Taika Waititi’s flight stick is shaking. The onboard computer is repeating, “Stall imminent! Stall imminent!” Will this next project save his career from spiraling into the ocean?

Genre: Drama/Sci-Fi
Premise: A young female robot becomes a companion for a sick rich girl who is trying to navigate her increasingly difficult life.
About: Taika Waititi just signed on to direct the adaptation of this book, which was written by Kazuo Ishiguro, who wrote Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day.
Writer: Kazuo Ishiguro
Details: About 450 pages

I could speak for days about Taika and Star Wars.

Okay, screw it. I’m going to get it all out here. The thing I hate so much about Kathleen Kennedy is that she insists that everything is fine when it’s clearly not. She’s the ‘house burning down everything-is-okay’ meme in real life.

She tells us that Taika’s Star Wars movie is still happening when it’s CLEARLY not. The guy has signed onto three different movies now since the Star Wars announcement. Just be honest with us. Tell us it’s been canceled. Stop living on Da Nile River with your Rian Johnson canoe and your Patty Jenkins gambling boat. The movies are dead.

And you know what? Thank God for Taika that they are. Because Taika’s career is in flux right now. Love and Thunder was a disaster. Our Flag Means Death was made for Twitter points. Nobody cares about Next Goal Wins.

He needs his next movie to be a hit and Star Wars is starting to look like a cursed franchise as long as Kennedy is in charge.

So good for Taika for escaping the Sarlac Pitt. And better for Taika to choose Klara and The Sun. Because Klara and The Sun very well might be the best thing I read all year.

13 year old Klara is an “artificial friend.” Or, to put it in today’s terms, an AI robot. But unlike a lot of robots, Klara is more perceptive than others. And when a 14 year old girl named Josie comes to the store and zeroes in on her, Klara is convinced that she’s found her match. This girl is pure kindness. Klara was meant to be Josie’s lifelong friend.

Josie’s mother buys Klara and they head back to their remote upscale home. We learn very quickly that Josie is sick. Every day, she gets a little bit weaker. However, the addition of Klara in her life is making the sickness more bearable. Josie is candy-apple sweet and Klara will do anything to keep her that way.

Soon after, we meet Rick, Josie’s neighbor. Rick is a nerdy middle-class weird kid, the kind of kid that upscale families like Josie’s don’t mix with. But Josie and Rick are so close that Josie’s mom tolerates him. Josie brings Klara into her special friendship with Rick and the three become the most offbeat trio ever.

As Josie’s health worsens, reality sets in, and Klara senses that the mother is preparing for the worst. But the worst is different from what Klara, and we, thought it was. It turns out Mother had a plan all along for her daughter’s doomed future, and Klara is going to figure into that quite prominently.

I want you to imagine something for me.

Remember that movie, “A.I.”, directed by Steven Spielberg? Okay, now imagine if that movie was actually good.

That’s Klara and the Sun.

One of the ways I determine good writing – which I encounter less and less these days – is by asking if I could’ve written the story. Given enough time, could I have approximated what the writer did here? For 98% of the Black List scripts, that answer is yes. And for most spec sales, same thing. I could’ve written something equivalent.

But that wasn’t anywhere close to the truth here. Kazuo Ishiguro writes in a way that scares other writers. He writes in a way where you think, even if I came up with my best concept, and I conceived of my best characters, and every day I wrote was a charmed day, I could never come up with anything close to this.

This guy is writing on another level. I spent half my reading enraptured by the story and the other half marveling at Ishiguro.

I usually have a good sense of how the writer is coming up with their approach to the story. But I was at a loss while reading Klara and the Sun. I guess I understood, in some ways, the broad strokes of what Ishiguro was doing. But I could never grasp the reasons he was making the choices he was making.

For example, there’s a chapter in the book where Klara has to attend a party for other teenagers her age. I guess, in the future, a lot more people are homeschooled, especially the smart ones, and so in order to socialize them before they go off to college they create these meetings, where the kids meet up so that they know how to interact with other people.

The chapter was tense and uncomfortable, and contained a couple of memorable moments, as the kids endured an accelerated obstacle course into high school politics. But I couldn’t figure out what the chapter had to do with the larger story. As it turned out, it didn’t really have much purpose at all.

And yet, I couldn’t imagine the book without it. It provided context to the story in a unique way, sort of like how, when you’re looking at a painting, you’re taking everything in at once, as opposed to understanding each individual piece of the puzzle. I could see everything – the whole story – in each of Ishiguro’s chapters. It was nothing like what I’m used to seeing in my daily script readings, where you see all the little strips of Matrix code the writer is clumsily stringing together to write the story he thinks he’s supposed to write.

