I don’t know what ElDave and I are. Are we enemies? Frenemies? Are we brothers who fight in the car the whole time we’re driving on vacation, our parents screaming at us from the front seat that if we don’t stop, they’re turning this car around! Are we sisters who scream at each other all day who then get mani-peddies and ice cream afterwards??
I’m not sure. But I thought it would be educational to make this post regardless.
For those of you who don’t follow Scriptshadow every day, this one requires some backstory. So, let me lay it out for you. Hundreds of writers pitched their horror ideas to make it into a Scriptshadow Horror Screenplay Contest. Only 97 writers made it in.
I then held a First Scene contest where any of the 97 writers could enter their first scene. I picked the best six scenes to feature on the site. One of the contestants, ElDave, didn’t make the cut. So, he posted his scene in the comments section.
A lot of writers liked it. In fact, quite a few of them said they would’ve voted for ElDave to win. It only seemed fair to ElDave, then, that I feature and analyze his scene on the site, which I did two weeks ago.
To summarize, I thought the scene was okay. But I didn’t think it was as good as the six other scenes that had made the First Scene Showdown.
Keep in mind, the main way to successfully get into my contest was to pitch me an idea that I really liked. But I also offered other ways to make it into the contest, one of those being, if your pitch got 15 upvotes from your fellow writers, you were automatically in.
ElDave did not get into the contest via my endorsement. He got in because the writers here upvoted his concept in. I mention that because ElDave repeatedly points out that I never liked his concept to begin with. Which I don’t think is true. I just had a very high bar for making the cut.
Moving on, ElDave responded to my critique of his scene in the comments section, which is something I’m totally fine with. If I’m going to analyze your script, you have every right to analyze my critique of it.
This provides a rare opportunity to respond to the concerns a writer had with my critique. I feel like this is going to help all of us get better. You know those Youtube videos where you have someone responding to a view of someone responding to a video? This is the Scriptshadow equivalent of that.
ELD: For all the complimentary stuff – sincere thanks. I’m mainly going to deal with the perceived issues.
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So when I read this opening page, my first thought was, “It’s the old suicidal person on the other line scene and our heroine is going to save them.” It’s a scene pattern I’ve come across a lot.
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ELD: I’m ESTABLISHING a 9-1-1 center. As it turns out, they handle a lot of suicides. And again, we’re establishing a routine call here to get our new world bearings because the next call is going to be the weird. So, as a writer, you know that, and you do not want your establishing 9-1-1 call to out-weird your weird that gets the premise rolling. You could make an argument to nuke the opening call and just get to it. But the argument that it must somehow be special belies the purpose of ESTABLISHING SCENES.
I have mulled that over but right now I feel it is more advantageous for the reader to see normal Zoey for at least 60 secs.
SS: This is an interesting point. Because, in principle, I agree with what ElDave is saying. You have to introduce the normal everyday life of your protagonist before you introduce the inciting incident, which is going to turn that normal world upside-down.
My problem is more with the choice of calls. Yeah, you want to introduce “normal.” But normal does not mean boring. Normal does not mean clichéd or uninspired. It’s a bit of a mindfuck but you want to introduce the “exciting version of normal” if that makes sense.
Give me an emergency situation that I can tell you put some thought into. I can’t even begin to convey how many of these “suicidal calls” I’ve read in scripts. It’s the first choice many writers use, which is why you should know it shouldn’t be the choice for you.
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When I read this second page, the big word that popped into my head was “competent.” The writing is very competent. It’s very professional. It’s doing the job.
But a screenplay needs something beyond competence. It needs a special quality, wherever that quality is going to come from. And when I read this page, this fear started to creep in that this scene was going to be adequate and nothing more. Because I feel like I’ve read hundreds of scenes just like it.
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ELD: I don’t buy this at all. This is an opening for a horror movie with a 9-1-1 dispatch operation at its center. What is more – I’ve read it or seen it a 100 times – This premise or — A zombie bite scene? A couple in therapy? A person dying in a car crash? Etc.
