Yet another million dollar sale on a story that can best be pitched as A Quiet Place meets The Sixth Sense!!

Genre: Horror
Premise: After a devastating health diagnosis, a recently divorced woman moves back in with her estranged father and becomes the only person who can see oddly inactive creatures hanging around their small town.
About: They just keep coming, these short story sales. But this one has kind of an interesting backstory. The writer honed the story, which is a meagre 20 pages, over the course of THREE YEARS(!!). He wanted it to be absolutely airtight before he went out with it, leaving nothing to chance. And you thought you were a perfectionist. 5 bidders over 72 hours fought for the project, with Netflix winning via a million dollar bid. The film will star Jessica Chastain. Misha Green will adapt the script as well as direct.
Writer: Chris Hicks
Details: 20 pages long

Something I constantly think about in how it relates to screenwriting is the elusive “bar.” I am referring to the bar your writing must rise above in order to be purchase-worthy. The quirky thing about the “bar” is that there’s the objective bar – the level at which your writing actually has to be at. And then there’s the subjective bar, which is where each individual writer *thinks* the bar is. That’s where everyone gets screwed up. Because their subjective bar may not be anywhere near the objective bar.

So how do you rectify that gap between where you assume the bar to be and where the bar actually is? Getting a lot of feedback helps. The more you’re told what’s wrong with your writing, the better you’re able to gauge where the bar is. But I’ve found the best way to locate the bar is to read a ton of scripts. The more you read, both professional and amateur, the better you’re able to see the key differences between the two and, in the process, find the bar.

In the absence of knowing how high or low the bar is, lean into the Chris Hicks strategy. Which is to rewrite the heck out of your script (or short story) until you honestly believe you have nothing left to give. Because even if you don’t meet the bar, you can say that you tried with all of your might to get there. And, in the end, that’s all you can do!

“I began seeing the creatures about a week before Zoe’s visit.” That’s how this story starts. We then cut back in time to find out that our heroine, Julie, is having a bad year. She’s a recent divorcee and, oh yeah, she gets brain cancer! Glioblastoma. One of the bad ones.

While she’s in treatment, Matt, her ex-husband, gets custody over their 4 year old daughter, Zoe. To make matters worse, after the treatment is over, the hospital refuses to release Julie without adult care supervision. The only person who can care for her is her father, who she has no relationship with.

So she moves to the small Kentucky town she grew up in and helps her older dad with simple tasks around the hardware story he owns. In the meantime, she desperately attempts to set up visitation with Zoe, something she finally gets after a lot of hassle.

But right before Zoe comes to town, Julie starts seeing things. Creatures. Big ugly things that sit around downtown. Just sitting there, doing nothing, occasionally looking Julie’s way, locking eyes with her. Nobody else can see these things. Just her. And when Julie’s dad sees her staring out at nothing, he gets concerned. He tells her it’s time to go back to the hospital.

As these spottings increase, Julie knows she needs treatment but wants to spend one last day with her daughter during the annual town fair. The dysfunctional trio head downtown and watch the locals prepare. Again, Julie sees the creatures, just sitting around in the middle of the street, doing nothing. But she also notices something odd. The people walk AROUND them. Which means maybe they are real.

As the fair reaches a crescendo, the creatures multiply. There are now 20 of them. Julie gets a sixth sense that something bad is about to happen and starts screaming at the police to get ready. They have no idea what she’s talking about. Until a creature walks over and pops the cop’s head like a walnut. Then all hell breaks loose.

The town is a barrel and the people are fish. They try and run but the creatures have the exits blocked. They pick off everyone easily. Nobody has any idea what’s happening though because they can’t see these creatures. Only Julie can. So Julie locates her dad and daughter and they make a run for it. But as they drive out of town, they are led to an even more terrifying realization: This isn’t the only town this is happening in.

So, why do you think Hollywood is going gaga over short story purchases? Treating them like spec scripts in the 90s? My theory is that everyone’s looking for that shorter time commitment to make a decision. This short story is 5000 words long. A screenplay is 20,000 words long. It allows them to do their jobs faster.

I’m also starting to realize that these short stories are like extended synopsis pitches. They’re definitely not formed yet. This is not a 100 minute movie that we get in this short story. All told, you’ve probably got 10 scenes here. So what you’re doing is you’re giving executives “the best of both worlds.” You’re allowing them to see the concept, which is the most important thing. And you’re allowing them to see it in some sort of fleshed out form, as opposed to a logline.

