Genre: Post-Apocalypse/Zombie
Premise: Set 20 years after a zombie outbreak, an alcoholic teams up with a young girl to find his brother.
About: I have not seen HBO go more all-in on a new show, maybe, ever. They have been promoting the heck out of this thing. As a point of reference, they didn’t tell anyone The White Lotus Season 1 was coming. They just dumped that on the service. For this, they’re blanketing every real, virtual, and conceptual space with ads for THE LAST OF US. Which indicates to me that they think they have something great on their hands. The show is spearheaded by Chernobyl’s showrunner, Craig Maizen. As well as Neil Druckman, who wrote all the video games the show is based on. It stars Pedro Pascal. They’re hoping this is the next big pop culture hit. With a 96% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, it just might be.
Pilot Writers: Craig Maizen and Neil Druckman
Details: about an hour long
Okay, just to give you some backstory here.
I’ve never gotten more recommendations to play a video game then I’ve gotten to play this one. Tons of people have told me to play it.
I think that’s because this is supposed to have the best story to a video game ever. So, obviously, that intrigues someone like me, who loves storytelling in all its forms. I don’t care if it’s a script, a book, a short story, a poem, a video game, an oral recounting – if it’s a good story, I want to hear it.
Funny enough, when I heard that a Last of Us project was in development, I decided not to play the game. Cause I figured: I’ll just watch the story instead! I won’t have to have put forth any effort. Little did I know it would take ten years for me to see a Last of Us show. But better late than never.
The Last of Us starts in 2003 for some odd reason. That’s when the worldwide plague hits. Joel Miller, who seems to be some small-town worker guy, is a single parent to his tween daughter, Sarah. Sarah is sweeter than a brownie sundae which means her lifespan is probably the same as the time it takes for that ice cream to melt.
When zombies start popping up like a whack-a-mole game, Joel, Sarah, and Joel’s brother, Tommy, make a run for it. But the army moves in and shoots Sarah dead. We then cut to 20 years later, aka, 2023, and the world looks a lot different. Our story is focused on a walled-in version of Boston that can best be described as, The Town Where Nobody Showers.
It’s here where we go from exciting story to Setup City. We start meeting characters, fast and furious, and hear about something called “FEDRA,” which I think is the current national government. A lot of people living in this quasi-Boston town, including a now gray-haired Joel, are part of a rebellion trying to take FEDRA down.
This Boston place is pretty brutal, by the way. When a poor little feral kid comes in from the outside, they take him in, tell him he’s going to be just fine, then EUTHANIZE THE MOTHERF—-ER. And they don’t even get canceled for it! This is a very different 2023 than I’m used to.
The story shifts to focus on the rebellion crew, who I think Joel is a part of. It’s a little confusing. The crew is obsessed with this teenaged girl named Ellie, who they are both intrigued and terrified by. We get the sense that Ellie may be special. When the rebellion’s current mission falls apart, they call on Joel, his girlfriend, and Ellie, to go outside the walls and grab them some drugs. Or weapons. Or both. Again, it’s a little confusing.
But off they go!
There are so many interesting storylines here.
It’s inspiring to see a video game writer upgrade to a huge Hollywood project. That almost never happens and says a lot about the value of writing a great story in the video game universe, as opposed to what normally happens, which is that the story is the least important thing to game developers.
You’ve also got this show trying to exist in a space that is, arguably, beyond dead. No pun intended. The Walking Dead has done everything within their power to suck the last millimeters of life out of the melodramatic zombie genre, leaving no other avenues to tread. How do you come into that space and bring a fresh perspective?
Then you have the video game curse itself. Video games never make good adaptations. Mainly because video games are about interacting and their stories are conceived for such. TV is a passive viewing experience and requires a completely different approach.
So what does this all add up to?
Well, the opening 20 minutes of the show are amazing. I was already dusting off the “genius” stamp, which has been packed away in the back of my closet. When things start going south and they have to escape town? There was some A-grade studio-level production value. I was on the edge of my seat. And then we get that whopper of a shocker where Sarah’s killed. Oof! That was one hell of a first act.
