Yesterday, we discussed the drudgery of formulaic writing via Rob Liefeld’s 2 million dollar monstrosity, “The Mark.” Today, I’m going to thank Andrea Moss for pointing me to Seth Sherwood’s tweet thread, which takes on the current industry formula for writing “elevated horror.” Sherwood is probably best known for writing 2017’s, “Leatherface.”

1. HOW TO WRITE “ELEVATED HORROR! A thread in which I tell you exactly how to harness your PTSD and A24 the shit out of your script to the point you may actually be able to use your FSA health insurance fund to pay for it cause it’s basically therapy!

— 𝕾𝖊𝖙𝖍 𝕸 𝕾𝖍𝖊𝖗𝖜𝖔𝖔𝖉 (@SethMSherwood) March 1, 2023

The reason I found this thread so interesting is because Sherwood is making the point of how cliched every script he reads in this genre is by highlighting the absurdly common beats that he sees over and over again.  Don’t get me started on how often I encounter the gaslighting boyfriend.  At this point, you might as well just make “And the Gaslighting Boyfriend” the subtitle to every horror script that hits the market.

But this isn’t just about horror.  Sherwood’s analysis can be extrapolated to represent every genre. Because every genre has its own formula that could be skewered in a similar way. If there’s anyone who knows this, it’s me. Cause I read these violating scripts all day long.

Because of this, I started getting a weird feeling while reading Sherwood’s thread. It was a feeling of, “Is writing a good story even possible anymore?” Because it’s all been done already. So why even try? What are you bringing to the table that hasn’t already been done to death? Aren’t you just matching these same story beats over and over again in your script?

Think about that for a second. Really think about it. Why do you write screenplays? I believe most writers write them because they want to show the world their unique vision, their unique ideas, their individual creativity. And then they want to be celebrated for that. But if your scripts are following the exact same formula that Sherwood lays out, aren’t you just copying what someone else has already done?

I grapple with this question nearly every day. Cause I still want to write stories in some form or another. But if I’m not bringing anything new to the table, then I don’t see any point in pursuing that endeavor.

For example, I love Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I think it’s the perfect movie. So let’s say I write a high school script about some teens breaking the rules. Is there any chance in my movie being better than Ferris Bueller? No. Not in a million years. So what am I doing here? Trying to write the bad version of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off?

Getting back to Sherwood’s thread, something surprising happened in the comments. A writer pointed out, “That’s the exact formula for The Night House and that movie was awesome.” To which, Sherwood agreed. Then someone else said, “That’s the exact plot for The Howling.” Sherwood acknowledged he was right.

Other movies that he acknowledged following this formula were Midsommar, The Witch, Hereditary, Smile. All movies that got either really high critical marks or did well at the box office.

And even though I learn this lesson once every two months, I always have to learn it again. While, yes, formula can hurt you, it can also allow your script to thrive if the execution is strong.

Now, that’s a vague term: “Strong.” It doesn’t really mean anything without context. So let me give you an example. Every horror script starts with a cold open. Something usually freaky and mysterious happens in the first scene. Well, how you EXECUTE that cold open can range from boring and uninspired to exciting and original.

I read an amateur horror script a while back that had a girl hanging out in her house – her parents were away for the night. The doorbell rings. She goes to the door. She checks outside. There’s no one there. She shrugs, goes back to the living room, plays on her computer for another 30 seconds, and then we see a shadow shoot across behind her. She turns around, peers into the darkness of the hallway. Can’t make anything out. She turns forward and, standing in front of her, is a freak in a mask who then kills her.

Contrast this with the opening of It Follows, where we see this barely dressed girl run out of her house at dawn, continuing to look behind her as if something is chasing her. We can’t see anything though. Her fear is palpable as we try to piece together why she’s acting so strange. She’s so scared that she gets in a car and drives as far away as she can. She hides out on a beach, looking off in every direction, before we cut to the next morning where she’s dead and looks like someone stuffed her inside a trash compactor.

Both of these scenes are following the formula of a cold open. But one gives you the “seen it a million times before” version that doesn’t try to elevate the scenario. The other gives something thoughtful and original that makes you want to keep reading in order to get answers on what happened.

