We also answer a screenwriting question that seems to be getting asked more and more every day: Is the character description dead?
Genre: Spy, 1 hour drama
Premise: A CIA director who heads up the “Lioness” division recruits a new female operative to embed into a Middle Eastern family in order to take down the patriarch, a high level target.
About: Where would Paramount Plus be without Taylor Sheridan? I’ll tell you where. THEY WOULDN’T EXIST. Sheridan keeps propping the streamer up and he’s done it again with his latest show, Lioness, which will feature Avatar star, Zoe Saldana.
Writer: Taylor Sheridan
Details: Just 46 pages
Taylor Sheridan is amazing.
I’ve said this before but I remember when he was just some name on the Black List, like everyone else. And he’s since turned his name into an empire. If it can happen to him, why can’t it happen to you? It’s 2023. Anything is possible. Except for nice weather in Los Angeles apparently.
Recently, Sheridan’s been running into a problem that very few people ever have to deal with. He’s got so many hits, he doesn’t have time to write anymore. Yet he’s still writing. He admitted he wrote the pilot to Tulsa King in a weekend. Did he try and top that by writing Lioness over an extended lunch?
At what point does the quality of the work begin to suffer? Cause for me it would’ve suffered on show #2. Sheridan is now on show #8. By the way, Tulsa King is a really fun time if you haven’t seen it. And you probably haven’t, since nobody has Paramount Plus. But it’s a great screenwriting class in scene-writing. Terrence Winter, the showrunner, makes every single scene a mini-movie. It’s well worth checking out.
Onto Lioness.
Joe is a high level CIA director who works out of Syria. She heads up something called the “Lioness” division, which was originally conceived because they needed female soldiers to pat down younger women in the Middle East. But the division has expanded massively since then and now, primarily, involves embedding a female operative into a family friendship in the hopes of setting up an assassination on the high level target male in the family.
But Joe has got a secret. When stuff gets bad, she’s not exactly someone you can depend on. In her most recent operation, when her operative is discovered, instead of sending in a team to rescue her, she orders the home and family to be blown up. Take out the high level target and, oh well, the collateral damage that is one of her own.
Cruz is a 23 year old Oklahoma City girl who somehow found her way in bed with some bad people, including drug dealer slash boyfriend, Edward. After a beatdown by Edward, Cruz has had enough and pummels him with a frying pan before running for her life. She runs straight into a marine recruiting office with Edward on her tail. The marine asks the arriving Edward if he’s got a problem. Edward angrily leaves with his tail between his legs.
Cruz takes the marine recruitment exam and scores off the charts. She later takes the physical exam and sets records. Not just girl records. She flirts with records that even the men have. The marines realize they’ve got a diamond in the rough and Cruz is fast tracked to several cool missions.
Several years later, she ends up in front of Joe. Both of these women are as cold as a Chicago winter so they don’t exactly get along. But Cruz agrees to be the latest lioness, where she’ll be embedded into a rich Afghanistan family by becoming friends with the daughter, who’s roughly Cruz’s age. As she makes first contact with the family, we quietly wonder if she’s just signed her own death warrant. Not from the family. But from her superior, the woman who’s supposed to protect her at all costs.
I don’t know how Taylor Sheridan does it. But he writes women that are kick-a$$ that in no way feel woke. 9 out of every 10 women written in Hollywood these days are amazing at everything they do without explanation. They are an army of Mary Woken Sues.
You never feel that when you read a Sheridan female character. Which is probably why his female characters are so much better than everyone else’s. For example, there’s an early scene where Cruz beats up a woman in Edward’s crew and Edward punches her in retaliation. I just don’t think anyone else in Hollywood would write that beat right now. They’d be terrified.
And that’s the problem. That beat rings true. Cause in the real world, drug dealers aren’t on Twitter worrying about getting canceled. They’re crazy violent psychopaths obsessed with how much money they’re making and they treat women the way you’d expect people like that to treat women. So it’s a moment that rings true to the audience and circumvents all this fake wishful thinking utopia nonsense that you see on TV these days.
If we feel that the writer is being honest, we’re way more likely to suspend our disbelief and go along with the story.
Beyond making the female characters feel genuine, he makes them awesome. The scene where Cruz takes a frying pan, wakes up Edward, starts beating him with it, then runs, with him chasing her through the city, where she finally ends up at the Marine recruitment office, is easily the best army recruit scene I’ve ever seen. It also makes this girl such a bad-a$$.
