We interrupt our regularly scheduled program (dialogue) to talk about character. Why character? Because yesterday some interesting conversations picked up AND I DISAGREED WITH EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM! Okay, that’s an exaggeration. My contention was that the script I reviewed, which sold back in 1994, never got made because the main character was so gosh-darn forgettable. He had ZERO going on. We knew NOTHING about him. Therefore, we had no emotional attachment to the story whatsoever.

One of you was quick to point out that Alien, one of the best movies of all time, tells us next to nothing about its characters and it didn’t seem to hurt the film at all. Others pointed out that action movies are often WORSE when the writer tries to jam a bunch of manufactured character development into them. Rose Tico has this deep tragic backstory in The Last Jedi. But she’s still one of the lamest characters ever.

So is character development overrated? Is it all just a matter of casting? I would answer that with a big fat NO. Not even close. In fact, character construction is still the most in demand writing skill in Hollywood. Put 10 guys in a room and ask them to come up with a cool plot or a killer set piece, and they’ll give you something that’s, at the very least, decent. Ask that same group of people to come up with a handful of great characters and nothing they give you will be useable.

There’s no question in my mind that if Man with the Football had a great main character, it would’ve been made. Why do I say that? Because good characters don’t come around often in Hollywood. So if an actor encounters one, they’re going to want to play them. That character was lame. I wouldn’t know a single actor in Hollywood who’d want to play him.

Now there’s a couple of things at play here that most writers aren’t aware of. When they hear “good character” or “make a character likable,” they think in terms of Adam Sandler movies or cheesy romantic comedies where the main character hands a homeless person a hundred dollar bill or, in the case of the most recent Sandler movie, Murder Mystery, Sandler busts a kid trying to steal something – BUT HE DOESN’T RAT HIM OUT! He lets him correct his mistake without arresting him. Gosh that Adam Sandler guy is nice, isn’t he?

That’s not real character development. It’s not real “character likability” development. It’s a hacky studio note that even the interns at CAA could give. And it’s not what we’re talking about today. The truth is, character development is varied. You will not use the same amount of it in every screenplay. Some stories require less character development. Some require more. Some GENRES require less character development. Some genres require more. A straight drama will always require the most character development of all the genres whereas an action movie might contain very little.

But hear me know, believe me later and understand me next week – YOU MUST ALWAYS add character development to your hero. And YOU MUST ALWAYS give us a hero that we want to root for. That doesn’t mean they have to be likable. But we have to want to root for them. Nobody liked that Hannibal Lecter ate a bunch of human beings to death. But, oddly, we still rooted for him to escape in the end. So today, I’m going to provide you with the eight most important things that affect how the reader perceives your character. I’m going to call this “care-achter” development. Because these are the things that make us CARE about your hero.

Backstory – Backstory is anything that’s happened to your character before the events of the movie took place. Backstory can be presented through flashbacks or alluded to through dialogue. Backstory is actually one of the least effective ways to influence a reader’s emotional response to a character. Movies are about what’s happening NOW, in the present, and therefore people don’t care all that much about what happened in the past. If I hear you lost your kid in a car crash – I’m sorry but big whoop. That’s every movie. We’re too desensitized to that stuff. Now if you start your movie with a flashback that SHOWS us the crash the kid died in, we’re definitely going to have a deeper emotional connection to that loss. But I would only rely on this sort of thing if that’s what the movie is really about. In other words, if the film is about a mother trying to recover from the loss of her child, that can be very powerful. But if you try to throw dead-child backstory into Independence Day 3, the audience is too smart to buy into that nonsense.

Actions – This is one of the single most important ways to influence how the audience thinks of a character – their actions. It’s also one of the primary character development tools in an action movie. Does your character step up to the plate and act when times are tough? If your character, Dan, is picking his 10 year old son up from school and sees Jake, 11, bullying him, does Dan walk up to Jake’s father and say something? That simple action can have a HUGE influence on how we perceive Dan. One of the easiest ways to get readers on your hero’s side is to write an early scene where your character acts in a strong manner. Or rights a wrong. That’s all I was asking from yesterday’s script. Not some big goofy backstory. But ANYTHING that gave me some insight into the hero and made me want to root for him.

