the gut. The solar plexus. First chakra. Does that sound hard? It should. Because it is. But if you’ve done your homework, if you’ve made your moonshine, you’re ready.

Back in the late 80’s when the whole “high concept comedy” idea was dominating Hollywood, I used to laugh and say the opposite is true. ‘High concept’ is just code for the stupidest, low-brow humor – the classic example back then being a five-word pitch: “DANNY DEVITO, ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER: TWINS!” But with 30 something years of pitching in the rear-view mirror, I look at that and see genius. It’s like the Michelangelo of Moonshine! Five words that conjure up an entire movie! Twelve syllables that give you that jolt, that laugh, that coin drop moment! You see the poster, the trailer, the whole thing. (FYI TWINS cost 15 million dollars to make in 1988 and grossed over 200 million worldwide.)

But the era of selling one-line pitches is long gone. In today’s marketplace you need to be ready to flip that switch and deliver the one-minute version, the five-minute version, the 15-minute version, and the (rare) 30 minute deep dive. Does that sound hard? It is and it isn’t.

The most important ingredient in a successful pitch is something everyone can deliver. It’s PASSION. Let me take you there. Imagine you just had the most earth-shaking experience of your life. You watched your wife give birth! You lived through an 8.0 earthquake! You were about to drown, and someone saved you! And now, minutes later, you are telling your best friend about it. How would you sound? Breathless, pumped, adrenaline flowing? That is pitch energy! That’s what you’ve got to bring.

Second ingredient: CLARITY. Your passion captures the attention of your audience. It delivers the jolt. Now you need to get in their heads. Not with an overload of information. Just enough to let them know where things are heading. Which is why a big piece of clarity is proper SIGNAGE. Lay out the story with that Carson-esque contest-winning logline, then post the signs that put the doubts to rest: act breaks, character arcs, key plot points. Give your audience the same feeling you get from reading the first pages of a great script. What happens there? You relax and settle in, knowing you are driving down the story highway in good hands.

Ingredient #3: EMOTIONAL LANGUAGE. Because there is a big catch to clarity. There is a ticking time bomb associated with delivering information. The minute it feels dry, perfunctory, logical or any of the above, your car just crashed off that highway. Every beat needs to be soaked in emotion. Cannot emphasize this enough. Your hero isn’t “heartbroken,” she’s CRUSHED. Your villain isn’t a “badass,” he’s KIM JONG-UN ON STEROIDS (Ok, you can probably do better than that). Movies are about emotion. They are about making your audience FEEL. Why are horror movies eternally popular? Because they target the one emotion that everyone can relate to: FEAR. Your pitch MUST BE an emotional experience. So pull out all the stops. Speed up, you slow down, your voice goes high and low. You pause at the moments of suspense. I know what a lot of you are thinking here: “I’m a writer. I’m not an actor.” Well, then go write the script of your pitch. Write it out word for word. Make it passionate, clear and full of emotional language on the page, and then…

Ingredient #4: PRACTICE THE HELL OUT OF IT. Pitch it to your friends. Pitch it to your parents. Pitch it to the postal worker. Get over yourself and your shyness. Pitch it to the mirror. Record it on video. Ask your actor friends for input. LISTEN TO WHAT THEY SAY. If you want to succeed in our highly competitive business, you better be ready to work outside your comfort zone.

And while selling a pitch is fantastic, it isn’t the only positive outcome of pitching. It’s your opportunity to leave a powerful impression on the people in the room. Trust me, they will remember a great pitch. That way, even if they don’t buy it, they are buying into you – your talent, your power to tell a great story. So the next time they’re looking for a writer for something that REMINDS them of you and your pitch, you’re already on their radar. Invited back for a meeting about that pitch-related job.

Here’s how this pays dividends. 2019. I’m out pitching a tv series. I’ve been developing this show over the course of MANY years (so many, I don’t even want to tell you. Okay. I pitched and sold it in 2014 to TNT. It languished. Didn’t go anywhere. Got the rights back. Started pitching it again). The meeting is at Lionsgate. There’s a new set of producers in the room. One of them hears my pitch for the first time. He’s so taken by it, he invites me out to dinner because he wants to pick my brains, to learn how to write and deliver a pitch exactly the way I did. At the end of the same dinner, he asks me if I would be interested in writing a script with him about a football player named Kurt Warner. Three years later (and in the middle of the pandemic, mind you) AMERICAN UNDERDOG is released on 3000 screens. So you never know. Every time you tell a story it is an opportunity on so many different levels, known, unknown and TBD.

At the American Underdog premiere.

