Genre: Fantasy/Family
Premise: (from IMDB) A vindictive fairy is driven to curse an infant princess only to realize the child may be the only one who can restore peace.
About: Malificent is one of the more daring movies Disney has ever released. As the title implies, the film is centered around one of the most famous villains of all time, Sleeping Beauty’s “Malificent.” For Disney to center a film around a villain is one thing, but to center it around a character this evil is a surprising move. Releasing the film in the middle of the year’s biggest movie season is yet another gamble. You’re competing against X-Men, Spider men, and really muscular men, all with bigger fan bases. I have to admit I’m fascinated by this choice, and am eager to see if anyone shows up. Writer Linda Woolverton has been writing for Disney forever. She wrote 2010’s Alice in Wonderland as well as the classics, The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast. In other words, if you’re going to do something daring with a Disney property, this is the woman you want writing it.
Writer: There’s no title page here, but this draft looks to have been written by Linda Woolverton. Disney favorite John Lee Hancock helped with rewrites on later drafts.
Details: 110 pages (unknown draft)

One of the age-old questions in screenwriting has been, “How do you make an audience root for an unlikable hero?” It’s easy to make someone root for an underdog like Forrest Gump or Wall-E. It’s not as easy to make them root for Captain Jack Sparrow or Cool Hand Luke. This question resurfaced when I heard they were having a hard time coming up with a Boba Fett spin-off film for the Star Wars franchise. Boba Fett is a bad guy. How do you make him the hero?

This argument typically parlays itself into the emergence of an antihero. In those cases our protagonist is just as bad as he is good, which makes us a little more uncomfortable about rooting for him. If you do this right, you can create a classic character. Everyone loves themselves a Jack Sparrow. But the ingredients are trickier to mix with anti-heroes. An extra dash here or a tiny spill there can be the difference between a perfect protagonist and a despicable one. Let’s find out which side of the forest Maleficent ended up on.

Now, I haven’t seen Sleeping Beauty in maybe 20 years. So I had to do some Wikipedia searching to catch up. But I realized this is basically Maleficent’s side of the Sleeping Beauty story. Maleficent starts out as a young, winged fairy who’s bigger than all the other fairies for some reason. She’s infatuated with a boy named Stefan, and it looks like they’re going to fall in love and get married.

That’s until he betrays her and joins the Human Land. After becoming chummy with the humans, Stefan tries to go back and kill Maleficent (man, that romance ended quickly), but instead is only able to clip off her wings. My man, Stefan. That was a baaaaad move. A wingless Maleficent is an angry Maleficent.

Many years later, Stefan becomes king (after standing by while the real king chokes to death – classy move) and has a child. This child’s name is Aurora (Aurora is the name of Sleeping Beauty. Did you know that? I didn’t. I thought her actual name was “Sleeping Beauty”). After a confusing array of events, a fairy casts a spell on Aurora that says when she turns 16, she’ll fall into a deep sleep and won’t wake up until her true love kisses her.

Afraid of Maleficent, Stefan hides Aurora in the forest with the fairies until she’s 16. But that incredibly genius idea turns out to backfire, since Maleficent lives in a hut only a short walk away. The two eventually meet up (ON PAGE 75 – THREE-QUARTERS OF THE WAY INTO THE STORY), and Maleficent actually ends up liking Aurora.

The two become friends, however, when Aurora turns 16, she falls into that deep sleep. Maleficent realizes she’s screwed, since there’s no one in the land whose kiss can wake her up. Which means she’ll have to find another solution. Whatever will that solution be….?

Before we even get to the antihero stuff, I have to say how freaking messy the structure of this script was. It kept jumping forward in time over and over again. No story was able to start as just when we’d get close to something happening, we’d jump again. We jump from Maleficent’s teenage years, to her young adult years. And then Stefan has Aurora, and SHE has to grow up, so we have to bumble through another 16 years. Which is why it took until page 75(!) before our two key characters even met!

I think that’s insane. Whenever you write a script, one of the key decisions you have to make is where to start your story. The idea is to start as CLOSE TO THE ‘KEY STORY’ as possible. The further back you start from that moment, the more mud you have to drag the reader through to get to the good stuff.

Take Die Hard for example. We could’ve started that movie back in New York. We could’ve watched John and his wife get married, have kids, fight, her get the job in LA, leave, see him alone for awhile, AND THEN show him come to Los Angeles. But how boring would it have been to slog through all of that? Instead, we started with John showing up in LA so we could get to the good stuff as soon as possible.

To me, the story here is Maleficent and Aurora. So why are we only getting to that on page 75? I understand that the movie is called “Maleficent” and they probably want to explore how she became this evil person, but to have to sit through 5 time bumps just to get to the good stuff? That feels sloppy to me. And the truth is, they didn’t even do a good job explaining how she became evil. Stefan betrayed her, but she was already a bitch before that.

Look at another fairy tale, Shrek. The timeline for that was three days! You can have time jumps in a script, of course, but you should try to contain them inside the first 15 pages if possible. Whether it be with Up or Frozen, we pass all the time we need to pass immediately, and then we can get to the story.