In addition to this, the writer is DRAMATIZING the events. This isn’t just a straight synopsis, which would be cold and lifeless. In the I Am Not Alone short story, we’re building tension. We’re building suspense. We’re building mystery. We’re exploring relationships. That’s a lot more fun to read then a synopsis.

It worked for me. I was invested in this story. One thing I’m finding that these good short story writers do is they wrap things around an emotional center so that the story explores the human condition on some level. It’s not just creepy imagery and jump scares.

We’ve got a triple-threat here on the emotional front. We’ve got the devastation of this brain cancer diagnosis. We’ve got the broken relationship between Julie and her father. And we’ve got the desperation of this other emotional relationship, whereby Julie is trying to retain a relationship with her daughter, despite everyone else trying to strip it away.

These are real-life issues that you could legitimately build a movie around. My question is, is it too much? Cause, usually, it would be for me. But Chris Hicks seems to know when to put his foot on the dramatic gas and when to ease up. Just when things start to get too depressing, we get a scene where she sees one of these creatures and it’s fun again. Maybe that’s what he spent three years on – trying to find that perfect balance.

The next question is, can you flesh this short out into a full movie? I think you can. But it comes with its own set of challenges. Here, we get four separate set-ups of Julie seeing the creatures, each one building in intensity. That’s fine for 20 pages. But what about 100 pages? You can’t have four scenes of “seeing creatures.” It’s not enough.

So Green will need to make a decision. Do you keep the slow-build “seeing creatures” format the short has, in which case this becomes more of a drama than a horror film? Or do you introduce juicer scenes that utilize these creatures in more dramatic ways leading up to their big attack?

I’m sure some of you are curious about my thoughts on the concept. Is it original? Good question. It’s sort like A Quiet Place meets The Sixth Sense. You’ve got the “I see dead people” aspect and then you have these terrifying “Quiet-Place”-looking creatures lingering about. So, it’s not entirely original. But, at the same time, I don’t know that I’ve come across anything exactly like it.  Which factored into my final grade…

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

What I learned: The latest round of these short stories selling to Hollywood are, basically, high concepts extended into synopses that have been dramatized so that they’re more entertaining to read than the average synopsis.

We’re going old school here – an article that could’ve appeared on Scriptshadow 1.0. All you advanced word-slingers, take the weekend off. Cause I’m speaking to my newbie homies, those of you who just joined the craft and don’t know where to start or how to put pen to paper. You imagine a screenplay – those 120 pages – and think, “That’s insane, bruh. I could barely write a 5 page essay in college.” Do college grads still say, “Bruh?” God, I hope so.

This article is for those of you who have either never written a screenplay, have started one only to abandon it midway through, written a script and are so scarred by the experience, you never wanted to go back again, or who have written a couple of scripts which were so bad, you wouldn’t let your cat read them. I’m going to hollllld youuuuurrr hannnnd (Hootie and the Blowfish, playing ten times a day at your local supermarket). Because, when you break it down, it’s not that hard. You just need a plan, bruh.

The first thing you’re going to do is come up with a concept that’s easy to manage. One of the reasons screenplays become hard to write is that the writer is writing about the Kakstiblox Galaxy Civil War which covers destabilization in seven different star systems and has 186 characters and, oh yeah, an entire novel of backstory.

If you want screenwriting to be easy, pick a manageable concept, something easy to write. You want to pick Aged Keanu (John Wick) over Keanu Prime (The Matrix). Why? Because The Matrix has a very complex mythology that takes way too long to work out. John Wick is a guy who gets revenge because they killed his dog! You couldn’t come up with a simpler concept if you were eating vanilla ice cream on a slice of white bread. Ladybird over Titanic. Nightcrawler over X-Men. Palm Trees and Power Lines over Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Next, you’re not going to stress too much about your concept. I know, I know. This site mentally murders you every time you don’t repeat the mantra: “Concept is king!” That’s still true. Concept IS king. But “great” is the enemy of startyourfuckingscreenplay and one of the reasons we don’t write is because we keep waiting – endlessly waiting – for that perfect idea to come to us.

In lieu of a great idea, just make sure you have an idea you’re passionate about. You can write something great if you’re passionate about it. Take Alan Ball. He wrote about one of the most boring things in the world – suburbs. But it was a great movie because he was passionate about it. Passion can help make up for weak ideas. I see it all the time.

