Today I use this wild thriller to teach you how to write better action sequences.
Genre: Thriller
Premise: When a crossword puzzle maker finds out his dead father hid a code inside of him, he must figure out what it means before a pissed off CIA finds him first.
About: I keep seeing this name in the trades wherever I turn. “Joby Harold.” He wrote the King Arthur remake. He wrote the new upcoming Robin Hood movie. He just signed on to rewrite DC’s new Flash movie. “Who is this writer??” I’ve been saying every time I see him. A little research shows he wrote and directed the Hayden Christensen movie, “Awake,” back in 2007. But he hasn’t done much since. I traced his re-rise back to this script, which he wrote in 2011. Let’s find out why this got him back on Hollywood’s radar, and led to him being one of the hottest screenwriters in town.
Writer: Joby Harold
Details: 114 pages – 2011 draft
This week’s going to be fun. Tuesday through Friday I’m going to review the Top 4 scripts from the Scriptshadow Tournament, with the winning script, The Savage, getting the final, Friday, review.
But that leaves an open slot for today. And while I’d love to use that time to discuss the box office battle that was Split versus A Dog’s Purpose, I’ve opted instead to figure out where Joby Harold came from.
Whenever you’ve got a guy tearing up the assignment circuit, you want to know what their secret is. I’ll save you the suspense though, since I already know the answer. You get big assignments in a genre because you wrote something good in that genre. This is an actiony thriller script. He’s writing actiony blockbuster scripts.
But what about the content? What’s inside this script’s walls? Is it good? Will it help me forget my unhealthy obsession with the Split versus A Dog’s Purpose box office battle? I hope so.
Jake Richmond lives a quiet existence in San Fransisco writing crossword puzzles for The San Fransisco Post. He’s divorced with a young daughter, Emma, who’s the apple of his eye. Unfortunately for Jake, his past is a rotten apple. He was found on a boat when he was a toddler and has no idea who his parents are.
Then one day, while riding on the subway, an old man notices the unique cross Jake has around his neck, the cross that was found on him as a child. He lets Jake know how rare the cross is and encourages him to come to his museum to learn more about it.
Jake does, reluctantly, and it’s there that the man finds a little trap door within the cross, where a teensy-tiny scroll comes out. On that scroll? A phone number! They call it, where a 35 year old message tells him who his parents were and that Jake’s carrying something valuable inside his body.
The lousy news is, the CIA stole the device designed to receive that call, and they want to kill Jake just like they killed Jake’s dad! Why? We don’t know yet. But we get the feeling Jake knows something big. Or, at least, he will once he pieces together the puzzle his dad left for him.
That puzzle leads him all across the United States solving all sorts of weird puzzles. For example, at one point, Jake has to cut himself open to receive another clue, which is a long string with tiny knots in it. Those knots? They’re morse code, motherfucker!
On another occasion, Jake is given a series of directions that takes his car in every which way, making dozens of turns that make no sense. That is until after he gets to the destination – a storage facility – and needs to know what number locker to open. Zoom out. The number was traced via the path he just took with his car!
All the while, Jake is being followed by a mysterious CIA operative named Mr. Poe, who has a creepy Marathon Man-y vibe to him. Jake’s only hope of surviving this chaos is to find out what his dad was hiding from the CIA and use that knowledge to bargain for his life.
The Key Man is an old-fashioned mystery-on-the-run thriller. And mystery-on-the-run-thrillers are tough to write because there are only so many ways to write the “on-the-run” stuff, and the “mystery” stuff requires a hell of a lot of intelligence and creativity to come up with anything fresh.
Typically the way these scripts work is they start off with one good puzzle component, then each subsequent component gets cheesier and/or dumber. And that’s because we, as writers, are inherently lazy. So with each subsequent mystery, we’re less motivated to write something as good as the last one.
The initial component in The Key Man is that the first clue’s been surgically implanted inside Jake’s body. This leads to the best set-piece of the script, which is Jake holding a nurse hostage and making her perform surgery on him to retrieve the clue.
Unfortunately, this is where the mysteries go downhill. A string with knots acting as morse code felt a little… I don’t know, far-fetched? And then we’re deciphering that code to come up with a long string of numbers and letters, which we eventually learn are directions (the letters are direction and the numbers the number of blocks to go).
Look, I’m not going to rail on Harold here. I’ve tried to write these things myself and they’re really fucking hard. If you can come up with a COUPLE of good clues/mysteries, you’re doing a good job. But these scripts have 7 or 8. And unless you have the endurance to stick those out and be creative with each one, you’re not going to write anything good.
And really, this is a lesson for every genre. One of the biggest reasons that bad screenplays happen is lack of effort. The writer knows their choice for this next scene or this next sequence isn’t great, but they tell themselves, “It’s good enough.” Once you start using that phrase (good enough), you’ve lost the battle.
Another thing I want to bring up here is the difference between simple action and structured action. Simple action is straight forward, no brains necessary, action. This is how The Key Man starts. We’re following this couple and their child as they run from the CIA. However, THAT’S ALL THAT’S HAPPENING. It’s linear, it’s straightforward, it doesn’t require anything from the viewer.
Structured action is when a story is built into the action. There are multiple threads going on or a complex problem involved or a character conflict that’s agitating the scene, or all of the above. Audiences like structured action because it ENGAGES them on more than just a “look at all the flying colors” basis.
A good structured action scene is the plane crash in the movie, Flight. Before there’s even a problem, you have a drunk pilot. That adds complexity to the issue. Next you have a set of broken hydraulics, which make it impossible to control the plane. Then you have a young co-pilot who’s freaking the fuck out. So we gotta calm him down. Then we realize that the only way to save everyone is to pull off an impossible flight maneuver that’s never been attempted before (turn the plane upside-down). There’s no guarantee that will work. So it’s an all-or-nothing proposition.
You can tell that this crash sequence has been THOUGHT THROUGH. There are things going on on multiple levels, giving the scene a three-dimensional structure. The simple action version of this scene would’ve been, one pilot, an engine problem, and an attempt to make an emergency landing. And that would’ve been it. I suppose it could’ve worked. But how exciting would that have been?
Anyway, getting back to The Key Man. This script had some fun moments but it never rose to a level that allowed it to overcome this conceit: a father leaves his son a dozen impossible-to-solve puzzles to find what he left him. Why not just put the answer in the initial necklace note and call it a day?
Of course, you could make a similar argument for movies like National Treasure. So maybe the problem’s me. I crave a more sophisticated and believable puzzle to get me going these days.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Almost all of your action scenes should be STRUCTURED. What I often find is that the writer will structure THEIR MOST IMPORTANT action scene (so the featured plane crash in “Flight”) and then go with simple action scenes the rest of the way. Take the extra time and structure ALL your action scenes. I promise you your script will be better for it.