Now, on to the question of the day. How was Maleficent as an antihero? This is how I saw it: I never learned why Maleficent was a bitch. She hated humans from the beginning of the script, so I didn’t gain any understanding of why she was who she was. It’s not that I NEED to know that with every character. But this script is practically screaming the fact that it’s going to tell us this girl’s origins. So why aren’t we learning her origins?

Eventually Stefan steals her wings and becomes the king, setting him up as our “true” villain in the story. But I didn’t think he was any worse than Maleficent. A trick to making an audience like an antihero is to write a villain that’s way worse than him/her. We’ll want the villain to go down so much that we won’t mind rooting for a “bad” hero. But again, these two seemed about the same to me (with a VERY SLIGHT advantage going to Maleficent), so I didn’t have a rooting interest.

It seems to me that this story is banking on the fact that you know the Sleeping Beauty story like the back of your hand, and therefore will wait patiently until the Maleficent/Aurora storyline arrives. But since this will be for children, will these children have seen Sleeping Beauty? Likewise, will the parents remember it well enough (again, I forgot that Aurora was the name of Sleeping Beauty)? I don’t know. We’ll have to see.

One thing I’ll give credit to Disney for is taking a chance. This is unlike anything they’ve ever done before. And with all the money they’re making lately (no one’s making more bank than Disney these days), they should be taking chances. Unfortunately, I don’t think this chance paid off, UNLESS John Lee Hancock did an Almost Page 1 rewrite on it. We’ll have to see. But I’ll ask you guys in the meantime, especially parents with children. Are you interested in seeing this film?

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

What I learned: Dichotomy with anti-heroes – The trick with anti-heroes is to give them ONE GOOD THING they’ve got going for them (so there’s SOMETHING to root for), and then one element of darkness. That dichotomy of light and dark is what makes these characters so fascinating. A lot of the time, the “good trait” is humor (Jack Sparrow, Tony Stark, Cool Hand Luke, Randle McMurphy from Cuckoo’s Nest). And the “darkness” is self-destructive behavior (Henry Hill, Jordan Belforte). In extreme cases, the darkness is sociopathic or even psychotic behavior (Patrick Bateman from American Psycho). If you don’t have that perfect light/dark balance with your antihero, chances are, we’re not going to care about them. I’m not saying I didn’t care for Maleficent, but she definitely wasn’t interesting enough to keep me engaged the entire read.

The disappointing showing of Transcendence really bummed me out this weekend. Not because I had anything invested in the film. It was just one of the few non-IP properties that made it to the big screen. And for screenwriters who still believe in original ideas, it’s very important that these movies do well. Because if they don’t, we’re bound to turn into an all IP industry.

The thing is, right now, the studios would have a good case against the spec world for doing so. Nobody’s writing anything good, so why should they buy any specs or make any specs into movies?

I’ve thought about this a lot lately, and I’ve noticed some real problems in the system. One of the reasons I tell everyone to simplify their stories and make sure their GSU (goals, stakes, urgency) is strong, is because these are the only scripts that get past script readers. They’re the thrillers and the comedies that have clean easy-to-understand stories, and therefore they can pass up to their bosses without fearing the dreaded, “What the fuck is this?? Give me something I can sell!”

So what does that say to us? It says we can’t explore anything too complex. We have to stay in that little box. In many ways, specs are like the Big Mac trying to compete with the studios’ lobster. We’re not allowed to create something challenging or unique or with substance, so how the hell are we supposed to compete with projects like “The Wolf of Wall Street” or “Benjamin Button?” If neither of those projects were based on IP, they wouldn’t have sold. And that’s really hard to accept. That the playing field is so uneven.

Despite that, I don’t think writers are giving it their best. Even with that reasonable excuse, I’m not reading enough good material. And I’ve tried to figure out why. Part of me believes that screenwriting is SO much harder than everyone thinks it is. There’s so much you have to know how to do.

You have to create intriguing likable protagonists that don’t feel like every other intriguing likable protagonist we’ve seen. You have to know how to pace a script with act breaks and story beats. You have to know what conflict is so you can write entertaining scenes (I can’t tell you how often I see all 55 scenes in a script, and not a single one has conflict).

You have to know how to explore a character in a way that adds depth, and to create relationships with problems that need to be resolved. You need to know how to write dialogue that does more than simply allow two characters to speak. It must push them to speak in a way that ENTERTAINS US. You need to know how to apply suspense, obstacles, setups, payoffs, urgency, stakes. And after you figure all that stuff out, you actually have to apply it in a NATURAL way that doesn’t look like there’s any craft to it. You have to build a house that looks like it’s always been there.

And that’s hard to do.

Part of the problem is too many writers are trying for the quick fixes. They read a couple of things from this site, a couple of things from another site, and they think they’re ready to go.  You can spot these scripts a mile away. There’s just no sense whatsoever that the writer’s put anything into the craft.  A couple of months back I read an amateur writer’s script, and he wanted to know if his hero should secretly be the killer. I was like, “I’m not even clear what’s going on in YOUR FIRST SCENE.” Whether the killer is the bad guy or not is irrelevant. You need to figure out how to write a scene first (a scene is a story.  Start with some problem your characters have to deal with, and you should come up with something reasonably good).