See – those make the cut even though they have actually been done and you have actually seen them written 100 times. The irony here is that this premise is relatively unique. You don’t like the premise. You didn’t when it was first presented and seeing it on the page won’t change that. I can respect that. Tastes are tastes. Even though Bite by Bite was really well written, it would not have made my cut because I just don’t care for Zombie movies and would have no interest in the 100th iteration of one. Now, what you might have loved is what goes on in a 9-1-1 center during a Zombie outbreak. All I know is that the solution is not to make the first call unique, fascinating, one in a million. The objective of the first call must be to make you feel like what it is in a 9-1-1 center.
and – There are two macro outcomes in play on a suicide call. 1) She saves him. 2) He dies. I thought I’d go with # 2 – She saves him with a twist – he is mad and ungrateful for her efforts.
SS: So here, ElDave is pitting the originality of his scene’s execution against the originality of some of the other entries. Let me be clear. I don’t think any entry knocked their first scene out of the park. Which is actually supporting what I’m saying. Every writer needs to work hard on making their first scene stand out.
The first scene needs some special quality that makes a reader perk up and go, “ooh, this is cool.” It can be dialogue, it can be an original scenario, it can be that the writer has a very unique voice, it can be we fall in love with the main character right away, it can be the writer is a master of suspense and he has you in the palm of his hand within half a page because he set up a great suspenseful scene.
The point is, there has to be SOMETHING for the big-time Hollywood producer to latch onto. I think that one of the errors writers make is they compare their openings to the openings of other movies they’ve seen. Let’s compare this to the opening of Weapons, which is a basic expositional montage scene. Your average aspiring screenwriter says, “Well, that wasn’t all that amazing. So why am I being asked to be amazing?”
You’re being asked to be amazing because you are a nobody. You are not Zach Cregger who 7 different studios were desperately bidding to work with after Barbarian. Zach Cregger has buzz, he has a hit movie, he’s demonstrated the ability to direct a strong feature film. The only thing you have is your script. So your script has to do a lot more than these other movies. It sucks. It’s unfair. But it’s the reality of this business. It’s why Christopher McQuarrie says, “It’s pointless to write spec scripts.” Because he knows how difficult it is to get Hollywood’s attention with a script all by itself.
He’s right. It is difficult. But it’s not impossible if you listen to people like me, who are telling you, the bar isn’t 5 feet high. It’s 20 feet high. So you just have to aim higher.
If I told any of you, you have to come up with a more original and entertaining first scene than the one you’ve written or else you die, do you think you’d be able to? I bet every single one of you would be able to. Not because you were all of a sudden more creative. But because with your life on the line, you’d realize that you didn’t put 100% of yourself into that scene.
There is DEFINITELY a more original emergency call you can create here. I once had this crazy woman living below me who would always file noise complaints for the most random of things, like that I was running my dryer too loudly. She got so crazy once that she called 911 on me because I was walking around too much. To me, a situation like that is not only more original, but more representative of what a 911 operator might experience — getting a bunch of bullshit calls that aren’t really emergencies.
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This was probably the page where I decided this wasn’t going to make the cut. Because this is the page where our main character solves the problem. And my question is: what special or unique or clever thing did she do to solve the problem? As far as I can tell, nothing.
She just got the guy to stay there long enough so the cops could pick him up. Remember, when you’re introducing a character, you’re trying to create something the reader will either fall in love with or become fascinated by. Anything less, and the reader isn’t going to be interested in them.
I’ll give you an example. The famous Lethal Weapon Mel Gibson suicidal jumper scene. In that scene, a guy is about to jump off a building and Detective Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) is tasked with stopping him. What does Riggs do? Instead of trying to stop him, he says, “Let’s do it!” The jumper is so confused he’s not sure how to react. Riggs keeps pushing him. Let’s do it. Let’s do it! And eventually, they jump!
It’s a scene that both goes against what we’re expecting and creates a fascinating character in the process.
Those are the kinds of things I’m looking for when I get introduced to characters.
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ELD:Arrrrgh….