I know what some of you are thinking.

Cancer.

And Kid.

Cancer Kid.

I was thinking the same thing. As soon as I saw, “cancer kid,” I groaned. I have long insisted that there’s no way to write about cancer kids that works. It’s just too freaking sad. And people don’t go to movies to be bummed out. They just don’t.

So that’s where my head was at first. I would read every five pages skeptically, ready to bail at the first red flag. But like any good story, each five pages was better than the previous five pages. Ishiguro knew how to keep us there.

For example, we start the story with Klara in the store, waiting to be bought. There’s a lot of exposition and world-building Ishiguro has to set up before the story begins. So what he wisely does is he brings Josie into the store early on. Josie immediately falls in love with Klara and Klara her. Josie says, I want to buy you. I’ll come back for you, I promise. And then she leaves.

As each day goes by, we wonder, where the heck is Josie???

What this does is it creates suspense. As Ishiguro continues to set up this world, we continue reading because WE WANT TO SEE IF JOSIE COMES BACK FOR KLARA. It’s a small thing but it’s a device that all good writers use. Cause they know that if a reader is going to quit on a book, it’s most likely going to happen early.  So they have to give you a reason to keep reading during those early pages.

From there, the story is simple. Josie is sick. We don’t know how sick, which keeps us curiously turning the pages. And then Klara cares only about keeping Josie happy. Klara is different from the other AFs in that she will disobey an order if she thinks it will make Josie unhappy. All the other robots have to follow orders. She does not. So it creates a special bond between them and we become fully invested in that bond.

In fact, I was more worried about how Klara would take Josie’s death than Josie dying. Cause I knew Josie was Klara’s everything. So what happens when she’s no longer around? Does she lose all purpose? And would the family just throw her away? But don’t think you know where this story is going. Another great thing about Klara and the Sun is that it has its share of twists and turns.

On top of all that, it’s one of the most fascinating character studies I’ve ever read. Since we’re in Klara’s POV, we’re basically learning how to be a human in real time. Everything that Klara experiences is a first-time experience. And because she’s so ignorant to it all, it highlights the complexities of being human from an angle we haven’t seen before.

For example, Klara will do anything for Josie. But then Josie’s mom takes Klara out for the day and makes her do something really weird. She then tells Klara that she cannot, under any circumstances, tell Josie about what Klara and the mom did. For Klara, she can’t comprehend this – lying to Josie. It doesn’t compute. But she understands that if she loses the mom’s trust, she could be booted from the family and no longer have access to Josie. So what does she do?  There is no correct choice.

There are a lot of moments like this that we, as humans, learn to navigate over time. But Klara learns all of them at once. And it’s interesting to see how she tackles these challenges.

This is going to be an amazing movie. I have zero doubt about that. It’s going to be up for multiple Oscars. And it could be Taika’s opus. Even better than JoJo Rabbit.

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

What I learned: I used to think you couldn’t touch kid cancer. But this book has made me rethink that position, and the position of handling difficult subject matter in general. What I’ve learned is that you can cover kid cancer if you don’t dwell on how depressing it is. The thing about this book is that, although Josie is dying, the story mostly focuses on her positivity and her happy moments, as well as her perseverance. Only occasionally do we delve into her pain. And, even then, Ishiguro covers it with a neutral brush. He doesn’t dwell on the pain and sadness.

For example, there’s a chapter where Josie has been wanting to go to a waterfall but her mother will only allow her to do so if she rests up and gets well. So Josie fakes being well so she can go on the trip. Halfway there, her mom figures out what’s up, and they get into an argument about it. This is, technically, a depressing scene. Josie’s health deteriorates to a point where she’s so weak, she can’t even walk. But that’s not the chapter. The chapter focuses on the mom being upset that Josie wasn’t honest with her. Ishiguro consistently skates around any truly depressing moments. He, instead, finds a way to dramatize them or talk around them. I swear to you – this is a movie about kid cancer and, yet, it never feels depressing. I did not know that was possible.

A dissection of a doomed movie concept

Guess what?

MAY LOGLINE SHOWDOWN IS THIS WEEK!

If you have a script written and you want to battle your peers, get some feedback from the community, and get that all important exposure for your screenplay, this is a great opportunity.

Send me your title, genre, and logline by THIS THURSDAY (May 18th). The top 5 loglines I receive will compete over the weekend. The winning logline gets a script review the following Friday. We’ve already found some killer scripts through this process. Let’s find some more!