And that’s something I just don’t think people do anymore. Actually WORK. I came across this short last week (The Long Game) which talks about all the geniuses throughout history. Da Vinci, John Coltrane, Stephen King, people of that stature. And what the director found was that there was this period in each of these artists’ lives that he called the “Difficult Years,” where they went through this self-appointed apprenticeship. This apprenticeship would last somewhere between 7-15 years, and would consist of them practicing and experimenting and writing and reading and playing and studying, and looking for any little thing that could make them better, that would give them an edge on, or help them catch up to, their competition.

Nobody talks about those years cause they’re not decorated with No. 1 hits or groundbreaking sculptures or Pulitzer prizes. But those are the MOST IMPORTANT YEARS of the artist’s life. Coltrane spent 15 years practicing relentlessly EVERY DAY on his saxophone until he got his first real gig. And this is the best saxophonist ever! It took him 15 years of practice!

In the documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” about the best sushi chef in the world, this guy spent something like 10 years studying RICE! What region the best rice came from, the textures that worked best, how to store it, how to cook it. We’re not even talking about the fish. We’re talking about the RICE. That’s why he’s the best in the world. Because he dedicated himself to finding the perfect EVERYTHING for his food. What are you doing as a screenwriter that’s setting you apart from everyone else?

I think I know why this is such a problem for our industry. It’s because screenwriting DOESN’T LOOK THAT HARD. Why would anyone work hard at something that seems so easy? Everybody thinks they can write a screenplay. They look at what’s out in the theaters and say, “I can do better than that guy.” No, you can’t. That’s exactly WHY screenwriting is so hard, is because even the best screenwriters can’t come up with something “better than that.”

As a writer, you should be obsessively doing three things. You should be writing, you should be reading (scripts/books), and you should be studying. If you really want to have a shot at this, you have to outwork everyone else. So I challenge you. All those things I noted above (obstacles, conflict, etc.), I want you to MASTER ALL OF THEM. Work on them until your fingers bleed. That’s the only chance you have of writing something great, is if you master all the aspects of storytelling.

Now I realize that’s a tall order, so maybe I can help you focus a little. If there’s one thing I see botched over and over again – the biggest problem I see in screenplays by far – it’s boring characters. And derivative characters.  Or the worst – the combos: Derivabores.  So start there.  Learn how to write good characters. Look back through my archives. Google the word. Re-watch all your favorite characters and take notes about why you love them.

Because the more I read, the more I realize that it’s ALL ABOUT THE CHARACTERS. If you write a bad story, you can make up for it with good characters. A great place to start is by doing the PLOT STRIP TEST. Mentally strip your plot OUT of your script and just look at your characters all by their naked selves.

Now tell me, are these characters interesting without the plot behind them? Without the explosions or the twists or the killer concept? In a script I read awhile back, I did the PLOT STRIP TEST, and here’s all that was left: A hero that was afraid of heights and a love interest who was upset that her dad died. Do those sound like interesting people to you?

Where is the flaw (she’s unable to love), the vice (she’s a sex addict), the relationship problems (these two were together once until she made a mistake and cheated on him).  What’s their personality like (wise-ass)?  What do they fear (sleeping alone)?  What do they keep from the world (they once watched a friend rape someone and didn’t do anything about it)?  I don’t want to use the dirty words “soap opera,” but you almost have to think of it that way. Are my characters interesting on their own, without the story? Because if not, you need to build a lot more into them.

But characters are still just one piece of the puzzle. Sometimes I’ll pick up a script and I don’t know what’s wrong with it. I just know that it’s lifeless, that it’s missing something.

So maybe I’ll turn to you guys for help. What do you think’s missing from today’s scripts? A lot of you called Transcendence a “bad screenplay.” What’s missing from it and other scripts like it? What is that one thing that all these writers (amateur and professional) continue to ignore?

And hey, if you think you’ve done everything I’ve said above and that you’re ready, well dog gonnit, send your script in for Amateur Friday (details at top of page). Maybe you’ll get reviewed and blow us all away. I hope so. Because baby, I want to believe again.

Oh, and finally, I’m sending out a new newsletter late tonight, and it’s going to be a good one. I’ll be reviewing a script from one of my FAVORITE writers, as well as posting some short films for you to check out. Make sure to check your SPAM boxes if you don’t receive it, and add me as a contact so it doesn’t go to SPAM in the future. If you’re new to Scriptshadow and want to sign up, go here!

Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: A love story set in a time where a dying scientist is able to upload his consciousness into the internet and, facing its global implications, must fight against the forces who are actively working against the existence of a singularity.
About: Transcendence is one of the few spec scripts that made it to the big screen this year, and a popular one with script readers, including myself. It was Wally Pfister’s directorial debut. Pfister, Christopher Nolan’s long-time cinematographer, was blessed with a strong cast that included Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Morgan Freeman, Cillian Murphy, Kate Mara and Paul Bettany. Despite what looked to be a surefire hit, the film was botched in just about every manner. Critics blasted it (it got a 20% on Rotten Tomatoes) and audiences didn’t come to see it (it made 11 million bucks over the weekend). So today, the question is, why? What happened? Where did things go wrong? I’d like to find out.
Writer: Jack Paglen
Details: 120 minutes/131 pages

Transcendence just made every single one of your jobs as writers a thousand times harder.