Give us a hero we love (preferably an underdog) and a villain we despise. This may sound like the most obvious advice ever but you’d be surprised at how many scripts I read that don’t have this. Again, we’re trying to keep things simple here so there are less barriers to entry on you writing your script. So go with the simplest hero/villain combo. Give us Star Lord and Thanos. Give us Daniel LaRusso and Johnny. Give us Frodo and Sauron.

Have your main character going through what you’re personally going through right now in life. Whatever that big hurdle you’re trying to get over in life is at this moment (fear of failure, perfectionism, selfishness, lack of self-awareness), have your character going through something similar. Not only is this going to make the character feel more authentic, but it’s going to make the character a lot easier to write. You won’t have to make up anything because you’re writing yourself! Yay, easy mode unlocked!

Okay, now let’s talk about the hardest part of writing the script: THE ACTUAL WRITING OF THE SCRIPT. Unfortunately, you can’t have ChatGPT write your whole script for you yet. So there will be some work on your end. But I’m going to make this as easy as possible by giving you a schedule and a plan.

Here’s how it’s going to work. You are going to write your script using The Sequence Approach. That means that instead of writing one big 120 page script (intimidating) you’re going to write eight 12 page scripts, also known as “sequences” (fun). The idea here is that once you start writing to never think of the whole script. If you start thinking of the whole script, you’re going to get intimidated and give up. Just focus on the current sequence you’re working on. Here are the eight sequences you’re going to write…

Sequence 1 – Setup: Set up your character’s life.

Sequence 2 – Resistance: Something shocking comes along throwing your hero astray. They must go off on a journey (either internal or external, but preferably external) but they don’t want to go. They want to keep their old life. That life you set up in sequence 1!

Sequence 3 – Leave for the journey: Off they go. Not ready to tackle this quest but they’re going to try anyway, darnit. This is also known as the fun-and-games section because the serious stuff hasn’t started yet which means your hero gets to have fun.

Sequence 4 – Encounter the first big obstacle: Something gnarly this way comes. The second act is basically about throwing a bunch of big obstacles at your hero and seeing how he deals with them. This is the first formidable one of those.

MIDPOINT

Sequence 5 – I’m still standing: The midpoint may have provided a dip in your hero’s confidence. But your hero is still determined to get the job done. So he’s got a little pep in his step, a little swagger going into the second half. A screenplay should look like roller-coaster ride. The hero starts off up (Seq 1), falls down (Seq 2), back up again (Seq 3), and down (Seq 4), back up again (Seq 5). You get the picture.

Sequence 6 – Things only seem to be getting worse: The reality of just how impossible this goal is is hitting our hero hard. The bad guys have the upper hand. The girlfriend leaves him. Nobody trusts him. This leads him to his lowest point. Either he’s almost dead or a good friend dies or maybe even HE dies (The Princess Bride). It will feel at the end of this sequence like the movie is over and the hero has LOST.

Sequence 7 – Rebirth and a plan!: Your hero has an awakening. He’s not going to give up. He’s going to take down the bad guy. But he needs a plan! So it’s time for him, along with the rest of the characters, to plan up!

Sequence 8 – Climax: It’s time to take the bad guy down!

You are going to write 3 pages a day for the first four days of each week. You then get to spend the last three days of the week catching up and rewriting. So if you only wrote 2 pages on Monday, this is where you make up that 1 page.

If you’ve written all 12 pages like a good screenwriter, use these three final days in the week to rewrite and make adjustments (maybe you realized a scene should come earlier so you have to move it). We do this so that everything REMAINS EASY. You don’t have excuses like, “I didn’t have enough time. I fell behind.” If you fall behind, you have 3 days each week to catch up. How easy is that!?

For those who forgot to go to math class, this means you will be writing one sequence a week. Since there are eight sequences, you will be writing for eight weeks. And at the end of those eight weeks, you will have a finished first draft of a screenplay. I have constructed this schedule so that you never feel rushed. This should keep things light and easy for you.  Also, DO NOT JUDGE YOUR WRITING.  If you judge, you will freak out and stop writing.  Never judge yourself on a first draft.  Judging is for later. :)

And there you have it.

Hey, what are you waiting for?? Come up with a concept so you can start writing your script THIS MONDAY!