THE GREATEST GIFTS ARE NEXT TO THE DEEPEST WOUNDS

This is more of a writing lesson, true for your own life and for your characters. The idea is simple. Where you have been hurt, abused, wounded, jilted or otherwise injured, you bank the intensity of those feelings. Speaking strictly as a writer – those experiences form your personal gold mine. (One of the reasons why heartbreak stories are so popular – no one ever forgets the burning hot emotion around lost or found first love). It follows that the deeper you feel, the better your writing will be. But there are other kinds of gifts located right next to those wounds.
Personal example. I grew up in a house, not unlike a lot of others, where the family rule was don’t say what you really feel. Or even what you actually want. Everything was indirect and convoluted. Here’s my mom (bless her soul) visiting my house at age 65.

That was my mother, telling me she’s hungry. Used to drive me completely crazy. But later that night, I’m putting my daughter to bed. She’s maybe 10 years old and has just spent a few days in the company of her grandmother. Lights are out. I tuck her in. She’s got a question.

I feel this wave of emotion rising in my chest.

My daughter, whose emotional intelligence is light years beyond mine, takes a beat and then says:

I literally started to weep. But that’s not even the point! I realized, afterwards, that the gift my parents gave me, the gift that was located right next to the wound of being born into a household of people tiptoeing around the truth was: I KNEW HOW TO WRITE SUBTEXT. I could write the crap out of scenes where people say one thing but mean another. Which, as you all probably know, is the essence of good dialogue. My parents gifted me with one of the most important tools in a screenwriter’s arsenal. And I thank them for that every day.

So check your wounds. And see if there are gifts waiting for you to harvest. And when writing your characters, consider their own wounds and then, explore what their gifts might be. You’ll find a new depth to their authenticity.

START THINKING LIKE A PRODUCER NOW

We are back in the career guidance category. Let’s call this a cautionary tale. Start thinking like a producer now because I didn’t. I wasted years seeing myself only as a screenwriter. I thought – I’m going to work at my craft, work really hard, be the best damn writer I can be, and that should be enough. And it was enough, the first ten years of my professional career.

In 1995 Pakula called me to come work on THE DEVIL’S OWN, a film that was already in pre-production. Alan was directing. We had the two biggest movie stars in the world attached (Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt), one of the great all-time producers in Larry Gordon (FIELD OF DREAMS). And speaking of Gordons, Gordon Willis, the same guy who shot THE GODFATHER, was our DP! What could go wrong? Well, for one I was rewriting the screenplay from scratch, 60 days before the start of principal photography on a 90-million-dollar film. Larry knew it was an impossible task for a single writer, so he teamed me up with the incomparable Vincent Patrick (THE POPE OF GREENWICH VILLAGE).

Vince and I took a script by Kevin Jarre (essentially a story about an IRA terrorist who comes to New York and moves into the basement of an Irish New York City cop), and we turned it into a full-on two-hander. Why? In the original draft the character of Tom O’Meara is kind of a shlubby beat cop with two left feet. When Harrison came on board to play the part (and Sony agreed to his fee), Peter Guber, then president of the studio, famously said: “I’m not paying Harrison Ford 20 million dollars to drop his gun in the middle of a chase scene!” Hence the rewrite. Endless drama ensued, off-screen, not on. Pakula, Vince and I flew out to Harrison’s compound in Wyoming to talk story, then rode Harrison’s Learjet to LA to meet with Brad at the Four Seasons, and then back to New York. It was like shuttle diplomacy, only the arguments weren’t over international geopolitics. More like how many scenes does Brad get versus how many lines does Harrison have? In the end we delivered a script that we were proud of. And the movie kinda works. But I digress.

The point of all that was I was living a good life as a screenwriter. And being young (and stupid) I thought everything would just continue along the same path. I mean when you start flying on the Sony corporate jet to New York (four of us, one stewardess), and the studio puts you up in a four-story brownstone on the upper East side of Manhattan for $20,000 a month, you run the risk of getting spoiled. (Ah, the 90’s!) I got lazy and entitled and adopted the mindset of expecting jobs to come to me instead of creating them. What I should have done was to start looking for material that I liked and optioning it, or partnering with other producers on IP so that when we went out to sell, it would be my project, my package. There would never be a question who was going to write it.

Instead, I burned through precious time chasing the dreaded OWA’s (Open Writing Assignments). The biggest scam in Hollywood. A studio comes up with an idea. Not even fleshed out. (To quote Woody Allen from ANNIE HALL: “Right now it’s only a notion, but I think I can get money to make it into a concept… and later turn it into an idea.”) But seriously – then they post this idea as an OWA, get ten really talented writers to come in and pitch their take on turning this sow’s ear into a silk purse. Now creating a take like this requires the exact same amount of effort as breaking an original story. But you do it because you believe you will always have the best ideas in the room, and mainly because you’re thinking about the 300k they’re going to pay you to write it. Only problem is the studio is listening to TEN different takes, each of which took that individual writer weeks of hard work to come up with, and then when they choose the other writer who had an inside track on the gig because his or her agent is sleeping with the executive (just kidding! Not!), you are left with BUPKIS, nada, nothing. You don’t own it and you can’t use it because you did it all in service of their ridiculous non-concept.