You may not know this, but every time a spec-script-turned-film bombs at the box office, it hurts you. Because the studios log that away and say “Yet another reason not to make spec scripts.”  Which makes it harder for you, my dear writer friend, to sell a screenplay.  I mean, first Draft Day bombs and now this??  We’re not exactly making a strong counter-case here.

The thing is, this should’ve worked.  If ever there was a spec that felt right being turned into a movie, it was this one.  It had an interesting role for a lead to play, a marketable premise, some intriguing new themes our interconnected planet is dealing with and some inventive set pieces.  Black List voters jumped on board.  And pretty much everyone I talked to liked the script.  So then what went wrong?

For those who don’t know much about the film, here’s an abbreviated plot breakdown:

40-something Will Caster is one of a handful of scientists across the world who is making strides in artificial intelligence. His goal is to reach the “Singularity,” a nerdy term for when computers become as smart as humans. From there, it’s assumed, computers will become exponentially smarter than humans, to the point where they may want to get rid of us.

Which is exactly why a renegade group out there known as the “RIFT” is trying to assassinate Will and others like him. To “save the world.” They do end up shooting Will but not killing him. However, just when he thinks he’s in the clear, Will learns that the bullet was laced with uranium. Will will be dead in weeks from radiation poisoning.

Will’s wife Evelyn, who loves him more than anything, comes up with this wacky idea to use Will’s own research to save him, uploading his brain into a computer. With the help of Will’s reluctant best friend, Max, they’re able to pull this off just before the RIFT find them.

With the entire internet at his hands, Will becomes really powerful, and starts building a super town out in the middle of the desert. While at first Evelyn was excited to have her man back, now she’s kinda freaked out. Will monitors her 24/7, and she’s starting to feel like a kept woman. RIFT joins up with a small department in the FBI to try and take Will and his new city down, but it looks like it’s going to be too little, too late.

“So let me get this straight Mr. Pfister. You want me to look bored the entire movie?”

The first thing I realized about the screen translation of Transcendence was that two of my favorite things about the script were gone. First, Pfister decided to nix the love-triangle between Max, Will, and Evelyn, which was a strange choice. Max’s inner struggle about whether to help Evelyn save her husband even though he secretly loved her, was one of the only aspects of the script that added any layers to the scenes. Without that, everything pretty much played out on the surface.

Then there was the compete lack of any set pieces. In the script, we get this super battle with Will’s self-made super-soldiers (which he creates via nano technology) throwing tanks and doing all these impossible things. In the movie, these “super nano humans” never engaged in any physical attacks. It was beyond bizarre. We built up to three major battle scenes, but nothing actually happened! Right as the nano-soldiers were about to unleash their awesomeness, they’d just… stop.

Now, obviously this could have been due to budgetary reasons. But I suspect it might have actually been a choice. In the script (major spoiler) we find out at the end that, despite RIFT’s insistence otherwise, Will wasn’t trying to rule the world. He was trying to help Evelyn “change the world.”  In other words, Will was never bad.  He was good! In order for this “shocking” twist to work, I’m guessing our director thought, “Well then Will can’t actually kill anybody! He’s a good guy.” “Aha,” he continued. “That means we can’t have those casualty-heavy set pieces anymore.”

This was a terrible choice, and a trap many writers fall into. In order to make one small aspect of their script work, they sacrifice other bigger parts of the script. In this case, we lost out on these cool set pieces for a lame twist that didn’t make all that much sense anyway.

But the truth is, I don’t think either of these were the reason Transcendence sucked. If you inserted those changes into the movie right now, it would’ve been only marginally better (maybe 35% Rotten Tomatoes instead of 20%). The reason this movie sucked was mainly due to something writers have zero control over: bad directing.

This film was botched on the directing end pretty much from the very first frame, when we get an absolutely unnecessary flash-forward (which was added to the script for God knows what reason) showing a future without internet or something. It did NOTHING for the story except make an already dangerously slow first act five minutes slower.

But here’s the real issue. Pfister has spent the majority of his career being a technician. His job is to capture an image. Directing, on the other hand, is a creative role, requiring thought and inventive choices and imagination and inspiration.  Pfister never figured that out, and therefore approached directing like a technician would.

Look at Transcendence: Everything was “technically” okay here. The effects shots were fine. The cinematography was pretty good. The lighting was fine. Actors stood where they were supposed to stand and delivered their lines when they were supposed to deliver them.

But that’s not what a director is supposed to do. A director must elevate the material on the page. And Pfister was only interested in transferring the material from the page. For example, one of the most important things a director must do is get performances out of his actors. There were zero performances in Transcendence. Not a single one. Every single actor in this movie played THE EXACT SAME EMOTION. Which was downtrodden/sad/reserved. I have never seen a movie where every character acted so similarly.

Also, the dangerous thing about a character who is downtrodden/sad/reserved is that if you play that emotion wrong, it comes off as “bored.” And for that reason, every single actor in this movie looked bored. They looked unengaged. It was almost like there was a meeting beforehand to drive home the point that nobody was to emit any emotion during this movie. Ever. Just look sad and deliver your lines in a monotonous voice.

“Hi, I’m Agent Bored.” “And I’m Agent Sad.”