You have this exact choice – lazy and uninspired versus unique and exciting – 15-20 times throughout your screenplay. You have that choice in the way you introduce your protagonist. You have that choice with how you handle your inciting incident. If you’re writing a haunted house movie, you have that choice the first time your characters enter the haunted house.

How are you going to innovate and make these common moments feel fresh?

In addition to this, you have to create a protagonist who we both relate to (we’re sympathetic to their situation because it’s similar to something that’s happened to us) and who we believe. The character must act in a manner that is consistent with real life and, therefore, feels like a real person. As opposed to a character who just acts however the writer wants them to act in the moment, even if by doing so they constantly betray the original character that was introduced.

This is why The Night House worked so well. You believed Rebecca Hall’s character. For those who haven’t seen the film, Hall plays a grieving widower who is cleaning out the lake house that her and her dead husband used to stay at. She then starts seeing things that indicate he’s haunting the place. Rebecca Hall’s part of the mourning widow was written so authentically that we were pulled into her grief.

To expand on that.  You’ve gone on a million dinner dates, right?  There are no surprises when you go to dinner with someone.  And it has acts, just like a script.  You’re going to get the menu.  Your’e going to choose something to eat.  You’re going to chat and eat.  You’re going to get dessert.  You’re going to hopefully get her to pay the bill and then leave.  However, if the person you’re with is engaging and fun and you guys are vibing, that dinner date that you’ve had a million times before all of a sudden feels fresh and new, because you like the company.   

We care so much that Rebecca Hall’s character is going to come out of this okay that experiencing this with her is the equivalent of great company on a date.

So, the next time you write a script and you worry, like me, that you’re rehashing a formula that’s been used to death, and, therefore, are unconvinced you can give the reader a fresh experience, remember the two rules I just laid out above.

For every major beat in your story, try to come up with something a little (or a lot) fresher/original than what’s usually used in that scenario. And then give us a relatable genuine hero who we’re really rooting for. Those two things will help you supersede the limitations of formula which will result in a great script even if it’s, technically, similar to every other movie in that genre.

From the creator of Deadpool comes a 2 million dollar spec sale from the 90s that was supposed to be the next huge Will Smith franchise. What happened??

Genre: Action/Adventure/Supernatural
Premise: A mild-mannered campaign worker receives “the mark,” a special ancient marking that gives him all sorts of special powers.
About: This was supposed to be a huge one. The script was purchased in the 90s for 2 million bucks. It was going to star Will Smith. None other than Steven Spielberg was going to direct. Smith’s Independence Day producers, Devlin and Emmerich, were set to produce. And, oh yeah, it was written by the co-creator of Deadpool, Rob Liefeld. Scripts don’t come with much more pedigree than that. According to Liefeld, the project fell apart because of merchandising and producing points. Although something tells me it fell apart after someone read this draft.
Writer: Rob Liefeld
Details: 1997 draft

The Matrix.

Wanted.

National Treasure.

Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The Devil’s Advocate

The script has it all.

In many ways, this project was the pinnacle of the 90s Hollywood deal. You had this sexy high concept idea. You had mega-star Will Smith. You had Spielberg joining you in the pitch room. Let’s be honest. They could’ve pitched “Bathroom Boy: The Tale of the Lost Toilet Paper” and sold it in the room that day.

But instead they sold The Mark.

And we’re all left to wonder if this was the final nail in the coffin for giant script sales. Cause this script is awful.

We start in Nazi Germany during World War 2 cause of course we do. Some evil German commander named Gates is storming into a Jewish apartment building to find the Jewish man who holds “the mark” on his hand – a special tattooed stamp that means you have powers!

The elder owner of the mark passes it down to his son, Jacob, who then leaps across buildings in a single bound, escaping the evil Nazis, as well as escaping the boring scene.

Cut to modern day and you bet your bottom dollar we got a New York apartment that’s got dirty clothes on the floor, that’s got beer cans on the side table, and, woudln’t you know it, when the alarm clock goes off, a hand shoots into frame and throws against the wall.