Which leads me back to the main topic here: BE A PRODUCER. What does that even mean? First (apropos the key ingredient for pitching), go where your PASSION is. Chances are you are already dialed in to certain worlds that you care about. That’s where you’re going to do the best digging. Case in point: I’m a sports fan. Nobody has to remind me to read articles about the Lakers or to watch the Bears games (Carson and I both hail from Chicago and root for the Bears, which is kind of like being members of the same 12 Step Program!). I’ve made a love of sports part of my brand. So in 2020 when the pandemic was raging, I spent even more time scrolling around ESPN.COM. Found myself on this ESPN+ women-in-sports page where there was a video posted about a Paralympic athlete named Oksana Masters. I clicked. It was like seven or eight minutes long, told her story. Childhood in Ukraine, in an orphanage. Being adopted by a single American mom. Footage of Oksana skiing. It wasn’t really that remarkable, when I think about it. But there was something that drew me in, that inexplicable thread that you can’t help but tug… so I tugged.

I ended up on her website. And there was this quote on the masthead that said: “Success, for me, is an everlasting pursuit of that which scares me the most. That’s the place I truly live.” And I thought to myself… THAT IS A STORY. I hunted her down. Got in touch with her sports agent. And then we met, like everyone else during the pandemic, on zoom. We made a connection. And kept talking and talking. And the more of her story I heard, the more convinced I was that it was a viable feature.

Fast forward, it’s two and a half years later. I brought an amazing director on board, who I met because I read an article about her in the LA Times. Sent her an email – the equivalent of a cold call. She answered. Fell in love with Oksana’s story. Turned out they had a shared history of disability, of going through some of the same surgeries when they were both young girls. The director and I bonded, then we wrote a pitch together, honed it, beta-tested it, kept making changes. And now we are out pitching it, in the spirit of CODA meets PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER. I am confident we will set it up.

But the point here is ALL OF THIS IS PRODUCING. Identifying great material that lives in your personal wheelhouse. Going after it. Building relationships. DOING THE LEGWORK! How much money did I have to spend to get the rights to Oksana’s story? I didn’t. I INVESTED in her instead. I spent hours with her on zoom because it mattered to me. Because I saw the potential for telling a story that has never been told before – this fascinating world of elite Paralympic athletes, who make huge sacrifices to be the best in the world at their given sport. The reward is when I go out to pitch the project now, I don’t have to worry about who is going to write it. Or who is going to replace me if I get the gig and the producers are unhappy with my draft. Or who is going to direct it. I am the producer, and the writer. I earned my seat at the table. (And as a bonus, I’ll make more money when the movie gets made.)

All of you have this capacity to discover stories you fall in love with, and to bring them, successfully, to the marketplace. The sooner you start producing, the better.

*************************************************

CARSON: David’s course will run for nine straight Wednesdays (7-9 pm PST) starting April 26th. Some of the topics he will cover include: breaking into the business, pitching, agents & managers, selling to streamers, acing the development process, navigating writer’s rooms, and much much more.  This is a live class, so you’ll have full access, including Q&A time, to learn about the business from a real pro.  He will also be bringing in some cool guest speakers to take you deeper into their areas of expertise.

This course is for intermediate writers, writers on the cusp of breaking in, writers who’ve recently secured representation, and writers who have just entered the professional ranks.  David has seen every situation in the book and he wants to make sure the next generation of screenwriters don’t fall into the same pitfalls he did.  To register, get information on pricing, or to learn more, visit the course website at navigatinghollywood.net.  Nobody’s ever taught a class like this so it’s going to fill up fast. There are a limited number of spots available. Register now!

After seeing John Wick 4, I started thinking about set pieces a lot. What makes a good set piece? What makes a bad set piece? What makes a great set piece! Set pieces are a big part of writing screenplays, especially if you’re writing big budget stuff. And they aren’t something you can wing on the spot. They’re their own unique skill.

Set pieces got their name from sequences that were so big, production needed to build an entire “set” for them. That’s why it’s called a “set” piece. But, as film has progressed, it’s ironically become more synonymous with big action scenes, which might take a sequence through many different areas, such as a car chase. So I’ll use “set piece” and “action scene” interchangeably.