Choice – Choice is action’s little cousin. It’s basically the same thing, but you add a little more weight to the action so that there’s not just a choice involved, but a difficult choice. Take the exact same scenario I mentioned above but change it so that Jake’s dad also happens to be Dan’s boss. So for Dan to go up and say something to Jake’s father is actually jeopardizing his relationship at work. If Dan’s already on shaky ground at his job, the choice becomes even harder. However, if Dan does the right thing (mentions Jake’s behavior to his boss), we’ll like him A LOT.

How They Treat People – This technically falls under the action umbrella as well, but I’m separating it because character interaction is such a major component of a screenplay. So if your character is treating everyone badly, you can guess how we’re going to perceive them. Conversely, if they treat people well, we’ll like them. These are the tiny slivers of character development that writers overlook. And yet in an action script where we want to convey as much about a character as possible in as little time as possible, paying attention to the way your hero treats others might be all you need to get him on the audience’s side.

Personality – A favorable personality can do a majority of the work for you. If we like a character because of their general disposition, we don’t need any save the cat moments or yell at bully’s dad moments. The magnetism of that personality is going to drive the majority of our support. Marvel has become a master at this. From Tony Stark to Peter Parker to Thor to Peter Quill, we like positive charismatic people. So if you’re writing a character like this, you don’t even have to worry about doing anything else. We like the character from the second they start talking.

Their situation in life – A character’s current lot in life has a huge effect on the level of sympathy we have for them. A character who lives in a tiny place in a bad part of town and barely makes ends meet is higher on the sympathy scale than a billionaire who owns a penthouse on Fifth Avenue. — BUT if you give the billionaire an A+ personality, it can override our negative perception of their privilege (Tony Stark). There used to be a belief in Hollywood that rich people couldn’t be main characters for this reason. We’d reject them because their life was great. But I think you’re starting to see how this works. You assess who your character is, how they’re likely to be perceived, and you adjust accordingly. Some characters have so much working against them that you need to add a lot of these tools to make us like them.

How others treat them – A lot of writers trying to make their heroes likable assume they can only do so by looking inwards, at the character themselves. But actually, you can make characters likable through the way others treat them. Look no further than Cinderella. One of the reasons Cinderella is so insanely likable is that her stepmother and two step-sisters are so mean to her. When we see people being mean to others, our sympathy immediately goes out to them. I actually leaned this lesson by watching the reality show, Survivor. On that show was this guy named Russell. He was one of the worst human beings you could imagine. He was duplicitous, mean, vengeful, a liar, and just plain not a good person. He also holds the title of being one of the show’s all time favorites. He has tens of millions of fans. But how can that be? Well, the thing was, everybody hated Russell so much that they were constantly trying to get him off the show. They tried everything in their power. And they would say it right to his face. “We don’t like you. We will do anything to get you out of here.” They were so awful to him that audiences gradually found themselves rooting for Russell. So never underestimate the influence of how others treat your hero.

Whether or not they get back up – Movies are about knocking your hero down. It will happen over and over again. In fact, if your hero isn’t constantly being knocked down by obstacles and conflict, there probably isn’t enough happening in your movie. But the critical thing here is HOW YOUR CHARACTER DEALS WITH BEING KNOCKED DOWN. Do they give up? Or do they get back up? One of the most likable types of people on the planet are people who get knocked down but get back up with a positive attitude. They keep trying. Failure is an obstacle to them, not an end destination. So an early scene where your hero gets their butt handed to them badly but they still get back up and want to keep going – that will have a huge positive effect on how we see that character.

I’ll finish off by repeating what I said yesterday. If I’m not rooting for your hero, I don’t care what happens in your script. So make sure that when you’re writing that first act, you’re thinking about how the audience is perceiving your hero. Cause the flip side of what I just said is that if you can make us fall in love with your hero, you don’t need to write the best story in the world. We’re going to care so much about that person that we’ll be willing to follow them anywhere.

