Every Monday in October I’ll be reviewing a classic horror film!

Genre: Horror
Premise: After recovering from his friend being killed by a wolf, an American traveling in England heads back to his nurse’s London home, where he begins to suspect that he’s a werewolf.
About: The famous wolf transformation scene in this movie was so impactful that it forced the Academy to come up with a makeup Oscar. Director John Landis came up with the idea for the movie at 18. But no one wanted to make the script for a full 10 years.
Writer: John Landis
Details: 97 minutes

Do you feel that?

It’s the hair standing up on the back of your neck.

That’s because it’s October, the month of ghosts, ghouls, monsters, and zombies. “Smile’s” 22 million dollar box office proved just how much people love to be scared in October.

With horror opening weekends, I’ve learned, it’s not about how good the movie is. It’s about how good the marketing is. That means what does the poster look like? And what does the trailer look like? Smile has that in spades. And it’s something all of you horror writers should be thinking about BEFORE you write your horror scripts. Not after. This movie was marketed very simply on a sinister looking smile and boy did it work. Cause nobody expected this film to take in 22 million dollars.

The lesson Universal learned was a little more complex with “Bros” bombing. I think a lot of people are going to point to moviegoers not being ready to accept a mainstream LGBTQ movie. But I think if you put a real movie star in that role over Billy Eichner, the movie at least has a chance. Eichner is annoying. He built his comedy brand on negativity. He’s not a leading man and is, arguably, unlikable. He just wasn’t going to be the guy to break a gay romcom into the mainstream.

Not sure how we segue out of that into London circa 1981 so I’m not even going to try. I’ll just say that like a lot of you, I saw this movie as a kid, and that werewolf transformation scene blew me away. It was a part of my nightmares for years to come.

But the funny thing about that scene is that it was so good it overshadowed my memory of the rest of the film. I don’t remember anything about this movie other than that scene. So I was really looking forward to watching it again as it was basically like watching a brand new movie.

The film follows two Americans, David and Jack, just out of college, who are traveling around England. After visiting a weird Yorkshire pub, they’re attacked by a wolf and Jack is brutally killed. The Yorkshiremen from the bar shoot and kill the wolf before it can also kill David.

David then wakes up in a London hospital two weeks later where he learns that his best friend is dead. As David recovers, Nurse Alex gets a crush on him. And his doctor, Dr. Hirsch, believes David is suffering from a delusion that they were attacked by a wolf, as the Yorkshiremen claimed the two were attacked by a madman.

While at the hospital, David starts getting visits from his dead friend, Jack, who informs him that David’s a werewolf now and must kill himself because, if he doesn’t, he’s going to turn into a wolf at the next full moon and start killing people. David dismisses these visions as trauma. But in the back of his mind, he wonders if his dead friend is right.

Eventually David is released and he goes to stay with Nurse Alex. Meanwhile, Doctor Hirsch heads to that Yorkshire pub and believes that David might start to hurt people due to believing that he’s a werewolf. It’s too late, though. The full moon comes and – kazow – he finally turns into a werewolf. From that point forward, his killing spree begins.

First off, great movie.

I was starting to worry that I wasn’t capable of truly enjoying movies anymore because I’ve seen so many. But this proves that it’s not me. It’s the movies. The people making the movies have to do better. Cause this film was basically brand new to me and I thought it was great.

I noticed a lot of good choices here.

For starters, David and Jack were a lot goofier than I remember them being. And when Jack gets killed, I learned a valuable lesson. Which is that, these days, characters are goofy just to be goofy. But here, the goofiness and the jokiness serves a purpose. Which is that Jack’s shocking death hits you harder because of the fact that these two were such good friends. And that friendship was built in just 10 minutes by having these two be very comfortable and jokey around each other. In other words, the choice to make them jokey, was 100% story motivated.

