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.
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!