The question was: Was this problem there in the script or just in the movie? It’s been awhile since I read the script, but I remember a more vivid and varied cast. I remember more personality in the characters. And again, I remember all the subtext that played out in that love triangle. With that gone, and everyone pretty much speaking on-the-nose, surface-level sentences to one another, it was hard to find any drama anywhere. This means you had flat performances delivering flat lines inside flat relationships. That right there is Transcendence in a nutshell.

Now, there was one big script mistake that I didn’t notice the first time around that I’m kicking myself for. And it’s a biggie. In fact, it’s one of the most destructive things you can do to your screenplay – a succubus that can destroy your script from the inside-out. Evelyn, our main character, was passive/reactive (aka the old passive protagonist problem – PPP). It’s almost impossible for a script to overcome a passive protagonist, and Transcendence shows why.

EVELYN NEVER DOES ANYTHING! She never instigates anything. She never activates anything. She never goes after anything. When your main character doesn’t do anything other than wait around for other people to make choices or do things, we will get bored with her.  We will get annoyed by her.  We will build up anger towards her, quietly thinking with each passing minute, “Why aren’t you DOING anything???”  And that is exactly what happened here.

In fact, Evelyn is so unengaged that we begin to wonder if she really is the main character. Max, Will’s friend, is the one trying to stop all of this, but even HE’S passive in the way he goes about it, allowing RIFT to come to him and suggest they rescue her. So that’s two out of our three main characters who aren’t doing anything but waiting for others to tell them what to do.

That leaves Will. Will is active, but it’s never clear WHAT he’s actively trying to do. He’s building something… but why? We’re not sure. In the script, where we have action scenes of RIFT attacking Will, we’re distracted enough that we don’t really care that much. But now, with there being virtually no action at all, we’re a lot more aware that Will’s creation doesn’t seem to have a point.

Finally I was reminded, after reading and then watching the film, that seemingly trivial logic issues on the page become INTENSELY MAGNIFIED on the screen. When you read, your brain is more active, as it needs to construct the images of the story you’re reading. When you watch a movie, however, it’s more of a passive experience and because of that, your brain has more time to ask questions, to wonder. Indeed, I couldn’t stop wondering WHY THE HELL the U.S. Army wasn’t trying to get rid of Will’s mini-fortress??? If it was really as dangerous as they were saying, why only send a second-tier local FBI agent to fix the problem??

So what does this all mean? Well, I think the badness that is Transcendence can be blamed equally on the director and the final shooting script. Wally Pfister did not infuse a single scene with life. NOT ONE! And that’s not hyperbole. Go watch this and point out one scene that was inspired. You can’t.

But you can’t discount that script issues played a part in the problem. Like the choice to eliminate the love story, the lack of any real set pieces (which was a strength in the original script), instituting a passive main character, and allowing heavy logic issues to slip through the development phase.

If there’s anything I learned here, it’s that if it feels like a minor problem on the page, it’s going to be a HUGE PROBLEM on the screen. Get it fixed or be embarrassed once you see all those glossy eyes at the premiere.

[x] what the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Something else I learned here was the importance of CHARACTER VARIATION. Every character here emitted the same downbeat serious demeanor and it absolutely killed the movie. Without variation in character, characters can’t contrast. Without contrast, everyone feels like a clone, a walking copy of one another. Have someone get angry. Have someone be funny. Have someone be crazy. Have someone be awkward. But whatever you do, don’t have everybody be exactly alike.

Get Your Script Reviewed On Scriptshadow!: To submit your script for an Amateur Review, send in a PDF of your script, along with the title, genre, logline, and finally, something interesting about yourself and/or your script that you’d like us to post along with the script if reviewed. Use my submission address please: Carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Remember that your script will be posted. If you’re nervous about the effects of a bad review, feel free to use an alias name and/or title. It’s a good idea to resubmit every couple of weeks so your submission stays near the top.

Genre: Horror
Premise (from writer): When a young geneticist attempts to save the world’s forests from a rabid insect infestation she unwittingly unleashes a plague of apocalyptic proportions.
Why You Should Read (from writer): A new, original monster for the horror/nature gone wild sub-genre based on real science and current environmental concerns – and it’s a pretty swift read at 103 pgs. Plus, the first and last lines of dialogue are ‘fuck’ and ‘beautiful’ ;)
Writer: Drew Bryan
Details: 102 pages

Ellen Page for Gemma?

I’m open to these kinds of scripts because they make movies. It’s not high art. It’s not Citizen Kane. But you have to see a script for what it’s trying to be, and judge it on if it succeeds. If you’re trying to be a dumb fun horror film, then you gotta try and make the “A” version of that. I downloaded a cheap fun B-movie called “Splinter” from Itunes the other day and loved it. It was stupid. It was ridiculous. And it was the exact kind of movie you want to watch on a Saturday night.

I need to find the people who like to make these movies though cause when I find a good B-horror script, I don’t know who to send them to. Lots of producers are afraid to touch these because they don’t want to be known as the “B-horror” guys, even though there’s a lot of money in B-horror. So if you’re one of these producers, e-mail me. Cause I wouldn’t mind being part of the next Tremors franchise.