Apparently Chat GPT time-traveled back to 1997 and answered the question, “How do I write the most cliched character introduction ever?” And that’s what it came up with before traveling back to the future.

The cliched hand belongs to Mike Collins, who gets a knock on the door soon afterwards and do I even need to tell you who it is? Cause if you don’t know, you’ve never seen a movie before. It’s the landlord! And she wants her money. Cause Mike is late with the rent.

Mike makes an excuse then meets his elder friend, Jacob, by the news stand – yes, Jacob is the same Jacob from before. Jacob tells Mike to bet on the Bulls against the Knicks if he wants to make some money. Mike heads to his campaign job where the mayor is going to be running for president soon. At the end of the day, the Bulls beat the Knicks.

Mike goes to thank Jacob except Mike finds Jacob shooting balls of energy out of his hands at two dudes in the alley. Jacob gets hit by a enemy energy ball and, as he lays dying, PASSES THE MARK TO MIKE! Mike runs away, realizing, in the moment, that he has super speed. And then he also has super strength.

He’s terrified of all this new power and he tries to hide. But he’s soon visited by this chick named Falkon. Falkon then takes Mike to her secret hideout which is in…. Wait for it, the Statue of Liberty. Falkon explains to Mike that he now bears the “mark” and, therefore he’s “the one” and that the evil Jonathan Gates (from the opening) is going to do everything in his power to get that mark because the planets are aligning soon and he needs to have it do destroy the world or something. Yada yada yada. The end.

The Mark may be one of the most blatant examples of how influenced we are by the time that we’re writing in. This was written squarely in 1997 when everyone was writing these scripts.

You’ve got the nobody everyman protagonist. You’ve got the special power that’s passed on from generation to generation. Our character is known as “The One” (although, in the writer’s defense, Matrix hadn’t been released yet). You’ve got Nazis. You’ve got the “learn your powers” fun-and-games section.

I love reading scripts like this for this very reason – to remind you not to write the same stuff that everybody else is writing at that time. You have to be able to step out of your body, travel 20 years into the future, and look back at your current script through that lens of, “Does my script read like every other movie that was being released at that time?” And if the answer is yes, your script either needs a major overhaul or to be thrown in the trash.

I always say that a screenwriter becomes a screenwriter when they watch other movies and don’t think, “Ooh, that’s cool, I’m going to include that in my script,” but rather, “Ooh, that’s cool, now I can’t use that in my script.” You learn to actively avoid the things that everybody else is doing.

But let’s play a different game for this review. Which is, if I read this in 1997, would I like it? And the answer to that would be no. I’ll tell you why. Because the secret base is in the Statue of Liberty. Let me repeat that: THE SECRET BASE IS IN THE STATUE OF LIBERTY!!!

I have seen many a questionable writing choice in my day. I’ve seen scripts written entirely on one’s cell phone. I’ve endured twenty-minute scenes of characters watching The Shining… IN SPACE. I’ve read not one, not two, but THREE Mattson Tomlin scripts, which, combined, exhibited the thoughtfulness and sophistication equivalent to a fifteen minute visit to the bathroom.

But giving your characters a secret base in the Statue of Liberty in a non-comedy is up there with the dumbest creative choices I’ve come across. I’m not even sure Mattson Tomlin would do something this dumb. I mean, are you even trying at that point?

As soon as that happened, I was out. The script was trending downwards before that. That brought it into “bottom of the ocean” territory.

Another problem is that Liefeld adheres to formula so rigidly that it strangles the story’s ability to live. This is a debate that’s raged on for years in the industry and this script shows you why. Because every single beat of this script is lined up with the Blake Snyder beat sheet and, as a result, there’s no life to it.

It’s just a screenplay beat sheet. It’s not a real thing that happened.

Which is what you’re trying to achieve, by the way. You’re trying to make your movie feel like something that really happened. The second we don’t feel that, we start seeing your movie as a produced fake product rather than an experience to get emotionally wrapped up in.