My interest in set pieces was further bumped up by a recent script consultation I did for a superhero script where the writer’s primary request was to help him improve his action scenes. Having just seen John Wick 4, I felt like my head was in the right place for this. Even though I’ve written articles on set pieces before, it’s easy to forget some of this stuff. Being able to contrast some of the best action scenes in the business (John Wick) with an amateur screenplay, drives home for me the major differences between the two.

There is a caveat to this, though, which leads to the first mistake writers make when writing action scenes: Action scenes work better on screen than they do on the page. For example, John Wick 4 has this big flashy action sequence where John Wick fights an overweight boss guy in a nightclub. I have no doubt that, on the page, this scene reads boring. You’re basically writing, “He punches,” “He kicks,” “He dodges,” “He falls,” over and over again. But in the film? It’s a really fun scene. Mainly because the overweight boss guy is so fun.

But as I was saying, an inexperienced writer watches this John Wick scene and they don’t see much ingenuity there. Therefore, they don’t think they have to do anything special when they write their own action scene. Which results in them writing a boring action scene.

Therefore, the first rule of writing a great set piece is…

REQUIREMENT 1 – ORIGINALITY

You should be looking for a way to make your action scene unique somehow. The reason you don’t often see this is that it’s hard. You’re going up against millions of action scenes. It takes some real thought to come up with a fresh angle on one. But if you’re just going to give us another garden variety fight or garden variety car chase or garden variety heist, chances are you’re boring the reader.

Movie that represents this: Captain America: Civil War’s airport fight is a good example of how making one change in a major category, location, can create a totally unique scenario. We’d never seen a superhero fight before in this kind of location. They’re usually in the middle of New York or at the top of a building or in some lair or on some spaceship. With just a little more thought, you can come up with a place where we’ve never seen an action scene in that genre before.

REQUIREMENT 2 – AN EXTENSION OF YOUR UNIQUE CONCEPT

This is one I harp on the most on the site. No matter how much I do, though, it’s something I’m seeing less and less of every year. Which is a crime. Because it’s the thing that can really supercharge your set piece. And that is: give us an action scene that could only happen in your movie. Let’s say you’ve got a group of characters who are planning to rob a bank. Could that action scene happen in other movies? Yes! It can! Well then you are not writing an action scene that is a direct extension of your unique concept. The guy who’s been the master at this all these years has been Spielberg. He understands this law better than anyone and it’s not even close.

Movie that represents this: The opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Is that opening sequence appearing in any other movie? No. Because it was so specific to Raiders’ concept.

REQUIREMENT 3 – GOAL

Let’s move on to basics here. Having a strong character goal isn’t as sexy as an original action scene or an action scene that’s an extension of your concept. But action scenes are best when they have direction and purpose. That’s what a goal does. And the way to approach it is to think of your action sequence as a mini-movie. It needs to have a goal. That goal does not have to be fancy. It just has to be clear to the viewer. If your hero picks a fight with another character, we need to know the goal behind why he’s chosen to do so. Or else we’re going to be confused as to why the fight needs to happen. Also take note that it isn’t always the hero who has the goal. Sometimes it’s the villain who has it.

Movie that represents this: Spider Man: No Way Home – That flashy early scene where Spider-Man is on the bridge with all the stopped traffic and Dr. Octopus, who’s just emerged from another dimension, arrives and tries to kill him. Dr. Octopus’s goal is pretty clear in this scene: kill Spider-Man.

REQUIREMENT 4 – STAKES

We know here at Scriptshadow that if there’s a goal, stakes aren’t far behind. “Stakes” just means: THE SCENE HAS TO MATTER. There has to be some real consequences involved if things go wrong. And there has to be some clear upside to things going right. If a set piece feels boring despite it being original and an extension of your concept, the problem is probably there are little-to-no stakes in the sequence. If your hero is planning to rob a bank for 10 million bucks yet he already has 100 million bucks back at his house, why would we care that he’s obtaining 10 million more? You must provide us with the highest level of stakes you can on that particular set piece.

Movie that represents this: For this one, I’m going to use a negative example: NOPE. The final sequence in NOPE has our heroes trying to get a UFO on film. But what was the exact benefit of this? What were the stakes? The stated reason is that they were hoping to sell it for a lot of money. But there was zero clarification on if they’d be able to. Then they were going to use that money to, I think, save the farm. Although that wasn’t set up well either. So you have this gigantic set piece climax that contains average stakes at best. That’s how much stakes can affect a set piece. If they’re even a little bit soft, we’re not going to care what happens.