She is NOT a clever character. This is not Sherlock Holmes or Martin Riggs in 9-1-1 center (although both would also be good movies). This is Zoey. A gal raised by the Foster Care system in New Orleans. She has no family, no real life outside of work. That is why she works the night shifts and every holiday possible. Things we will learn when they organically make sense for us to learn them. Like the fact that she became a 9-1-1 operator because when she was 17, a 9-1-1 Operator saved her from being raped and murdered by her Foster Dad.
She is an average person who will be faced with extraordinary new circumstances. i.e. why in the world would you require or expect a clever way to solve the problem from an unclever person. That is a biased filter at work. i.e., you like movies with clever folks, so you need the clever solution. Again, this is a taste issue – not a writing one.
This is going to be a Sixth Sense-type story with a Sixth Sense-type lead character. This is not going to be Indiana Jones. Let’s look at the lead character in The Sixth Sense – here is his description:
Dr. Malcolm Crowe is characterized as a devoted, quiet, and thoughtful child psychologist who is highly intelligent and at the top of his profession. His professional manner is described as subdued and academic, yet he is committed to his cases and hesitant to immediately “slap a ‘label’ of a diagnosis on a child.”
Think Maclom Crowe in a 9-1-1 Center – how “clever” would he be?
Carson – just my humble opinion – but you need to open your script review mind to include these types of characters and situations because, at least in the case of the Sixth Sense, they can lead to one of the best horror movies either way.
SS: This one you’re not just wrong on, ElDave. You’re dead wrong.
Every character has to have something they’re good at or what’s the point of writing a character at all. If we’re all the same, all devoid of any special skills, then there is no originality in us. There is nothing for others to root for.
Every person in the world has something they’re better at than most people. And the thing about highlighting this skill, especially early on, is that it does an AMAZING JOB at making us like the protagonist.
You said that Zoey grew up in the foster care system. Jesus Christ, that’s a goldmine of opportunities to get really good at certain things. You have to be a survivor to go through that system. You have to be resilient. You have to be tough. You’d probably have to learn all sorts of tricks to survive, basic things like how to navigate other girls bullying you.
How well do you remember The Sixth Sense? Malcom has an early scene, when he first meets Cole, where he does the most clever thing in the script. When Cole won’t talk, Malcom comes up with a game to get Cole to open up (If I guess something right about you, you have to take a step forward, if I guess wrong, you have to take a step back).
That’s EXACTLY what I’m talking about. That game is something only a psychiatrist would learn working in their line of business.
It sounds to me like Zoey’s life experience has subjected her to a lot of unique experiences that have made her a fighter and, likely, a problem-solver. So let’s see her use those problem-solving skills in that first call.
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The explanation of using the word “darling” didn’t make this feel any more clever. If the idea is that she goes against the handbook to save people, I’m down with that. But if sometimes using an unapproved word is breaking the rules, it’s the tamest rule-breaking I’ve ever seen. So much more could’ve been done here.
For example, if this would’ve been some incel lamenting the fact that no girls like him and Zoey exploited that to save his life by pretending to be romantically interested in him. Maybe even agreeing to go on a date with him if he stepped back, only to go cold the second the cops snatched him up, that’s a character I would’ve been interested in. But just calling someone ‘darling’ doesn’t move the needle for me.
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ELD: I like this suggestion.
SS: Phew, an easy one.
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In every script, I’m always looking for honesty. For truth. In other words, are the people in the story acting out truthful moments, saying truthful things? Or are they just puppets for the writer to say what he wants or do what he wants? The more I see of the latter, the more tuned out I become. The more I see of the former, the more invested I get.
I have a hard time believing this call center goes cuckoo over “the q word.” That feels made up to me. It feels like a lie a writer concocted. I want the truth. And I want the details of that truth.
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ELD: This was the first comment that actually irritated me.
So, I spent a solid week researching 9-1-1 call centers down to every detail and one of the more common rituals/jinxes I came across was the Q word jinx – and not surprisingly, most often caused by rookie operators. So, a writer does all this work to try and make something authentic, and then you judge its authenticity based on whether you are personally knowledgeable in the matter ( It would have taken a 2 second google search on your part). What that paradigm means is if Carson is not aware of it than it is not authentic.
