Genre: Buddy Cop?
Premise: (from Black List) A rogue cop suffers a gunshot wound in 1987 and wakes from a coma thirty years later, where he is partnered with a mild- mannered progressive detective – his son.
About: Former real-life cop Will Beall burst onto the scene in 2009 with the highly touted spec, “L.A. Rex.” A screenwriting neophyte, Beall didn’t even know that dialogue was supposed to take place vertically. So all the dialogue was side by side. He would eventually write Gangster Squad, create the Training Day TV series, work on the upcoming Venom, and has sole screenwriting credit on the upcoming Aquaman. So I’d say life’s going well for Mr. Beall. This spec of Beall’s finished with 8 votes on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Will Beall
Details: 131 pages
If you possess the urge to overwrite, the push to pontificate, the desire to scribble endlessly between the margins, my friends, I have found your champion. Will Beall is on a mission to write the ultimate ‘fuck you’ page – one without a single square inch of white space on it.
If I’m being honest, I don’t think Will Beall has ever read a script. If he had, he’d surely know how annoying it is to consume jurassic sized paragraph after jurassic sized paragraph. It’s exhausting. And it’s self-defeating. Once paragraphs start getting too long, readers just skim them. So why write that way if no one’s going to read it?
27 year old Sam Braden is the best (and wildest) cop in 1987 Los Angeles. And he loves his job. There’s nowhere he’d rather be than some titty bar busting a high-profile coke deal. It has some residual effects on his family life. He’s not around all the time. But what can he do? The cop life is too addictive.
That addiction ends up being Sam’s undoing. After answering a routine call, a man in a mask kills his partner and shoots Sam in the head. Cut to present day. Sam’s recently come out of a 30 year coma and has severe brain trauma. That is until they try an experimental procedure on him that magically cures everything.
Sam meets his now 27 year old son, Sean, who’s a cop himself. Unlike the wild Sam, however, Sean is a calm and calculated lawman. And he’s pissed that Sam wasn’t around more when he was growing up.
Sam can’t stand being on the sidelines so he reapplies for his cop license and within a week, he’s teamed up with is reluctant son to fight crime.
Naturally, Sam is all ‘shoot first and ask questions later’ while Sean is all, ‘ask questions, check the manual, and don’t shoot at all.’ The two stumble across some high grade guns that have made their way into the gang ranks, and try to find the source.
(spoilers) They learn that these guns are connected to a plan by their police chief to turn the LA police force into a military style mercenary outfit that, for some reason, first involves blowing up half of LA. It’ll be up to our father and son team to stop them. But can their styles mesh long enough to pull it off?
Holy Bonkersville.
This script is freaking ALL OVER THE PLACE! I don’t know where to start. First of all, Beall does know that this is a comedic premise, right? So then why is it a drama?? Straight out of the gate you’re going to piss off your audience who think they’re coming in to see something else.
And the plot steps all over the premise. With a concept like this, you want to create a bunch of scenarios that juxtopose the styles of a loose-cannon 1987 cop and a by-the-rules 2018 cop. We only get a couple of those scenes and the rest of the script focuses on an unrealistic plot to destroy half of LA in order to militarize the police force.
The odd choices don’t stop there. We get a futuristic military drone that’s based on the Terminator flying robotic killing machines. Um, what?? It’s enough to make me wonder how Beall is getting all this high profile work. Not only is the plot all over the place. But the script is really hard to read. Each page is so dense it feels like a homework assignment due tomorrow morning in first period. I thought reading was supposed to be fun.
I suppose there are a few reasons for Beall’s success. First of all, he understands the world of cops better than any other writer working in Hollywood right now. And that’s worth something. Most writers do their cop writing based on the Die Hard franchise. That’s never an issue with Beall. Here’s Sean rolling up on a clueless bank robber:
“You really don’t know what the hell you’re doing, do you? You don’t lay your hostages down on the floor. You stand them up, so the SWAT snipers will have to shoot through them to get at you.”
I mean, who the fuck knows this besides a real cop?
He’s also good with dialogue in general. I would suspect that’s the main reason he gets hired.
“The fuck are you, a doctor?” “Right now, I’m the difference between five years with good behavior and a lethal injection. And I just bought you about ninety seconds to make up your mind before this guy bleeds out and you’re a slam-dunk death penalty for a DA who’s up for reelection.”
But everything else here feels like it was vomited onto the page, a series of tonally mismatched sequences in search of a movie. I mean, the opening scene, which takes place in a room with a giant aquarium, has a shootout with sharks attacking our cops. Then we get this ultra-serious “scientifically accurate” depiction of how Sean recovers from his coma, which is later followed by a goofy one-on-one battle between Sean and a state-of-the-art military drone which is later followed by a serious investigation into how gangs are getting their hands on military grade weapons.
Is this a comedy or isn’t it?
Beall should’ve kept the plot bare-bones and focused on the differences between the cops. There’s a ton to mine from there. In the last 3 years alone, there have been insane changes to how cops operate. Imagine having 30 years of changes to play with. You could do so much.
I have a theory about how this script came together. I think Beall had two different scripts, one about a 1980’s cop who wakes up in the present day. And another about a military takeover of the LA police force. He didn’t feel like either of them worked on their own. So he combined them.
I’ve seen the “idea-combining” strategy before and it rarely works. The reason is that you don’t want ideas competing against each other in a screenplay. All of your ideas should be working together. Even if Beall rewrote this to death to fuse the concepts into something more harmonious, I don’t see it working. These are separate concepts that require their own screenplays.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Read more scripts. This SHOULD be obvious advice on a site like this, but I get the feeling aspiring screenwriters don’t read enough. The reason you read scripts isn’t only to figure out what works, it’s to figure out what drives you crazy so that you don’t do it yourself. A lot of writers will say stuff like, “The 3-line max paragraph rule is dumb” or “A 130 page script is fine if that’s how much time the story needs.” Read a hundred scripts and tell me how you feel about these opinions then.
What I learned 2: Make adjustments to names if needed. The two main characters here are Sam and Sean. Can you imagine reading 500 dialogue entries starting with two names that are so easy to mix up? So Beall referred to Sam by his last name, “Braden,” and Sean by his first.