I think structure is good. But it has to be invisible. You can’t be so clunky in your construction of it that all your plot pillars are visible. You have to hide it, like exposition. Which basically means that your characters are dictating what happens as opposed to the writer dictating what happens.

When the Terminator walks naked into a bar and finds a biker his size and tells him to give him his clothes, we feel that as a genuine moment because the Terminator needs to blend in to society. And he can’t blend in without clothes. It’s imperative that he do this to succeed at his mission.

Conversely, when Captain Marvel steals a guy’s jacket and motorcycle who tells her to smile, that moment is 100% created by the writer. It doesn’t need to happen for the story. It’s just the writer wanting to get this thing in there they want to say.

Structure works the same way. If we feel like, “Oh, now we get the scene where the guy gets a tour of the secret base,” and, “Oh, now we get the scene of him practicing his new powers,” and “Oh, now we get the scene where the love interest pops in,” then we start falling asleep.

A script dies the second the reader knows what’s going to happen three minutes from now. Once they can always tell what’s going to happen in three minutes? Your script is dead to the world cause it’s terrible.

You’ll never be able to perfectly hide everything, of course. But you have to be good enough to hide most of it.

To be fair to Liefeld, this doesn’t feel as cliched if we’re reading it in 1997. But it doesn’t matter because there is literally nothing to offset the cliches. Every single choice, from the main character to the love interest to the powers to the rules, are so insanely bland that I don’t know how he was okay with others seeing these pages.

Try.

At the very least, try.

That’s all I ask from writers. Let me see that you’re trying and, even if you write a bad script, I will respect you for giving it your all.

This script had zero try-factor.

And you can read it yourself! – The Mark

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

What I learned: There’s a famous moment in the movie National Treasure where Nicolas Cage’s character has to use the Constitution, which is encased in bullet proof glass, to deflect some bullets. The reason this moment is so famous is because it’s ironic. It’s clever. That you’re using this 300 year old document to defend yourself. Having a secret base in the Statue of Liberty is not ironic. And because of that, it comes off as lazy and dumb. So, if you’re tasked with coming up with something and you don’t know if it’s cool or stupid, do the irony test. If there’s some irony there, it’s probably cool.

The hottest horror director in town charges in and grabs a juicy new horror story.

Genre: Horror (short story)
Premise: When a new home is moved onto an empty lot in a Texas town, it begins haunting all the houses around it.
About: What did I tell you guys? Write those short stories! Especially in the horror space. They’ve become the new million dollar spec sale. This short story got everyone around town hot and bothered and ended up in the hands of the scalding Zach Cregger (Barbarian), fetching just shy of 1 mil. The story is written by a newbie writer, Victor Sweetser, who was actually pitched the story from someone in the business who had seen his writing from Reddit and then Sweetser wrote the story and published several parts of it on Reddit.  It was the person who pitched Sweetser who helped set the whole thing up for a bidding war. Cregger will team with Roy Lee at New Line (It) to make the film. The two are collaborating on another hot project that sold recently called “Weapons.”
Writer: Victor Sweetser
Details: 34 pages

A while back I talked about how Barbarian had one of the best opening acts I’ve seen in years. Apparently, Hollywood agreed, because since then, the director, Zach Cregger, has become the town’s newest obsession. He has set up not one, not two, but THREE different projects this year, all of which resulted in big auctions with lots of bids.

This is his latest sale and it comes from the newest get-rich-quick scheme for writers – a killer short horror story.

17 year old Chloe lives on a normal block in a Texas town, the kind of place where nothing much goes on. Her days consist of looking forward to seeing her boyfriend, Mason, who has his faults but is, overall, a pretty awesome partner. Chloe also likes to slum around town with her kinda dumb best friend, Kat, and her dainty brother, Jake.

Then one day, a house moves onto the block. That’s right. Like, an actual giant Victorian house is wheeled into the one open lot on the block and plopped down there. Everyone is confused by this but Chloe and Mason see it as a new opportunity to have some fun so they go inside that night. Except only one of them comes out. Mason, simply, disappears!

