If there is such a pitch as “Michael Clayton meets Ready Player One,” this is it

Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: Set in the near future, a group of savvy game-developers create high-class characters that they auction on the open market for a popular online game.
About: Today we’ve got a mysterious script from Andor showrunner, Tony Gilroy! You can download the script yourself at the bottom of the review.
Writer: Tony Gilroy
Details: 125 pages

There are so many things to get triggered about in 2022.

So why is it that my number 1 trigger is Tony Gilroy??

Oh, that’s right. Because of Andor!

I watch Andor through this haze of perplexity and frustration because I know it *says* it’s a Star Wars show. But there’s nothing in it that resembles “Star Wars!”

No, I take that back. Last week there was one scene on a beach that actually felt like Star Wars. There were aliens. ALIENS! I know it sounds weird that I’m getting excited about aliens but you have to understand Gilroy’s Star Wars universe only has four aliens and three robots in it. The man hates Star Wars.

But anyway, seeing aliens and robots was this really cool look at what this show could be if it was actually run by someone who had seen a Star Wars movie before he signed up to direct a Star Wars series. Honest to God, I still don’t believe Tony Gilroy knows what a lightsaber is. And Kathleen Kennedy still hired him!

And while we’re here, we need to stop the positive discussion of Andor on the internet.

Stop.

Everyone knows this show is as exciting as watching a womp rat nap. But the internet is so weird when it comes to these shows. I don’t know exactly what’s going on or why people feel the need to prop up a show that everyone knows is lame. But they do. They say this show is groundbreaking because it deviates from the Star Wars we know which is “necessary” for the franchise to grow.

Oh go jump off a Cloud City diving board.  You know what will help make Star Wars grow?  A good Star Wars show!!!

But anyway, I’ve become so obsessed with why this show got produced, to an, admittedly, unhealthy degree, that I looked back on Tony Gilroy’s body of work to see if it’s not just that he doesn’t understand Star Wars. But maybe he’s not a very good writer.

He wrote that cheesy ice skating romance flick called The Cutting Edge. That’s what started his career. He had that lame Stephen King adaptation, Delores Claibourne. He then wrote The Devil’s Advocate, which I liked quite a bit. It was The Firm meets hell. Which I thought was a fun pitch. That was his first true hit.

From there he wrote Armageddon. I don’t even know what to say about that one because 13,000 writers worked on that script. And I still don’t know if an Armageddon writing credit is a positive or negative thing. I suppose as long as he’s not responsible for the animal cracker scene, his work on the film is a net positive.

From there, he moved into the Bourne franchise and that’s where he really became an A-lister. I liked The Bourne Identity. The rest of the films were slightly better than average. But he certainly gets kudos for that first film.

Cinephiles love him for Michael Clayton. Maybe at some point I’ll revisit that movie but I didn’t like it when I saw it. Can someone pitch the reason why it’s worth watching?

This brings us to Open World, a more recent screenplay of Gilroy’s. Let’s see if this is more Bourne Identify or more Andor.

A quick warning – this was one of the hardest scripts to follow that I’ve ever read. So this summary is going to sound vague. It’s set a dozen years in the future (that’s the one part I’m sure of). Two game developers, Evan and Laurel, work for a mysterious company that builds characters for rich gamers that can be played in a large open-world game.

Their boss, Monty, recently learned that one of their co-workers, Tina, sold company secrets to a rival. So Monty wants Evan and Laurel to keep an eye out, in the game, for any suspicious goings-on. He occasionally sends them to Old West towns that he believes may be housing Tina’s latest character.

In one of these excursions, they see a blue rag of some sort but are unable to get it for some reason. There is a lot of consternation about this blue rag and what it means. There are very important conversations that follow that discuss it in detail. Nobody thinks to tell us, the reader, why we should care about the blue rag. But it’s certainly a priority for the characters.

After this event, Evan and Laurel’s co-worker, Gita, tells their boss, Monty, “The Koreans are in the lobby.” At this point, I mentally gave up trying to understand what this abomination of a script was about. But I guess the big reveal is that some of these characters in the game are becoming artificially intelligent and may be used for military purposes. The end.

So, what went wrong here?

We’re dropped into things in media res – which means we’re thrown into a story that’s already going on. And because Gilroy either isn’t clear or is purposefully being mysterious, we’re playing catch-up from the get go. We know people work on open world video games but we don’t know much more than that.