Same thing for Jack’s transformation into a wolf. Of course I remember the actual transformation as a kid. But what I didn’t remember was how much pain Jack was in while it was happening. That’s what stayed with me this time. He was in immense pain as it was happening. And they really draw the transformation out so the pain we feel is extended. Again, it’s a STORY and CHARACTER related reason why the scene hits us so hard. Not just amazing special effects.

I also thought they did a great job with the exposition. I’m working on the exposition section of my dialogue book at the moment so this hit me especially hard. But every single exposition scene takes place when dead Jack comes back to explain to David how the werewolf thing works. The thing is, we’re so focused on the amazing special effects of Dead David (he becomes more disgusting with each visit) that we have no clue that massive exposition is being thrown at us.

And kudos to Landis because he created the biggest distraction of all for the biggest exposition scene of all – that being the porn movie where David and Jack talk in the back of the theater and Jack introduces David to all of his dead victims from last night. I can’t remember anything as creative as that to hide exposition.

Granted, this is more of a writer-director trick since it wouldn’t have worked as well on the page (we can’t see special effects on the page). But it was still genius.

The only thing that perplexed me was the structure. David stays in the hospital all the way until page 35. He doesn’t turn into the wolf until 60 pages in! They just wouldn’t do that today.

And I was really thrown by it because I didn’t think it was necessary. Every movie can benefit from urgency. Urgency keeps the plot zipping along. So why did Landis turn his back on urgency??

Finally, I realized what was going on. They didn’t have any choice but to wait an entire month. Obviously, on the day David and Jack were attacked, it had to be a full moon. So we were going to have to wait another month until the next full moon turned David into a werewolf.

That’s why the movie doesn’t seem interested in pushing anything forward. David has these bizarre extended, ultimately silly, nightmares while he’s in the hospital. When he gets back to the nurse’s place, there’s an entire day where he has nothing to do so he just hangs out. Typically, you want to avoid this in screenwriting. Your hero should never be in a position where they have nothing to do.

Ironically, the movie works in spite of this. And I think it’s because they had such a large carrot dangling in front of the audience (the coming full moon) that we didn’t care that we had to wait. We were so locked in by the suspense, that time didn’t really exist (that’s what good suspense does, by the way – eliminate time).

It seems as if Landis wasn’t ignorant to David’s lack of purpose. When one has a protagonist without a goal, it’s important that someone else in the story does have a goal. At least that way, we can cut back to them occasionally, to give the story some forward momentum. That character came in the package of Dr. Hirsch. He’s the one who starts getting concerned about David. Therefore, he goes out to the Yorkshire pub to see if he can get more answers. He’s the one who grabs Nurse Alex to head back to the city in an attempt to find David before he can hurt people.

That’s a little tip for you if you ever find yourself with an unmotivated main character. Make sure at least one other key character in the story is motivated with a strong goal.

I just thought this was a really good film. It still holds up today. Yes, there are some goofy parts (I could do without the killer Nazi ghosts and ghouls nightmares). But the core of the story works. We care about the main character. We like all the supporting characters. We want to see what happens to our hero. That’s really the only rule that matters in writing: The audience needs to want to see what happens to your hero. If you have that, you have a movie. If you don’t, you have Bros.

Movie is free to watch on Amazon Prime!

Screenplay Link: An American Werewolf In London

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

What I learned: Intense suspense. If you can’t have the urgency, replace it with VERY STRONG SUSPENSE. It can’t be rinky-dinky suspense. It’s got to be intense suspense, like the impending full moon in An American Werewolf in London.

The newsletter just hit your Inboxes! We have plenty of fun in store for you this month, including, wait, an IMPRESSIVE script review??? I thought you didn’t give those out anymore, Carson. Well surprise surprise. I guess I do. And it happens to be from two of the best screenwriters in Hollywood who inexplicably teamed up for this script. Oh, and you can download the script and read it yourself! We’ve also got my continued frustrations with Andor. We’ve got a cool Hollywood story about a creative team and what they did to win the next movie in a coveted franchise. We’ve got new Blade Runner news. We’ve got updates on the myriad of Scriptshadow things going on, like contests, showdowns, and my book. So you’ll DEFINITELY want to read this newsletter when you have a minute. E-mail me at Carsonreeves1@gmail.com to get on the Scriptshadow Newsletter mailing list!