Everything Everywhere All at Once meets Time Crimes meets Mulholland Drive

Genre: Drama/Supernatural/Trippy
Premise: Burdened by the loss of his wife to a suicide cult, an embittered investigative journalist infiltrates an elite secret society, only to find something far more sinister.
About: This script finished with 14 votes on last year’s Black list. The writer, Jonathan Easley, is on the cusp of having his first produced credit with the film, Red Right Hand, coming out soon and starring Orlando Bloom.
Writer: Jonathan Easley
Details: 112 pages

Garfield for Johnny?

Just yesterday I said I hated cult backstories. But for some reason, I like cult present stories. Don’t ask me why. Actually, I know why. Because the past is the past. And movies work best in the present. So, I can pretty much get on board with anything as long as it’s happening RIGHT NOW.

And right now, we’re going to jump into the midnight pool!

Johnny is the best writer at his Los Angeles magazine, Corrosion. But Johnny’s been distracted lately. His wife, Mary, ran off to join a cult called the Golgotha Saints. Like a lot of cults, it’s just an excuse for the leader, Dhanna Purandara, to do ayahuasca, have sex with people, and spout a lot of new age nonsense.

Because of this, Johnny wants to do a profile on the cult, but that profile gets upended when his wife leaves a voicemail saying she’s going to the other side. Johnny tries to get to the compound to stop her but it’s too late. Everyone in the cult commits suicide.

Cut to three years later and Johnny wrote a book about it that’s gotten him a lot of attention. One day, he receives some photos of a man standing on a beach in cult clothing. The man is him. Confused, Johnny has his tech guy analyze the photos to see if he can find anything, and the tech discovers metadata that they were taken in a small town north of San Francisco.

So off Johnny goes, and when he gets to the town, he starts meeting all these weird characters. Some burly twins. A MAGA type dude. A prostitute who loves to take off her clothes in front of Johnny within 30 seconds of meeting him. Through these new contacts, he learns about Bethel Horizon, a secret yearly party with billionaires that involves black magic, which he gets invited to.

Once inside, he starts hobnobbing with billionaires and is told by the party’s handlers that he can write about this 2023 Wicker Man party afterwards. Cool.  Another story!  Almost immediately, strange things start happening. The leader of the party, Beatrix Belladonna, paralyzes him with black magic then communicates with him without speaking. It’s trippy city here.

(Spoiler) Eventually, Johnny finds his way down to a secret pool in the basement of the central castle and hops in. Inside, he “finds God,” and when he emerges, he’s told that it’s actually 15 days in the past. Beatrix doesn’t even know who he is. After he finds his bearings, he agrees to team up with Beatrix to lure the other version of him here, the version of him that’s still back in Los Angeles. From there, they’ll figure out how to make these two Johnnies coexist together.

Noooooo!

This one started out sooooooo good. For 20 pages, my eyes were shaped like the word “impressive.”

But then I had to remind myself of a lesson I learned when I was a wee little boy. It occurred when I saw the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, “The Sixth Day.” That moment where Arnold comes home only to find ANOTHER Arnold with his family was one of the all time great movie moments for me. I was so pumped to find out what would happen next!

I then spent the next 100 minutes bored out of my mind.

This script reminded me of that. When Johnny sees those pictures of himself in a cult robe despite never having participated in a cult, I was deeply intrigued by how that was going to play out.

The reason I had more faith in this situation than that one was that today’s writer is exceptionally good at adding detail and specificity to his writing. That usually indicates a lot more effort has been put into the plot as well.

But as soon as we get to this manor, the story becomes a cornucopia of randomness. We got drugged out girls walking into rooms and tossing off their dresses, white horses that hang out in hallways, lumberjack twins, black magic paralysis, people who are dead one second but alive the next, time travel, multiple universes.

Even if you treat the randomness like you would a David Lynch film, I still felt that the writer missed some opportunities. What originally drew me in was the devastation this man went through losing his wife to this cult psychopath. Easily could’ve started the script with the wife already dead. But he created so much more impact by having us witness her death, especially with how pointless it was. After that, I was so connected to Johnny that I was willing to go anywhere with him.

So I thought Johnny was going to investigate and expose a similar type of cult. That way, even if he didn’t save his wife, he at least would find some peace in stopping another, similar, cult. But that’s not what this movie does at all. The Bethel Horizon is a totally different monster. They’re much grander in scope. They recruit billionaires. They seem to only meet once a year. They’re not even a cult, really.