I didn’t know until page 27, for example, that the company’s primary job was to create characters for rich people then sell them in online auctions. It was very oddly presented. Usually, in a movie, we meet a main character, we learn who he is, something interrupts his life, then he has to go deal with it. The ‘dealing with it’ part is the second and third act.

“Open World,” on the other hand, has us meeting a bunch of random people, seeing them play a video game, watching them mope around in their real life, then go back into the game without explaining to the reader why, then come out of the game and speak in hushed tones about vague things that they saw, then go into work, then get yelled at by their boss, then go back into the game, and then do stuff in the game that we never quite understand. It’s not exactly riveting storytelling.

If you don’t lay out who your hero is and what they have to do within a reasonable amount of time, it’s virtually impossible to make your script work. Cause we’re going to be asking basic questions (such as “who’s the main character”) deep into a script at a time when what we should be doing is enjoying ourselves.

It’s an interesting approach – making the reader play catch-up. I’m not exactly against it if it’s done well. But it’s definitely a gamble. Because if you, the writer, stay too far ahead for too long, the reader just gets frustrated and stops caring. Especially if the mysteries you’re presenting aren’t very engaging.

Ooh, the’s a blue cloth in the game. What’s that blue cloth?? Everyone in the movie wants to know. OH YEAH, BUT WHY THE HECK SHOULD WE THE READER CARE? Does the writer ever consider that question? I don’t think so.

Another huge problem with Gilroy that hurts him here and hurts him in Andor – is that his stories lack playfulness. He sees the world through such a serious lens, that the world of fun doesn’t exist in his eyes.

This script is about gaming. What is out there that speaks to “fun” more than gaming? Yet Gilroy manages to avoid that word at all costs.

You guys remember that brilliant scene in The Bourne Identity where Jason plans this big heist where he’s going to send Marie into a government building to steal important information about who he is so he can find out who’s after him? And she goes in there and he’s going over, in detail, every little move she needs to make to swindle the officials, and a minute later she comes out with the documents and he stares at her in awe before asking her, “What did you do??” And she says, “I just asked.”

THAT’S WHAT I MEAN BY PLAYFUL.

And I’m willing to bet a million dollars that another writer wrote that scene. Not Gilroy. Because Gilroy hates fun. There’s a brief moment in the most recent episode of Andor where the famous MSE-6 mouse droid appears for a second. And you can feel Gilroy’s unbridled anger at having to include the shot in the scene. Just from the way he points the camera and quickly cuts away.

I’m not going to lie. There’s a part of me that thinks I got duped here and that this script isn’t actually Gilroy’s. Cause I can’t imagine even him writing something this poor. Maybe you guys can do some research and confirm or deny it. If it is his script, I mean…. wow. This was really bad. Or maybe it wasn’t. You can decide. Cause I’m including the script below.

Script link: Open World

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

What I learned: If you have a lot of characters and your story is complex, you need a “Reminder Character.” This is a character who shows up and basically reminds the characters, and by association us, what needs to be done. Yes, this can feel like blatant exposition. But blatant exposition is preferable to complete and utter confusion, which is how I felt reading this. I had next to no idea what was going on. You needed someone to come in and say, “Don’t forget, we’re going after the MacGuffin and we need it within 24 hours because, if we fail, the entire world blows up.” Lay out the freaking story why don’t you.

Genre: Thriller
Premise: When an American family vacationing in Australia takes an improvised excursion to a private island to see local wildlife, a devastating accident turns them into public enemy number 1.
About: Ready for some inspiration? Adrian McKinty was a Belfast shipyard welder who started writing books, many of which got published but didn’t sell well. At one point he was so poor, he got kicked out of his house. He was driving for Uber just to make ends meet. During this time, an author who liked his books introduced him to producer Shane Salerno, who convinced him to write “The Chain,” a book I previously reviewed on the site. That book got McKinty a movie deal for 1.5 million. This latest book from McKinty is going to exceed that deal, reportedly nabbing McKinty 2 million from Hulu, who are going to turn it into a limited series. McKinty ain’t driving for dollars anymore!
Writer: Adrian McKinty
Details: 385 pages

There are two tracks you can take as a novelist. Okay, there are a million tracks. But the phrase doesn’t sound as good if I say it like that so bear with me. The first track is to create a series – usually about someone solving crimes or what have you, and just write 20 books with that character. The other is to write thrillers that secretly double as spec scripts. They’re written specifically in the hopes of being turned into a film (or, in today’s parlance, a “limited series”).