I continue to work hard on the Scriptshadow Dialogue Book. One of the most time-consuming parts of the process has been cross-checking all the tips against my favorite movies.

I’ll watch a favorite movie and, with each scene, make sure that the dialogue being spoken doesn’t contradict anything I’m saying in my book. For the most part, it’s gone great. Everything that I’ve watched lines up perfectly with the tips I’ve written.

And then I read Sideways.

For those of you who don’t know, Sideways is a movie that came out in 2005 about two friends in their 40s, eternal pessimist Miles and sex addict, Jack, who go on a wine-tasting weekend the week before Jack gets married. The screenplay, written by Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, won the Academy Award for best adaptation.

In order to understand why this script threw a wrench into my previously perfect book, you must first understand the principle tenets I’m building the book around. Namely that every dialogue scene needs to be motivated by a character who wants something.

Typically, that something is a goal – such as needing advice or needing to confess – or the need to solve a problem – such as a car breaks down on the side of a deserted road; what do you do? But, mainly, there needs to be purpose in the scene, and that purpose needs to be driven by the characters.

Then I read Sideways and in the first half of the screenplay, there were, at most, three scenes that abided by this rule. Characters were speaking to speak. Sometimes just to fill up time. And I’m thinking… wait a minute here. This goes against everything I believe.

Here’s a scene from early in the script, when Miles comes to pick up Jack.  Miles is thrust into a room with Jack, his fiancé, and his fiancé’s family.  Notice how there’s no one here with any real goal (the cake tasting gets them in here but it’s not a true goal since it’s inconsequential). Nobody really wants to talk to each other. They’re just talking cause they’re stuck in the same room for a moment.

Then here’s another scene where Miles and Jack are having dinner with two women they recently met. Note how nobody really has a goal here. Sure, Jack wants to get laid and Miles likes Maya. But nobody has a specific goal in the scene. It’s basically just chit-chat.

Some might say, “Well, the goal it to decide on what they’re going to eat.”  Yeah but that’s not a real scene goal. Ordering in movies is inconsequential, as is the case here as well.  Does it matter what they order?  No.  So it’s chit-chat.  It’s the stuff you usually leave out in screenplays.

Now, to be fair, Sideways is a high-brow movie written for well-educated folks 40+ years old who live on the Upper West Side or Beverly Hills. And it’s an indie film. It’s not meant to pull you in and bombard you with drama every five minutes like a big-budget Hollywood film. So the rules are a little different.

With that said, the dialogue does work. It’s fun listening to these friends banter back and forth for two hours. So what’s going on?  How is that happening?

There were a few things I learned.

First, I came to realize that the scene goals in indie films can be softer (or more subtle) than in mainstream films. They don’t need to be as big of a deal. So while in a Hollywood movie, the goal of a conversation might be to figure out how to defeat Vulture before he destroys the city, in an indie movie, the goal might simply be to teach another character how to taste wine.

I do think soft character goals in scenes are dangerous. They’re more likely to result in boring conversations. For example, go write your own scene where one character teaches another character how to taste wine. Just how entertaining can you make that dialogue?  Especially when nothing’s at stake in the scene.

But a skilled dialogue writer has tools in their toolbox that you don’t yet have and, therefore, know how to navigate these softer scenes to still make the dialogue work.

That leads me to the second thing I discovered, which is that Payne did something long before any of his scenes were written that ensured the dialogue would be entertaining. He made Miles and Jack the most opposite of opposites ever. Miles is a pessimist. Miles’ marriage fell apart. Miles’ book is never getting published. He’s a bitter shell of a man.  Jack, meanwhile, sees possibility in everything. He’s optimistic. He’s about to get married. He loves life and loves meeting people.  They are polar opposites.