Once we established that that was the movie, I grew less and less invested in the story. Cause I wanted to connect what happened to his wife to the experiences he was going through now.

To the writer’s credit, once we get into the midnight pool, which happened around page 80, the script finds its structure again. Post-Pool Johnny is determined to recruit his past self to come up to the manor. It’s here where we learn that all of the photos Original Johnny was sent and the mysterious messages he got came from himself in the future. This Johnny is sending him these messages.

Still, I didn’t really understand the stakes of this. Why do we need to bring this other Johnny here? And then we get a double trippy plot development where we find out we’re not in our past but we’re in another universe’s past. In this separate universe, the other Johnny got married and moved on.

Which is cool, I guess. You’re capitalizing on the Everything Everywhere All At Once train. But to what end? Now I’m just confused. I don’t know why we need the other Johnny to come up here. And it doesn’t feel like the writer knows either.

Usually, when you’re writing a script like this, you’re trying to find the character arc that ends the story on the highest emotional note. Like in Everything Everywhere All At Once, Evelyn must finally accept her family. That’s the whole point of the movie, is that character arc. I don’t know what Johnny is trying to accomplish here. He gets mad at the other Johnny for moving on from Mary. But what does that mean? Where’s the emotional catharsis in that?

Look, screenwriting is hard. Not only writing a great story but writing an arc for your character that works on its own and also effortlessly weaves in the plot, is tough stuff. But you have to keep rewriting until you get there or else you get scripts like this. Scripts that have good moments but that, ultimately, don’t come together in a satisfying way.

With that said, if you like absurdist stuff – David Lynch and those types of movies – you might dig this. It certainly has its charms. It just gets too messy in places.

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

What I learned: This script reminded me of the power of seeing a death and the way it affects our hero as opposed to the death happening before the movie started. I think sometimes you don’t have a choice other than to place the death in the backstory, especially if you want to start your script with the plot already moving. But as an extended “cold open,” a family related death really makes us sympathetic to our hero. Easley nails that here in The Midnight Pool.

HOLY SMOKES!  A GREAT SUBMISSION SCRIPT IS COMING YOUR WAY NEXT WEEK! STAY TUNED!

Genre: Drama/Light Sci-Fi
Premise: Set in the near future, a group of women partake in an experiment at a mysterious company that promises to solve their inability to find love, albeit do so in controversial ways.
About: Darren Aronofsky. Need I say more? He’s one of the executive producers on this show, which is written by a fairly new writer, Kit Steinkellner, who created the Elizabeth Olsen series, “Sorry for Your Loss.” The Answers, which will premiere on FX, is based on the book by Catherine Lacey. This is her second novel.
Writer: Kit Steinkellner
Details: 56 pages

Letitia Wright for Mary??

Okay, so I’ve got some awesome news!

I just read a submission script that was an “[X] IMPRESSIVE.” You know how rare that is around these parts so it’s time to get excited! What I’m going to do is reach out to a few people and see if I can help the writer out. And, then, what I’m going to do is review the script next Tuesday. I’ll post the script as well so you can all read it. It’s *really* good, guys. It totally took me by surprise. You’re going to love it.

NEXT TUESDAY – BE THERE!

Okay, moving on to the constantly evolving TV space. This medium is a strange beast. Every four months, the pieces seem to shift on the chess board. Outside of HBO, I don’t know if there’s a legitimate second tier contender for consistent quality television.

FX used to be high on that list with shows like Fargo and The Americans and Legion. Now, I’m not sure what they are. They do have The Bear, which is a great show. But they’re also torturing us with series like Y The Last Man.

I guess every network has their hits and misses. But it feels like FX is missing a lot more than they’re hitting these days. Let’s see if today’s script changes that.

Our pilot starts out with a series of interviews. Various women in their 20s and 30s are explaining their disastrous dating lives. One woman says she loves having sex but doesn’t ever like the men she has sex with. Another says that she’s so forgettable that men who she hooked up with literally forget her face the next day. Still another is angry that society tells her it’s bad to have high standards of men. And then, finally, we have our heroine, Mary, who is a year out of a relationship and she’s still not over the man.

We pull back to learn we’re in a place called “The Center,” which is run by doctor/therapist/CEO, Lawrence Crowe. Crowe assures all of these women that along with his principle assistant, Doctor Sylvie Ellis, that he can fix their problems for good. But, in order to do so, they will need to enter an experimental program. They all agree, of course, because they’re desperate.