That’s what The Island is. It was birthed to be purchased by Hollywood more so than to be enjoyed as a novel. Although, like any good story, it works in both forms. The Island has one heck of a setup. It’s so good, in fact, that it sets a bar the author struggles to live up to. To McKinty’s credit, though, he almost pulls it off.

The Island follows a young former massage therapist, Heather, who falls in love with one of her clients, a doctor named Tom. Tom recently lost his wife and it doesn’t take long for Heather to fill that void. Unfortunately, she comes into Tom’s family under heavy fire. Both his kids, Olivia, 14, and Owen, 12, instantly hate her.

When Tom has a conference in Australia, he thinks he can double the work trip as a “getting to know you” vacation for Heather and the kids. So off they go. It turns out, however, that Australia is pretty boring, and the kids are checked out by day 3. They can’t even find a freaking koala bear to hug.

So one day, while driving outside the city and stopping for lunch, they overhear a couple of scraggly locals talking about all the cool animals on their island. The kids beg their dad to convince these dudes to let them visit the island. But these guys are steadfast that it’s a hard no. This is not a public island. But once a few Benjamins exchange hands, their tune changes.

A ferry allows them to take their car over to the island, along with a Dutch couple who overhead the conversation and wanted in as well. While listening to the islanders chat, Heather notes that these are not the friendliest of folks. Some of the things they talk about would give you hard time in the real world. But they don’t live in the real world. They live off on their island. About ten minutes later, the family is on this cool private island that’s roughly 3 miles long and 2 wide.

Tom begins zooming around the island looking for any animals he can find. But it becomes clear rather quickly that they’ve been had. They can’t find anything over here. Angry at being duped, Tom gets distracted and punches the accelerator to get back to the ferry. When he takes a sharp turn, everything changes. A young woman riding a bike appears out of nowhere and they hit her head on at 50 miles an hour.

She’s instantly dead.

Pandemonium ensues. Tom panics. The kids are confused. It’s up to Heather to figure out what to do. She knows that if the sketchy island people find out about this, they may have their own version of island justice in mind. So Heather makes the call to pull the body off the road, hide it in the brush, and get back to the mainland. From there, they’ll tell the authorities what happened. But by no means can they be on this island when the locals find out what they’ve done.

In one of the most harrowing scenes I’ve read in a long time, the family pulls up to the ferry and tries to calmly convince the captain to take them back immediately. The captain wants to wait for the Dutch couple though. Meanwhile, Heather is staring at this walkie-talkie strapped around the captain’s chest, knowing that if someone finds out what happened, he’ll be alerted immediately.

Since this book is titled, “The Island,” and not “After the Island,” I think you know what happens next. Their secret is discovered and mob justice begins. But this is way worse than regular mob justice. These are the kind of people who tie you down next to red ant hills and watch insects slowly make a meal of your face. Somehow, Heather and the kids escape. But they’ve got nowhere to run to. Only… the island.

Books are the new spec scripts. But because Hollywood loves following trends rather than following logic, they’re currently convinced that any book needs to be turned into a TV show first. Which is what we’re getting with The Island.

And that’s too bad because this is a movie all the way. It’s not a TV show. Let me explain. This is an ACTION-THRILLER. It’s about movement. It’s about escape. It’s about time running out. It’s about the chase. We’re not talking about a psychological thriller in the vein of Big Little Lies where slow talking dramatic scenes are an organic part of the story.

This is a chase-and-escape scenario and those work best as movies. Literally from the moment the hit-and-run happens, there are 175 pages of non-stop intensity. If you try and slow all that down because you have to to fill up an 8 episode television show, it’s going to affect how thrilling the story actually is.

And by the way, those 175 pages were some of the best thriller pages I’ve ever read. McKinty understands one of the primary rules of writing captivating thriller scenarios. Which is to put your characters in situations that the reader thinks, “There’s no way they’re getting out of this.” Weak writers write situations that they can get their characters out of, and by extension, we the reader know they can get out of as well. Therefore, we’re not entertained.

McKinty is the opposite. The family is in the bush. A line of people looking for them is just 500 feet away. They’re getting closer. The family can’t go anywhere without being seen. One of the kids is so dehydrated, he couldn’t move even if they had an escape route. The islanders have made it clear that once they capture them, they’re going to kill them. It’s Coen Brothers level, “How in the world are they going to get out of this?”

And McKinty puts them in that situation again and again and again. It’s riveting.