This ensures that even if Payne never once comes up with a scene that has a strong character goal and actual consequences, that the scene is still going to be entertaining on some level due to the fact that these two will never see eye-to-eye. Every conversation they have is going to have a push and pull to it.

One of the key tenets of my book is, “Conflict solves all.” Because, if all else fails and you’re not doing many of the “proper” things needed to make your dialogue work, conflict can save you because when two people aren’t on the same page, there’s at least going to be some push and pull in the scene that will generate drama. And that’s what Payne so wisely does here. He bakes conflict into the Miles-Jack relationship from the start to ensure that, even when the plot isn’t humming, the conversations will still be entertaining.

Another thing I learned is that a character goal can be extended out beyond the immediate scene. So, in that scene above where the four characters are having dinner, Jack’s ultimate goal is to bed Stephanie. Originally, I was under the impression that dialogue goals needed to be scene specific. But, in this case, the goal is going to take several scenes and that’s okay. This is just the first of those scenes. Therefore Jack does, technically, have a goal.  It’s just softer. It’s to establish sexual chemistry in order to get laid later on.

Finally, I learned that there are actually scenarios where nobody having a goal helps the dialogue. In the first scene that I posted, Miles doesn’t want to be talking to Jack’s in-laws. Jack’s in-laws don’t necessarily want to be talking to Miles. I guess they might be a little curious about him but they seem more focused on being polite than anything.

But that’s the reason the scene works. Because dialogue can be fun under awkward circumstances. The fact that nobody actually wants to speak is what makes the speaking fun. Cause we’ve all been in those situations. We’re stuck in a conversation we don’t want to be in and we just try and survive it. The desperate attempts to survive the conversation, wondering when the misery will be over, are what make it funny.

The more I study dialogue, the more complex I realize it is. But it’s really fun to keep learning this stuff and I can’t wait to share the book with you guys.

Also, a new newsletter is hitting your Inboxes this weekend! I’ll be reviewing a big-bugdget screenplay written by two of the biggest sci-fi screenwriters in Hollywood. I never knew these two teamed up on a script so I’m really excited to read it. So if you’re not already on the list, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com to get on!

GET $100 OFF A SCRIPTSHADOW SCREENPLAY CONSULTATION! – I’ve read over 10,000 scripts.  Done over 1000 consultations.  I am the guy who can figure out the issues hampering your script AND HELP YOU FIX THEM so you can start doing better in contests, start getting more responses from queries, and start actually getting jobs in the industry!  I have a 4 page notes package or a more detailed 8 page option designed to improve every aspect of your script, from your plot to your characters to your dialogue.  I also give feedback on loglines (just $25!), outlines, synopses, first acts, or any aspect of screenwriting you need help with. If you’re interested, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com and let’s set something up!  

Genre: Horror
Premise: A young black man fights for his life after taking a job at a white-owned beauty parlor, whose monstrous owners concocted a wildly popular shampoo that requires a sickening ingredient.
About: We’re going back a year to a high-ranking 2020 Black List script (17 votes) that I never got to. The script was adapted from the writer’s own short film.
Writer: Chaz Hawkins
Details: 103 pages

Ski Mask The Slump God for “O?” 

While reading “The Sauce,” I went back and forth, throughout the script, on whether it was a movie or not.

Yesterday we were talking about “movies” vs “scripts” and, at first glance, this is a movie. You’ve got a character who gets stuck in a dangerous situation and must get out of it. It’s got your concept, it’s got your goal, it’s got your stakes, it’s got your urgency.

However, the script is adapted from a short film. And that’s evident when you read it. Because it spends the first half of its length building up to the “sauce’s” reveal. It does this because it knows that once you reveal the “sauce,” the script becomes about escaping. And it’s hard to build a long escape story around people who are stuck inside, essentially, a warehouse sized room.

But we’ll get to that. First, let’s talk about the plot.

22 year old Jason lives in a city called Coolchitown, which may be short for Chi-Town, which may be short for Chicago. Or it may just be a fictional town. It’s unclear. Jason is reeling from two issues. One, his mother recently died. And two, he has extremely low testosterone, to the point where he needs to take steroid pills.