But there was definitely a shifting of the gears once we jumped to 2023. We started bouncing around to a lot of different people – probably too quickly. I wasn’t really getting to know them. I wasn’t caring about them. Which was surprising because the opening of the show does such a great job setting up the characters.
When you’re writing a pilot, the bulk of your focus should be on creating the best characters possible. Cause we’re going to have to watch these characters over the course of 60 episodes. So, if you lose that battle of creating strong characters in your pilot, your show is dead before it’s even started.
Another high profile show that came out last year – La Brea – It pretty much got every single character wrong. And the show was dead from that point forward. It had no hope.
So it was good to see that we got Joel down. I’m onboard with him. I like the brother (who, by the way, played the most recent Terminator). I think I like Ellie. I’m still trying to figure her out. I don’t really like this girlfriend character (who, by the way, was the lead in Fringe). So I guess I’ve got one foot in and one foot out right now.
I know that when a pilot ends, I need to be dying to see the next episode. I was not dying to see this next episode. It didn’t even have a good cliffhanger. They just panned up to a night shot of a dilapidated city. I don’t know about you but that seems mighty unimaginative to me.
I’m not even clear what the overall hook of this show is. I think in Walking Dead, Rick had to find his family? I guess Joel is looking for his brother here but it’s not nearly as compelling because his brother isn’t lost due to the apocalypse. He’s been doing just fine for 20 years. He only recently hasn’t come back to town. Is that a big enough hook to keep watching?
There’s a minor twist where we find out Ellie might be sort of infected but not really? So maybe she’s the secret to the cure? Didn’t Walking Dead do that like a dozen times during its run?
I don’t know, guys. I was hoping for a lot more. There’s some fun stuff if your’e paying attention, like the opening nod to Dawn of the Dead. But it’s far from must-see television. And since that’s what it wants to be, it’s got a higher bar to clear. At least for its pilot, it came up short of that bar.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The opening of the pilot went full exposition mode, as newscasters debate what it would take to create a worldwide zombie pandemic. Unknown screenwriters can’t do this. Not enough is happening to keep the reader reading. Maizen can do it because he knows the show will be on television no matter what. So he can open with a guy taking a ten minute nap if he wants to. But you can’t. You have to write a scene more like the opening of Dawn of the Dead, which had a similar exposition first act, but then the news station starts violently falling apart in the wake of the zombie uprising.
Also, does Carson actually know what he’s talking about?
It’s time for me to cash those receipts. The problem is, I don’t know if the receipts will support my claims or refute them. I guess we’re going to find out together. That’s because today, I go through the last ten movie releases that I’ve done script reviews for.
The idea is to see if my assessment of the script was a proper indication of how the movie would perform. Now performance is a relative term. That’s what she said. And also what I said. That’s because certain movies get 100 million dollar advertising campaigns and others get 5 million dollar advertising campaigns.
We can’t compare those films on numbers alone. It has to be relative to the movie’s budget and marketing campaign. In order to provide more clarity, then, we’re going to look at the critical score (RT) and also the audience score (RT). If two out of the three of these numbers support my initial script rating, I consider my assessment of the script correct.
Although we can’t completely dismiss how the pandemic skewed these numbers, I stayed away from any movie released in 2020.
Okay, are we ready to see how right I was? Or how wrong?
Let’s do it!
BABYLON
Original Script Rating: What the hell did I just read?