That is a poor reviewing technique. Sorry… It just is.
SS: I actually went back and forth on whether I should include my thoughts on this “Q-word” moment because, like you said, what do I know about call centers?
But it’s important to remember that authenticity doesn’t just mean you literally point to the detail you added and confirm it’s a real thing. It’s that the situation as a whole must FEEEEEL AUTHENTIC. So I think this had more to do with the presentation of how the q-word was introduced. That’s the part that didn’t feel right.
I once did notes on this screenplay about a doctor who was trying to cover up his malpractice on a high-profile patient. And my number one note to the writer was that it was the most inauthentic depiction of a hospital I’d ever read. I told him he needed to do a ton of research on hospitals and doctors before writing the next draft.
He then proceeded to tell me that he was a doctor. Yeah, that got awkward fast. I felt strange about it so I called him and we talked about it. We ended up going through a few of the bigger sequences so I could highlight why I thought they were inauthentic. As I was explaining myself, he would say things like, “Well no, you’re wrong because the hemodynamic parameters would’ve been reconciled with the attending physician so that the telemetry system could accurately track the cardiac output and mean arterial pressure.”
And I said to him, “Wait, why the f$&@ isn’t *that* in your script?” And as we went through every section, he would explain in detail what was going on, but he hadn’t included any of that detail in the script. And if he had, it would’ve felt VERY authentic.
But the point is, it’s not just the technical component of it (that people don’t like the q-word). It’s how it’s depicted. It’s got to feel natural and effortless. And I remember reading that part and feeling like the whole world stopped to highlight this one moment about the ‘q-word’ and it just didn’t feel genuine. It felt manufactured.
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Essentially what’s happening here is that the scene is rebooting. It’s starting over. We’ve got a brand new call. And the good news is, there’s something different going on with this call. There’s something glitchy, both in the connection and the way that connection is interfering with the nearby electronics.
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ELD: First call – ESTABLISHING
Second call – CATALYST
All before page 9.
I’m fine with that pace.
SS: Yeah, the pace of this scene is fine. But the funny thing about pacing is, it’s not “the” thing. It’s “the supporting” thing. As I’ve established, the creative choices behind that first call could be better. Now, is it nice that the pacing allows us to get through that not-as-good-as-it-could-be first call faster? Sure. But that doesn’t absolve you from not coming up with a better first call. The pacing would work even better if that first call was more entertaining.
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For some reason, I’m only casually interested in this boy’s plight. I don’t know if it’s because the rest of the pages haven’t fully pulled me in or if it’s something with the boy himself. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s because the scenario feels too obvious. First we have the drug addict tweaking out. Now we have the little child. None of these things feel different enough.
I can’t emphasize enough how much I read and, because of that, I read stuff like this all the time. Something that might help you guys is to put yourself in my head and ask, “Is this something Carson has probably seen a lot?” If the answer is yes, go back to the drawing board and write a scene that’s more original.
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ELD: To get a script approved by you – Yes. To write a good script – No. Again, see above, your core problem is the premise. It wouldn’t really matter how this was written. I’ll offer you the same test. How many times have you read a Zombie scene, a car crash scene, a therapy scene? You coat this as an originality problem when it clearly is not – it is a taste difference. Otherwise, I would have to believe there are just hundreds of scripts out there with 9-1-1 call scenes where the cops show up and all are fine and all deny that they ever called.
SS: Okay, let’s address this cause you’ve brought it up a couple times now. I liked the movie Eddington. There is no movie that is designed more for me to dislike than Eddington. But Eddington won me over. Any single concept can win me over if the writing’s good.
As for this specific concept, I don’t know why you think I wouldn’t like a call center movie. I was pumped when they announced that The Guilty movie with Jake Gyllenhaal. It sounded cool. I also think phone calls with people in trouble are naturally dramatic. There’s plenty to worth with here.
My problem is that, of the two calls at the beginning of the script, neither of them stand out. Neither is nearly as good as they could be. Since that’s the whole focus of the movie, that worries me.