May Logline Showdown
Send me: title, genre, logline
Deadline: 10pm pacific time, Thursday, May 18th
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com

Speaking of loglines, we here at Scriptshadow love ourselves a good concept discussion. “That idea is amazing!” “No, that idea sucks!” Concept development is really the heart of screenwriting. Because it solves so many problems when you’ve got a good one. Conversely, if you have a weak or bland movie idea, your entire script is an uphill battle as you attempt to make up for your problematic idea.

This process is complicated by the fact that there’s no universally accepted standard for what constitutes a good idea. The only real way to know is to field test it. The bigger the field, the more accurate the assessment is. But, even then, you’ll have people who think a good idea is a bad one. Every single project that’s been made into a movie in Hollywood had its detractors.

But that’s what makes talking about this stuff so fun! And, today, I want to talk about two movie ideas that fall on opposite ends of the good-bad spectrum.

So, over the weekend, I stumbled upon an article about that Jennifer Lawrence comedy, No Hard Feelings, which is one of the rare comedies that’s being released into theaters. In the article, they talk about how the movie came to be.

Jennifer Lawrence’s close friend is writer/director Gene Stupnitsky (Good Boys, Bad Teacher). Stupnitsky showed Lawrence the original Craig’s List ad that inspired the movie several years ago. Lawrence fell on the floor laughing when she heard it and thought it was the most hilarious thing ever. What kind of crazy family would actually hire a woman to de-virginize their son??

Stupnitsky, smart screenwriter that he is, secretly began writing the script as soon as he got that reaction. Then, two years later, he came to Lawrence and said, “Hey, remember that hilarious ad about the family that hires a woman to have sex with their son? I wrote a script about it!” Quite possibly the easiest way in existence to get a movie made: Not only know a movie star, but know EXACTLY the kind of movie they want to make. I do not begrudge Stupnitsky for doing this. It’s so hard to get any movie made and he was given a golden ticket.

Now, did Stupnitsky know this was a bad movie idea and write it anyway cause he knew he could get Lawrence and, therefore, get the movie made? Maybe he thought, like a lot of writers, that the idea had problems, but he could overcome them when writing the script. Because, the truth is, this is an awful movie idea, as it has a poison pill embedded in the bowels of its story. But before I explain what that pill is, let’s talk about another movie idea.

A year ago, I heard about this “Flamin Hot Cheetos” project which was ALSO being adapted from a real-life story. I was neutral on the announcement but they released the trailer last week and it looks pretty good. It’s got an underdog story of this janitor working at the Frito Lay plant and he comes up with this idea to make Cheetos taste even better by adding hot sauce.

The story is about him being thrust into the buttoned-up corporate world of which he’s highly unfamiliar, as he pushes his snack idea to the top ranks of Frito Lay. The movie seems to be marketing mostly to the Latino family crowd. But it certainly looks like a crowd pleaser.

So why do I bring these two projects up?

Because, as screenwriters, you have to understand why one concept works and another doesn’t. I get hired by writers all the time (e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com – logline consults for just $25!) who send me a couple of ideas and want to know which one they should write. When I do these consults, the answer is always easy. One logline is always a lot better than the other. But screenwriters have a tough time seeing this.

So why is Flaming Hot Cheetos a markedly better idea than No Hard Feelings? One of the most dependable templates in all of storytelling is the underdog template. If you can find a really great underdog story, especially one based on real events, write it. Cause Hollywood loves to make them and people love to watch them. This is why Flamin Hot Cheetos is a great bet.

Now let’s move over to No Hard Feelings. Even the title of this film is bad. What does that even mean? If you have a title, especially for a comedy, that doesn’t give the audience any indication whatsoever what the movie is about, you are in MAJOR trouble. To be fair, I understand why Lawrence and Stupnitsky thought this ad was funny. If someone had read this ad out loud to me, I probably would’ve laughed as well. It really is bizarre that a family actually put an ad out for this.

HOWEVER.

That doesn’t mean it’s a good movie idea!

The more you dig into No Hard Feelings, the more you realize how bad of an idea it actually is. What’s sympathetic about Jennifer Lawrence’s character? Why do we like her? Why would we want to root for her? Who’s rooting for a 30 year old woman to successfully take the virginity of a high school kid under the pretense of scoring some money so she can continue her loser narcissistic lifestyle? Anyone?