The next day, at school, while in class, Chloe and her class see a naked guy on the school’s football field charging at them. It’s Mason! Mason sprints, with hate in his eyes, straight at Chloe, bashing into the window and hitting the dirt. Something happened to him in that house. Something bad.

Chloe does some research and finds out that the house owners bought the house for FREE on Facebook. The only stipulation was that they move it out of its New Orleans neighborhood. So they moved it here. Quickly, everyone on the block starts going crazy. One homeowner sets himself on fire! Another drives their car straight into another neighbor’s house. Clearly, this house is doing something to everyone.

Chloe knows that it’s only a matter of time before she’s next so she recruits Jake and Kat to go to New Orleans and learn how to stop the house. Once there, they get the low down. The house was responsible for destroying an entire neighborhood! Everyone had gone crazy. Chloe now knows that if she’s going to stop the madness, she has to go back to Texas, go into the house, and face whatever it is that’s doing this.

One of the hardest things to do in writing is find a new spin on an old idea that actually feels new. As writers, we’re really good at convincing ourselves that we’ve come up with a new spin when, in actuality, we’ve just come up with a weaker version of a previously successful idea.

It’s like saying you’ve come up with a new spin on the disaster genre by having a giant earthquake hit Portland instead of Los Angeles. Sure, your disaster is taking place in a different city. And that does make it “different” by the letter of the law. But does that difference make it desirable to audiences? That’s the real question. And a Portland earthquake movie does not.

I do have sympathy for writers looking for that “same but different” idea because sometimes, a writer will come up with only the tiniest change and still, somehow, strike gold. Like M3GAN. It’s Chucky with the only difference being now the doll is AI. Other than that, IT’S THE SAME FREAKING MOVIE!

So I’m not going to pretend like this is an exact science but I do think that Occupant hits that “same but different” mark as I’ve never seen a story where a haunted house is moved into a neighborhood.

It’s a pretty cool concept and I liked the idea of the haunted house making the entire block haunted. Not only was it different but, from a story perspective, it forces your hero to be active. Because, since Chloe lives on the block, she has to figure out how to stop this haunting or she dies too.

Chloe was one of the things I liked best about the short. Often times, in horror screenplays, writers make the mistake of having their hero wait around for the next scare. Not only is Chloe active within her own neighborhood, but once things get really bad, she travels to another state to figure out how to defeat this thing. So Chloe alone pushes – dare I say SHOVES – this narrative forward.

Moving on to the adaptation of this story, short story writers who are using the medium as an avenue for a spec sale need to make sure that the Hollywood readers can see places within the story that can be expanded for the movie. Or else your story won’t feel like it has enough meat for a feature.

So I’m happy to say I could see the whole movie here. There’s this section that the writer rushes past where, individual neighbors start doing crazy things, such as lighting themselves on fire and I realized, you could make all of the characters on this block bigger characters for the movie. And then you can expand this section where they all start going crazy because of the haunted house’s effect. Cause I felt that section was the one with the most potential. So I was actually kinda surprised the writer zipped by it. But it’s going to work great on-screen. It’s such an obvious place for the screenwriter to expand.

The story also has a great villain. There are these figurines and images on old dishes and vases throughout the house of this “twisted woman” who looks like she’s trying to do the most advanced yoga pose ever. Only later do we learn that this is the woman who’s haunting the place. And, naturally, when we finally see her in twisted form, we’re terrified.

So, I liked a lot about this story. However, it still only gets a “worth the read” from me because, in the end, there’s nothing truly stand-out about the short. If feels like, if there are any missteps in the production, that it could end up being a Scream knock-off. And Scream isn’t good anymore. So that’s not what you want.

Which, I guess, begs the question: Which Cregger is showing up for this movie? Is it the Cregger who directed the first 50 minutes of Barbarian? Or is it the Cregger who directed the second 50 minutes? Because those were two completely different movies. If the first 50 Cregger shows up, this is going to be good. Cause the story is solid.

