How to write a bland screenplay
Genre: Thriller
Premise: When eco-terrorists attack Los Angeles’ power grid and orchestrate a cascading citywide blackout, a jaded former Secret Service agent and a brilliant but unassuming engineer must fight their way across the metropolis – in the dark – to restore power before the city collapses.
About: This script made last year’s Black List. Kevin Yang made a movie called The Puppeteers last year, which is about the hidden world of transnational repression. Not sure what that means. It looks like Yang will also direct this film.
Writer: Kevin Yang
Details: 113 pages
My new plea to Black List writers? Hire me.
Not for my sake.
For your sake.
I can save you so much embarrassment from some of these really basic script errors, errors that are destroying your script from the inside out. I don’t know how you write a script about the fall of LA that feels this neutral, this devoid of energy.
32 year old Riley Smith is a Los Angeles Department of Water and Power junior engineer who’s inspecting some sort of electrical glitch at LAX which almost causes two planes to crash into each other. This near crash is the height of the script. It’s all downhill from here.
After doing some investigating, she sees that there’s a similar electrical problem at the Culver Electric Station, which is in a different part of the city. The problem is, none of her bosses think this is an issue. But she senses the connection could lead to a much bigger electrical issue across the city.
When LAX’s head of security, Magnus, learns of Riley’s theory, he tells her to join him because he’s headed over to a dam in the Hills which he believes might be linked to this electrical issue. The two head over there and find out that the dam has been messed with and that someone may be orchestrating these small infrastructure invasions to unleash a bigger attack on Los Angeles.
Indeed, Riley and Magnus run into a dude named Drake who is the “Hans Gruber” of this plan. When they ask Drake what the hell he’s doing, he tells them that he wants to show Los Angeles for what it really is, or something, and then vanishes. But he leaves behind henchman, who are constantly attacking Riley and Magnus.
Riley and Magnus continue to run around the city to prevent an attack of which we never really understand and are never clear on how bad it will be. The end.
Blackout is a good example of a script that shows what happens if you don’t know the basics. And, by basics, I’m not talking about likable main characters, start scenes late and leave them early, get to your second act on page 25.
There are a secondary set of basics that are just beyond the primary set. And here’s one of them…
Your stakes can’t be general. They have to be specific. The big thing that haunts this script is that it’s implied that something terrible is happening. But we don’t know exactly what it is, and, therefore, we don’t care.
First, we’re told the power is about to go out. Well, I’ve been in LA when the power is out. It’s actually one of the easiest cities to survive a lack of power in because the weather is rarely too hot or too cold here. So, all I’ve ever experienced during a power outage is inconvenience. If this version of a power outage is different, it’s your job as the writer to tell us that. It’s your job to lay all of that information out for us.
Having Riley and Magnus run around LA like chickens with their heads cut off is not enough to keep us engaged. We need to know what a successful mission for them looks like. Or a failed mission, for that matter. Nobody tells us what either of those things look like so we don’t care what happens.
Compare this to Independence Day. That movie is not the greatest. Like, its wacky cheesy tone nearly destroys it. But do you know why it works? Because the stakes are clear. Once we see the aliens blow up the White House, we know that if we don’t solve this issue, we’re goners.
James Cameron, who’s probably the best at writing giant stories, shows you how to do this correctly at the beginning of his opus, “Titanic.” In the present-day storyline, he has a computer tech take us through a simulation of how the Titanic ship went down. It lays out how the water gets in, where it gets in, and how it eventually overwhelms the ship. That way, later on, when we see people in the lower decks, we know, because of that computer simulation we saw, that they’re dead if they don’t find a way out of their soon.
This script didn’t give us anything like that. There’s one vague monologue early on that warns of terrible things that happen during a city-wide blackout. But, again, it’s not specific enough for us to understand the stakes. In a power outage, things get worse and worse the more time the power is down. But, how long before you have serious deaths? Cause I think, based on my own experiences, we’re talking weeks. Well then what’s the rush? It seems the rush is to prevent the inconvenient type of power outage. The kind where you’re mad your wireless is out for a few hours. Not the killer type. So, again, I ask: What are the stakes here? Cause they don’t seem that bad.