Is Gripper one of the winners?

Well, it sure has a hell of an opening. We’re in the middle of a forest fire with two firefighters, 25 year old Gemma and 25 year old Bobby. This fire is bad news. So bad that it four-walls them. No way out and not wanting to burn to death, Bobby allows Gemma to kill him. So she takes a fire axe and SPLITS HIS HEAD OPEN! Good thing he axed nicely.

Before Gemma can join Bobby, a small hole opens up and she’s able to escape the fire. Gemma is so scarred by the ordeal that she does some investigating and finds out that forest fires are created by a certain beetle that eats away at the trees and makes it really easy for forest fires to spread. So if she can find a way to kill that beetle, she can stop the forest fires, and she won’t have to split anybody’s head open anymore.

So Gemma, who’s now a scientist of some sort, finds this fast growing-fungus that kills these beetles. But when she tests it, the fungus is out of control. It’s a bust. But it’s enough for Gemma’s former lover and boss, the darkly handsome Darius, to take the product out in the filed and test it.

So he hires a bunch of clueless assistant-types and takes them to a recently burned-down forest to see if he can get this fungus operating. Meanwhile, Gemma heads out to another part of the same forest to perform some other fungus related experiments with her new boyfriend, surfer-dude, Tor.

After a night of crazy sex though, she wakes up to find Tor not in the tent, but up on a tree, frozen in a strange comatose like state. It’s creepy. And it’s also the exact same thing the beetles in her experiment did when they were infected with the fungus. Uh-oh. This could be bad.

So Gemma heads over to Darius’s little operation, since she knows they have better equipment than her, and asks for help. They hike there, cut Tor down, but he’s acting nutso, twitching and cracking in weird ways, and desperately trying to get back up on that tree. This begins the infestation, where one by one, our team will get infected, with no help in site. Will they figure out a way to stop the mad fungus before it turns them all into fungus-creatures? Click on the link at the end of the review to read the script and find out!

Gripper started off great. I was NOT expecting that first scene. But then things start to get a little messy. We get one giant 10 minute scene (split into two halves) documenting this beetle experiment, and that was the first time my impatience set in. You never want to give a scene any more time than it needs. As soon as the reader feels like we’re hanging around too long, we get uncomfortable. And this goes double for anything within the first fifteen. Readers expect you to have them laser-focused during that time, or else how can they expect you to keep their interest 60 pages from now?

In addition, it was unclear to me why our main character, Gemma, who was a firefighter in that first scene, was now a scientist. Those are two completely different jobs that require two completely different skillsets. In retrospect, maybe they were in that fire AS SCIENTISTS and not firefighters, but if that’s the case, that needs to be made clear.

From there, we set out to this dead forest, and I was confused again. I thought Darius and Gemma were going out there together. I swear there was something in the dialogue that implied that. So later, when Gemma comes to Darius’s camp for help and he asks her what she’s doing out here, I was confused as hell. I eventually realized that they had both come to the same forest, but separately, for different reasons. That seemed overly-complicated. Why wasn’t the story written to get them there all together?  Having two teams just confuses things. It makes it harder for you to write. And it makes it harder for us readers to follow. So it’s a lose-lose.

From there, I don’t think the story got going soon enough. I believe I was on page 50, halfway through the script, before they tried to get Tor out of that tree. That’s 50 pages without very much happening. Remember that you need STORY DENSITY in your script. You need to fill the pages up. Not drag things out. I felt like things were being dragged out.

The characters were okay. But nobody felt “real” enough for me to really care. Gemma herself was a strange character. It appears she has three different boyfriends in this (Bobby, Darius, and Tor), which is fine. I’m all for banging as many people as you want, but in a script, it just looks unfocused. We don’t know what to make of it.

And then when Tor starts turning into one of these spore-like hybrid monster thingeys, Gemma is strangely unaffected. She’s more concerned about capturing and quarantining Tor than she is losing someone she cares deeply about.

When you’re writing one of these movies, which is basically a zombie movie (or an “infected” movie), this is one of the best conceits you have. Is having someone love someone else, and then that person gets infected, and our hero has to figure out whether to kill them or not. Watch that opening episode of Walking Dead, where that father has to decide whether to shoot his zombie wife. How hard it is for him. That emotion is pouring off the screen. We don’t get any of that here. Nobody really seems to care about one another so it doesn’t really matter if someone gets hurt. That needs to be fixed.

This is all very hard for me to say because I think there’s something here. I think the monsters Drew’s created are borderline genius. I’ve never seen anything like them before. Where I see writers fail in this genre, is when they make monsters that they just think are cool. They haven’t really thought about them, their origins, their evolution, the reasons for why they look the way they do.

Gripper put a lot of thought into its monsters. I love the way they crick and crack and twist. The way they have to climb up high on the tree, just like the beetles did, the way the long spine grows out of their mouths and the spores explode up out of them, populating more areas in order to spread the disease. It’s freaky as hell and is going to make for one hell of a visual.

But none of that matters unless this other stuff is shored up. Cut down all the techno-babble in that early ten-page scene. Get them out to the site sooner. Make it one group, with Darius and Gemma together, instead of two separate groups. Cut down your character count. There are way too many people here and it was hard to keep track of them. And then just work on your character building. Make sure people actually care about each other so that when they start dying, there are emotions involved.