Domestic: $13m
Worldwide: $13m
Rotten Tomatoes Critic Score: 55%
Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score: 51%
Breakdown: I knew this script was an utter disaster 30 pages in. If they would’ve stayed at the party the entire movie, maybe this movie would’ve had a chance, since, at least then, it would’ve been focused. But the second that party ends and we enter into this elongated nonsensical rant of a narrative, every ten pages was a million times worse than the previous ten pages. I call these movies, “The Big Swing,” because directors make them when they have a lot of heat and they can get anything made and so they make their weirdest most precious screenplay. And, unfortunately, these movies are often better in their heads than in reality. We saw this with Southland Tales, Under The Silver Lake, Bardo, Babylon, and the upcoming Beau is Afraid. “B” seems to be a common letter in a lot of these films. Bablyon is the biggest loser of all because Paramount put a giant marketing campaign into this, hoped it was going to be an Oscar contender, and instead it was a big incomprehensible mess.
Conclusion: Carson knew exactly what he was talking about
Original Script Rating: Impressive
Domestic: $8m
Worldwide: $8m
Rotten Tomatoes Critic Score: 65%
Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score: 91%
Breakdown: How’s the old saying go? You win some, you lose some. Looks like I lost this one. There’s no other way to look at it than to call this film a failure. It started out so positively, with Brendan Frasier getting 9 day standing ovation at the World Festival. When I reviewed the script, the one thing I was worried about was how small the movie was. It was a guy in his apartment. Now, unlike a lot of contained movies, this one was well-motivated. It was contained to one space because the main character was 600 pounds and couldn’t move. But I think, ultimately, that killed the movie cause it’s really hard to make non-genre contained movies entertaining for 100 minutes. If you don’t have murders or killer zombies outside trying to break in, where is the entertainment factor coming from? Maybe I was a little blinded by what Aronofsky would do with this. But, it the end, I have to take the L. This one I was wrong about.
Conclusion: Carson didn’t know what he was talking about
Original Script Rating: wasn’t for me
Domestic: $45m
Worldwide: $87m
Rotten Tomatoes Critic Score: 39%
Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score: 74%
Breakdown: Man, what a s—t show this project turned out to be. I’m not sure we’ll ever know what fully happened – if Harry Styles spat on Chris Pine. But I do know this. A script will tell you a ton about a movie. And this script had all the earmarks of a failed production. The story was too darn thin. And you might say, yeah, so then go rewrite it. Well, when something is this thin, a few rewrites is not going to do the job. It’ll fill in some of the gaps. But it won’t fill in all of them. And you could see that in the finished product. Things kind of connected. But not really. What was that plane doing in the sky? Who knows? It may be fun to write “mystery plane flies through sky” in a late-night writing sesh. But then you actually have to explain what it is at some point. The numbers on this film represent EXACTLY what that original script score indicated. The numbers aren’t disastrous. But they aren’t good. This project may have been cursed. But the real issue was probably buying a script and then not identifying how to fix it.
Conclusion: Carson knew exactly what he was talking about
Original Script Rating: Impressive
Domestic: $37m
Worldwide: $87m
Rotten Tomatoes Critic Score: 89%
Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score: 76%
Breakdown: I was going to declare this one a definitive win for Team Scriptshadow until I saw the budget. It cost 30 million to make this film. I thought it cost half that. Making 37 million at the box office on a 30 million dollar budget is not that impressive. With that said, I think most people consider this film a mild success. It got some pretty good buzz going for a concept that nobody had ever done before. That’s not easy to pull off. It got a really high RT score. And it did well worldwide for a movie that wasn’t an action or superhero flick. I felt the movie was a perfect adaptation of the script. The casting was great. Most everyone I know who’s seen the movie liked it. This wasn’t a runaway success but it definitely made a mark.
Conclusion: Carson pretty much knew what he was talking about
Original Script Rating: wasn’t for me
Domestic: 148
Worldwide: 401
Rotten Tomatoes Critic Score: 41
Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score: 90
Breakdown: These are probably the hardest movies to judge on the page because they’re so action-oriented and action doesn’t work nearly as well on the page as it does on the screen. I know that I did like that opening crazy set piece in the script, though. But, after that, there was a lack of elegance to the proceedings. It just seemed generic and dumb. Was the movie ultimately successful? I’m not sure it was, despite what Sony will tell you. It had a 120 million dollar budget and only made 148 domestic. That’s not a great number. The critical score was weak. And the audience score is most likely due to how likable the two leads – Wahlberg and Holland – are. Everybody likes those two. So I’m going to go ahead and chalk this up to me being right.