Stupnitsky and Lawrence not only raised their hands, they doubled down! In the trailer, we see Lawrence’s character deceive a freshly-axed boyfriend so she could bang some hot dude via a one night stand!! Sure.  Let’s instantly come up with a way for the audience to hate the main character, and then we’ll send her off on this totally sketchy adventure.   (I think I liked that scene in the script – I was clearly high on drugs at the time)

But hold up here, Carson. Just hold the heck up. What about The Graduate? Doesn’t that have the exact same situation in it? Mrs. Robinson seduces Benjamin Braddock. Yes, it does. Except for one critical difference. MRS. ROBINSON ISN’T THE MAIN CHARACTER. And The Graduate wouldn’t have been a good movie if she was.

Which is the clue that gives us the fix to this entire premise. Maybe, just maybe, the movie works if the KID in No Hard Feelings is the main character. If you built the movie around him and his inability to connect with people and his helicopter parents are terrified their son is never going to find anyone so they hire a woman to seduce him, there might be a movie there.

I could even see that being a midpoint twist. Nerdy guy meets older woman. They get together. Halfway through, the reveal comes – his parents hired her to have sex with him. Second half of the movie is, what happens between these two after the fallout?

So why didn’t they do that? I’m about to tell you a dirty little secret about Hollywood so get ready to take a shower afterwards: Cause then Lawrence doesn’t sign on. If Lawrence is just some secondary character, she doesn’t sign onto the movie. This is what I hate most about Hollywood. The system is designed, at least in situations like this, to make the worst version of the movie.

Now there’s actually a little more nuance to this story because keep in mind who’s writing No Hard Feelings. Gene Stupnitsky. What is Stupnitsky known for? He’s known for writing a female teacher who’s a total b—h. He’s known for writing about a group of middle schoolers who run around swearing at everyone. It looks like Stupnitsky believed that, because he’s been able to get away with writing “unlikable” characters before, he could do it again.

But he’s miscalculated this time. Unlike those scripts, which have a singular problematic element, this script has TWO of them.  The main character is unlikable AND the adventure itself is unlikable.  We don’t like that Lawrence’s character is in this situation.  We don’t want her to succeed.  What’s left to like?  What’s left to root for?

Maybe if you made her the world’s sweetest person and she’s forced into this instead of chooses it, there’s a fraction of a chance we would root for her. But even then I’d be unconvinced.  Years after the movie, Flashdance, was released, producer Lynda Obst was asked about the 30+ different drafts that were written of the script before it got made.  She said, in retrospect, that it was one of those movies, with its cleverly ironic main character, that was always going to work no matter what.  Every draft would’ve worked.  No Hard Feelings is the opposite.  I don’t think there’s any way the premise could’ve been saved.

Before I check out today, I want EVERYONE from this site to read the TJ Newman article over at Deadline. Newman is the writer of the two airplane novels that netted her a total of 3 million dollars from Hollywood. She wrote a guest article explaining how it took her 20 years (TWENTY YEARS!) to sell both of those novels. She was rejected 40 times. It’s an inspiring and insightful look into the persistence and perseverance required to be a successful writer. Never let that flame extinguish!

A secret about screenwriting that only the tippy-top screenwriters know

One of the weirder things I’ve learned about screenwriting over the years is that there are things that work in a script that don’t work in a movie and there are things that work in a movie that don’t work in a script. Understanding why this bizarro process takes place can help you elevate your scenes – especially your dialogue scenes – to another level.

For example, montages work great in movies. Montages don’t work very well in scripts. That’s because movies are great for images and music. But you can’t see images and can’t hear music when you’re reading a script. In a screenplay, a montage is just a bunch of factual description a reader has to read through. Where’s the fun in that?

On the flip side, limited characters and limited locations work great in scripts because everybody who reads a screenplay wants it to read fast. So they love it when there’s any setup with 2-3 characters, minimal description, and a lot of dialogue. So if you have two characters trapped on a tower talking most of the time (“Fall”), a reader can get through that script in 30 minutes. It’s a dream read.

However, limited location movies, especially if they’re set somewhere stagnant, like a basement (the Duffer Brothers’ “Hidden”) become very boring on screen. That screenplay that read faster than lightning is boring to watch because it’s aesthetically boring to look at.  Same background and little-to-no movement aren’t exactly cinematic.

This opens up a “4-D Chess” strategy to screenwriting because you’re now making choices about whether to write something that’s going to work in the script even if you know it’s not going to work in the movie (good idea for spec writers), or something that’s going to work in the movie even though it doesn’t work in the script (good idea for a writer who’s already hired). In other words, do you write for the ‘great read’ or do you write for the ‘great movie?’