His other main female character is great too. I loved the scene where Joe is looking at her operative being compromised and she makes the call to get rid of her. It’s an uncomfortable moment that too many writers are afraid of writing these days. They’d say, “Oh, this makes Joe unlikable. So we can’t do that.” No, the fact that it’s such a controversial decision is what makes the character so interesting. It also sets up a great question for the remainder of the series. Will she do the same to Cruz?
Separate from that, I want to give props to Sheridan. I love his character introductions. And I noticed that WyldWrite put together a list of all the main character introduction of all the Oscar hopeful scripts this year. Props to him because I’m going to copy-and-past what he wrote.
The skinny is that he was surprised at just how weak all the character descriptions in these scripts were. Here they are…
—(SULLIVAN), a good-looking man of 35 or so,
HENRY PELHAM (mid-40s, disheveled)
JULIO STRASSERA, 55, thick-framed glasses, bulky mustache, and bags under his eyes. He combs his wet hair.
a boy of twelve: PAUL GRAFF, red-haired and pale and freckled and bespectacled.
MAREN (17, Mixed Race)
CHARLIE CULLEN, 36, small, sinewy and very pale. His hair is flecked with silver, his scrubs are bachelor white. Charlie is leached of colour, except for his eyes, they glisten.
CLOSE on the piercing blue eyes of CONSTANCE REID (”CONNIE” – 23).
PETER, 24, is dressed identically to his fellow commuters, though his suit is of a lighter shade and less broken in.
GAIL BISHOP, mid 40s, black, upright and unyielding.
TOM BURGESS (60s) walks his dog along rocky bluffs edging the sea. It’s a blustery day. Tom has the build of a lifelong athlete, though his face has become rugged with sun exposure. His broad shoulders are hunched with tension.
If you’re someone who’s always hated character descriptions, this is good news for you, since it’s proof positive that Oscar-worthy screenplays can have weak character descriptions.
But I will remind you that a lot of these are director-writers. They are also scripts that are written with an actor already attached. In both of these scenarios, character descriptions aren’t important because you’re not trying to create a visual for readers. Your focus is on the movie. And if you already have Denzel in your film, there’s no reason to spend five hours coming up with the greatest description of Denzel’s character ever.
However, if you’re writing specs, it’s important because you’re still in the stage where you’re trying to paint a picture for people so they can imagine the movie. If they can’t imagine the movie, why would they make the movie? Your job is to help them out in that department. And one of the many ways you can do this is by writing great descriptions for your main characters. Which Sheridan is consistently good at.
Here’s one of his early character intros, which I love…
“A MAN IN HIS 30S, thick beard, wears a t-shirt, ball cap on backwards, Oakleys, and blue jeans — looks like he was on the way to the mall then decided to go to war.”
I mean how much better is that than all the nonsense descriptions above?
Details matter. They are what’s going to elevate your screenplay. So don’t use directors who only care about what’s on screen and not as much about what’s on the page as excuses for why you don’t need to write detailed character intros. Or detailed anything, for that matter.
The only thing I didn’t like about this script was the ending. We were building up to this important moment where Cruz has to win over the family’s daughter in a shopping mall. The whole show depends on Cruz being able to infiltrate the family. And, yet, the daughter literally does all the work for her. Cruz doesn’t have to do anything and she’s in.
You want to do the opposite. Cruz should encounter a major obstacle and cleverly overcome it to get into the daughter’s good graces for the perfect climax to the pilot. That was a big enough error to bring this down from an “impressive” and probably has to do with Sheridan whipping this script together between pop-tart toastings.
But, overall, Hollywood’s current screenwriting superstar does it again.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: A great way to find a show is to identify one of these specialized military programs and create a show around them. Go do it right now! Google ‘special programs’ in the military. You could find yourself a show in the next ten minutes.
I asked ChatGPT and they suggested this one: “The United States Military Working Dog Program: This program trains and uses dogs for various military missions, including detecting explosive devices, conducting patrols, and providing security.”
Sounds like a show to me!
Genre: Horror
Premise: A workaholic toymaker’s life is turned upside-down when her sister dies and she gains custody of her young niece. So, to keep her niece company, she creates the ultimate toy, M3GAN.
About: While the big box office story right now is Avatar reaching 1.7 billion and confirming that James Cameron truly is the king of all the worlds, M3GAN’s box office success isn’t so shabby itself. The film scored 30 million this weekend, surprising the industry, who thought it’d be much closer to 20. Screenwriter Akela Cooper now has two hit horror films on her resume. This and Malignant.
