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.
Is today a holiday?
Somebody told me today was a holiday. That because New Year’s Day landed on a Sunday, they didn’t feel it was right that we should waste a holiday on a day we already had off, so they added an additional day off and called it New Years Day Adjacent.
Man, I thought screenwriters were the worst procrastinators. Apparently our government is angling to steal our title. They don’t even want to start the year!
I’m curious what the new year is going to bring on the movie front. On the one hand you have the, “movies are dead, TV is king” crowd. And that’s a hard crowd to argue against. TV is pretty freaking amazing at the moment. You still don’t get the level of production value you do on a movie. But it’s close!
Then you have the, “Do you not see what Avatar is doing at the box office” crowd. And they’re pretty convincing too. Because you will never ever get the full experience of Avatar 2 at home. It’s so much better seeing it in the theater. And, apparently, a lot of people agree.
But once Avatar 2’s run is over, we’re in for some dark days, folks. They’re calling 2023’s movie line-up one of the worst in history. I don’t know if that’s true. But the very fact that some people think it’s true is scary.
With that said, I don’t want to get bogged down in theatrical prognostications. Instead, I want to highlight five interesting movie releases in 2023 and talk about the screenwriting obstacles they present.
As I’ve said many times before, every screenplay has its own unique challenges. One of the major jobs of a screenwriter is identifying these challenges and coming up with a game plan for how to tackle them. So let’s jump into it!
Cocaine Bear – Feb 24
Cocaine Bear has a classic screenwriting conundrum. It’s got a “poster-only” premise. What that means is that Cocaine Bear looks great on a poster. It looks great in a trailer. But because the story’s success is so dependent on its wacky titular character, what happens 10 minutes after the bear has been introduced and the shock factor has worn off?
I see this happen all the time in screenwriting. The solution is to come up with a plot that assumes the concept is weaker than it is. In other words, don’t mail in your execution. This is exactly what happened with Snakes on a Plane. It thought its concept was so great that they didn’t have to bother with good characters or a good plot. Never assume that the concept is going to do the work for you. You have to roll up your sleeves and give the reader a great story that could survive whether there’s a cocaine bear in your screenplay or not.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny – June 30
(Spoilers) Rumor has it that this is going to be a time travel Indiana Jones movie. Anyone who has tried to write a time travel movie will tell you the same thing. It’s one of the hardest narratives you’ll ever have to write, cause you’re always dealing with a paradox. If the plan doesn’t work, you simply go back in time and try again.
Sure, you can come up with rules like, “You can only time travel two (or three) times,” but therein lies why the genre is so difficult. Cause the second you start adding hard rules, those rules need to make sense within the mythology. They can’t just be rules that the screenwriter needed to be there. That’s when movies start feeling fake.
So, with time travel, you have to outline like an insane person and rewrite like crazy. There’s no other way around it. A well-executed time-travel script will take you twice as long as any other genre script in order to work out all the kinks and make the time travel stuff as seamless as possible. If you’re willing to make that commitment, go for it!
Oppenheimer – July 21
When it comes to biopics, there are two versions you want to avoid. You want to avoid the cradle-to-grave biopic. It’s like the real life version of an origin story — predictable and bland. But you also want to avoid the two-years-in-the-life-of biopic. This is exactly what it sounds like. You’re covering two years of the main character’s life. The reason why both of these are bad is because movies don’t do well with extended timelines. They do well with short contained timelines. Most of the movies you’ve loved have taken place in under two weeks. Why? Because movies go hand in hand with urgency. When we feel like every minute spent onscreen is important, due to time running out, everything about the story feels charged. And if you’re going to write a movie about the biggest bomb in history, it only makes sense that you create a ticking time bomb element to it. If Nolan keeps this timeline tight, the movie has a chance at being good. If we do a slow-burn two-year lead-up to the bomb, I promise you the movie will fail. You can’t make slow-burn studio movies in 2023. You just can’t. And Nolan understands this. Dunkirk takes place in under two hours, right? Then again, Interstellar takes a year so who knows what Nolan will do.