It’s an interesting topic that I was thinking about the other day because I watched this show where, in a scene, two girl friends (I forgot their names but we’ll call them Sara and Nancy) needed to have a discussion about whether Nancy was going to marry her fiancé.

Whenever you have two people trying to work out a problem via dialogue, there’s a lot of variety in where you can set the scene. Theoretically, you can place a conversation anywhere. So, in this case, the writer placed it at a gym. Sara and Nancy were doing a workout routine with one of those giant tires that you flip over again and again. And, while doing so, they talked about whether the fiancé was marriage material.

The scene was actually okay, mostly because you were invested in the characters. But also because the movement and pauses and catching of their breath gave the conversation a little extra oomph.

However, I noted that, if you had read this scene in a script, nothing about this workout would affect how you read the scene at all. You could’ve set the very same scene at a cafe and it would’ve read the exact same. Because dialogue reads the same on the page whether your characters are working out or hanging out.

I’ll see this a lot, also, with characters doing the dishes together. Instead of placing your characters on a couch to have a conversation, you give them something to do, like dishes, while they have their conversation. Again, in a movie, that’s a good idea. But in a screenplay, it doesn’t matter where that conversation is had because we’re just reading the dialogue. We don’t care if Husband Joe properly places the egg-beater in the right dishwashing compartment.

The more I thought about this, the more I realized that the real problem here was that you wrote a scene that was so stale, you needed all this artificial movement — whether it be a giant tire workout or loading the dishwasher – to make up for the weak scenario. A scenario should never be so boring that it needs an extra on-screen boost.

Instead, you should be looking to write scenes that work on the page AND on the screen. To achieve this, you need a two-pronged approach.

First, you want the CONTENT of the scene to be good enough on its own that it wouldn’t matter where you placed it. You could have something as static as two characters sitting in bed together before they go to sleep. If the content of the conversation is compelling, we don’t care where it takes place, either on the page or on screen.

There’s no better example of this than Marlon Brando’s famous “I coulda been a contender” scene in On The Waterfront. It was the culmination of his entire life, this “contender” admission. So it was a very important moment. And, originally, the director, Elia Kazan, had this elaborate background projection sequence planned that would play behind the two characters as they had this conversation in the car.

But the projection broke, forcing them to film the scene with the back window closed, making it the most boring background ever. But it didn’t matter because the content of the scene was so strong. So make sure the content of the conversation is awesome first and foremost. That will take care of 75% of bad dialogue scenes.

Second, if possible, you want to use the physical scenario the characters are in TO ENHANCE the conversation, not just be incidental movement. Let’s say our married dishes couple is just getting things back on track after some infidelity by the husband. It still stings for the wife. So there’s pain there.

If these two had a dinner party with another couple and the wife thought the husband was too flirtatious with the guest wife, then that dishes scene is going to be a little more interesting. Just the way that the wife is handling the dishes. You could have her GRAB them and SHOVE them into the dishwasher to add an exclamation point to her frustration.

But guess what? You could make this scene EVEN BETTER if you used the scenario to enhance the conversation, not just use it as a minor visual distraction.

One thing you could do, for example, is to set the scene at a restaurant. The husband is taking the wife out to patch things up. But then, they get a really attractive waitress. And the waitress keeps coming in. She seems to be giving the husband more attention than the wife. This starts upsetting the wife. And now we’ve got a scene where, if you’ve taken care of the content part, we’re using the scenario they’re in to poke the bear – to fire up the coals beneath the dialogue. It becomes a much more interesting scene cause there’s an extra element going on.

I just watched this Portuguese show called “Gloria,” about the Cold War. Our hero, a spy who was transporting highly classified audio tapes across countries, regularly has to drive through checkpoints. But he knows all the checkpoint people so he’s able to shoot the sh— with them and move on.

In one of the scenes in the pilot, though, he’s chatting with a checkpoint friend but then, behind them, a new checkpoint guy strolls up. And this new guy decides to inspect the trunk, where our hero has hidden one of his audio tapes. So you’ve got your dialogue between the hero and his checkpoint friend. And then you’ve got the other thing going on behind them that, if it goes badly, our hero could be thrown in prison.

That scene’s going to work on the page and on the screen. Which is what I’m asking for here. First and foremost, make sure the scene works on the page. Cause you have no control over whether your script is going to get produced. All you have control of, at the moment, is making the read as good as possible.

Once you’ve got that down, see if you can improve the scene so that it also works on screen. Maybe it already does cause you got lucky. But if it doesn’t, see if you can find a way to create a scenario that enhances the good dialogue you already have. If you do that, you’re going to turn that good dialogue into great dialogue.