Conclusion: Carson pretty much knew what he was talking about
Original Script Rating: wasn’t for me
Domestic: $11m
Worldwide: $13m
Rotten Tomatoes Critic Score: 86%
Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score: 69%
Breakdown: I thought this was one of the thinnest concepts I’ve ever come across. And the script was one of the most basic obvious executions of that concept you can imagine. It was basically like an adult game of tag with the lights off. That should’ve been the title actually: Adult Game of Tag With The Lights Off. I later found out that the script had been written by the original short story author and she’d never written a script before. So they brought a real writer in to improve it. Which may explain why the film was a hit with critics. I will say that I could see talent and vision from the director in the trailer. That probably helped as well. I don’t know if you’d call this movie a hit, though. I know it got a little buzz. But I’m not sure 11 million is a good enough haul to call this movie a success. Which means, once again, I was correct!
Conclusion: Carson pretty much knew what he was talking about
Original Script Rating: Double-Impressive
Domestic: $22m
Worldwide: $52m
Rotten Tomatoes Critic Score: 68%
Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score: 88%
Breakdown: Just when I reach the top, they pull me back down again. I can’t escape this one. I thought this script was excellent. It was one of the best action thrillers I’ve ever read. But let’s be honest. The movie massively underperformed. In retrospect, you can kind of see why. It was posing as a big movie when, in reality, it was a medium one. You can see 15 ambulance chases in a Transformers movie alone. Why would you pay the exact same money for no Transformers and just the ambulance chase? I will say that I’m on record worrying about Bay as the director. Bay’s style is so well known that I was afraid it was just going to look like all the rest of his movies and not be able to differentiate itself. I also don’t like Bay’s weak attention span, which results in his movies moving too fast at times. But I’m making excuses. This one’s another L for me. I got it wrong.
Conclusion: Carson didn’t know what he was talking about
THE BLACK PHONE (review in newsletter)
Original Script Rating: double worth the read
Domestic: $90m
Worldwide: $161m
Rotten Tomatoes Critic Score: 83%
Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score: 88%
Breakdown: This may be the most low-key movie success story of the year. I saw very few stories about The Black Phone on the internet, and yet it made 90 million dollars. Which is incredible. It also scored well with critics and audiences. This analysis is a bit of a cheat since I read the short story and not the script (which was reviewed in my newsletter). But even then, you could just tell that the movie was going to work. You had two strong elements adding value to the story – the serial killer and the ghost phone. You’re always looking for a fresh angle in the serial killer genre and you’re always looking for a fresh angle in the horror genre. Hill said, “What if I just combine the two?” It turned out to be a genius move.
Conclusion: Carson very much knew what he was talking about
THE UNBEARABLE WEIGHT OF MASSIVE TALENT
Original Script Rating: double worth the read
Domestic: $20m
Worldwide: $29m
Rotten Tomatoes Critic Score: 87%
Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score: 87%
Breakdown: This script was one of a thousand that tries to get on the Black List with that well-known gag of using a real-life actor and placing them in the story. It just so happened that this script *did* make the Black List. And the actor actually agreed to be in it! Unfortunately, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is a minor failure. Almost everyone I know who saw it, liked it. But the industry was hoping for a lot more from this film. This was supposed to make Nicholas Cage a big star again. The film is a good example of where most movies end up, which is somewhere in that middle space. Not a big hit. Not a big failure. For that reason, I consider my assessment an incorrect one.