Barbie – July 21
Barbie is, by far, the most challenging screenwriting assignment of the year. And it’s relevant because when you make it as a screenwriter, you will be given impossible assignments like this. And it’ll be your job to come up with an angle that’s compelling. The most notorious example of this is Charlie Kaufman’s, “Adaptation.” The book (about flowers) Kaufman was paid to adapt was so mundane, so boring, so without narrative, that he went crazy while adapting it, to the point of inserting himself into the narrative. I don’t see Greta Gerwig inserting herself into Barbie. But she’s going to have to come up with a really clever way to adapt this because not only is adapting a toy hard, but she’s adapting a toy that is thought of as a prime symbol of the patriarchy. Which means she’s going to have to change the character into something acceptable for modern-day audiences. And it never works when you change something that was super popular for being something else. Normally, that would be my screenwriting advice: Stay true to the character. There’s a reason the world fell in love with Barbie. Highlight that in your adaptation. But you can’t do that with Barbie. It would cause a Twitter meltdown. This is the one property that I have no solution for. If they hired me, I would not know how to turn this into a good movie. Which makes me all the more curious what they come up with.
Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1 – July 14
If you are writing a big action movie, it is imperative that you have at least three set pieces that nobody’s ever seen before. Which is why I actually nudge people away from writing movies like Mission Impossible. Because Mission Impossible exists in the real world and, therefore, is going up against 100 years of action movies that have also existed in the real world. Finding three brand new set pieces in a 100 year old genre is its own mission impossible. Which is why I advocate for unique high budget concepts that grant you access to set pieces that haven’t been done before.
For example, if you make an action movie about dream heists, you’re providing yourself with a unique world that contains all sorts of new set piece possibilities. Mission Impossible has found the weirdest way around this issue, which is to promote Tom Cruise doing his own stunts. This way, even though we’ve seen the set piece before, we’re watching it with the knowledge that Tom Cruise really did the stunt, which heightens the experience. If you don’t have the greatest movie star in history to do his own stunts, though, you need to put off writing a traditional action film UNTIL you have three set pieces that have never been seen before. Because, I promise you, if your best set piece is something the reader saw last year at the movies, they’ll forget your script the second they finish it. Another thing to remember is that one hands-down amazing set piece can be enough to get a producer to want to make your movie. Even more incentive to take your time and come up with great original set pieces!
The new newsletter is in your inboxes. In it, I set up your screenplay gameplan for 2023, telling you the exact steps you need to take to achieve success. I also set up the LOGLINE SHOWDOWN, a new Scriptshadow feature of 2023 that’s going to be a blast. I review the original draft of a cult classic screenplay that is said to have been GENIUS before the film’s embattled director screwed it up. I also review a trailer of the coolest high concept script idea I’ve seen all year. How come nobody here came up with it??? HAPPY NEW YEAR!
If you want to get on the newsletter, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com!
“I know we just won the World Cup. But what we really want to know is what are Carson’s Top 10 movies of the year???”
It’s the final post of the year!
Yes, after this, I will be heading deep into the Scriptshadow caves to plot the ongoing goings-ons of 2023.
But before we get there, we must give 2022 its last dab by celebrating the best movies of the year (you can see my ‘worst movies of the year’ list here). It’s been a transitory year for the industry. Studios seem to be confused about what the masses actually want. And the indie outfits are watching helplessly as their films start their runs in hospice care. Justice for storytelling.
Despite this, there were some really good movies in 2022, even if Quentin Tarantino called it the worst decade of movies in history. Some notables that didn’t make today’s list include Deadstream, Smile, Emily the Criminal, Cha Cha Real Smooth, and X. Movies that I still haven’t seen yet include The Woman King, The Banshees of Inishirin, The Menu, The Fablemans, Aftersun, Knives Out 2, Babylon, and The Whale, most of which I’ll catch soon.
