Currently one of the best writers in town, Taylor Sheridan is back with another spec that’s expected to start a major franchise.
Genre: ACTION/CRIME
Premise: A former delta force operator is given a unique opportunity by the DEA to take down drug dealers without any oversight.
About: Can life get any better for Tyler Sheridan? The writer of Hell or High Water, Sicario, and Sicario 2, as well as writer-director of Wind River, recently moved into TV, where he took a project that wasn’t on anyone’s radar, Yellowstone, and turned it into a surprise hit. F.A.S.T doesn’t seem to be following the same narrative, unfortunately. Sheridan was in negotiations to direct it with Chris Pratt attached to star, but those negotiations broke down and the studio brought Gavin O’Connor onto the project. Since that point, it’s unclear if Pratt remains on F.A.S.T. But a new Sheridan spec is always a big deal so I’m excited to find out about it today.
Writer: Taylor Sheridan
Details: 132 pages
I think Taylor Sheridan is one of the best writing successes of the last five years. There are hundreds of thousands of fellow actors writing screenplays. He rose above them all by putting emphasis on the things he knew best – character development and modernizing old-fashioned subject matter like cops and robbers.
The way breaking in works is that you go at screenwriting for a while until you finally write something that people like. Then everyone in Hollywood wants to work with you. Because you’ve been at this for so long, you have 2-3 scripts in the hopper that are almost there. These scripts allow you to keep the momentum going.
But once you get past those scripts, you’re writing from scratch. Now, theoretically, you’re a better writer so you should be able to write a good script faster. But the reality about screenwriting is that you need drafts. No matter how good you are, it takes half-a-dozen drafts before you even start to find your story. This is what famously happened during the writing of The Sixth Sense. That script started off about a boy who drew spooky images about a killer and ended up being about a kid who saw dead people and the psychologist who helped him.
All this is to say that the well appears to be drying up for Sheridan. His first couple of scripts were great. But Sicario 2 was a narrative mess. It was the first script where I thought, “He’s rushing this.” And I’m not mad. Look, you don’t know when the Hollywood truck of money no longer wants to pay you a visit. So you have to capitalize when you’re hot. But I’m worried that Sherdian may be biting more than he can chew. Let’s hope I’m wrong.
Kyle is a former delta force operator in the Middle East. But ever since he’s been back in Baltimore, he can barely make ends meet. His wife and two kids are tired of living in a garbage tract house. If something doesn’t change soon, he’s not sure he’ll be able to keep it together.
One day while bringing his kids home from school, Kyle spots two skinheads – who live on his block no less – carrying his TV and furniture back to their house. Kyle has his kids wait at home then goes over to get his effing stuff back. As often happens with skinheads, things escalate, and within seconds, Kyle’s killed both of them.
Kyle calls his old commander, Sheel, who now works for the DEA, and Sheel comes over to help him clean up the mess. They learn that the skinheads were drug dealers in the area. In a roundabout way, they just helped the community.
This gives Sheel an idea. You see, it’s impossible to get anything done at the DEA. There’s a thousand miles of politics and red tape. So what if you just… didn’t have to worry about that? In the Middle East, the CIA used to run a program called “F.A.S.T.” that didn’t have any laws. If you wanted to take the bad guys out, you just went to their house and did it. Sheel wants to do the same thing, but for drugs. And he wants Kyle to run it. The upside is that Kyle gets any money he finds at the houses.
There are rules, though. You can’t kill anyone. You seize drugs and money and then leave. That’s going to require a very skilled team, Kyle says. “You can use anyone you want,” Sheel replies. Kyle gets some of his best men back together and after carefully prepping their plan, they begin their operation.
The first job goes so well that they keep doing them, and within a week, they’ve done more damage to the local drug trade than the DEA has in 10 years. They’re so good at what they do that word travels to the higher-ups, who want them to take on a higher profile job – IN TURKEY. The group is flown out to Turkey where they’re going to be facing the biggest drug kingpin in the entire country. Will they make it out alive? What do you think?
To answer my earlier question – Sheridan is back!