Writer: Akela Cooper (script) and James Wan (story)
Details: about 2 hours
Once again, we are reminded that if you want to break into this business with an original screenplay, this is the genre to do it in. Because where else can you make 6 times your budget on opening weekend than with a horror flick?
The frustrating thing about this strategy, though, is the unknown in regards to choosing your concept. Horror concepts are total wildcards. I mean, this is just an updated version of Child’s Play and Annabelle. And Child’s Play even had a reboot a few years ago, which, you would think, would make this movie irrelevant.
Sure, it’s an AI toy, which introduces a new twist. But not much of one. It’s still an angry killer toy. We’ve seen that before.
I think that younger demos who are looking for somewhere to go with their friends are always going to be into fun horror movies because they get to escape their parents as well as get their emotions stimulated. You know what they say. Fear is our most primal emotion.
So maybe the screenwriting lesson here is to write a horror script within a template that Hollywood has made before and, therefore, knows they can market. As we just established, Hollywood knows how to make Annabelle and Chucky sell tickets. So they can apply that same strategy to M3GAN. Make Hollywood’s job easy for them.
Aren’t we here for a movie review, Carson? Was M3GAN any good?
Gemma is a cutting edge toy-maker who develops advanced computer-aided toys. She’s routinely blasted by her boss, David, for making these toys unaffordable. But Gemma doesn’t care! She’s determined to change the toy game, giving everything she creates that ChatGPT flare.
But single-and-not-ready-to-mingle-cause-families-are-for-suckers, Gemma, gets the shock of her life when her sister, brother-in-law, and niece get in a car crash and only her niece, Cady, survives. Gemma is given custody of Cady and, all of a sudden, she’s got to split duties between work and family.
As a way to ease her time commitments, she finishes up M3GAN, an artificially intelligent little girl that can act as Cady’s friend. M3GAN is an instant hit with Cady, who begins to hang out with her all the time.
M3GAN is a hit with Gemma’s boss as well, who realizes this can completely change the toy game. The two formulate a launch plan that will begin with a streaming announcement in two weeks (remember what I told you about movie timeframes staying within 2 weeks??).
But while Gemma gets ready for the big announcement, M3GAN starts to get more and more possessive of Cady, first killing the neighbor and her dog for threatening Cady, and then killing a little boy who’s mean to Cady. Also, when M3GAN gets really angry, she dances. Which I can totally relate to.
When M3GAN finally realizes that her creator is standing in the way of her and Cady being BFFs, she constructs a plan to kill her. It will ultimately be up to Cady to decide who’s more important in her life, M3GAN or Gemma. Let the best girl win!
So how do you write a professional level horror script?
Cause they look easy. But, obviously, not everyone can write them.
You’re basically looking at three things. One, you need a plot that’s tight and that moves towards a clear destination. Here, we have Gemma trying to launch this toy.
In reality, all the audience cares about in these movies is watching the doll kill people. Unfortunately, you can’t just go from doll-killing-people-scene to doll-killing-people scene. There has to be the illusion of some sort of story in the meantime. And that’s what the “toy launch” plotline is. It makes us feel like there’s an actual story here.
Going back to my Friday the 13th review – a movie I found to have had a terrible screenplay – you can see what happens when you don’t have that plot pushing the story forward. They didn’t have that in that movie, even though it was available to them (they could’ve focused more on having to get the camp ready for the arrival of the campers). Without it, it just felt like an empty excuse to create a bunch of gory kills.
The other thing you gotta do a FAIRLY good job with is the character struggle. You don’t have to nail this – M3GAN certainly doesn’t – but you can’t ignore it. You need something that the main character is unknowingly struggling with or actively trying to overcome. With Gemma, it’s that she’s super-selfish. She cares more about work than her own niece. And there’s this question of, is she cut out to be a mother?
Again, Cooper didn’t execute this very well. But she made it serviceable. And the reason you want to it to be, at least, serviceable, is because it makes the character feel more real. If you don’t include this, then the character becomes an empty vessel with nothing going on, and it’s clear that they only exist because the movie needs a main character.
The final thing you need is three great scary set pieces. Ideally, you want the set pieces to be specific to your concept. In other words, you don’t want some garden-variety haunted house scene in a cursed doll movie. You want your set pieces to revolve around stuff only a cursed doll movie could have.
What’s different about M3GAN is that the villain is, many times, also the hero. She’s getting rid of people we want gotten ride of. So she takes out the neighbor, whose dog viciously bites Cady. She takes out the evil kid who tries to beat up Cady. In a weird way, I guess you could call M3GAN an anti-hero. And that helped her scenes feel a little different than traditional scary bad guy scenes.