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

What I learned: Even if you nail everything in a fun concept like this, you’ll still find yourself struggling to sell it if you haven’t come up with a visually scary villain. If this haunted house is just haunted by some old creepy dude, that’s not enough. This weird twisted woman conjures up a much more aggressive and freaky image. Which is exactly what you want. You want that reader imagining that creepy villain on screen. That’s the exclamation point for selling a horror story like this. Because once the producer can see that unique freaky villain that they can build an entire marketing campaign around, THEY’RE IN.

What if I told you that there was a new horror film coming from a Shyamalan but that it WASN’T M. Night Shyamalan? Would you believe me? Would I believe myself? Alas, this newsletter’s big script review comes from Night offspring. Are we ready for a whole new generation of twist endings? I also share my thoughts on the new Mandalorian season and if it’s possible to die from cuteness overload. I give you two big tips on movie idea theft, one regarding a scenario you shouldn’t worry about, and another about a scenario you should. I give you a dialogue book update, some tips we can learn from a couple of recent Amazon purchases, and my assessment of, quite possibly, the most confusing movie I’ve ever come across.

No post today. Just a newsletter. So if you want to participate in the conversation, e-mail me to get on my newsletter list and I’ll send it over to you immediately (assuming I’m not asleep). carsonreeves1@gmail.com

Yesterday, we took a look at a screenplay covering the famous Betty and Barney Hill UFO sighting. This, naturally, led to some discussion in the comments about the greatest UFO movie ever made, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

I don’t need a reason to get me to watch Close Encounters again. Just a passing mention of it and my TV is already firing up because who doesn’t want to watch an iconic film about UFOs? While watching Spielberg’s near-perfect movie, I discovered something that shocked me. It’s something you don’t see anymore.

That something is: THE HEIGHTENED MOVIE MOMENT.

These are the moments in his movies that Spielberg basically writes himself.  Or, if he doesn’t write them, he conceives of the sequence and tells the writer exactly what he wants.  His screenwriters may write the scenes whole cloth where the government explains to Indiana Jones where the Ark of the Covenant might be.  But the scene where Indiana is dragged by a truck before eventually overcoming the truck and beating up everyone on it?  That’s all Spielberg.

Basically, what the heightened movie moment is, is a big moment that is meant to be captivating all on its own. Some people might call these “set pieces,” which they can be. But they’re more than that. They’re clever imaginative dramatized scenarios that pack a punch and are highly memorable.

Close Encounters is PACKED with these moments. And the more of these moments I saw, the more I wondered why this art has been abandoned.

I would argue that Spielberg himself doesn’t even do it anymore.

So what are these moments specifically?

The first occurs with some scientists showing up in a blustery dust storm in the middle of Mexico. They’re being frantically led somewhere, the suspense building as to where and what’s going on. Then they finally come around a bend and see that there are two dozen World War 2 planes just parked out in the desert, which we quickly learn all went missing during a mission over 30 years ago.

This is followed by a really smart scene where a plane nearly hits a UFO at night. But we’re never in the plane. We see this happen back in the air traffic control tower. Our featured controller helplessly watches as an object is hurtling towards one of the planes on his screen. Again, the suspense is high. Is it going to hit this plane and kill 200 people? Then, at the last second, it disappears.

In the very next scene, we get what is, probably, the most famous image from the movie, which is when the little child is woken up by all the flashing moving electronic toys, and then follows the noises out of the house.

That’s three scenes in a row that all work individually. In other words, you don’t need to know anything about what’s going on in the movie to enjoy the scenes. Because they’re creative, imaginative, heightened, suspenseful, and are constructed as if they are their own little story with a beginning, middle, and end.

Just a few scenes later, we get another famous heightened movie moment. This is the one where Roy, our protagonist, stops his car at night, another car pulls up behind him, but then that “car” rises up and hovers above him because it’s not a car, it’s a UFO. And this UFO then proceeds to magnetically lift up everything in his car.

What’s amazing is that all four of these great scenes happen BEFORE THE 20 MINUTE MARK.

Think about that for a second. Most writers can write 5-6 movies before writing one truly memorable heightened movie moment. Spielberg had four of them within twenty minutes!! That’s INSANE!!