It’s hard to figure out exactly what Sheridan does better than everyone else. Because when you take a step back and look at his screenplays from afar, they don’t seem that special. They’re covering territory – SWAT, DEA, CIA – that are so often used in movies that they’ve become cliche. And yet he’s clearly better than everyone in this genre. So what’s his secret?
The answer very well may be in the opening scene. When I read any script where a character is a vet, they always have post-traumatic stress syndrome. They’re all having trouble adjusting back into society. The ubiquity of thier condition destroys any weight it may have. The only way you break through that wall is by individualizing the character’s experience. You give them something that sells their PTSD in a way that separates them from characters in other scripts. That separation is what makes us believe they’re real.
Here, Kyle is engaged in a therapy session with a military psychiatrist. She’s asking him how he’s been doing. Kyle is trying to say all the right things. But between answers, we’re getting quick flashbacks to his time in the Middle East. He’s inside a moving van where ISIS members are taping an attempt to decapitate him. He’s only barely able to get out alive. The psychiatrist asks another question. He answers with, “I’m fine,” and we get another flashback with him casually chatting with a soldier while walking through a city and then an IED evaporates his friend. Back to therapy.
There was something about this three-pronged attack of a therapist asking him questions, him denying anything was wrong, and a flashback that proved the opposite, that sold me that this was a real vet and not that paper-then “vet in name only” character I typically see in scripts. In other words, Sheridan finds a way to sell you on his characters so that you care more about what happens to them.
And he’s so smart about it. Like the way he updates old screenwriting tricks. “Save the Cat,” for instance. The idea behind saving the cat is to get your character to do something nice for/to someone and, once the audience sees that, they’ll like the character. The problem is most screenwriters’ approaches aren’t imaginative enough to create an authentic moment. They’ll just have the hero pass a homeless man five bucks and call it a day.
But Sheridan realizes that “saving the cat” is a much broader tip than merely being nice. It’s anything that makes us like the character. The “save the cat” moment in F.A.S.T. comes when Kyle is bringing his kids home and sees a couple of skinheads walking his TV and furniture back to their house. He puts his kids in a safe room under his garage and walks over, puts a gun to the skinhead’s face, and tells him they’re going to pick everything back up and walk it right back to his house.
The reason we like this is obvious when you think about it. Skinheads are bad. We don’t like people who take our stuff. And therefore, we love anyone who’s willing to stand up to those people. Because, in our lives, we wouldn’t be able to do that. This man represents who we wish we could be.
There’s nothing you can do in a script that pays more dividends than a character people love. You could be an average writer but if you’re great at that one skill, you can go a long way in this business.
The other thing Sheridan does that makes him different is he finds these little cracks inside well-known subject matter and builds stories around them. So he doesn’t just tell a story about the CIA. Or the DEA. He creates a division within them – a totally new type of team that does a very specific job in “F.A.S.T.” You might be sensing a theme here. Sheridan looks for small ways to make his script different than all the other scripts out there. He knows that generic won’t cut it.
Problems? Sheridan sometimes adds one extra plot beat late in the second act that draws the narrative out too long. He did this with Sicario 2 and he’s doing it here as well. Late-story pacing is crucial to driving a script home. If you linger too long in plotlines that don’t matter, you risk the audience’s attention drifting away like dandelion strands on a late August afternoon. That’s the section you gotta keep tight and, despite its title, F.A.S.T. feels slow in that area.
Still, this fortifies Sheridan as one of, if not THE, top gun in this genre. I can’t think of any other writer who does it better in 2019. Can you?
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Dealing with emotion in screenwriting is challenging. It’s easy to oversell it, and when that happens, the moment feels cliché or on-the-nose. When I read the line, “A single tear falls down his/her cheek,” in a script, I literally throw up inside of my mouth. Which is why I’m happy to show you someone who tackles this issue successfully. Here, Kyle is being interviewed by a therapist and she gives him a rorschach test and asks what he sees. He struggles to come up with an answer, and then Sheridan writes this: “He stares at it and smiles, as his eyes well with tears ….” Why is this better than “a single tear falls down his cheek?” Because the reaction is more complex. He smiles WHILE fighting tears away. There’s contrast in reaction (two contrasting things are going on at once) which is way more honest, and therefore, a lot more authentic.