If we take the screenplay out of it, M3GAN was like an Eastern European gift basket. You got some things in there that are worth trying out and others that’ll probably send you to a military ER.
I can tell you this. The movie worked well with my crowd. Every time M3GAN started singing, my crowd howled with laughter. And they were always giggling at things M3GAN would say. So I can see why the film was so popular.
But if you look a little deeper, this was a super-cheap film. They must’ve spent all the money on M3GAN because there were 4 sets in this movie. It’s so overt that the big final fight takes place in a 10-12 foot basement.
And Allison Williams is about as convincing as a geeky toymaker as I am a professional opera singer.
There is no world in which this movie deserves a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s barely better than average. And most of that is attributed to how weird M3GAN is. I’m not even convinced that weirdness was purposeful, by the way. I think they got a little lucky with it.
M3GAN is a campy horror film that is way more appropriate for streaming than paying 15 bucks for. But it’s a fun harmless movie that feels like it would be a blast for the 12-17 crowd. This one just BARELY passes into ‘worth the watch’ territory.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the watch
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Dramatize your exposition, don’t state your exposition. Early in the script, we need to establish that both Gemma and Cady have voice control over M3GAN. This will be relevant later on when M3GAN starts ignoring Gemma. But you must first set that rule up.
Weak screenwriters will do this with a straight-exposition scene. They’ll have Gemma sit everyone down and carefully explain how M3GAN works (“You can have multiple people paired with M3GAN so Cady’s going to be paired with her and also I’m going to be paired with her…”). This can work but it’s boring and unimaginative.
Strong screenwriters look for ways to dramatize this information within a scene. So what Cooper does here is Gemma and Cady get into a fight while eating lunch and M3GAN is sitting next to them. M3GAN keeps trying to interject so Gemma says, “M3GAN, turn off.” And as the arguing continues, Cady says, “M3GAN, turn on.” Gemma continues to spar with Cady, and looks at M3GAN again, “M3GAN, turn off.” “M3GAN, turn on,” Cady immediately retorts.
What this does is it establishes that both Gemma and Cady have voice control over M3GAN, and it does so within a dramatic framework – the two of them arguing. This is so much more effective than a straight, “Let’s list out all the doll rules” exposition scene.
As the New Year rang in, I went back through many of my old articles and I was surprised at the extent of the minutia I covered. If you were someone just getting into screenwriting and you stumbled across this site, you may think this craft was so overwhelming, why even bother?
To be fair, mastering any skill is a long involved journey. And there’s value to obsessively mastering every little crevice of this skill in an attempt to write the best screenplay possible.
With that said, details can consume you, and ultimately sabotage you, if you become obsessed with them to the extent that you overlook the basic principles of good screenwriting. Let me provide you with an analogy.
There’s this principle in tennis that’s come up in the last five years called “wrist lag.” The idea is, when you’re hitting your forehand, you want your wrist laid back and dragging as you swing the racket forward. Then, at the last second, just before you hit the ball, you want to whip your wrist through, which allows you to get more power.
Now, is wrist lag important? Sure. But wrist lag makes no difference at all if you haven’t gotten to the ball on time, if you haven’t set your feet properly, if you haven’t gotten your racket back early, if you haven’t timed the swing properly, if you haven’t extended out through the ball.
Ironically, one’s obsession with wrist lag will actually make the forehand worse than if they’d never attempted it in the first place. That’s because focusing on highly specific details meant to take your script – er, I mean your forehand – to the next level, are pointless if the basics aren’t in place.
Another more universal analogy might be someone focusing on intermittent fasting to lose weight when they can’t even make it through the week without late-night binging on In and Out and donuts for three of those days. Totally not talking about myself here.
You get the point. You need to learn how to control basic calorie consumption before you go off and try some highly specialized eating system meant for finely-tuned athletes who are looking to go from 9% body fat to 8%.
So today’s post is a reminder of the eight primary things that will have the biggest impact on the quality of your script. If you’re weak in any of these areas, I’d advise you to work on improving them before you go off and work on things like perspective-based dramatic irony. Or even simple stuff, like obsessing over which to use, bolded or un-bolded slug lines.
The basics may be boring. But they will be the primary reason for whether your script is good or bad. So let’s remind ourselves of them.