After Jason is fired from his uncle’s barbershop because his uncle can’t pay him anymore, Jason takes a janitor job at the new hair salon across the street called “The Sauce,” which specializes in making straight hair curly. And it’s all because of their secret ingredient, the “sauce.” By the way, many black men in the area have gone missing over the last two months. I think you know where this is headed. Or do you??

The Sauce is run by Priscilla and a group of gorgeous Greek women who are very secretive and who immediately love Jason. And Jason loves the place too! He’s making a lot more money here than he did at that barbershop, that’s for sure. But Jason wants to make more money. So when his best friend, O, and his former crush, Meddy, come up with a plan to steal from The Sauce, Jason is all in.

So they go there late at night, break into the safe, find 100,000 dollars, and think their lives are about to change. Well, they are. Just not the way they think they are. Curiosity gets the best of them and they open the private door that Priscilla said never to open. They’re shocked to find a giant orgy going on between white women and black men. And it doesn’t take much for O and Jason to join in.

Jason then wakes up, still inside this secret room, which appears to have powers that allow it to expand out into this giant “spa.” While O wants to stay here for the rest of his life, Jason wants out. And that’s because Jason’s medical deficiency – his low testosterone – is making him think clearly! He’s got to find a way out of here before Priscilla figures out a way to fix his Low-T problem and, in the process, permanently turn Jason into another “sauce” supplier.

I want to give the writer props here because the whole time we were building up to “what’s going on here?” I thought these Sauce women were killing black men and using their blood in some ritual that allowed them to create this perfect curly shampoo. I definitely didn’t think there were giant orgies going on to extract “their secret sauce” so to speak.

I always give credit to writers who can surprise me.

But let’s go back to my earlier issue of this being a stretched-out narrative. Something that all writers go through – I know I used to agonize over this when I was younger – is “does your concept have the legs to last an entire movie?” And it took me, probably, ten years of being around concepts and seeing them played out in screenplay form before I was inherently able to know if a concept had legs or not. It’s not easy.

But adapting 5-10 minute short films into features is about as hard as it’s going to get for a writer to create a feature length film that doesn’t feel stretched out. Which “The Sauce” is. It takes us all the way until page 55 before the orgy is unveiled. That’s 55 pages you’re stringing the audience along on a single carrot. Most audiences are just not going to be that patient. Especially these days.

And then you run into just as difficult of a problem. Which is, how do the characters escape this room and how do we expand that out another 55 minutes? You really feel that when you’re reading the script. You can sense the writer looking for ways to stretch things out (O takes Jason on a tour of the place?). And screenplays are supposed to read the opposite of that. They’re supposed to read like time is slipping away.

Now, to the writer’s credit, he does some pretty imaginative stuff with the mythology. I thought it was quite creative the way things were tied back to Greece and the Gods and the sirens, and how the workers were also birds, which led to some fun imagery.

But, in the end, if the pacing isn’t satisfactory, the reader or the viewer tune out. And the pacing here, especially throughout the first half of the script, felt like it was being stretched.

I’m not saying this can’t be done. Lights Out is an example of a 3 minute short film that went on to become a feature and make 70 million dollars. I’m just saying this is stuff you need to consider when you’re picking your concept. Or thinking of expanding a short film.

I have a writer-director friend who wrote this fun short movie about a guy whose car gets stolen at a gas-station and his kid is in the backseat. It’s the perfect concept for a short film because this guy has to chase down this car to save his kid. And my friend wants to turn it into a feature. But I don’t see how you do it. Because following a car with your kid in it is great for 7 minutes. But it gets old if you’re doing it for 107 minutes. He still won’t listen to me, lol, but, yeah, we all go through this because when we fall in love with ideas we only see possibilities, not problems.

Anyway, this script is okay but the slow pacing issues born out of a thin idea being stretched to the max kept me from giving it a recommendation.