REQUIREMENT 5 – URGENCY

This starting to sound familiar? Goal. Stakes. And now Urgency. The reason these are necessary in the same way that GSU is necessary for your movie is that action sequences are like little movies. So it makes sense that you’d build them the same way you would your larger story, with a beginning, middle, and end. This one is self explanatory and you see it all the time near the end of movies. In that big climax, time is always running out. Urgency adds so much tension to a sequence that you’d be silly not to include it.

Movie that represents this: One of the most famous examples of this is the Dark Knight scene where Batman is told that Rachel is across town about to be blown up. So he has to race there and save her. Complicating things is that the Joker gives him two locations. So he doesn’t even know if he’s racing to the right one.

REQUIREMENT 6 – SIMPLICITY

This is easily the most overlooked element of writing a good action scene and it’s one amateur writers, in particular, screw up. You want to create a SIMPLE ACTION SEQUENCE where the goal, the rules, AND THE GEOGRAPHY (!!!) are easy to understand. Cause if they’re not, we’re going to be lost. If you’ve ever watched the ending of one of the recent Marvel movies where a million different things are going on at once and you have no idea what the rules of the sequence are supposed to be, you know what I’m talking about. There’s a cave and aliens and zombies and a land war and a sea war and, at some point, our hero has to zipline between buildings. Do you honestly think readers are going to be able to follow that? Give me simplicity on an action sequence every day of the week and twice on Friday. Need I remind you that The Matrix, considered one of the best sci-fi moves ever, has its climax take place in a hallway where one man fights three other men. As simple as an action scene can get.

Movie that represents this: Shang-Chi. The fight on the out-of-control bus. Note how easy those two things are to understand as a reader. A runaway bus – we immediately get it. A fight on that bus – we immediately get it. Why do you think they built their entire marketing campaign around that scene and not around the climax which had weird dragons and a million things going on? Because the bus set piece was freaking clear and easy to understand!

And there you have it. The six ways to write a great action sequence, aka, “set piece.” I know I called these “requirements” but do you need to include every one of these every time you write an action sequence? No. But your goal should be to include as many as possible. Cause I can guarantee you, the less of these you’re using, the worse your set pieces are. I’ll go one step further. If you can integrate these six rules into your set pieces consistently, you will write better action sequences than 75% of professional writers working today. I know this because I’ve watched too many movies where the writers have NO IDEA how to write a compelling set piece. As a result, their action scenes are exceedingly forgettable. Now that you’ve read this article, you will never have that problem.

SCRIPT CONSULTATION DISCOUNT 100! – I’m giving out a couple of discounted screenplay consultations. If you’re interested, e-mail me with the subject line, “100,” and I’ll take $100 off my regular feature script or pilot script rate. If you’ve never had notes from a professional, take advantage of this!  I can help you identify and fix things in your writing that would otherwise take you years to learn on your own. Not to mention, I’ll elevate your current script. So if you want to get a consult, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com. I do features, pilots, first acts, short films, loglines, whatever you need!

Has the exceptional Sheridan written yet another great TV show?

Genre: TV 1 Hour Drama
Premise: Tommy works as a “fixer” for the oil companies in booming West Texas, where there’s a new problem gumming up the pipelines every day.
About: Taylor Sheridan is back with yet ANOTHER show, this one to star Billy Bob Thorton. The show is based on a successful podcast called “Boomtown,” which examines West Texas’s oil “boomtowns.”  There is some confusion as to whether it’s a Yellowstone spinoff. Some say yes. Others say no. I guess we’ll have to wait until the show airs in 2024 to find out. And, of course, the show will be on Paramount Plus.
Writer: Taylor Sheridan (based on the podcast by Christian Wallace)
Details: 51 pages

I don’t think anyone in history has had this many shows produced in this amount of time. Maybe Darren Starr? I guess there’s no point in stopping. If they’re going to greenlight everything you write, just keep going. Let’s try to get 50 shows on this Paramount network.

My mind always goes to money on these things. If you have one hit show, that’s worth 8 figures over the course of your life. If you have two, do the math. Three? Four? Now you’re starting to approach 9-figure territory.

So what’s Taylor Sheridan’s secret? I would love to know. I wouldn’t mind having a hit show on TV. Let’s see if we can find out together after reading… Land Man.

The most American name ever, Tommy Norris, is 55 years old and a fixer for the oil companies in West Texas. When we meet him, he’s been dragged to a remote location where he has a meeting with a cartel kingpin, all while wearing a bag on his head so he doesn’t see the guy.

The kingpin wants to know how these land rights work. Cause, as far as he knows, he owns this land. But Tommy explains to the guy that he only owns the top of the land. Tommy’s employers, the oil tycoons, they own what is underneath the land. And, therefore, they are ultimately in charge of how the rules are made.