A larger than life movie idea with high stakes – I often think about terms such as “high concept” and “a great hook,” and while I believe these things are important, the reality is, most movies aren’t high concept. They don’t have buzzy hooks, like “Nope,” or “65.” And that’s because not everybody likes to write genre horror or genre sci-fi. But that doesn’t mean you can just write anything you want and expect the reader to care. There has to be somewhat of an elevated feel to your idea. Which is why I say, write something that feels larger than life. Instead of writing a group of friends reuniting at a cabin, write Knives Out (a group of people at a house and someone is murdered). Instead of writing about a loner who feels disconnected from the world, write about a loner who feels disconnected from the world who finds his calling in “nightcrawling,” the art of public citizens racing to cover violent late-night news stories. You want your mind thinking along those lines.
Outline – I’m not going to get into a big debate on outlining. I’ll leave that up to you. But I’ll remind everyone that the main reason writers lose their way when writing a script is that they didn’t plot their story out ahead of time, and therefore, ran out of ideas. “To plot” literally means “make plans to carry out.” So why would you expect to do anything successfully without making plans ahead of time? Outlining creates a blueprint for your script which makes it way easier to get to the end. That’s valuable in an art form where you quickly learn how far off page 100 feels when all you’ve got is a cool idea and a vague understanding of your main character.
A strong main character – If you took the plot away from your story and all we did was follow your main character around, would we want to keep following them or would we quickly grow bored of them? The main thing you’re trying to do with your character-construction is create someone memorable. That “memorability” can come from being eccentric (Louis Bloom), really funny (Deadpool), larger than life (Tony Stark), insanely active (John Wick), highly opinionated (Travis Bickle), really messed up (Carrey Mulligan in Promising Young Woman). What you’re trying to avoid is a character who’s casual, normal, passive, reactive, someone you’d never notice in a crowd. These characters kill screenplays, man. I realize that some movies require softer main characters. But there has to be some larger-than-life aspect to your main character if your screenplay is to have any chance.
A first act that grabs us – It’s been said in a million and one screenwriting books. And yet, I’d say a good 70% of the scripts I read continue to make the mistake of writing a first act that doesn’t grab the reader. Or only kind of grabs the reader (which is just as bad, by the way). Treat your first act like it’s a life-or-death situation. I’m not talking about for your characters. I’m talking about FOR YOU. Write like you will immediately die if the reader puts your script down before finishing the first act. I’m serious! Because if you don’t treat that first act like a life or death situation, I guarantee you other writers who respect the ease in which a reader gets bored are writing better first acts than you. From the first line to the the last line in that first act, give us something we can’t put down. And if your response is, my script isn’t that kind of script? Well then maybe you should be writing a different script.
A second act that moves – Remember what the second act is. It’s the “conflict” act. All that means is you’re going to be presenting a lot of obstacles that stand in the way of your main character achieving his goal, and your main character will keep trying to overcome, defeat, move past, or outsmart those obstacles. These can be physical, such as all the assassins John Wick has to defeat. Or they can be cerebral, like Will Hunting trying to overcome all the mental demons preventing him from moving forward in life. You also want to throw in a few twists (or unexpected moments) to keep the reader on their toes. And that should get you through the expansive second act without enduring any ‘script lag.’
A third act that slays – Too many writers are so happy just to get to the third act that they convince themselves that merely finishing their script is enough. I’m here to tell you it isn’t enough. Your final act has to slay. Here’s why. Because the only way scripts really break out in this town is when people excitedly recommend them to other people. You want to write that script where someone says, “You gotta read this.” And leaving the reader on a giant high is one of the best ways to do that. Sure, a big final twist can work. But those are hard to pull off. Something shocking, like an unexpected death (Promising Young Woman) can also work. You can also go with the big emotional ending (a cathartic experience where the main character changes in such a powerful manner that the audience is left weeping). You can write a big WTF ending (Get Out). The main thing you want to ask yourself is, is the reader going to feel charged up and like they have to tell someone about my script after they finish it?
Keeping your scenes entertaining – Too many screenwriters use their scenes as vessels to get their characters from point A to point B. The scenes work. But they’re not nearly as entertaining as they could be. While it’s true that scenes are the connective tissue that push your characters from the start point to the end point, they are not meant to be logical and information driven. Start looking at your scenes as mini-movies that need to be entertaining in their own right. Ask yourself, if I stripped away all of the movie that came before this scene and all of the movie that comes after, would it be entertaining on its own? Obviously, a lot of scenes have payoffs that we only understand because they were set up earlier. But, generally speaking, is the scene entertaining on its own? If not, come up with a scene that is. Cause if I encounter 2-3 boring scenes in a row, I know I’m done with that script. That script isn’t going to get better. And the only reason I run into that issue is because people aren’t trying hard enough to make each individual scene great.