After the movie cools down a little bit, we then get another classic heightened movie moment where hundreds of Indians chant a strange little hymn while praying in a remote city. We get Roy going nuts, collecting items around the neighborhood in a deranged state so he can build his rendition of the mountain he keeps seeing in his dreams. And then you get that amazing final set piece where the military makes official contact with the aliens.

When do we ever get sequences like this anymore? Truly creative thoughtful suspenseful moments that are so impactful that you talk about them with people immediately afterwards? You don’t. Most of today’s “heightened movie moments” are just superheroes fighting each other.

I suspect the problem is that the special effects technology has gotten so good that people don’t have to think creatively anymore. If you can do anything, you end up doing the obvious thing. Captain America vs. Captain America. Sure, it’s a fun scene. But does it require the thoughtful energy and creativity it takes to come up with any of the Close Encounters moments? Not even close. It’s the kind of scene that Chat GPT would come up with. There’s no heart, no soul.

As I started to think about Spielberg, I realized that he built his entire career on this. He built his career on a guy running from a boulder in a cave. He built his career on people wrestling back an angry caged velociraptor. He built his career on kids flying on bikes with an alien and a full moon in the background.

Every movie he used to make, he would think of those individual powerful movie moments that work all on their own. And we just don’t see that anymore. And, again, NOT EVEN SPIELBERG does it anymore. It’s like he’s forgotten what made him great.

I think you know where this is going.

I want you to start incorporating this secret old Spielbergian philosophy into your own scripts. Think about five magical moments that take advantage of your specific premise and then incorporate them into your script, even if it means building your narrative around them. Because if there’s anything today’s taught me, it’s that a script is worthless if it doesn’t have any memorable moments.

How do you achieve this?

I know that Spielberg did a ton of research in Close Encounters. He hired J. Allen Hynek, the number one UFO authority in the world at the time. And Hynek just bombarded Spielberg with all these crazy UFO stories he’d investigated.

Spielberg then took the ones he liked the best and he built little mini-movie scenes around them. Just like any artist should do, he took the root of the real-life experience and he looked for ways to make it more dramatic and impactful.

For example, when it comes to the famous scene of a UFO appearing above a car and turning everything in the car off, I suspect that Spielberg may have added the idea of the UFO first coming up behind them and looking like headlights. And then I’m guessing he added the magnetism pulling everything in the car upwards.

So look to real-life events in the subject matter you’re writing about to find the foundation of your heightened movie moments. For example, if you’re writing a plane crash movie, research 10 famous plane crashes. I’m sure you’ll find one you can use as the foundation for an amazing movie moment (which actually happened, by the way – John Gatins, who wrote “Flight,” heard about a plane that got inverted once in flight and used that as the basis for his movie’s crash).

You should also be drawing from experiences in your own life and looking for ways to dramatize them. I think of all those toys going berserk at once. I’m guessing that wasn’t something Allen Hynek offered. Spielberg probably had a memory from his childhood of a few of his electronic toys moving around and realized it would make for a highly dramatic moment if he could exaggerate it and have a bunch of toys moving around at the same time.

So use those moments from your life that really affected you and build scenes around them. Oh, and DON’T USE MOMENTS FROM MOVIES YOU’VE SEEN. Then you’re just copying.

Also, use suspense! Notice how Spielberg doesn’t just come into these scenes and give you the information. He draws it out for as long as he can in order to get the most entertainment value out of the scene. So, when they get to Mexico, in the opening, we don’t plop down in front of all the missing planes right away. We meet people beforehand. We see their excitement and confusion. We want to know what they’re excited and confused about. The planes aren’t clear at first. They are hiding amongst swirling dust (more suspense! What are we looking at??).

Even when the planes do become clear, we’re not even sure why we should we be freaking out about planes. We have to go a few more beats into the scene before we find out that these are lost planes from World War 2. It’s a clinic in writing an entertaining scene.

Since writers aren’t doing this anymore, everyone reading this article has just been given a golden ticket to writing awesome screenplays. Because if you can bring this practice back effectively, your scripts are going to be so much more entertaining than the stuff everybody else is writing. Personally, I can’t wait to see what you come up with.