After getting out of that situation with only a black eye, Tommy is informed of a snafu in a nearby township. A drug plane landed on a remote road where they quickly unloaded their cocaine onto a coordinating van. But because they were set up just over a hill, they didn’t see an oil-truck scream over the top of the hill before it crashed into them, blowing everybody up.

Tommy now has to figure out how he’s going to navigate that issue.

As he’s putting together a plan, his ex-wife calls and reminds him that he has to take their 17 year old daughter, Ainsley, for the weekend. Ainsely is a bit of… let’s just say that if her parents don’t watch out, she’s going to end up in porn. So she needs a lot of attention.

Unfortunately, when Ainsley shows up, she does so with her new Top 50 football recruit Greek God of a boyfriend, Dakota. And now Tommy has to keep his eyes on both of them. While this is happening, little does Tommy (or Ainsley, or his ex-wife) know, that his 22 year old son, who just got a job as an oil rig mechanic, is involved in a giant explosion after a malfunction. Whether he’s okay or not will be left a mystery until…. Episode 2.

I have one question for you. Is Taylor Sheridan screenwriting Superman?

This guy is so talented. I don’t know where in the millions of pilots he’s written he fit this one in. But if this is one of his many “belt-it-out-in-a-week” scripts, I don’t know how he does it. Because, normally, the problems you associate with rushed writing are a lack of specificity. A sloppy plot. Thin characters.

That isn’t the case here.

Right off the bat, we get this highly specific monologue. This is Tommy explaining the land deal to the cartel people:

“First they’ll hire Halliburton to build files on you f—king assholes the FBI dreams about having, then they’ll send thirty tier one operators from Triple Canopy to bust you like fucking pinatas. And if any of you dipshits make it back to Mexico they will blow up your house with a drone. While your family is in it. … It costs about six million to put in a new well, they’re putting 800 of them right fucking here … That’s 4.8 Billion in pump jacks. They’ll spend another billion on water, housing, and trucking. At an average of 78 dollars a barrel they will make 6.4 Million dollars a day. For the next fifty fucking years. The oil company is coming. No matter what.”

I call this the Gollum Effect. Peter Jackson famously put 70% of the CGI focus on Gollum’s very first scene because he knew if he could convince you in that moment that Gollum was real, it wouldn’t matter, later on, if his special effects got fuzzy. You’d already bought in.

Same thing here. By being highly specific about this world right away, we immediately buy into it. So even if some of that specificity becomes more generalized later on, we’ve already bought in. But the thing with Sheridan is that he keeps the specificity going! Which is so noble because it’s so hard to do. Unless you know these details inherently, you have to go look them up then figure out how to craft them into a convincing monologue. That takes research time and rewriting time, since monologues never work on their first go. Yet here he is, able to do this in record time. It’s amazing.

Another thing I love about this pilot is the contrast. Technically this isn’t a high concept idea. It does feel larger than life since so much money is involved. But it’s not a splashy idea by any means.

But one way you can combat that in TV is to create an enormous contrast in the worlds your main character has to deal with. Remember Alias? On that show, the main character had to deal with this extreme spy world only to go back home and deal with everyday life, like frustrated boyfriends.

That contrast works as a powerful engine for storytelling because we can’t believe someone who’s just had to kill a person now has to patch things up with their best friend who’s mad cause she didn’t come to her birthday party.

Same thing here. The opening scene shows us how dangerous Tommy’s job is. He has to have one-on-one meetings with insane cartel leaders because they operate on the same land that he’s drilling under.

But then he has to go back home where his firecracker of a 17 year old hormones-on-overdrive daughter is ready to bang anything in sight. And now he has to figure out how to deal with that, both internally and externally. That contrast really made this pilot pop.

Sheridan also understands the little tricks of the trade to keep the reader interested. A great dramatic device to use is first setting up a certainty. You say: X IS GOING TO HAPPEN. Then you make sure that when X arrives, it arrives with a complication, Y. In other words, nothing should ever be certain in dramatic writing. Things should always be happening that weren’t in the plans.

In this case, Tommy’s ex-wife calls and says that their daughter is coming to stay with him this weekend because she’s going on vacation. He didn’t know this and tries to get out of it. “She 17. She’ll be fine home alone.” She then shows Tommy a picture of Ainsley’s new boyfriend, who looks like he’s going to bed every woman in Texas and says, if Ainsley stays at home by herself, these two will have 72 hours by themselves, and who knows what could come out of that. So Tommy agrees and flies Ainsley in.

Except, the second Ainsley walks off the plane, we see the boyfriend emerge behind her. This is the complication (the “Y” in the equation). The boyfriend is going to be staying with Tommy as well. These kind of dramatic reveals are especially important in television, which is character-based. A lot of the creative choices you’re going to be making in TV revolve around character. So this is definitely a tool you want in your tool shed.