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

What I learned 1: The sneaky backstory character introduction. I’ve seen writers do this and it’s clever. What you do is you introduce your character not by describing them, but by giving us a little backstory on the character. It’s a cheat code to sneak some backstory in. Here’s how Jason is introduced.

JASON (22), black, a kid that could have made it out the hood but gave up before he saw the greener grass.

What I learned 2 – Don’t make obscure references in your scripts. You’ll be lucky if 5% of the readers catch them. Here’s an example from this script: “Agatha grins slowly, sexually like Herman Cain in one of his 2012 election campaign commercials.” Some people from yesterday didn’t know who William Hung was. William Hung has, maybe, the single most popular talent show audition of all time. And some people don’t know who he is. If people don’t know who William Hung is, they definitely don’t know who someone from a 2012 political ad is. Yet I see writers doing this all the time. You can include references like that IN DIALOGUE, because maybe it’s in that character’s personality to make obscure references. But you can’t do that when you’re talking directly to the reader. Because all you’re going to get is an annoyed eye-roll and the reader thinking, “Who the heck is that?”

Is today’s script killing the Black List?

Genre: Biopic
Premise: The true story of the aftermath of the most infamous audition of all time – William Hung’s “She Bangs” cover on American Idol.
About: This script finished with 9 votes on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Tricia Lee
Details: 125 pages

Somebody made an interesting comment to me the other day.

They had this cool idea for a script and noted that they were trying to figure out what direction to take it in. They said they were thinking about writing it for the Black List, which meant making it a slow burn, character driven, and more “cerebral.”

Or, he noted, he could “write a script that will actually become a movie.”

This characterization of the Black List struck me. That the writer thought of it as a compilation of scripts that will never become movies.

Because it didn’t used to be that way. The Black List used to gleefully tout how many of its scripts would go on to become films. But is that the case anymore? A lot has been written about how the Black List cares more about social causes these days than what it used to be about, which was compiling a list of the best scripts in Hollywood.

So I decided to do a quick unscientific look at a current Black List compared to an older Black List. I went through the 2019 Black List and counted how many of the scripts went on to become movies. I didn’t use 2020 or 2021 because scripts need time to get produced. But 2019 is still within the time period where the Black List had refocused its mission, leaning into more socially conscious screenplays and writers.

Here’s what I found. In the 2019 Black List, 8 out of 66 scripts became movies. That’s equal to about 8%. In the 2010 Black List, 36 out of 76 scripts became movies. That’s equal to 47%.

Now I know a few of those scripts from the 2010 list took longer than 3 years to get made but it’s clear to me that the Black List used to be a place where, if you made the list, you’d have an almost 1 in 2 shot of getting your movie made. Now it looks like that’s closer to 1 in 8.

What this tells me is that the writers have figured the Black List code out. They know that they can write scripts that have no shot at becoming movies but because the Black List loves those types of scripts, they’ll make the list. And since more scripts are being written to make the Black List as opposed to writing scripts that could be movies, the Black List has become more and more dominated by screenplays that aren’t movies.

Today’s script might be the perfect example of this.

The story is simple. William Hung is 21 years old in 2002, attending Berkley as an engineering student, when, on a whim, he auditions for American Idol, which was still early on in its run and Simon Cowell was fast becoming one of the biggest stars in the world for how mean he could be to aspiring singers.

An American Idol producer recognizes that she’s struck gold as soon as she hears the earnestness behind William Hung’s audition despite being a terrible singer and puts him through to audition on tape in front of the official judges.

It doesn’t go well.

Months later, when the show airs, William Hung is walking around Berkley and everyone starts approaching him, congratulating him on his audition. What quickly becomes apparent is that William is being made fun of, and the only one who doesn’t seem to realize this is William himself.

So when he’s offered a singing contract, he’s more than happy to sign it. His goal is to use this fame to make enough money to buy a house for his parents. Along the way, he’ll deal with fake friends, girls who use him, lots of ridicule, and even a woman who marries him and later takes half the money he earned from all his singing in the divorce. But through it all, William Hung always remains positive.