Genre: Thriller
Premise: On a private island off San Francisco, a nanny goes to work for a mother who is one of America’s most powerful tech entrepreneurs. Things slowly begin to devolve as the mother’s hyper-monitoring and surveillance become suffocating.
About: Another script that made last year’s Black List. Laura Kosann has won the Nicholl Screenwriting Contest. She wrote an interesting script I reviewed last year called, “From Little Acorns Grow.” Definitely a writer to keep your eyes on.
Writer: Laura Kosann
Details: 113 pages

Anna Kendrick for…. ANNA!

Give me an island and I’m a happy script reader.

I don’t know what it is about islands but the second I see one in a logline, my eyes light up. It’s probably because of the isolation – the fact that you can’t run away. Especially these days, with everything being so interconnected – with help being a pushed button away – islands are the last places in the world where you’re truly screwed if things go wrong.

I also love islands near giant cities. I’ve told myself for years I’m going to visit Catalina Island (a ferry ride away from Los Angeles – the island doesn’t allow cars, how cool is that!) and I still can’t get over the fact that there’s an island (called “Treasure Island”!!!) in the San Francisco Bay, just sitting there, that you or anyone can live on. Which segues perfectly into today’s script, because that’s where our island is located – in San Francisco. Except it’s not a public island. It’s private.

Ever hear of Elizabeth Holmes? The creepiest tech CEO in history? Well, wait until you meet Nicole. We’ll get to her in a moment. First we must meet Anna, a 30-something former tech engineer who left her job abruptly under mysterious circumstances. Now, she just focuses on nannying.

Anna gets a call for a prestigious nannying job that will require her to live in the mother’s house. When she shows up to meet the mommy she’ll be working for, she instead is greeted by a boat! A drone boat which tells her to hop on. Anna reluctantly does and gets shuttled across the bay to a glitzy home on a private island.

Here she meets Nicole, a care-free tech CEO with more money than South America. Nicole is in her 40s and has set her sights on using technology to eliminate miscarriages. She had a bunch of miscarriages of her own due to the stress of her job and wants to make it so that women can work in stressful environments and still have babies.

Aiden is her miracle baby, her only child, now just months old. And she needs Anna to take care of her while she works from home.

Aiden’s got some problems. His skin blisters in the sun, so he always has to be kept under a special netting when he’s outside. He spits up and chokes wildly, so you have to be very careful about what you feed him and how you feed it to him. Basically, he’s the most delicate baby ever. Which means Anna rarely gets an opportunity to nanny him. Nicole is always over her shoulder telling her what she can and cannot do.

It isn’t long before Anna senses something is off with Aiden. And it takes even less time for her to deduce that Nicole is bats—t crazy. There’s a great scene early in the script where, out of nowhere, Nicole goes into this seizure-like crazed fit that’s utterly unsettling. Just when it seems like she’s dead, she smiles and is fine again. She explains that she just wanted Anna to know how Aiden’s choking episodes looked like so she could recognize them. But that isn’t even her biggest “crazy” tell. She swims in her private pool with Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” blasting on max volume!

Anna senses that if she doesn’t get Aiden away from this witch, he will most likely die. But, you see, Anna doesn’t have the best judgement skills either. She’s got a couple of wackadoodle episodes in her own past linked back to a traumatic event in her life. So she wonders: Is this woman really endangering her baby or I am just going nuts?

I have to say, I LOOVVVEED the first half of this script.

It was everything I wanted my contained thriller on an island screenplay to be. It was very much a female version of Ex Machina. I’m sure that was a big inspiration for Kossan.

Nicole is a particularly fun character. She takes the “Oscar Isaac” role and ups it several notches. Her helicopter child-parenting and helicopter nanny-parenting is so fun to watch. You’re wondering what weirdo thing is she going to do next? And watching Anna slowly realize that she’s surrounded by cameras no matter what she does really makes the suffocation feel unbearable.

I would give the first half of this screenplay an A.

Here’s the problem though (and we’re going to get into semi-spoilers so you’ve been warned). There’s clearly something sketchy going on with Aiden, the baby, to the point where we know the writer is hiding something.

What do I mean by that?

If you are going out of your way to keep details away from the reader, we’ll eventually figure out that you’re cheating. We never see Aiden for more than a brief few seconds. He’s always under netting. Or when Anna takes care of him, we never really get a good look at Aiden. He always seems to be conveniently distorted. And because we don’t get any extended looks or interactions with him, we know something is up. So when the big twist comes, we already kinda figured something like that was the case.