And you’re wrong when you say: “to get a script approved by you.” The people who actually have to put up money are SO MUCH MORE JUDGMENTAL than I am. I don’t have anything on the line. I just want to be entertained. These people risk their careers when they buy a script.
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There’s a beat on this page that is the key to this entire scene living up to its promise. It’s when the boy says, “I got a bike. Santa already came.” And Zoey says, “Why would Santa have already—?”
This is supposed to be our introduction to the hook—the strange situation our operator finds herself in. Receiving calls from the future. But it’s such a blink-and-you-miss-it moment that it doesn’t register. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone reading this completely missed it.
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ELD: I’ll take a fresh look at this – I thought when the boy said Santa already came and we know the real time scene is before XMAS was clear enough.
I’ll run this by some folks to see if they pick it up or miss it.
SS: Sounds good.
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I get that Eldave doesn’t want to show his cards too soon, but you need to hook us here and this scene BARELY mines its hook. Even the scene at the house afterwards is rushed. You want to SLOW DOWN as we get to the house. Show that the cops believe someone is in danger. Have them carefully go up to the house, maybe even knock the door in when nobody answers. And they just see this family casually dining. That would’ve hit a lot harder.
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ELD: I don’t know – I have a feeling if I would have done that I would have got the start the scene as late as you can mantra. But I’ll look at it.
Thanks for the read and notes – I do appreciate it. I just did not find most of the suggestions compelling.
SS: My feeling is always, when you have a strong suspenseful moment, milk it as much as you can. That’s when a story like this is going to be at its strongest. I see no value in rushing through this moment. You want to tease it, make us beg. Make us wonder. Have us in the palm of your hand. This moment would’ve been great for that.
ELD: PS – for some reason I did not see the DID TODAY’S SCENE GET SCREWED?? banner until just now.
Screwed is an odd word… If I answer yes, it means I was treated unfairly.
I don’t think I was treated unfairly. I think instead you have blinders for certain topics and a certain type of storytelling and those contaminate your script review process. That is of course true for all human beings. What we know is:
You were a NO on the logline – Yet, it got 23 upvotes.
You were NO on the scene, making it in the top 6 – Yet, the scene got 24 upvotes and tons of comments stating it should have been in and several I would have voted for it ones. And I did not solicit these. I merely said – here is my scene.
Point being, I think there was sufficient evidence there for you to conclude you got it wrong.
The objections/criticisms/reasoning above are for the most part not compelling as a separator from the entries that moved forward. e.g., Your issue that – you have seen this a hundred times before (which you have not) is not a disqualifier knowing that you have seen a car death, zombie bite, couples therapy, etc, exponentially more times. You have an authenticity hiccup on 9-1-1 operators discussing a Q word jinx because you’re not familiar with it, but are quite willing to accept really weird and unknown elements in the other scripts.
This was DOA because you did not like the premise. BUT – I don’t feel cheated because you didn’t. It is your site, ergo your tastes.
SS: I think you’re looking at this the wrong way, ElDave. By making this my fault, you are relieving yourself from having to look in the mirror and ask if you could’ve done better.
I don’t dislike this idea or the subject matter. I’m not sure where you’re getting that. I just didn’t like them as much as some other ideas. But there have been two fairly high profile 911 call center movies recently, those being The Guilty and The Call. So there are movies out there that this feels similar to.
Also, there’s a show called 911 and I’ve seen at least a couple of hundred (probably more) scenes from movies or TV shows that have included a 911 dispatch operator. So, actually, I’ve seen these scenarios more than 100 times. Which is why the bar is high. And I don’t understand why you want to keep it low. That logic doesn’t make sense to me.
As a writer, you should stay out of comfort. You should be pushing yourself for the best versions of these scenes you’re capable of writing. I just don’t believe that this opening scene you’ve offered is the top of what you’re capable of. If you insist that it is, I apologize. But I think you can do better.
Script Notes Deal! – For all writers, if you want me to push your writing to another level, I’m offering a 40% deal for script notes on your screenplay or pilot script. If you want the deal, you have to e-mail me with the subject line “forty,” but with a Chicago accent (where I’m from). So e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com and put in the subject line, “FOURDEE”