Oh, and one more suggestion. Usually in these movies, there’s one big final ‘super version’ of the creature. This is a really cool creature you’ve created. I wouldn’t mind seeing a version of it that’s balls-to-the-wall insane.

There’s something here, Drew. It’s just not there yet. Good luck on the rewrite though. You seem like a fungi. ☺

Script link: Gripper (note: This is an updated version of the script from the one in Amateur Offerings with changes made based on commenter feedback)

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

What I learned: Before you kill off a character, make sure there’s someone who cares about that character. That’s the only way you’re going to get emotion out of us. My favorite example of this is in Aliens with Vasquez and Drake, who were best friends. When Drake got killed, Vasquez went nuts, so we actually cared. Had they not known each other, our reaction to Drake’s death would’ve been less intense. That was my problem with Gemma and Tor. I didn’t think Gemma gave two shits about him. So who cares if he turns into a monster. And they don’t even have to be boyfriend-girlfriend for this to work. They could’ve been best friends since they were kids. But they need to care for each other.

Last year, in anticipation of the upcoming Star Wars films, I invited anyone who wanted to send in their own Star Wars script to do so. I would review the Top 5, and if one was really awesome, who knows, Disney might see it and get the writer involved in a future installment of the series. I received 20 Star Wars scripts in total. This week, I will review the best of those. Monday we got Old Weapons. Tuesday we had rising shadows.  Yesterday we had the most badass lobster in the galaxy.  And today, we’ve got twins, baby.  Twins!

Genre: Sci-fi Fantasy
Premise: (from writer) With the fate of the galaxy in the balance, two-young Jedi and children to the heroes of the New Republic, must come to terms with their destinies as they set out to save the lives of millions from a dark force with deep ties to their family’s past.
About: Star Wars Week continues! Team Jedi wins! I was especially moved by Tom Albanese’s comment about how thoughtful Nicholas has been in the comments all this week. Yes, Nicholas’s script was 150 pages, but after I heard that, I felt like he deserved a shot. Let’s find out if he delivered!
Writer: Nicholas Saraceno
Details: 149 pages

As we continue to get closer to the greatest day in the history of the universe, December 21, 2015, the day Star Wars VII comes out, I must admit that I grow more and more worried about the script. Here’s what I know so far, based on three-quarter-truths that most news outlets agree are probably accurate.

Michael Arndt came in before the Disney-Lucasfilm deal was finished to create an outline for Episode 7. He was working off a treatment from George Lucas himself. Now as we know, Lucas only really understood Episodes 4-6. Everything outside of those films he only knew bits and pieces of. So this outline for Episode 7 was likely based on a few really flimsy ideas.

One of the strangest parts of this whole odyssey is that Arndt started writing the Episode 7 script before a director was chosen. As most everyone who’s worked in Hollywood knows, writing a script within the studio system without a director guiding it is pointless, because once a director comes on, he’s going to change everything anyway. But I guess they wanted to get a head start, which I suppose makes sense.

Needless to say, JJ was then chosen as director and started guiding Arndt to a script closer to his own vision. Somewhere during this process, something broke down. Maybe it was that Lucas’ flimsy idea for the film never worked in the first place. Maybe JJ and Arndt weren’t getting along. I don’t know. But soon, Arndt was fired and JJ (who started as a screenwriter and had a very successful career doing so) pretty much took over writing duties himself. He then rewrote the entire script within three months.

Now I think JJ is talented as shit. I’m so behind him helming this film. But this is Star Wars we’re talking about. You can’t write a good Star Wars film in three months (while prepping the biggest movie ever, while running a company, while shepherding 15 different TV shows, while putting the kids to bed every night). There’s too much imagination involved. Sure, you can slap something together. But if you want it to stand out, you need time. And since JJ had to start building sets and doing pre-viz, time is the one thing he didn’t have. So for better or worse, whatever he came up with in those three months is what we’re getting. And that scares me to shit, only because I believe Star Wars deserves more, and the franchise now has a history of bad films due to shoddy writing. I don’t want that trend to continue.

Nicholas Saraceno to the rescue? Maybe that’s asking to much. I will say, though, out of the four Star Wars scripts I’ve reviewed this week, Saraceno’s is the most faithful and exciting. It was the first time I saw the potential for what the new Star Wars films could be. It’s not without its faults though. It’s extremely ambitious and there’s a lot going on, but let’s see if Nicholas was able to wrangle it all in.

It’s 20 years after all that Ewok dancing. But despite yet another “Nyug Nyug” video going viral, not all is well in the universe. There’s still a lot of poverty, a lot of crime, and an upstart terrorist group known as the “Children of the Sun” which is using all this unrest to push its agenda.

Meanwhile, across the galaxy in the Spice mines of Kessel, a young man named Jacen Solo is following in his father’s footsteps, buying and smuggling spice between planets. On this particular run, one of the mine’s slaves sneaks on his ship, the Falcon, because she’s sick of working for nothing. Her name is Kayla. And although Jacen would never say it out loud, he thinks she’s darn cute.