However, McKinty makes a choice late in the novel that abandons this philosophy. I understand why he did it. But I still think it was the wrong choice.

He basically decides to turn Heather into John McClane. She goes on offensive. This is advice that I’ve actually given writers myself. You want to change up the dynamic of your story so that the reader doesn’t get bored. We’ve been on the defensive the whole time. Let’s go on the offensive.

Also, at some point, you want your hero to start being active rather than reactive. So I’m guessing that’s where McKinty’s mind was at when he came up with this choice.

So he stuck the family in a safe cave where they couldn’t be found. And this allowed Heather to start going on the attack.

My issue with this choice is that I no longer feared for the family. The family was fine. That was the whole reason I was invested in the first place. I knew if the islanders captured the family, they were dead. That’s where the suspense and conflict and fear resided. As soon as the kids could hang out in this nice cave and drink clean water, I relaxed. And if your reader feels like he can relax during a thriller? You’ve made a wrong turn.

Writing is funny like that. Sometimes the thing that you’re supposed to do isn’t always the best thing for your story. You’re supposed to change it up so it isn’t an entire movie of “get chased.” If your hero is reactive for much of the movie, at some point they have to become active.

Yeah, those things sound great in a vacuum. But, in the end, it’s gotta be about what’s best for your story. If your story feels like it’s firing on all cylinders when this family is barely able to escape these crazed islanders, then that’s what the whole story needs to be about.

With all that being said, I thought this was a VERY entertaining book. I’m so curious how they’re going to adapt it. It looks like we’re going to be getting a lot more slow “hang-out” scenes between chases. I’m curious if they’re going to be able to pull that off and not lose any of the tension.

Definitely check out this book if you’re into thrillers. It’s good stuff.

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

What I learned: A thriller book with a good hook is the 1997 version of a million dollar spec script. Every streamer is looking for these. Psychological thrillers preferably (Big Little Lies, The Watcher) but The Island proves that they’ll buy action-thrillers as well.

Carson has never seen The Evil Dead. Until today!

Genre: Horror
Premise: A group of friends head out to a remote cabin where they inadvertently unleash a series of demons from the woods.
About: This was Sam Raimi’s first film! You know Raimi as the director of the original Spider-Man films, the director of Dr. Strange and the Lame Sidekick, and the guy who insists on wearing a tuxedo while he directs. The Evil Dead was one of the few horror movies before 2000 that actually got good reviews. The film was made for about 300,000 dollars and when it debuted, the master of horror, Stephen King, fell in love with it, becoming a huge advocate for the film.  Look down below.  They even quoted him in the poster!
Writer: Sam Raimi
Details: about 90 minutes long

I am about to blow your mind.

I’ve never seen The Evil Dead.

I can’t say why. It’s just one of those odd holes in my movie-watching history.

Let me tell you why I chose to watch it today, though. I looked it up online and saw that it wasn’t streaming anywhere. Which is impossible in 2022 – that a popular movie isn’t available for streaming.

I was annoyed but what was I going to do? Make the movie appear out of thin air? So I decided to watch John Carpenter’s “They Live” instead.

Holy moly in a hand-basket full of guacamole is that movie terrible. I’m talking late stage 4 send it to the hospice terrible. It does *not* hold up.

Which brought me back to The Evil Dead. The more I internalized the idea that I couldn’t have it, the more I wanted it. I’m not allowed to watch you?? Oh, we’ll see about that, Mr. Movie! Without going into too much detail, I took a trip into the bowels of the internet, got stuck in a Mongolian server, before shooting back up through the center of the earth holding a copy of Evil Dead autographed by the entire cast.

Which brings me to this moment.

I’ve seen The Evil Dead. Finally. A movie that, for long stretches of time, I believed was the same film as Army of Darkness. It’s time for my ignorance to end!

If you haven’t seen the film, five friends head up to a remote cabin. Ash, Cheryl, Linda, Joke-maker Scott, and Shelly. Ash and Linda are together. Scott and Shelly are together. Poor Cheryl is the fifth wheel. Ironically, she’s the most attractive of the bunch. Go figure!

On the way to the house, they cross a rickety old bridge, and arrive at their destination a few minutes later. They obviously didn’t plan this trip very well because they don’t seem to have anything to do. There’s no lake to swim in. Everyone forgot their cell phones. I don’t even think they brought beer. All they can do is sit in a tiny cabin and talk.