As soon as our five candidates are confirmed, they’re told that they will be dating Christopher Sky, a movie star and one of the most recognizable celebrities on the planet. Apparently, Christopher is having relationship issues as well so he’s volunteered himself. Each woman will date Christopher in a different capacity. One will be his “emotional” girlfriend. One will be his “intellectual” girlfriend. One will be his “sexual” girlfriend.

Mary’s date comes first and she makes the mistake of telling Christopher that all his failed relationships, which he thinks were the girls’ fault, are actually his fault, since he is the common denominator (Mary’s flaw is that she says whatever she’s thinking). This causes Christopher to end the date abruptly and Mary considers leaving the experiment. But after Christopher has a couple more dates, he realizes Mary was right and asks her to stay so they can give this a shot.  Which means, “Tune in next week when the experiment continues!”

I don’t see “The Answers” helping FX anytime soon. There are some pretty big errors at the core of the pilot script that I don’t think are possible to overcome. The biggest sin of all is that, after reading the pilot, I still don’t know what the series is about.

Mary is here because she’s broken-hearted. But another girl is here because she can’t fall in love with men. Another girl expects too much from men. Another girl is here because guys always ghost her after they hook up.

All of these problems are so different that I was never sure what the program was attempting to accomplish. The best answer we get comes at the end of the pilot when Crowe excitedly tells Ellis that they’re going to “hack love.” The moment is delivered with such emphasis that you’d think it would clear things up. But it just made me more confused. How does “hacking love” stop guys from ghosting you? They seem like two different things.

It sounds obvious but if you’re not 100% clear with what your show is about, your show is dead before it gets started. Even though a show like Severance doesn’t tell us everything right away, it makes it very clear what the core story is – that these workers have decided to sever their work lives and personal lives so that the two will never meet.

The experiment is also sketchy, strange, and, quite frankly, hard to buy into. They’ve recruited an A-list Oscar-winning DiCaprio type supermodel famous actor to date all the women in different capacities, one of those capacities being straight sex. I mean, we’ve got the very hard buy-in that Leonardo DiCaprio said yes to such a thing that, if anybody found out about, he’d be canceled immediately. And then we’ve got regular women agreeing to de facto prostitution in a post #metoo era.

Buy-in buy-in buy-in. The audience will buy into one big ask. In rare situations, two asks. But if you keep piling on the insane situations, trust me, they’re going to stop buying in.

You’ve also got cliche backstories like the main character growing up in a cult. Let me just tell you guys this in case you don’t know. I read a LOT OF SCRIPTS with cult backstories. They’re not as frequent as DKB (dead kid backstory) but they’re the go-to backstory if you want to create mystery around your female character and make them weird, which Mary is.

I dare give this show the worst comparison any show can get, which is that this is the TV version of Spiderhead. It’s got a lot of that same murky purpose and weak rule-set combined with two evil (but seemingly nice) lab experimenters – and if I remember correctly, that movie was about making people love each other too. Whatever the case, that’s definitely not a movie you want to be compared to.

Was it all bad? No. I thought some of the dialogue was quite good. Here’s Mary sharing what went wrong in her previous relationship: “I made all this space for him. It’s like my life is this house and I built this huge room in the center of myself for him and now he’s gone and I can’t fill the space and I can’t get rid of the room. So am I just going to be empty forever? Because I think that’s going to kill me.”

I love when metaphors aren’t just there to be admired, but when they actually create some insight that you wouldn’t be able to convey otherwise. That’s how this read to me. That was the pilot’s biggest strength, its dialogue. The characters were all quite verbose and intelligent and I was engaged by most of the conversations.

But the script just can’t overcome how unrealistic it is. I understand that this is set in the near future when, maybe, the world is a little more lenient about these things. But the second this celebrity came in to just offer his services to these women so that they’ll get better – as if Leonardo DiCaprio doesn’t have better things to do – I mentally gave up on the pilot right there. There’s just no way that happens.

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

What I learned: I think this wants to be the next Handmaid’s Tale. But if you want to be the next Handmaid’s Tale, you have to have a clear hook. The Handmaid’s Tale has a great clear hook. In the future, fertile women are forced into child-bearing slavery. The concept is so clear and powerful. “Hacking love” is way too vague. Audiences don’t do well with blurry concepts. They just don’t. If they’re even a little bit confused about what a show is about, they won’t watch it.

Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: An interplanetary explorer and a little girl crash land on earth 65 million years ago and must make it to their escape ship while avoiding the most dangerous predators the planet has ever known.
About: 65 inched its way towards a 13 million dollar opening this weekend, landing in third place behind Scream 7 and Creed 3. The subpar showing means we’ll probably never get the sequel, 66. Although, now that I think about it, that probably wouldn’t be a very good movie. Movie Trailer Voice Guy: “In a worrrllld consumed by fire and ash, where not a single living thing is still alive, one microbe is determined to replicate… in an attempt to repopulate the planet.”  Yeah, probably won’t be at that one opening day.  65 was written by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who burst onto the scene several years ago with their breakout screenplay, A Quiet Place. This is their directing debut. The two first-timers had only 40 days to shoot the movie! For reference, Jurassic World had 115 days.
Writers: Scott Beck and Bryan Woods
Details: 93 minutes

Is there anyone who looks more like a movie star today than Adam Driver?

You may be thinking I’m covering the third biggest story today (Scream 7 and The Oscars being 1 & 2) but everything about this project, this screenplay, this movie, is infinitely more interesting to me than Scream or the Oscars.

Scott Beck and Bryan Woods wrote the spec script, A Quiet Place, five years ago. How cool is it that the script you’re working on RIGHT NOW could be the next Quiet Place. And how cool is it that several years later you could be directing a movie with freaking dinosaurs in it?? I just think that’s the awesomest thing in the world. It definitively shows you the power of a great script.

If I were still writing screenplays, this is the type of script I would write. A huge concept with a simple story – the kind of thing that works both on the page and in the theater. At least, theoretically. Maybe I’m about to learn my latest screenwriting lesson after watching “65.”

65 follows an interplanetary explorer (from another planet – not earth) named Mills. Mills is dealing with a daughter who grows very ill and then dies. But work calls so he has to get out there and keep sussing out the universe.

Halfway through his latest trip, an undocumented meteor cluster hits the ship and he crash-lands on earth…. 65 million years ago. Everyone in the cryo-bays is dead except for a 10 year old girl named Koa. Unfortunately, Koa speaks another language, so her and Mills can’t understand each other.

Mills realizes that when their ship broke up, the escape pod landed about 10 miles away on the side of a hill. And it’s still in tact. So if they can get to that, they can pop back up into space and wait for a rescue vessel.

But it’s not going to be an easy trip. Cause it’s 65 million years ago when dinosaurs were at their hungriest. Right away, Mills is attacked by a little baby runt lizard thing that’s as big as a large dog.  He barely survives.  And that’s one of the weakest animals he’ll to have to deal with!

As they traverse the jungle and try and communicate with each other (poorly), Koa spots something in the sky casually zipping past the moon. (Spoiler) Later, Mills sees it too, and we’re introduced to the coolest plot development in the movie – that the anomaly is the meteor that wipes out the dinosaurs. Yes, our duo happened to arrive on earth just hours before the most devastating moment in the planet’s history. Talk about bad timing.

Now, getting to the escape pod takes on significantly more importance. But, along the way, our duo gets the attention of a couple of T-Rexes. Unknown to Mills, the T-Rexes stalk them from a distance to the escape pod where they perform an all-out attack on our heroes, determined to keep them here and make them suffer the same fate as them.

Probably the hardest thing to do in a script like this is come up with two characters who we actually care enough about that we want to spend an entire 100 minutes with them.

Beck and Woods do all the right *technical* things in this screenplay. They give Mills a traumatic backstory where his daughter died of an illness. That’s what we’re told to do as screenwriters. If we want to build sympathy towards our protagonist, create a sympathetic situation for them. What’s more sympathetic than a parent losing a child?

Then you have the girl. This is a helpless little girl who’s scared and who only cares about getting back to her family. Who’s more sympathetic than a helpless scared girl?

Beck and Woods also incorporate a screenwriting tip I routinely encourage, which is to make things difficult for your characters. You never want anything to be easy for them. So B&W make it so Koa speaks another language. This creates a language barrier. Now it’s difficult for Mills and Koa to communicate even basic things, which makes their task of working together that much more difficult.

So far, no mistakes have been made in this screenplay.

Then you have the most ruthless landscape in history. Literally every inch of the 10 miles you’re going to traverse has potential danger within it. This creates tons of tension and suspense, which is exactly what you want in a movie like this.