Conflict – Conflict should be everywhere in your screenplay. There should be conflict within your main character (he wants to be a CEO but he’s riddled with anxiety to the point where he can barely function). There should be conflict between your characters (a husband and wife don’t see eye-to-eye on their future, two co-workers are heavy rivals and always butt heads). And there should be situational conflict. A character should never just go to a store and be able to get everything he wants. He should go to the only store that has the particular item he needs but it’s closed. What now? She should be vegan and end up on a family weekend where everyone eats meat (“Pure”). Conflict conflict everywhere and not a drop to drink.
It’s easy to get lost in the never-ending matrix of screenwriting. There are always new things to learn and fun things to practice. But, in the end, it comes down to getting these eight things right. If you don’t have mastery of at least five of them? You’re going to have a hard time writing a good screenplay. So figure out where you’re weak and start looking to improve as soon as possible.
I look forward to the results!
Which is the perfect segue reminder for LOGLINE SHOWDOWN
We’ve got twelve of these throughout the year. They’re due the second to last Thursday of every month. Submit your logline. I post the five best ones. You guys vote for your favorite. I then review the script that gets the most votes. The first one of these contests is January 19th. So if you want to get in, you’ve got another 15 days to submit!
What: First Ever Scriptshadow Logline Showdown
How: Send your title, genre, logline, and a PDF of your script. (You don’t need a ‘why you should read’)
When: By Thursday January 19th, 8pm Pacific Time
Where: Carsonreeves3@gmail.com
Genre: Comedy/Sci-Fi
Premise: A married couple attending a gender reveal party are quickly informed that they must stop the reveal party at all costs… or the world will blow up.
About: This script finished top 10 on the Black List. Jack Waz has been slowly working his way up the ranks. He was a writer’s assistant on Starz’s, Get Shorty. He wrote a small TV movie called, “Love Blooms.” And now he’s made it to the Black List.
Writer: Jack Waz
Details: 99 pages
Is it finally going to happen?
Am I going to genuinely laugh during a comedy screenplay?
It’d be a first.
Why is being funny so hard for people?
I’m hilarious. Just be more like me.
This script’s got a head start, though, cause I love the logline. As I stated in my annual Black List assessment post, I think gender reveal parties are HI-larious in how stupidly insane they are. Especially because of how much it sucks when you find out it isn’t a boy.
Carson, it’s 4 days into the New Year. Let’s not get cancelled!
Meg and Andy, both in their 30s and still acting like they’re in their 20s (getting wasted every night), reluctantly agree to go to Meg’s sister’s (Grace) gender reveal party. Since these two are not into kids, going to a gender reveal party is their own personal nightmare.
Of course, it’s about to become an actual nightmare, because once they get there and everyone settles in, a giant shipping container is opened and blue balloons shoot out into the sky. It’s a boy!
Except Air Force One happens to be flying by at that very second, the balloons get pulled into the engine, the engine explodes, the president dies, and the United States retaliates against Russia and China, who they think shot the president down, and ten minutes later there is no earth.
Luckily, right before Meg and Andy die, some guy named Tank shows up. He’s buff, naked, wears a fanny pack, and is from the future. He tells them he’s time traveled back here to stop this gender reveal party in the hopes of saving the world.
So Tank time travels them back to the morning, tells them they’ve got five shots at stopping the gender reveal party. And off they go. But in their initial attempt, which includes popping all the balloons ahead of time, the sister’s husband has a backup plan! A series of fireworks go off that, when they blow up, reveal the gender. Oh, except it triggers a massive earthquake and the earth splits in two!
The group quickly learn that there are forces bigger than them determined to make sure this reveal happens. They will have to outwit fate to save the planet. But, more importantly, put an end to this evil attention-seeking practice that soon-to-be parents all across the United States participate in – the gender reveal party!
Baby Boom, which definitely needs a title change with the words, “Gender Reveal Party” in it somewhere, is its own unique beast. It’s a quasi-time loop comedy with a spritz of Final Destination thrown in.
The script is written in a brisk effortless style, as every comedy should be. The structure is solid, as it’s divided into five sections, each with a big goal (prevent the world from blowing up).
But for me, it’s more of a “smile” comedy than an “lol” comedy. To be fair, most comedy scripts I read get nowhere close to “smile” level. They live closer to “neutral” and “scowl” level. So I don’t want it to sound like I’m dissing Baby Boom for only making me smile. That’s actually a compliment.