Hey, do you have a logline that isn’t working? Try out my logline service. It’s 25 bucks for a 1-10 rating, 150 word analysis, and a logline rewrite. I also have a deluxe service for 40 dollars that allows for unlimited e-mails back and forth where we tweak the logline until you’re satisfied. I consult on everything screenwriting related (first page, first ten pages, first act, outlines, and of course, full scripts). So if you’re interested in getting some quality feedback, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com and I’ll send you a quote!

Genre: Biopic
Premise: The rise and fall of the greatest one-hit wonder ever – Vanilla Ice.
About: “Something grabs a hold of me tightly. Flow like a harpoon daily and nightly.” Best lyric in the history of music? If this movie happens, one thing they won’t need is a make-up department. That’s because Vanilla Ice doppleganger Dave Franco is rumored to be playing the lead.
Writers: Chris Goodwin and Phillip Van
Details: 127 pages

You know the deal by now. When I read a biopic, I’m looking at whether I’m reading an author who did a quick wikipedia search and copy-pasted the story into Final Draft, or if I’m reading something where the writer actually thought about telling the story in a creative and moving way. If you do the latter, as very few people do, I’m thrilled. If you do the former, it’s one more bullet to the chest of the biopic. Which I’m okay with also because it means we’re one death closer to this genre never being relevant again.

For those new to biopics, here’s how we got here. Event movies destroyed the movie star. The movie star needed to find other options. The biopic became the go-to genre because it allowed the movie star to do what they do best, be the center of attention. The movie was about the historical figure, of course. But it was just as much about the actor. Even better, these movies became a primary vehicle for big studios to win Academy awards. So they were willing to spend big money on the production, the actor, and the director. Do you get to save the world anymore? No. But you get your close-up. And that’s all movie stars care about.

Anyway, I like the idea of a Vanilla Ice biopic because it opens up some avenues to not take the genre too seriously. Maybe play with the format a bit. Have some fun. Let’s see what route the writers took.

Robbie Van Winkle grew up in Miami Lakes, Florida. He was a little kid with a unique dream as a white boy – to be a rapper. Robbie worked as a used car salesman at 20 years old, and he and his crew would go over to the City Lights Night Club every weekend and watch the rap acts. One night, his friends tricked the booker into getting him up on stage, And Robbie killed it. Tommy Quon, the owner of the club, liked what he saw. To him, Robbie was a young Elvis, just doing it in a different style of music.

Tommy ended up selling his club and going out with Robbie on the road where they played in a bunch of dingy redneck bars that didn’t understand what Robbie was doing. But after a year of touring and Robbie piece-mailing together 10 songs, one of those songs, Ice Ice Baby, which was actually a B-track that Ice and his crew felt was weak, started playing on the radio. This led Tommy and Robbie to LA, where they signed with the record label, SBK, who gave Robbie, now “Vanilla Ice,” a half-million dollar advance.

Ice’s single would shoot to the top of the charts where he’d rub elbows with MC Hammer, an artist who many people felt Ice was copying. The single would then lead to an infamous cameo in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2, and then Ice’s own movie, Cool as Ice (“Drop the zero and get with the hero”). Quickly, however, the media turned on him, saying that he had stolen the hook from David Bowie’s song, “Under Pressure.” In a famous interview, Ice would explain the difference. “We sampled it from them but it’s not the same baseline. It goes DING DING DING DIGA DING DING. DING DING DING DIGA DING DING. That’s the way theirs goes. Ours goes DING DING DING TING AHH DING DING. DING DING DING TING AHH DING DING.”

But things would get a lot worse. Suge Knight, then an up and coming music producer, threatened Ice’s life if he didn’t give him a percentage of the profits from Ice Ice Baby. Ice was so shaken by the encounter that he hired eight body guards with machine guns to guard his house at all times. Ice then turned to drugs to ease the anxiety, and before he knew it, he was out of money with no prospects. Eventually he would come to the realization that it was time to leave Ice behind and reintroduce himself to Robbie.

Dave Franco for Vanilla Ice!