Let me start off by saying this script isn’t bad. It’s actually pretty heartwarming. The writer explores themes of celebrity and the pressures of being an Asian in America. And there’s something very sweet about William Hung as a character. His priority is spreading a positive message within a worldwide tsunami of negativity. It’s not reaching to say that we need more people like William Hung on this planet. Especially today.

But come on.

This movie is never getting made.

And while I don’t claim to know what’s going on inside the writer’s head, I’d be surprised if she said she wrote this script in the hopes of it becoming a movie. It’s a music biopic, the catnip of all Black List catnips. Just by writing that word – biopic – next to the genre category, the script’s chances of making the list went up 5000%.

You’re probably wondering what that means. “A movie?”

What’s the difference between a script that’s a movie and a script that is only ever going to be a script?

The answer is in the word itself: “Movie.”

“Move.”

A movie script tends to have MOVEMENT. Characters need to go places. They need to do things. And they need to do them NOW. Because if they don’t, something terrible is going to happen.

Several years ago I did a script consultation for a writer. The broad strokes of his story were that a guy comes back to his hometown for a weekend and spends some time with a girl he kinda likes.

This writer’s plan was to sell the script. And I kept telling him, in as many ways as possible, that this wasn’t a movie. Two people hanging out isn’t a movie. There was no hook here to build a marketing campaign around. It was just two people chilling. And nothing even happened between them.

I told him, literally, the only way this becomes a movie is if you’re the director and you find the money and make it yourself. Nobody’s going to buy this because it’s not something anybody can make money off of.

There’s no MOVEMENT. There’s no hook. There’s nothing important going on. Nothing with genuine stakes attached.

Maybe today’s script isn’t the best example because, at least with music biopics, you have famous music. And people will show up to a movie to see all their favorite songs performed from that group. But this isn’t even a real artist. Nobody’s pining to hear William Hung sing a Richard Marx song.

Another growing problem I’m noticing in the industry is that we’re in this weird state of having so much content that it’s easier than ever to convince yourself that your obscure script idea can get made. And to a minor extent, that’s true. There are more openings for content than ever.

But the principles for what sells are still in place. You got to have a concept with a hook, something that entices a mass audience. You gotta have that MOVEMENT I’m talking about – characters with goals that have stakes, and urgency. And freaking CONFLICT. That was another problem with the consultation script. There wasn’t enough conflict between the main character and the girl.

Even TV shows are becoming like this. They’re moving away from strictly character-driven stories to mini-movies. So they need that concept, goal, stakes, urgency, conflict as well.

Look.

There’s an opportunity out there for someone who wants to start chronicling the best scripts in Hollywood again. Cause The Black List clearly isn’t doing that anymore. And even though I thought this script was fine and it was a fast read, it shouldn’t be celebrated as one of the top scripts in town.

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

What I learned: A few weeks ago, I pointed out the opening bully scene in Lord of the Rings as an example of a great way to create sympathy for your main character. Readers immediately like a character who’s being bullied. However, the reason the scene worked was that it found an inventive way to approach the bullying. This little girl lovingly creates a little origami boat and then floats it down the river. And some jerk boys start throwing rocks at it to try and sink it. It wasn’t the on-the-nose bully scene that I usually read in scripts. “Idol,” however, does contain the bully scene you DON’T want to write. William Hung is 10 years old. He’s singing badly. And then we get this line: “Suddenly, a FIST comes rushing toward William’s FACE and makes HARD CONTACT with his right eye. The fist belongs to ANGRY WHITE KID (10).” The “angry white kid” then starts yelling at him that he can’t sing. It’s the epitome of a stereotypical bullying scene, which is why it doesn’t work. Bullying scenes are one of the best ways to create sympathy for your hero. But just like everything else in screenwriting, you have to be creative with it. You can’t give us the on-the-nose, “anybody could think of this” bullying scene.