Here’s the thing I’ve learned about comedy.
It’s mostly about performance. It’s about the actor adding their own flourish to the action, to the line, to the performance. When you think about the funniest moments you’ve watched (imagine Step Brothers for example), virtually none of them work without that particular actor delivering that particular line or that particular action in that moment in that particular way.
So it’s hard to judge comedy on the page.
With that said, it goes to show that if you *can* manage to make a script funny on the page, you have something incredibly special. So I’m always looking for that. Even if it is a unicorn.
One thing that can really ramp up your comedy is stakes. The reason for this is that when stakes are higher, it creates tension. We feel that tension since more is on the line. This creates a tightening of your body and primes it for release, which of course comes in the form of laughter. When you don’t have that tightening, there’s no need for release.
Baby Boom low-key doesn’t have any stakes.
On the surface, it looks like it does. The world is at stake!
But they tell us, right from the beginning, that we’re going to get five shots at this. So we know we’re good for the next 75 minutes. They’re going to make it out of each world-ending catastrophe just fine.
Baby Boom has stakes in its fifth and final attempt. But you’ve asked us to endure four meaningless sections to get to the actual danger.
Just so you know, this is not a hard and fast rule. There are examples of screenplays that work with low stakes. To do this, though, you have to excel in other areas of your script, usually the character front. But I just wasn’t into the characters here. I mean, I thought they were fine. Meg and Andy did a solid job taking us through this journey.
But my ultimate character litmus test is, “Would they be interesting without this particular plot surrounding them?” Are Meg and Andy interesting as everyday people? If we were to follow them around for a day, would we be infatuated with them? Not really. There’s some late script stuff where they battle whether they’re ready to have their own child that’s pretty good. But as people, I only ever smiled at a few things they said or did.
Tank was clearly constructed to be the breakout character here but he was just too wacky for me. A naked guy from the future wearing only a fanny pack is a funny image but it felt like it belonged in a South Park episode, not this movie.
Despite all this, I thought the Final Destination angle was a stroke of genius. Waz seemed to anticipate a problem with all the repetition that came with the five similar sequences. So he made sure to keep us guessing on how the world was going to go belly up each time. My favorite was the AI takeover. I thought that was clever. And the Air Force One accident was fun as well.
As confident as I feel in my assessment, I’m aware that I haven’t laughed at a comedy script in forever so the problem could very well be me. Also, this script reminded me A LOT of the script Michael Waldron wrote to get on the Black List, The Worst Guy in the World and the Girl Who Came To Kill Him. And we all know how things turned out for him.
Anyway, did anybody read this? What did you think?
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: It used to be that you could sell a comedy script pretty quickly by following the simple rule of capitalizing on a popular cultural trend. Remember when “Bromance” was a thing? There were like five comedy specs about bromances that sold. When Uber came out, we got a couple of ride-share comedies, with, “Stuber” getting produced. Wedding Crashers is another example. Baby Boom’s high placement on the Black List proves there’s still interest in this approach. So if you’re looking for a comedy idea, this is a good well to draw from. Maybe we can all brainstorm in the comments section current popular culture terms that would make good movies. Getting cancelled is probably a good starting point.
Genre: Drama/Thriller
Premise: A young woman obsessed with eating healthy becomes convinced that all the food she puts in her body is rotting, leading to her having a meltdown at her sister’s wedding.
About: This script finished NUMBER 1 on the recently released 2022 Black List.
Writer: Catherine Schetina
Details: 94 pages
One of the more popular topics for a Black List script is the main character having an unhealthy obsession with something. A ton of these scripts make the Black List so it’s a topic worth considering if your goal is to make the list. In the past we’ve seen obsession over exercise, bodybuilding, porn, influencers.
It’s the car crash principle. We know the crash is coming. And we can’t help but keep looking. We want to see what happens when our hero’s crash finally comes.
30 year old Hannah Abrams works a retail job and bemoans the fact that she doesn’t have her life together. She’s in a relationship with her girlfriend, Cal, who’s a local school teacher.
The two have a great relationship except for one problem. Hannah has orthorexia, a condition where healthy eating becomes an obsession.
Hannah isn’t thrilled that she has to head up to Northern California to her perfect lawyer sister’s wedding but Cal going with her makes it a little easier. On the way up, the two stop to get food and Hannah buys a salad. She then flips out when one of the pieces of lettuce has mold on it.