As night sets in, Cheryl thinks she hears something outside. So she goes outside to check on it because that’s what any rational person would do. While she’s out there, she’s attacked by the trees, which wrap her up and, I believe (correct me if I’m wrong), try to impregnate her with tree sap. Maybe in the hopes of creating a little half-human half-tree baby. Luckily, she escapes before this tree malfeasance can happen.

Back at the cabin, she screams at Ash to drive her into town. She’s not staying here. But when the two get to the bridge, it’s collapsed. Cheryl knows why. The demon people want to keep them here all night.

Once back at the cabin, Cheryl turns into a full-on demon and, after an intense scuffle, they’re able to throw her down into the cellar and lock the floor hatch. Unfortunately, Shelly turns next. Then Ash’s girlfriend, Linda. And now it’s on like John and his fawn. Ash grabs an axe and does his best to fend everyone off. Stupid Scott, who ain’t cracking jokes anymore, is too injured to help.

From there, it’s blood city. There is a LOT of blood in this movie, which I guess is one of the reasons it’s famous? No entity dies without gobs and gobs of liquid shooting out of them in every which way. Gobs of blood our man Ash will have to endure if he’s to make it to sunrise!

I just have to say that for a good 20 minutes there, I was ready to unleash my rage upon horror fans everywhere. This movie is so beloved by so many people but if you watched just those first 20 minutes, you would think you were watching a movie directed by your pal, Gerry, who works nights down at the Gas and Pass.

I mean it was baaaaaaaad.

I’ll tell you the moment that changed for me, though.

It was when Cheryl went into the forest and was met with an unrequited romantic pursuit by the trees. I thought to myself, oh, okay, we may have something here.

And, really, the entire movie changed after that. It was like two different films. I don’t know what happened but everything about the production became more confident.

Unfortunately, like a lot of low-budget horror, the screenplay was clearly not a priority. Raimi put more effort into it than those guys over on the Friday the 13th production, but not much. I’m not even sure there was a single plot development, lol. It was just, demon lurks, demon possesses, possessed friend attacks, rinse and repeat.

And you know what? It works!

I can’t imagine trying to keep a narrative like that going for 90 minutes in just four rooms, though. And SMALL rooms, too. That living room was miniature. If you killed someone, their body was basically right next to you on the ground.

The biggest tell about the lack of a screenplay were the characters. It wasn’t clear who the hero was until the final third of the film, when Ash becomes the only un-possessed character left. But, before that, the guy was background noise. He was the least vocal character of the bunch.

It reminded me of “Alien,” in the way that Ripley was non-existent for the majority of the movie until she, essentially, became the last person left and then we had no choice but to anoint her as our main character. Ash was very much cut from the same cloth.

This movie sent me off on an intense journey to find that mythical answer to the question, what makes this movie work and 99% of its imitators fail? Because we’ve all seen the bad versions of Evil Dead. Heck, we saw the bad version OF Evil Dead, in the 2013 remake.

Why does this work and all those other movies not work?

Here’s my unscientific answer. The Evil Dead is infused with a rarefied energy – and that’s the energy of a group of people desperate to break in. They know that this was it for them. Very few people raise 300,000 dollars (over a million in today’s money), make a bad movie, and get another shot at it. You have to get it right.

And this movie feels like that to me. The energy throughout its second act is just as intense as any 300 million dollar Marvel movie you’ll see today. There’s something about desperation that supercharges an artist’s creativity.

I’ve watched so much content lately that has no heartbeat to it. Andor is a good example. It’s lifeless. It’s hard to make something come alive when you don’t have that 180 beats per minute energy pumping away like The Evil Dead did in its veins.

Is this a perfect movie? Definitely not. There were times when the production value was so poor that I was pulled out of the film. But, by and large, the movie works. And for that reason, I think it’s a great entry into the approved Scriptshadow Spooktacular Club!

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the stream (if you can find it!)
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: You have a superpower that everyone working in the business right now does not have. And that’s your desire to succeed and make it in this business. If you can take that energy and place it in the DNA of your script, you can write something that feels way more alive than anything these dead-inside work-for-hire Hollywood writers are churning out right now!  I promise you that!

As someone who reads a lot of scripts – scripts of every level – I’m lucky enough to be one of the few people who will read a top level professional screenplay and then, just a few hours later, a script from a brand-new writer.

This allows me to study screenwriting from a unique perspective, as it allows me to see, almost in real time, the differences between pro level work and beginner level work.