Big twists are tough. I’m not going to pretend they aren’t. If you give too much information, we figure it out. If you give too little information, the twist feels random. Honestly, the only way to get twists right is from repeated feedback. You have to test the twist. Get feedback. Rewrite it with adjustments. Then test it on ANOTHER PERSON. Cause the last reader already knows the twist is coming so their feedback is worthless. Then you just keep making adjustments until it’s perfect.

This probably needs 4 or 5 more drafts to make this work. You need to give us more time with Aiden where Aiden is acting normal so we don’t suspect anything. And then you can’t highlight so many times where something is weird about Aiden. Because we can put two and two together. We know this is a tech CEO. She’s talking about making artificial wombs a lot. Artificial sperm. We suss out what’s going on here long before the twist arrives.

Which is too bad for this draft because the script started off sooooo good. It was easily in “impressive” territory. I just think there were too many questionable decisions in the second half. I didn’t think it was worth it to have Anna questioning her sanity. Every writer does this. And it’s never done well. Someone questioning their sanity always feels sloppy.

You had enough going for you with your original concept: A tech CEO invites a nanny onto her private island to take care of her baby then starts acting crazy enough that the nanny wants to rescue the baby. That’s a movie there. The “Am I also insane” question overcomplicates it.

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

What I learned: When you choose to reveal information is so important to every story you write. It can completely change how the story reads. For example, Anna goes to meet Nicole on this beach where she assumes her house is. But instead, there’s a boat and it’s talking to her, telling her to get on. Kossan could’ve easily told Anna and us beforehand that Anna was going to an island. But then you don’t get the fun reveal of both her and us being surprised by this boat. Ironically, I think that Kossan makes some questionable decisions about when to reveal information later on in the story. But in this boat reveal, she hit the bullseye. That’s information that leads to a way better story moment if you wait to reveal it. It’s a wasted opportunity if you tell us about the island beforehand.

Today’s script is something Spielberg would’ve directed in 1988.  And that’s a good thing!

Genre: Action/Adventure
Premise: When aspiring magician, Harry Houdini, discovers a mysterious puzzle-box, he must use his talent for illusion and escape to unlock the box’s powerful secrets and keep it out of the hands of a vengeful sorcerer.
About: This script finished with 12 votes on last year’s Black List. The writer is brand spanking new on the scene.
Writer: Matthew Tennant
Details: 116 pages

The Black Phone’s Mason Thames for Houdini? 

This is a clever idea.

Studios have been desperate to find the next Harry Potter. It still baffles my brain that they’re going to turn that into a TV show with a new cast. Justice for Daniel Radcliffe. If they tried to remake Star Wars with different actors, I’d have a conniption fit.

So it’s a good idea to come up with another magic movie that focuses on a young character. You know the market is eager for it.

Also, Harry Houdini specs always get love. Even the bad ones. There’s something about that name that gets people excited to read a script.

Now, all we need, is for the execution to be great. Easy as a warm cup of cheesy tea-sy.

New York. 1889. 16 year old Erik “Harry” Weisz is a magician! Or, at least, that’s what he’d have the many small crowds he performs for around New York City think. In reality, Harry is an apprentice for a locksmith named Hugo Crane. Hugo has been on the wrong side of the law for a good portion of his life and, therefore, has taught Harry some trickery in relation to how to pickpocket.

Our opening scene has Harry performing a “magic trick,” which is really just a distraction so he can steal a rich guy’s pocket watch. Harry makes a run for it as the cops chase him which doubles as an establishing shot of 1880’s New York. We hit just about every fire escape and building top in the lower east side.  I don’t know if this was actually happening on the lower east side.  I just like saying “lower east side.”  Makes me sound like a real New Yorker!

The cops end up catching Harry but Hugo, posing as a dastardly orphanage headmaster, convinces the cops to leave Harry with him, where he’ll be mercilessly worked to death over the next two years. “Can I have summor playse?”

Back at their locksmith shop, an old rich friend of Hugo’s stops by, Sir Neville Ballantine. Ballantine gives Hugo a puzzle box. Says he needs it opened and Hugo’s the only guy who can do it. The rumor is that there’s REAL MAGIC inside. No sooner has Ballantine left than Aleister Crowley, a 20 year old professional douchebag wearing a cape, shows up. Crowley wants that puzzle box!

When Hugo refuses to reveal where he’s placed the box, Aleister stabs him and leaves. Harry tries to save his dying friend, but Hugo says it’s too late. He tells Harry to get that box back to Ballantine. He’ll know what to do next. And with that, he breathes his dying breath. So off Harry goes!