This is one of the most offbeat Top 10s I can remember putting together. The movies really run the gamut. Prepare yourselves… for the best films of 2022!
10 – Triangle of Sadness – I struggled long and hard about whether to put this movie into my top 10 or Emily The Criminal. In the end, I chose this because it’s so unlike any movie you’ll see this year. The “triangle of sadness,” by the way, refers to a term in the modeling industry regarding the three points between your eyes and nose. When they’re too scrunched up, it makes you look sad. Triangle of Sadness doesn’t do as good of a job as The White Lotus at satirizing rich people. But it has some gonzo scenes, such as the drawn-out 12 minute argument between two models about whether a woman should ever pay for dinner. There’s a lack of connectivity to the narrative that’s frustrating at times (we’re all of a sudden on a yacht yet no one tells us how we got there). It’s probably going to piss you off occasionally but the movie is guaranteed to stay with you. It’s worth checking out.
9 – Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers – Natural transition, right? One of the artiest movies of the year to an animated studio film! But don’t be fooled by Chip and Dale’s shiny exterior. This is the best deconstruction of an animated film, maybe, ever. It’s like Who Framed Roger Rabbit on steroids. And if you have any doubts about what I’m pitching here, this film comes from the Lonely Island crew – Andy Samberg and Akiva Schaffer. Those guys aren’t going to sign on to an animated film unless they can do something different with it. And that they do! One of those wonderful surprises where you turn it on, expecting to give up after five minutes, only to watch the entire thing.
8 – The Night House – If you’re like me, a red-blooded human being, you love Rebecca Hall. I recently watched Vicky Cristina Barcelona again for my dialogue book and Hall is excellent in it. Her only weakness is that she often plays the same character. But that doesn’t hurt this movie. The Night House follows a woman whose husband mysteriously committed suicide and she visits the old summer house they owned and starts to receive messages from the other side. Her dead husband seems to be trying to tell her something. And when she starts looking into his life, she discovers there are things about him that she never knew. This is “headier” than your average ghost movie. So it’s not for the “Smile” crowd. But if you like genre stuff that’s more adult-themed, this fits the bill.
7 – Barbarian – When I reviewed this, I said it had the best first act of the year. I stand by that. The first act is amazing. So much so that it’s disappointing the rest of the film doesn’t live up to it. But there’s something to be said about a film that is determined to get crazier and crazier as it goes on. I mean where else are you going to find a 6 foot 5 inch naked beast woman running around deserted Detroit suburbia killing anything she can find? I also love Justin Long leaning into his despicableness. Who doesn’t want to watch (spoiler) Justin Long suffer an agonizing death? Biggest WTF movie of the year. Constantly keeps you guessing.
6 – Hustle – How good is Adam Sandler when he tries? This is a huge part of the reason why Sandler has such a heated hater fanbase. It’s because we all know how awesome he can be when he puts in the effort. And this is the perfect role for him. Washed up, overlooked coach who puts everything on the line for some no-name basketball prospect from another country. I didn’t think you could do traditional sports movies anymore. The genre is too cliched. But you’ll note that one of the ways Hustle avoided getting too cliche was it didn’t have “the big game.” The climax, instead, is a workout. That alone made this feel different. But the real pillars of this film are Sandler and the guy who plays the recruit. It’s like a double-dose of underdog. I love films that make you feel good afterwards. This achieved that more than any other film on the list except my number one film.
5 – Avatar: The Way of Water – It’s been a week now since I saw the film, allowing me some perspective. My feelings remain the same. The film needed a main character. Jake Sulley was clearly the main character in Avatar 1. Who knows who the main character is here. The reason that matters is that the audience feels emotionally detached from a film in which they don’t have a guide. That really hurts the film. On the flip side, I’ve never been to another planet in any movie that’s felt this real. It’s weird because, on the character front, Cameron makes a mistake that keeps you at a distance. But on the technical front, he creates a world that feels as real as the one you’re living on. It all adds up to a strong movie that leaves the slightest bad taste in your mouth because you were hoping it would achieve ‘great’ status.