Everything I just mentioned, I enjoyed. But if that wasn’t enough, you also have this mystery of this plane-truck-van collision that happened. How is that going to play out? That’s a good lesson as well. Throw a mystery into your pilot. It’s one more reason that we have to tune into episode 2.

The only thing I’m confused about when it comes to Sheridan is the length of his pilots. Most of the pilots I’ve read from him hover around the 50 page mark. I’m not sure why he does that. Because I wouldn’t mind 10 more pages here. The plot does feel a teensy bit light. Since TV is all about character, you can always stuff one more character plotline in your pilot and build that character up.

Maybe it’s something Paramount requests. I don’t know.

Either way, this was a really good pilot. This guy is one of the best screenwriters working today.

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

What I learned: As we’ve discussed before, you can tell a good writer by the way he writes descriptions. Look no further than this character description of Tommy’s ex-wife…

Hard to say how old Angela is, she commits most of her existence to keeping that a complete mystery.

Deductive reasoning puts her well into her forties — fifties even, but good hair, better skin, a great boob job and one hell of a personal trainer make us doubt the math.

I am so enormously overworked at the moment that I am unable to formulate a post today. It hurts just placing my fingers on the keys. So I asked an old friend of mine how to sell a script and this is what he said.

Genre: Action
Premise: In order to clear his name and re-enter the Order, John Wick will have to take on the guy at the top of the program’s pyramid, the psycho, Marquis Vincent de Gramont.
About: The John Wick franchise had its biggest weekend ever, scoring 73 million bucks. This means that if you were betting on the “more money than kills” wager circulating around Las Vegas, you’d be short about 20 million, as Wick killed nearly 100 million people in this movie. Director Chad Stahelski swears this is the last John Wick film. “American Assassin” screenwriter Michael Finch teamed up with Shay Hatten to write it.
Writer: Shay Hatten and Michael Finch (based on characters by Derek Kolstad)
Details: 2 hours and 50 minutes long (no seriously!)

Are movies back??

Has the answer, all along, been to just ‘dude’ it up?

Hollywood has bent over backwards these past five years to de-masculinize the moviegoing experience. “Terminate the testosterone” was the operating slogan.  If you wrote a script without a prominent female character, the studio would toss it then euthanize you, not necessarily in that order.

Well, it turns out that when you give your core audience what they want, as opposed to try and make a movie for everyone, you signal yourself as a flick that knows what it is and celebrates that.

John Wick 4 is a movie where you go get your dude friends, you head to Taco Bell, you buy a bag of taco carnage. You hide all the tacos in your pockets. Then you head into the theater and have John Wick Taco Time. 69% percent of the audience who saw this flick were dudes.

So which was better, the tacos or the movie?

The plot breaks down like so. The captain of all the Continental Hotels, Marquis, who lives in France, tells the New York Continental manager, Winston, that his hotel is no longer in operation since he failed to kill John Wick in the previous movie. He then blows the hotel up.

Marquis then force-hires this guy named Caine, who’s blind, and was once the best assassin in the world, and tells him to kill John Wick. Cut to Japan, where John Wick visits his old friend, Shimazu, who runs the Japanese Continental (it’s like White Lotus! Even Jennifer Coolidge was there!). Caine and his team descend upon this hotel which results in an outright war.

John Wick escapes and, after a side quest where John has to reclaim his name or something, Wick enacts prima nocta, whereby Marquis must battle him in a duel. If John wins, he’s back in good standing again. Marquis is a fan of Amelie so he sets up the duel at Sacre Couer. Marquis then swaps himself out for Caine. And then… well and then we have our shocking ending.

I don’t know if I have ever, in my life, seen a bigger gap between the quality of a script and the quality of a production. The screenwriting here is so bad. Yet the direction is so good.  How do I reconcile this madness???

I suppose, if we’re being honest, the John Wick franchise was never about the writing.  It is about a guy who goes after the Russian mob because they killed his dog.  I’ve met third graders with better starting points for stories.  Instead, the series focuses on its icy cool directing style and the “gun-fu,” which has risen to all new heights in John Wick 4, whereby somehow people are able to withstand 15 shots to the gut before they die.

Pretty much nothing makes sense in this movie. There is a team of people who monitor assassinations who have an office that takes up an entire floor OF THE EIFFEL TOWER. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Eiffel Tower but there are no private floors.

Therefore, this group of people are doling out 25 million dollar hits in front of anyone with a pair of binoculars. And, oh yeah, this office is run by 1950s pin-up cosplayers who ARE AMERICAN. So I guess France rents out a see-through office in the Eiffel Tower to American cosplaying assassins. Sure. Why not?