The most amazing thing about this script is that the rise and fall of Vanilla Ice is structured so evenly. It’s literally the first half is all about the rise and the second half is all about the fall.

To me, the fall was more interesting. I didn’t know anything about the Suge Knight stuff. What do you do when a thug accompanied by four armed men holds you over a ledge and threatens to drop you unless you give him ten percent of the proceeds to your multi-million dollar hit? I guess you say ‘yes.’

As long as we’re talking about hit records, though, we might as well talk about broken ones. I say this every time I review a biopic. Unless you have the most fascinating person with the most fascinating life ever, to the point where you don’t have to change a thing – that’s how amazing it is. If you don’t have that, you need to make some story decisions that set your biopic apart from all the other ones.

This is your typical rise and fall music biopic. There’s nothing inventive about it at all. There’s even a “descends into the drugs and party life” montage. And while Vanilla Ice is amusing, he’s by no means fascinating. So it’s one of those typical reads where you get to the end and you think, “That wasn’t bad.” But it certainly wasn’t great.

A stronger theme probably could’ve helped. With these biopics, since they’re so furiously focused on one individual, you want to say something about the world through that individual. There were tiny moments that hinted at this theme of Vanilla Ice being the first example of cultural appropriation – a white man trying to act black. But they never went that far with it. I think they also could’ve pushed Ice’s desire to be accepted by the black community more. Let’s face it. In this day and age, the media loves race-bait. They eat it up. So if your movie plays into that, people are going to talk about it. And I truly felt like Ice was hurt that people in the hip-hop community weren’t more accepting of him.

And if you’re wondering how do you manage a theme like that in a screenplay – you start with your climax. Your climax should be the moment where your theme is colliding with your character in the most dramatic way. So, as an example (although there are many ways to do it), you might have Vanilla Ice break down about the fact that this community he so badly wants to be a part of has officially rejected him. And then you move backwards from there and make sure there are ample moments throughout the script that keep that topic at the forefront. If your theme is a huge part of your climax, it’s likely the audience will know that THAT’S what your film is about. If it isn’t, we’re probably going to be confused as to what the movie was about. And that was the case with To The Extreme. I’m not sure what it was about other than a singer’s rise and fall.

With that said, I was never bored by To the Extreme. But like all biopics, it’s sort of like reading a wikipedia page while on a Disneyland ride. It’s slightly more exciting than reading it from your couch. And I suppose if you knew nothing about Vanilla Ice, this might wax your candle. But if you don’t know who Vanilla Ice is, do you wanna know? I don’t know. Word to your mother. Peace in the Middle East.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Always try to find fun ways into scenes. If you have a meeting between characters, ask yourself if there’s a way into that meeting other than one man walking into a room, sitting down, and talking with another man. In To The Extreme, Tommy (the night club manager) says to Robbie to come meet him tomorrow at 10. This is Robbie’s big shot. Someone likes his music! Now we could’ve had Robbie just show up. But the writers cleverly have Robbie working at the car lot that day. And his boss, Bryon, won’t give him the time off. So Robbie has one of his friends, Chill, show up pretending to be looking for a car. This allows Robbie to give him a “test-drive,” which, in actuality, allows the two of them to get to the meeting.

Last week we talked about how to set up a scene in order to create the best dialogue. Today we’re going to go back even further than that and talk about how to create characters that lead to good dialogue. How important is character creation when it comes to dialogue? Well, you know that guy Quentin Tarantino? The screenwriter who many believe writes the best dialogue in town? All Tarantino does is he creates a series of larger-than-life characters and simply lets them talk. You could argue that unless you’re constructing some of your characters with the larger-than-life gene, you’re dooming your screenplay to bad dialogue. Think about it, how many average characters do you remember in all of the movies you’ve seen who spit out memorable dialogue? I’m guessing none.

So my first piece of advice to you when it comes to character and dialogue is to create a character who’s larger than life in some way. Now when I say, “larger than life,” I don’t mean Melissa McCarthy in Bridesmaids. I mean there’s something about your character’s personality that’s bigger than the average person. Juno is a good example. That character was talkative and opinionated, slightly larger than life. But she was still able to exist in reality. Steve Jobs in Aaron Sorkin’s “Jobs,” is another example. Big and opinionated and intelligent and thoughtful. He had that larger than life quality.