Finally, Beck and Woods create one of the coolest ticking time bombs I’ve ever seen in a movie: THE meteor that killed the dinosaurs. I had a huge smile on my face when that plot point was introduced. And I gave the writers extra credit because they combo’d the inciting incident (the crash) with that meteor’s orbiting rocks, setting up the meteor from the get go. This makes the meteor’s arrival feel believable as opposed to forced.

All that should add up to a great movie, right?

Yes.

But it didn’t.

Why?

I had to sit with this one for a while because I didn’t know the answer to that question right away.

All I know is that the movie had some cool moments for sure. But I wasn’t engaged the way I wanted to be. Something was missing. And I tried to figure out what it was.

The first thing you look at is the main characters. There is an enormous importance to the audience liking the characters in scripts like this because there are only two of them. There aren’t any other characters to cut to. So if we don’t love the main protagonist, and love the co-protagonist, as well as love both of them together, nothing else matters. Doesn’t matter if you have sixty gazillion dinosaurs. We’re going to be bored.

One of the mistakes Beck and Woods made was DKB. DKB (Dead Kid Backstory) is a cancer upon screenplays. It is the single laziest attempt to create sympathy the screenwriter has access to and, therefore, often creates the opposite effect of what the writer is going for. Especially if you do what Beck and Woods did here, which was to endlessly repeat DKB. We must have seen Mills’s dead kid a thousand times throughout the movie (in videos and flashbacks) despite the fact that she’s dead!

Dead Kid Backstory can work if the movie doesn’t depend on it. Gravity is a good example.  We never once see Sandra Bullock’s dead kid. But that backstory was enough to motivate the character (in that she wanted to get away from earth) and that’s all we needed. I suppose there are a handful of examples of DKB working but that’s a handful out of thousands of attempts. It’s just lazy.

The other big mistake they made was having Koa speak a different language. I think I know why Beck and Woods did this. A lot of these adult-kid team-ups inadvertently descend into the kid being the “adult in the room.” They’re smart. They’re precocious. And it just ends up feeling false, with the kid snapping back at our hero in ways that would never happen in reality.  By creating this language barrier, there was no way the script would fall into this trap.

But in a movie with just two characters and those characters can’t have any real conversations?  You’re playing with fire. That’s a long time to ask the audience to spend with characters without a single extended conversation. People get restless. Even in Beck and Woods semi silent film, A Quiet Place, there were full conversations that were had.

This is where writers can sometimes get ahead of their skis. They want to make some profound silent film. But silent films are freaking hard to pull off. Audiences don’t have the patience – especially these days – unless you execute a perfect 10 on the dive. Mixing metaphors here – roll with me.

The thing that ultimately did the script in was there wasn’t enough variety. This is a challenge you’re always going to run into in a script like this. 90% of the scenes are walking through a forest with dinosaurs peeking around the corner. You need to find ways to mix it up. And the ways they mixed it up didn’t work. For example, they tired to have a cave scene. But it was sloppily constructed and not very clear. “Mixing it up” only works when the mixed up part is good. Duh but, yeah, that’s the reality.

Oh, and one other thing that hurt 65 was that a concept like this necessities a large scope. There’s a natural let down when that scope isn’t met. The reason a movie like Palm Trees and Power Lines, which also revolves around two characters, works, is because the expectations of the concept are low. It’s two people stuck in a small town. 65, however, is overwhelmed by its gigantic premise, which eventually swallows it up.  The audience wants more than the movie can give them.

I’m bummed out. Because the movie wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be. And I’m going to cheat here with the rating because while there is no way this movie is worth the 20 bucks it costs to see in a theater, I do think it’s a strong streaming choice where the expectations are lower. And I have to support spec scripts and original material.  We need more shots like this or else we’re going to be stuck with “The Creed Universe.”  Dear lord help us all.

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

What I learned: There is no other artistic medium that thrives in the present better than the movie. Movies are the most alive when they’re focusing on the RIGHT NOW. Therefore, when you put too much emphasis on things that happened in the past, you move away from what makes a movie work. That’s not to say you should never include the past in your scripts. The past informs who your characters are in the present. But if you’re going to go down that road, know that you are purposefully moving away from what makes a movie work. Therefore, you better have a great reason for it.

What I learned 2: One way to fend off repetitive storylines is to add more twists than the average screenplay. Add more shocking moments.  65 could’ve benefited from a couple more of those for sure.