I was doing a lot of that this week. Reading beginner scripts then professional scripts then beginner scripts again. And I kept encountering the same mistake over and over by the beginners. Which is that they don’t exhibit any quality control over their ideas.

They instead have something I call “I Can Do It Too” Syndrome.

“I Can Do It Too” Syndrome is an evil infectious virus that most beginners don’t realize they’re sick with. It’s the act of liking something from other movies so much that they want to show that they can do it too.

As I’ve stated before, almost every screenwriter’s motivation, whether they’re aware of it or not, is to rewrite the movies they fell in love with as kids and young adults. If they liked Star Wars, they want to write their big space opera epic. If they liked Die Hard, they want to write that big action thriller with a fun one-liner spitting protagonist. If they liked Step-Brothers, they’re determined to write a fun goofy two-hander comedy.

While imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I can assure you that this syndrome is KILLING YOUR SCREENWRITING GAINS.

Because whether you realize it or not, every person who reads your script is comparing it to the movie you’re inspired by. And guess what? Your script is losing. You’re never going to write a similar movie to a classic movie and beat it. You’re never going to write a space epic better than Star Wars. You’re never going to write a movie about a guy trapped in a military base taken over by bad guys where he has to save his wife that’s better than Die Hard.

You are only going to fall short in the eyes of the readers. They’re going to read your script and whether they say it to your face or not, they’re thinking, “This is just a not-as-good ripoff of [whatever your favorite movie is].”

But for some strange reason – and I put myself in this category when I was starting out too – beginner writers are unable to see the similarities between their script and the movie they’re copying. To them, that movie was an *inspiration* for their script. It doesn’t matter that the main character is basically the same. It doesn’t matter that 75% of the set pieces are similar. It doesn’t matter that a lot of similar dialogue lines are used or that a lot of supporting characters seem eerily similar to that favorite movie of theirs. In their minds, it’s different *BECAUSE THEY WROTE IT*.

And that’s the big mistake. Assuming that because the story is coming from their fingertips as opposed to someone else’s, it can’t be mistaken for any other movie. The mere fact that they wrote it is what makes it unique.

But that’s not reality.

Readers have a very broad filter for what they consider “familiar.” They think way more scripts are familiar than different. That’s because there have been a lot of great movies over the years. So they’re always thinking, “This feels too much like The Exorcist.” “This feels too much like The 40 Year Old Virgin.” “This feels too much like The Hunger Games.”

I can assure you, one of the most common feelings a reader has is, “This script is just like [so and so].” And beginners are the most susceptible to this because they don’t yet know it’s a common problem and therefore don’t know to look out for it. Again, they think that the mere fact that they’re writing the movie means it will automatically be unique no matter what.

So, if you want to gradate into the intermediate level of screenwriting, one of the easiest ways to do so is to squash this mistake and never make it again. Cause if you’re writing original ideas with original execution, you’re ahead of 90% of the people out there.

How do you achieve this?

With an Idea Bouncer.

Your screenwriting brain is a club. Just like any other club, you need to be careful about who you let inside. That’s the bouncer’s job. He’s there to only let original ideas into your club. He has to screen every single idea that arrives and ask, “Is this original enough to come inside?”

You’re going to do this on two fronts. The first is the more important front – the concept itself. The good news is, if this is a strong highly original movie idea, it wards off a ton of potential problems down the line. An original movie idea can withstand a solid chunk of cliched choices. On the downside, if you let a bad movie idea into your club, there’s virtually no way to save the night.

The other front is all the individual creative choices within your script that need to populate the club (aka, your screenplay). This includes the main character. The supplemental characters. The plot developments. The setting. The tone. The scene choices. The set pieces. Every one of these choices must line up in front of the club and your bouncer needs to determine if they’re original enough to come inside.

The more unoriginal (or “familiar) ideas that get past your bouncer, the lower the probability that your script will feel unique, even if you have a unique concept. Because if you’re writing a bunch of scenes that I read all the time, that will neutralize your strong concept.

I can’t emphasize enough how big of a problem this is in screenwriting. I suppose I understand why new screenwriters make this mistake. You can’t prevent a mistake that you haven’t yet learned is a mistake. However, I cannot, under any circumstances, accept non-beginner screenwriters making this mistake. If you’ve written more than five scripts and you haven’t even hired an idea bouncer for your club yet, that’s unacceptable.