Conclusion: Carson didn’t really know what he was talking about
Original Script Rating: worth the read
Domestic: $101m
Worldwide: $239m
Rotten Tomatoes Critic Score: 54%
Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score: 76%
Conclusion: I had to double check my research here. Bullet Train crossed 100 million dollars at the box office?? Good for them! Bullet Train got a pretty bum rap when it first came out. But it ended up doing fairly well. From the moment I read the script, I pegged this as a movie that was right down the middle. It wasn’t going to cause any massive opinions one way or the other. And that was the problem with it. It was just kind of bland. Which is yet another reminder that scripts don’t lie. If they’re telling you, “This is average,” you don’t want to go make that movie hoping to fix that averageness in the production. It’s not going to happen. You gotta fix it in the script.
Conclusion: Carson very much knew what he was talking about
So what’s the tally? Carson knew what he was talking about with 7 out of the 10 screenplays. Which means, guess what? THE SCRIPT MATTERS FOLKS. You can tell when a script is going to result in a good movie and when it isn’t. And the thing is, I’m no one special. I’m guessing anyone here who read these scripts probably saw the same thing. If you have a script and there’s something that’s nagging you about it, there’s likely something to that. Address the issue and get it fixed. Then, and only then, are you going to make a great movie.
SCRIPT CONSULTATION DISCOUNT 100! – I’ve got a couple of screenplay consultation slots open. If you’re interested, e-mail me with the subject line, “100,” and I’ll take $100 off my regular rate. If you’ve never had notes from a professional before, I would strongly recommend taking this opportunity to do so. I can help you identify and fix things in your writing that would otherwise take you years to learn on your own. Not to mention, elevate your current script. So if you want to get a consult, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com. I do features, pilots, first acts, short films, loglines, whatever you need me for!
Genre: Comedy
Premise: When his girlfriend catches her boyfriend doing something unthinkable, she leaves him, forcing him to consider the unthinkable – therapy.
About: This script finished top 10 on the most recent Black List. Shane Mack has one produced movie under his belt in 2020’s Coffee and Kareem, which was on Netflix and starred The Office’s, Ed Helms.
Writer: Shane Mack
Details: 118 pages!
Jake Johnson for Guy?
Sometimes you look at a logline and you think, “How in the world is that a movie?”
I’d definitely put A Guy Goes To Therapy in that category.
I mean, it’s right there in the title. “A guy goes to therapy.” Annnnnnd……???
Then what?
I guess we’re about to find out!
Guy is 36 years old and a construction worker. He’s creeping into middle age having not reached his potential in life. But the one good thing he has going for him is his girlfriend, Jen. That is until Jen, while checking her “cat cam” from work, inadvertently sees Guy eating the entire shaker of parmesan cheese.
The image is so odd and so distributing that it triggers a series of emotions that lead Jen to dump Guy. Guy is baffled. Who gets dumped for loving parmesan cheese too much? Of course, what Guy doesn’t yet know is that the cheese is symbolic of much bigger issues in his life, namely that he’s a man-child.
When Jen suggests that Guy go to therapy and figure his s—t out, he’s offended. He’s a man! He doesn’t need therapy! Guy tries to find his own version of therapy with his group of immature friends, but they’d rather argue about which of them can beat up the Avengers than what Guy needs to do to become happy.
So Guy bites the bullet and goes to therapy but therapy turns out to be just as much of a tug-of-war as talking to Jen. This therapist doesn’t get it! At least that’s Guy’s assessment of the situation. Guy then does what all broken-hearted people do, which is stalk his ex-girlfriend’s house, where he finds out she’s banging some short guy.
Guy becomes obsessed with Short Guy and secretly follows him to the gym, only to discover in the changing room that Short Guy has a 13 inch penis. This 13 inch penis may get its own spinoff film at some point because it is honestly the biggest plot point in the whole movie, no pun intended.
Guy keeps going to therapy in the meantime and, after he lowers all his walls, actually starts making progress. But will he make enough progress to get Jen back? Will he even want her back at that point?
Okay, let’s talk about script length for a second.
We’ve debated script length ad nauseam here, coming to the conclusion that how long your script should be depends on a number of factors.