Or this was my favorite part. At the beginning of the movie, John Wick is hanging out in an abandoned underground subway when Lawrence Fishburne shows up with a freshly dry-cleaned suit for him, then proceeds to light a match and ignite a pre-arranged fire triangle on the ground that has ABSOLUTELY ZERO PURPOSE. Literally nobody benefits from this triangle of fire. And yet there it is.

But wait, there’s more! There is a fight to the death that takes place IN THE MIDDLE OF A CLUB. And everyone just keeps dancing! Two guys pummeling each other into a bloody pulp and no one bats an eye. At one point, after John Wick had fallen off a 40 foot railing, some guy two feet from him was more concerned about his twerking technique than checking to see if John Wick was okay.

One would think this would place John Wick 4 squarely into the “crap” category, which is so bad that it needs to pass special arbitration rules to even be included in a Scriptshadow review. But that wasn’t the case.

There’s something undeniably special about the production value of this movie. It joins the ranks of James Bond and Mission Impossible of showing us just how magical an experience REALNESS has on a film.

Every. Single. Location is stunning. The framing of every shot is beautiful. The production design is second-to-none. The costuming is excellent. The cinematography is so good.

Even when the set dressing is cliche, it’s done so much better than everyone else’s version of it, that it still leaves an impression on you. For example, John Wick walks into a church and every single candle in the place is lit. Seen it a million times. But it was done on so much steroids here that your jaw was on the floor.

There was a moment, though, that exposed this practice. I don’t even remember who was in the scene. I think maybe Marquis and Winston. The scene was pure exposition. It was there to set up *what needed to happen next*. It was so nuts and bolts plot exposition that Stahelski decided to set it inside a gigantic equestrian practice barn. As our characters work out the plot, these equestrian riders, for no purpose whatsoever, start riding around our two characters as they converse.

Make no mistake, it made for a visually interesting conversation. But when you’re going to these lengths to hide the fact that your dialogue is boring, you’re doing it the wrong way. What you want to do is find a dramatically interesting scenario that you can use as a vessel to hide your exposition.

For example, there’s an earlier scene where a “tracker” who claims to be able to find John Wick, comes to the Marquis to negotiate a contract. In that scene, there’s something dramatic going on – a negotiation. Both men have big egos. Neither likes the others’ terms. As a result, the negotiation escalates quickly. All of this while exposition is being given (their discussion is yielding what happens next in the story).

That’s how you do it. You can’t just put shiny things on a screen and hope they distract the viewer from the fact that you’re force-feeding them three minutes of dead-boring exposition.  You must entertain them while feeding them.  To highlight the ineffectiveness of Stahelski’s strategy, I don’t remember a single thing they discussed in that scene. But I remember what happened in that Marquis-Tracker scene down to smallest detail.

Dramatize scenes people. It makes a world of difference.

For me, what sets these movies apart is originality and cleverness within set pieces. The two set pieces that stood out to me were, one, Caine’s first sequence in the Japanese Continental Hotel. Remember, Caine is blind. So he carries these little motion sensors which he slaps onto walls. Then he lures his prey into these rooms and waits until they pass the sensors, which beep a noise, which tells Caine exactly where to point and shoot. I thought that was fun and clever.

And even though I was making fun of it earlier, I liked the John Wick club sequence for its bombastic over-the-top boss fight. John takes on this gigantic man who just won’t die. And they fight each other all over the club. The gigantic guy reminded me of boss fights in video games. You just keep hitting the guy and nothing happens. I’d never quite seen a scene like it in a film. And that’s all I’m asking for. You don’t have to give me something totally original. But at the very least, it needs to be original-adjacent.

Such a mixed bag with John Wick 4. The running time here is so ludicrous, it’s hard not to laugh at it. The number of kills could’ve been cut in half and nothing would’ve been missed. But I guess if this is your last Wick, you gotta go full Wick.  And that they did!

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

What I learned: Shay Hatten says that Keanu Reeves is the king of demanding less, not more, when it comes to dialogue. In the first film (before Hatten came on board), there was a five page monologue for Keanu and Keanu ended up convincing the team that all he needed to say was, “Uh huh.” When it comes to how much, or how little, dialogue you should write, “less is more” is, historically, the more effective approach. Now you can get carried away with that. But the key is to be honest with yourself. Are you only writing that monologue because it’s a movie and you feel like that’s what happens in movies? The character gets a big monologue at this moment? Or are you writing that monologue because it’s something the character would really say? Lean into the latter. Because when characters start saying things that they don’t really need to say, that’s when dialogue dies on the screen (and on the page). There must be purpose behind the words for them to matter.