I’m bringing this up because I read tons of screenplays and most of them are boring due to the fact that the writer isn’t even trying to be original. They’re just repurposing their favorite movies and their favorite scenes under a new title and a slightly different story and thinking that’s going to do it. But these scripts are the easiest ones to dismiss because they’re uninspiring and forgettable.

Now, I realize this is an imperfect argument. Cause you can bring up The Equalizer and John Wick and say, “Those movies sure seemed familiar, Carson.” Yes, it’s true. They do.

But those movies are outliers. First off, The Equalizer doesn’t count cause that movie was being made in-house and hired a writer to do what they wanted. It wasn’t a spec. And John Wick was destined to be a straight-to-VOD-cemetery crap-fest until the directors repurposed it into a slick action flick with game-changing fight choreography.

Let’s not forget that everyone in town not only passed on the John Wick script, they laughed at it. And while that may sound like they were the ones who made the mistake, it’s pretty hard to look at that script before the film and think, “Yup, this is going to be a billion dollar franchise.”

Point being, you can’t use the most successful outliers in history as an excuse for why your script gets to be cliched. You’re operating as a one-man or one-woman business and that business is your screenplay. It’s got to speak for itself. Which means your idea bouncer has to be the most discerning in the business. He’s got to be the bouncer who’s looking at that 9 out of 10 but not letting her in because her outfit looks like it was cobbled together at the Salvation Army.

I want you guys to take this seriously. I want your bouncer to have an extremely high bar. I want you to give him a name. I want you to share that name in the comments. I want you to give him a backstory. You can share that too if you want. Heck, I want you to give him an accent and tell me which actor is going to play him in his biopic. I want him to feel as real as yourself. Because he’s got one of the most important jobs in the world – he’s quality control over your ideas. He needs to be hard on those ideas because I can guarantee you, we, the reader, are going to be a thousand times harder on them than him.

Now go write something original and great.

Genre: Thriller/Horror
Premise: After an introverted college kid gets together with a pessimistic strange young woman, the two visit her father’s old home, where many secrets lie below the surface.
About: One of the most prolific writers in the screenwriting business, Zahler, wrote this one in 2005. He would eventually turn it into an audio-story, in the hopes of improving his chances of getting a film adaptation. The audio story got some pretty big-time actors in Vincent D’Onofrio, Will Patton, and Kurt Russell’s son, Wyatt, playing the lead. But, as of today, it still hasn’t been turned into a film.
Writer: S. Craig Zahler
Details: 95 pages

Lili Simmons played the role of Ruby in the Narrow Caves audio book

The man still has one of my favorite scripts of all time in my Top 25 list (Brigands!). So I’m always excited to read one of his screenplays.

Plus, this is probably the shortest script he’s ever written! So how could I resist?

It’s 1981. 21 year old Walter finds himself at a party he doesn’t want to be at. That’s where he meets Ruby, a girl who doesn’t want to be there either. But in her case, she lives at the house. So she parks herself in the backyard, away from everyone, and reads a book all night.

Walter sees her and makes a move but she stiff-arms him. Determined to try again, Walter shows up the next day, pretending he left something there and gets rejected a second time! But later Ruby has second thoughts and calls him to go on a date.

Cut to six months later and they’re boyfriend-girlfriend. Ruby finally wants Walter to meet her father, who lives in the middle of nowhere. So off they go, and right away, Walter’s kind of put off by this guy. He seems a little weird.

During their stay, Ruby tells Walter about some strange experiences she had growing up in the area, including occasionally seeing mysterious naked men running around. After Walter finds an old diary of Ruby’s dad’s, he becomes really creeped out by this place and wants to leave.

However, that night, both of them are knocked out and kidnapped by a group of albinos. When they wake up, they’re in some cave. The albinos bring a strange disgusting fruit and make Ruby eat it. Over the course of the next two weeks, Ruby loses all of her teeth and hair, likely because of this death cave fruit.

On the brink of death himself, Walter gets a final reprieve when Ruby’s dad shows up and cuts him loose. He’s too late to save his daughter, though, who killed herself. The dad then inexplicably abandons Walter, forcing him to find a way out of this hellhole himself.

You’ve never read anything like this before.

I mean, you sort of have.

You’ve read about people going to a remote location and encountering danger. But the danger introduced into this story isn’t quite like any you’ve seen before. That ends up being the script’s biggest strength and biggest weakness.

One of the things I take for granted these days is how well I understand structure. Cause I just assume everyone else understands it as well as I do.

To me, structure is obvious.