4 – The Worst Person in the World – What’s funny about this tiny Norwegian film is that it has something in common with Avatar 2, which is that I felt like I was in Oslo as I was watching the film. You wouldn’t think I would like a film like this. There seems to be nothing in the way of a plot. The main character is wishy-washy. But one thing film can do that screenwriting cannot is take you somewhere. And if you like that somewhere – and the director does a great job of enhancing it with cinematography and score – you’ll overlook a lot of story problems. Something about this movie and the way it covered a lost soul spoke to me in a way I can’t quite articulate. I just know that when I watched the film, it stirred something up. And isn’t that what it’s all about?
3 – Thirteen Lives – By far, the most underrated movie of the year. I hear no one talking about it. I don’t know if that’s because it was released by Amazon or what. This film had so much for going it, the most shocking of which was that Ron Howard left his schmaltzy storytelling crutch behind and, for once, let the truth be the focus. Maybe that’s why it didn’t resonate more. It was too realistic for people. But I’ll never forget the way these divers came up with this impossible solution for saving the kids, accepting the fact that there were going to have to kill some of them, but did the rescue anyway because it was better than leaving them all to die. I think the best movies put the characters in such a perilous situation that the audience wonders what they would do if they were in that position. And that’s where my head was at this whole movie. What would I do if I was one of those divers? Because there wasn’t a single simple solution to the rescue.
2 – Everything Everywhere All At Once – I saw somebody trashing this movie in the comments section yesterday. And I don’t begrudge them. The movie is so weird and makes so many odd choices, that there’s no way it doesn’t alienate some people. I mean, at one point, there’s a three minute scene with two rocks talking to each other. No matter how good your movie is, not everyone’s going to be on board with that. I tell you guys all the time that I like writers who take risks. But when push comes to shove, we’re all too afraid to truly take risks. We always revert back to the safety of our traditional choices. The Daniels are the only people in Hollywood making legitimately crazy choices and seeing where they take the story. And I think what makes it work is that, in the end, they have a traditional approach to character development. They give their characters flaws – like the mother giving up on her family – and then they arc that character over the course of the story. That dedication to character is what holds these wild choices together. This movie made nearly 70 million dollars at the box office which is insane. It’s the kind of arthouse fair that would normally make 10 million if it was lucky. Goes to show what an amazing job the Daniels did. I expect this film to be the belle of the Oscar ball.
1 – Top Gun: Maverick – How bout this? The director of my least favorite movie of the year, Joseph Kosinski, is also the director of my favorite movie of the year. If that isn’t proof that nobody knows anything, I don’t know what is. Top Gun 2 is bigger than just one movie. Not only did it make everybody feel good at a time when we all desperately needed to feel good. It was a reminder to Hollywood to lighten up. All my friends who never go to the movies saw Top Gun 2 so I asked them, why did you see this film over all the other movies that came out this year? And they said, “Cause it looked fun and it looked light.” When I pressed them on it, they said that movies out there are all too serious these days. They pointed to Black Panther and Eternals. These are Marvel films that people are complaining are too serious! If there’s a lesson to Top Gun, it’s to start making movies again that bring everybody together rather divide them. How crazy is it that a Top Gun film became the most important movie of the year? Joseph Kosinski recently stated, “There were a million ways this movie could’ve gone wrong and one tiny way it could go right.” It’s safe to say he found the right way.
SCRIPT CONSULTATION DISCOUNT 150! – I’ve got a couple of screenplay consultation slots open for the end of 2022. If you’re interested, e-mail me with the subject line, “CHRISTMAS 150,” and I’ll take $150 off my regular rate. If you’re 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!
MERRY CHRISTMAS, EVERYBODY!