The script is also riddled with a lot of techy talk that we don’t understand. “We’re observing de-sync between automated signals and field status. Latency like this is unusual but we’re trying to figure it out.” “Something upstream took the power I redirected. And it’s not stopping.”
These create the illusion that something important is happening. But what good is it if we don’t understand what it means? I’ve already established that the stakes are unclear. Now we have unclear exposition. So it’s a double-dose of ambiguity, which is going to send us further into a state of boredom.
On top of that, your main character pairing has vanilla-as-hell chemistry. They both feel like characters we’ve seen before. There’s nothing unique about either of them. There’s no big likable quality for us to latch onto. And so, together, they’re just going through the paces of your basic “conflict-filled” coupling. Which is one of the quickest ways to bore a reader.
How do you prevent this? Go watch Project Hail Mary. One of the more common notes I give on a screenplay consultation is to GIVE YOUR CHARACTERS PERSONALITY. It’s strange the way writers think. They’re so focused on making their characters a product of the plot moving forward that they forget to stop and ask who this person is when there is no plot. What’s their baseline day to day personality? Are they fun, sarcastic, witty, weird?
Go watch the trailer for Send Help. Those two have PERSONALITY.
We’ve already got stakes problems. We’ve already got exposition problems. Now the people taking us through the story aren’t that interesting. Nor do they have any chemistry. I mean, at that point, I’m not sure anything can save the script.
The other day, I said that it would behoove young action screenwriters to go back to those 80s action classics, like Commando, and watch them to see how they were constructed. Because you learn things. And one of those things is: BE CLEAR ABOUT THE ACTUAL SETUP OF THE MOVIE so that we understand what the main character is doing, why he’s doing it, and where he is in relation to achieving or failing the objective at every stage of the journey.
And from there, you just make things as hard on him as possible so he has to overcome a lot of obstacles. I talked about the importance of saying “NO” to your character and how that creates better scenes.
There’s this really fun scene in Commando around the middle of the movie. Matrix and Cindy figure out the island Matrix’s daughter is being held on and come up with a plan to get there. But Matrix says, “First we need to go shopping.” And he goes to this giant closed gun store, breaks in, and starts loading up on all these insane weapons. It’s a fun montage. We’re into it because we can already imagine Matrix going crazy with these weapons.
And then, out of nowhere, you hear, “FREEZE!” And it’s a bunch of cops. And Matrix is arrested. It’s the ultimate “NO” to your character. He’s not able to do what he wants to do. We don’t get any “No’s” in this script. Sure, there are a few bad guys who cause some bumps in the road to Riley and Magnus’s investigation. But never anything that makes us say, “Oh no, how are they going to get out of this?”
When Matrix got arrested and placed in the back of an armored police vehicle, I literally had no idea how he was going to get out.
I don’t know, guys. Reading these scripts these days is frustrating. Most writers give you what I call “I finished it” scripts. These are scripts where the writer wants validation just for finishing the script. That should never be the goal of the writer. Nobody gets a gold star for finishing a script. You get the gold star for writing a great story. Finishing the script should almost feel like it’s getting in the way because your story is so damn awesome that nobody wanted it to end.
This script is an “I finished it” script. It wants accolades for getting to page 114 and not embarrassing itself. That is not, nor should it ever be, the criteria for writing a screenplay.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Readers respond to the personal, not the general. If Commando was about a guy taking down bad guys because it’s the right thing to do, nobody would’ve cared. It was about saving his daughter from the bad guys. So we cared. Similarly, if Grace and Rocky aren’t trying to save each other in Project Hail Mary, nobody would’ve cared. Blackout could’ve used that tip before it was written. Instead of just trying to save a bunch of faceless souls in Los Angeles (of which, as I mentioned, we don’t even know if it’s that many), try to save one soul who we actually care for.