The first 25% of a script is your beginning, aka your setup. The next 50% of your script is your middle, aka where all the conflict happens, and the last 25% is your ending, aka your resolution.

There are smaller markers to meet within those sections, but that’s pretty much it.

The reason structure is important is because it’s the most satisfying way to hear a story. When someone tells you a story, even if it’s just about their day, it works best if that person sets up the scenario, then tells you all the crazy stuff that happened to them, and then wraps things up with a big satisfying conclusion.

It doesn’t work nearly as well if someone sets up their day in a quick 5 seconds, then spends the next 20 minutes telling you what happened, then rushes through the resolution, spitting it out in 15 seconds.

The story feels off somehow, even for those unfamiliar with storytelling.

So these story beats are important because they exist within a framework that the receiver is familiar with.

My big issue with this script is that the first act is basically the first 60% of the screenplay (meet everyone, from Ruby to her father to her brothers to the home they stay at). Then we get our second act, which is the next 30% of the screenplay (kidnapped by the cave people), and then the final act is the last 5% of the screenplay (his escape).

When you read it, it feels lopsided.

Now, does this mean you should be a slave to structure? No. Of course not. Good writers should play with structure. But there has to be a good reason for it. Any altering of traditional structure has to feel like an organic extension of the story. 500 Days of Summer played with structure in that it jumped into different random days of the relationship. However, the chaos of that structure was baked into the concept.

Here, it feels like this should’ve been a traditionally told story. That’s why the extreme structural issues feel so off. This isn’t the kind of movie you do that with.

I’m assuming a few of you will have the following question: Why wouldn’t the moment Walter and Ruby head to her house, on page 27, be the beginning of the second act? Why am I saying that the second act doesn’t start until they’re stuck in the cave, on page 60?

Because whatever the big hook of your movie is, that needs to be the beginning of the second act. If you write Jurassic World, you better brace for a riot from ticket buyers if you don’t get to Jurassic World until minute 60. You gotta get there at the end of your first act, if not sooner.

The hook here are these cave people who kidnap them. So that’s gotta happen much earlier in the story.

Now, of course, all of this is debatable. There are no official rules when it comes to storytelling. But read this script and tell me its pacing doesn’t feel lopsided. It does. And that’s directly because of the structural issues.

Which is too bad because I think this script had a lot of potential. Zahler has come up with some really weird creepy creatures and he’s got an elaborate mythology backing up their history.

On top of that, Zahler continues to kick butt in the specificity department of script description. He’s one of the best at bringing you into scenes, scenarios, situations, and entire screenplays.

He paints really vivid worlds that make us feel like we’re there.

And he started off great with Walter and Ruby. Ruby was tough in an organic way (and not how female characters are written these days – tough because the climate demands it) and I really enjoyed how Walter and Ruby got together. It was romantic yet truthful. It felt like Zahler really knew these characters.

But after that, Ruby loses her gusto. I don’t know what happened but she becomes a passenger throughout the rest of the script and I was baffled by it because I liked her so much when I met her. Maybe there’s a lesson to be learned there. Don’t just give your characters snazzy memorable opening scenes. Keep that personality blazing for the rest of the movie.

Characters who are passive and neutral are rarely interesting. Movie characters need to be polarized somehow. They should be either really intense negative or really intense positive. Because those extremes are where personalities shine. Nobody knows anyone who has a great middle-of-the-road personality. I wanted Zahler to take both of these characters up a notch.

Narrow Caves is a mixed bag. I would say if you’re a Zahler fan like me, definitely check it out. If you’re a horror fan, you might like it cause of the unique nature of its creepiness. But as a screenplay, the structural issues were too much to overcome.

Screenplay link: Narrow Caves

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

What I learned: Sometimes when we’re describing a situation, we can get caught up in trying to be “Writers” with a capital “W.” So, for example, let’s say we’re writing a heavy dinner scene with four characters. We might write, “Joe has an intense look of consternation in his deep-set eyes while Fran is fraught with anxiety yet doing her best to hide it. Nick shares a glance with Sara, the two of them plagued with the residue of a long week of too much work and not enough sleep.” Granted, Zahler is susceptible to this over-describing. But there was one line he wrote in a scene similar to this that I thought was perfect. He sets up that the people are sitting at the table then he writes: “Nobody looks happy.” Those three words did more for me understanding this scene than the 40 words I wrote above. Just remember with screenwriting, less is usually more. And a clear succinct description is usually more effective than a long lumbering one.