However, one thing I can tell you for sure is that a comedy called, “A Guy Goes to Therapy,” should never, in a million years, be 118 pages. At most, it should be 110 pages. And, ideally, like most comedies, it should be 105.
When I see an incorrect page length, my spider senses start tingling. I’m on high alert. And when I then read a 4 page scene where characters debate which Avengers they could beat up, the writer has just confirmed my biggest fear. Which is that there are probably going to be a lot of scenes in this script that don’t move the story forward. Sure enough, that’s what we get. A lot of 2023 versions of Kevin Smith scenes, where characters debate penis size for 5 pages at a time.
Once I understood what kind of script this was, though, I was able to change my mindset slightly and attempt to enjoy it for what it was. I’d categorize it as an Anti-Judd-Apatow comedy. It has a lot of guys hanging out talking about women and life, but the tone is more cutting and less fun.
And I think that’s where the script lost me. Guy is angry, he yells at everyone, he doesn’t think anything’s his fault. And while Apatow’s characters are similarly flawed, Apatow knows that, in the end, the audience has to like the guy. It’s a comedy. We need to like the hero!
I hated Guy. He’s petulant. He’s juvenile. He’s judgmental. He’s selfish. This is impossible to get away with in a comedy. It’s just impossible.
You’re probably saying, “Well, he has to be flawed if you’re going to build a movie around him going to therapy.” Yeah but, if we hate the character, we don’t care if therapy helps him or not. Which is how I felt. I was rooting way more for the therapist to get through to this moron than I was Guy.
When you write a script like this these days – something heavy on dialogue and light on plot – you need a strong theme. Cause something needs to stand-in for the lack of story going on. At times, it felt like the script had this. There were these moments that commented on masculinity in the modern age.
For example, Guy picks up a girl at the bar who, it turns out, is only sleeping with him because she feels sorry for all the men on the planet who are being emasculated by modern social conditioning.
But as soon as these mini-commentaries are made, they disappear, and it’s a while before we get another one. It was too inconsistent of a commentary for me to count it as an official theme. If this script made a bigger commitment to that theme, I probably would’ve liked it more. Cause it would’ve felt like there was a point to the movie.
However, I fear that the problems go much deeper for Guy Goes to Therapy. You guys all know my concept rule by now. If the main plot is something that can be a subplot in another movie, your concept probably isn’t big enough. I see therapy subplots all the time in movies. And I don’t think they’re big enough to take center stage.
I realize there’s a little leeway to that rule when you’re dealing with a comedy. But this script didn’t convince me that it was the exception. There were too many scenes where we just drifted. Hanging out with friends, debating life. I need more momentum and purpose and stakes in my story.
As for the the good stuff, I thought the reason for the breakup was hilarious. Your girlfriend checking her cat-cam while at work only to find you eating parmesan cheese like trail-mix — in all the breakups I’ve read, I’ve never read one like that. Very funny.
I also thought the writer made an interesting choice by never showing the therapist, which has an interesting reveal. And I think that the writer has a strong voice. I wouldn’t say I was fan of that voice. But that’s what voice is. It’s polarizing. Just because I didn’t like it doesn’t mean it didn’t have power. I definitely remember the conversations in this script and that’s because the voice on display was so big.
I suspect that if you’re in your 20s and like comedies, you might connect with this. But this script just wasn’t for me man.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] just wasn’t for me man
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If you’re writing something that’s exclusively dialogue-driven these days, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to write a feature film. You’re much better off writing it as a pilot. TV is about characters talking to each other so if you have a script with a lot of characters doing a lot of talking to each other, write a show.
What I learned 2: Get rid of the fat (tighten the screws). A script should’t feel like it’s been written off-the-cuff. It can feel that way in a first draft. But, after that, it’s your job to tighten the screws on every scene. Get rid of all the excess dialogue. Even in scripts like this, where the dialogue is more fun-driven than plot-driven, there are always weaker jokes you can get rid of. If you keep everything in, it feels way too messy.
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.