Harry heads to Ballantine’s mansion where they’re having a ball for his 17 year old niece, Sophia. Harry is able to sequester Sophia away and tell her why he’s here. He needs her help to get this box to her uncle! Except no sooner does he tell Sophia this than Aleister appears again!  What a douchebag.

Sophia, who doesn’t like Harry, is forced to team up with him and run off. They hop into one of the first ever “electric carriages” (a car) and it’s a car chase through the city. Beep beep! But after the chase ends with them in the Hudson River, the two will have to come up with a new plan to both open this box and defeat Aleister Crowley!

This was a solid script!

When I read these big adventure stories, I concede that we’re going to be following the Hero’s Journey. And even though that’s a familiar template, it’s a template that works. So I’m perfectly okay if your story feels familiar in that respect.

Where I push back is if your world and plot feel too familiar. Have I seen these set pieces before? Have I seen these situations before? Does every scene feel like a movie I’ve already watched?

I’m going to be honest here – I was feeling that a lot during this script. The opening set-piece where Harry steals the watch and runs through New York felt almost identical to a dozen scenes Spielberg has filmed.

In fact, I couldn’t stop thinking about the opening scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It almost felt like a beat-for-beat remake of that scene, to the point where I could hear John Williams fun little “bompf” musical cues when Young Indiana would fall down.

But hold on, Carson. You just said you liked this. When does the liking start?

It’s the exact same lesson as the one I talked about yesterday with “Silo.” I loved the characters. I liked Harry immediately. He’s fun and funny and clever. But I obviously liked him even more when his mentor died. It’s a cheap move but boy does it work. We feel sympathy for anybody who’s lost someone close to them, especially if we’ve met that person and liked them ourselves, which was the case with Hugo.

What’s strange is, I usually don’t like the love interest characters in these movies, especially these days, because the industry pressures writers to make female characters perfect little Mary Sue badasses. And Sophia was a *little* annoying as she had some of those qualities.

But I can’t lie. I really wanted to see the two end up together. There was something intense about her disdain for this street urchin and I couldn’t help but wonder how he was going to puncture that wall and make her like him. If you liked the Peter Parker MJ dynamic in the Spider Man movies, I would put this above that. Tennant got a little more out of this relationship than the Spider Man people did theirs.

I only have one big complaint and that’s this new trend of side quests.

Boooo!  Boooo!  Hissss!

Side quests work like this. Let’s say your hero is pursuing something. The Lost City of Atlantis. And they’re running around the whole movie. They’re trying to find it. And they finally find someone who can take them down to the city. But the person says, “First, I need you to steal something for me. Then I’ll help you get to the city.” THAT’S a side quest.

You know how flashbacks stop the forward momentum of your story cold which is why they are evil and must all be placed at the bottom of a nuclear waste dump? Side quests aren’t that much different. They’re better than going backwards. But they’re still stopping the forward momentum of your story so you can go off on this little side thing that you never technically needed. Which is the real problem. A side quest is almost universally unneeded. It’s only there because the writer created it.

They just did this in John Wick 4 and it was so unnecessary. Everyone complains that that movie was 30 minutes too long. Well, you could’ve gotten rid of ten of those minutes in a heartbeat if you didn’t do that stupid side quest.

Same thing happens here. Harry and Sophia get the puzzle box to a woman who can open the box. But she says, first, you gotta go steal back this trinket that some bad guys took from me.

NOOOOOOOO. No side quests. Side quest bad. Side quest very bad.

I know why this is happening more and more these days. It’s because the first person video game generation is becoming adults. And they’re incorporating what they know from video games into screenplays. Which is stupid video game side quests.

But you have to remember that you can’t spell “movie” without “move.” A movie’s gotta move. A side quest THINKS it’s moving. It creates the ILLUSION of moving since your characters are going after something. But the main plot is stalled and therefore we feel stalled.

Outside of that one issue, I thought this was really good. I could see Spielberg circa 1988 attaching himself to this in a heartbeat.  Unfortunately, in order to do that today, you’d need to set the movie in a newspaper room that’s covering the Cuban Missile Crisis.  I kid, I kid!  But actually I’m dead serious.

The end.

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

What I learned: Houdini really is a spec-hack. If you can come up with even a semi-cool idea that revolves around Houdini, you’re going to get reads. Matthew Tennant came up with two key angles that made this feel fun. We meet Houdini as a teenager. That’s one. And we bring in the possibility of REAL MAGIC, which is two. Those two things made this concept pop.