Hannah tells Cal that the only way to deal with this poison going inside her body is to go on a cleanse. “During your sister’s wedding?” Cal asks. Yup, Hannah says. You see, to Hannah, all her little weird food solutions make total sense, even if no one else understands them.
Once at the weekend cabin, Hannah struggles mightily to survive during group meals. Everyone slurps up chemically-injected food sources. To Hannah’s horror, even her own girlfriend chows down on steroid-injected beef like it’s no big deal.
On that first day, Hannah is horrified to find that there are maggot eggs underneath her fingernails, no doubt from that rotten salad! So she tears away at her fingernails. But she doesn’t get rid of it all because, the next day, she finds maggots on her hands. And also underneath her skin!
Hannah goes into major damage control, scratching and clawing into her skin to capture the little buggers and pluck them out. She also stops eating, causing her to look more and more like a walking corpse. Things get so bad that clumps of her hair keep falling out.
Hannah repeatedly refuses Cal’s help and Cal begins to go through her own mental anguish as she comes to terms with the fact that she’s been enabling this behavior for their entire relationship. It’ll be up to Cal to step to the plate and get Hannah to the hospital before it’s too late. But that’s the problem. IT IS TOO LATE.
I like creepy obsession stories. If you look back through all my reviews of them, I usually give them high marks. I think it’s because we all feel like we’re close to being one of these people. We all have our unique obsessions. What would it take for them to become a legit medical condition? The line between the two is probably a lot smaller than we know.
But the fact that we aren’t yet as wacko as these jokers allows to watch them spiral out of control from a place of comfy schadenfreude. I think that’s another reason these concepts work. We can read them and think, “Well at least I’m not THAT level of crazy!”
I also personally know people who are obsessed with the super-clean food industry and they’re their own level of wacky. For instance, I knew a guy once who bought off-brand milk from Australia because Australia doesn’t pasteurize their milk, or something, and so the milk is the only legit chemical-free milk in the world (his words, not mine). It cost him, I believe, 30 bucks a gallon.
It seems to be this hole you go down that never ends. Cause first it’s Whole Foods since they’re organic. But then you find out that they’re only “certified” organic, which still allows for some light chemicals to be used. So now you start going to Erewhon, which has the truly truly truly organic food. Of course, all the food there cost five times as much. And that’s another element to this obsession. You’re soon paying 100 bucks a day for your habit.
As for the actual story, I give it mixed marks. The stuff that Hannah goes through – first the eggs in her fingernails, and then the maggots, and then the fly eggs, and then the flies coming out of her. I’ve seen that before. I read quite a few scripts where insects are crawling around underneath the character’s skin and they’re trying to scratch them out.
So nothing there really surprised me.
But I did think it was clever to build this narrative around a wedding. A lot of times with these weird indie scripts, the writer focuses so much on the bizarre stuff (like insects breeding inside you) that they overlook a solid defined narrative.
By constructing a script that happens over a single weekend, you take care of that issue. We now have form to our story. We know where the high-pressure points are (Hannah has to give a maid of honor speech). And, most importantly, we know where it’s going to end. It’s going to end in two days. Which means we know we’re not going to be lingering on endlessly.
It’s sort of like Meet the Parents, the I’mFlippingTheFu*kOut edition.
I also liked the relationship aspect of the story. We’ve seen scripts such as Magazine Dreams and movies like Joker that tackle these weirdo characters dealing with their obsessions in isolation. It becomes a different story when the protagonist is in a relationship. Because everything they do affects the other person. And you also have this other character who has to decide – do they stand up to their significant other’s delusions? Or do they nod their head when their partner says, ‘I’m fine,’ even when it’s clear they’re not?
Finally, this script made me think. There’s this moment where Hannah is listening to the radio and there’s a segment about how much micro-plastics we ingest every time we drink bottled water and we have no idea what the long term effects of these micro-plastics are. I drink a lot of bottled water. And now I’m thinking, “Maybe I shouldn’t do that.”
Which I think is healthy. But if I start advocating to rip my skin off to take out the maggots crawling underneath my skin, you have permission to tell me I’ve gone too far.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: “Hannah smiles at her brother. Genuine love there.” You should never ever have to write the second sentence of this line. If you can convincingly SHOW that Hannah and her brother love each other through the actions they take or the words they say, why would you need to directly tell the writer that there’s “genuine love there?” Shouldn’t we already know? In the past, I’ve told writers this is okay, but I realize now that you’re just allowing the writer to be lazy. Do the hard work. Find a couple of moments that unequivocally show that there’s genuine love between Hannah and her brother. And then you never have to tell us in the action description.