Kayla seems like a nice girl alright, all the way until they get to Tatooine to sell their spice to Babbee the Hutt. That’s when Kayla reveals that the whole slave thing? FAKE! She played Jacen to get here. Before Jacen can figure out what just happened, the Hutt palace is attacked by the Republic, and everybody must run for their lives.

Somewhere in this mix, both Luke Skywalker and Jaina Solo (Jacen’s twin sister) show up, and everyone’s trying to get to safety. After they get away, it’s revealed that the attack was some kind of front to trick the Hutts into aligning with the Children of the Sun in a growing war, led by a nasty Sith-in-Training named Dragil.

If you’ve lost track yet, don’t worry, it gets more confusing. Luke meets up with his old friends-with-benefits Jedi pal, Mara Jade. Turns out, Luke’s 5 years late on Republic Credits child support. Because he be a baby daddy!  Do I smell a “Jedi and Pregnant” reality show coming to TLC?

Not that that matters, because we learn that some other children, the Children of the Sun, are planning on blowing up Coruscant with a rare super-weapon made of red spice and a powerful Jedi infant, that infant being the son of the Emperor’s brother, who’s been hiding out on his estate on Naboo all this time!  Jar-Jar?  How could you let this one slip by!

Over the course of the story, Jaina is trying to get Jacen to be a Jedi. Jacen is trying not to fall in love with Kayla, who keeps changing sides. Luke is trying to train Jaina, who keeps doing non-Jedi things like making out with hot soldiers, and Han is trying to figure out why his family is so damn dysfunctional. This will all end in a Hutt battle on Naboo and a race to stop a super-bomb from destroying Coruscant.

Naturally, you can guess what my biggest problem with Children of the Jedi was. There were 8 billion things going on! You have to admire Nicholas for trying to go big, but in the end, he bit off more than he could chew. Actually, he bit off more than anyone could chew. Too many characters, too many storylines, too many twists and turns. I kind of felt like I’d been dropped into an Industrial-sized trash compactor along with every single Star Wars character ever created.

Part of the problem was that Children of the Jedi tried to invent a universe instead of just telling a story. That was the problem with the Prequels. They were trying to invent a universe. What I mean by that is that they had to set up a million things before they got to a single storyline that mattered.

I keep telling everyone that about Star Wars. Its genius is in that it wasn’t trying to be an epic. It jumped into a story that was already moving, that had already been set up many years ago. We were coming in when the good stuff started, after the Death Star plans had already been stolen. That’s what gave the story such urgency.

If Star Wars had, instead, tried to invent a universe, it would’ve started by introducing everybody on their home planets. It would have had the rebels come pick Leia up and say, “Hey, we want to go steal these Death Star plans. You in?” We would’ve met Han Solo smoking cigars with old friends on Planet Takator before saying, “Yo, I gotta go visit Tatooine.” Instead, Star Wars fast-forwarded over all that stuff and put us in the thick of the moment.

In fact, that’s the whole point of the Star Wars crawl. To get all that exposition taken care of in 60 seconds so that you COULD start in the middle of the action.

I’m not going to say that Children of the Jedi didn’t have any action. It had plenty. And there were instances where characters were introduced in the heat of the moment. But by biting off an unheard of character count, and having to then set all those characters up, Nicholas gave himself no choice but to repeatedly stop the story to let us know who these new people were.

I must remind everyone of The Power of Simple. When in doubt, simplify. This script should’ve been Jacen Solo’s story through and through. He was the most interesting character. He had the most going on. We needed to strip away all those cumbersome non-essential plotlines and focus on his deal. That’s how I would’ve approached it, at least.

Overplotting is kind of like throwing a grenade. There’s the explosion that kills anyone within the explosion radius. But those aren’t the only deaths. Frags also shoot out, hit people, and kill them slowly. One of frags of an over-plotted story is confusion. I just wasn’t always sure what was going on.

For instance, when Jacen originally arrives at the Hutts to trade spice, Luke Skywalker is hiding out in the crowd. What he was doing there I still don’t know. I know that Nicholas knew. But by forcing the reader to sift through and remember so many things, even the simplest things can be hard to understand. All I could think was, “How long has Luke been here? Does he always just pretend to be a bad guy and hide out at the Hutts for no reason? Has he been here for days? Months? Years?” Maybe he has early onset dementia and is trying to save Han, who’s frozen in carbonate?

I think identifying the solution here is easy. This script needs a clear main character on a cleaner, easier-to-understand journey. I understand why Nicholas ran into this problem. He loves the original characters so much and wanted to find a way to get them in there. But if characters are only in a story because a writer wants them to be, they never feel quite right. Characters only feel right when they’re organically grown along with the story. This is a problem that not only Nicholas had to deal with, but JJ will as well. I wish him luck!

Script link: Children of the Jedi

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

What I learned: The more complicated the plot, the less double-crosses work. Double-crosses (characters being on one side then switching over to another) can be fun – a great surprise to shock the audience. But the more complicated a plot is, the less effective they are, because we’re trying to figure out what’s going on period, much less figure out who’s on who’s side. When Slave Kayla kept changing sides, I got confused and stopped keeping count. I didn’t know if she was good or bad. In a simple plot, I would’ve figured it out, but because I had to keep track of so many other things, multiple double-crosses were information overload.