So the next question becomes, how do we vary these characters? Not everyone should be Juno. The good news is, it’s not as hard as you think. Personality comes in many different flavors. There’s the motormouth, the joker, the know-it-all, the b.s.’er, the opinionated, the walking thesaurus. Write out a list of all the people you know in your life and next to them write down what their most dominant trait is and you’ll get a sense of what types of people are fun to listen to and what types aren’t. You can also watch sit coms (Seinfeld is a good one) where characters, especially guest characters, are highlighted by a particular trait (the soup nazi is militant, for example), and get ideas that way. It’s important to note that every trait is scaleable to the tone of the movie you’re writing. There’s a version of the Soup Nazi for a move like “The Mule.” You’d just have to dial the goofiness back and make him one of the drug dealers, not a soup dealer.

One of the things that really gets in the way of good dialogue is, believe it or not, the main character. This is because your main character is often the most grounded variable in your story. Their goals and desires need a certain element of truth to them for us to care about their journey. Unfortunately, this often makes them an un-engaging conversationalist. And normal conversation isn’t as fun to read as larger-than-life conversation. This is why people remember Han Solo over Luke Skywalker, Jack Sparrow over Will Turner.

There are a couple of ways to deal with this. The first is to buck the trend of writing a grounded main character and center your story around someone larger than life. A good example of this is The Narrator (Edward Norton) in Fight Club. The guy is very thoughtful and has lots of opinions on work, love, and life, and he’s giving us a rundown of these thoughts throughout the story. He’s anything but your average grounded main character. Christy Hall’s angry man-hating heroine, Skylar, in her spec, “Get Home Safe,” is another anti-grounded character who says what’s on her mind and doesn’t care how you feel about it.

The second way to tackle this problem is to identify which character in your script shares the most screentime with your grounded lead and make sure they’re a larger-than-life character. A recent example of this is Hell or High Water. In that film, Toby Howard (Chris Pine) is our muted reserved down-to-earth lead and Tanner Howard (Ben Foster), his brother, is our alcoholic rambling joking threatening larger-than-life character. What this does is it creates contrast between the characters. Contrast results in a steady wave of conflict. And conflict is where you’re going to find all of your best dialogue. And the reason, of course, that you do this with the second biggest character is because you’ll have a ton of scenes with those characters throughout the screenplay, which guarantees you a lot of good dialogue exchanges.

One of the most dangerous things you can do in a script is create two down-to-earth grounded leads who aren’t big talkers. I’m sure a few cinephiles here can name a movie or two where that’s worked. But I’m guessing those examples are few and far between.

How many larger-than-life characters should you include in your script? That’s obviously going to depend on genre and what kind of script you’re writing. Every character will have a function in the screenplay that may or may not jive with being “larger than life.” However, one of the nice things about supporting characters is that their lives don’t have to be as fully-shaped and grounded as your leads. Therefore, you can have more fun with them. A movie with great dialogue is Good Will Hunting and pretty much every supporting character in that movie is larger than life. Chuckie (Ben Affleck) was a big goofball. Morgan (Casey Affleck) was the willing butt of the joke. Skylar was big and humorous and always ready to have fun. Lambeau (the math professor) was this fevered tortured soul desperate to see this young man reach his potential. And of course Sean the Therapist was the most animated character of them all. If there ever was a movie to prove the point of this article – that larger-than-life characters are the key to good dialogue – Good Will Hunting would be it. To summarize, there’s no limit to how many of these characters you can add. But there are situations where you have to be very judicious about adding multiple larger-than-life characters. I probably wouldn’t have a ton of them in Moonlight, for example.

I want to finish this off by saying that one of the consistent threads in the scripts I read that contain lifeless dialogue is the lack of interesting characters. It’s hard to make someone sound unique who isn’t. This is the reason for another big dialogue faux-pas, which is try-hard dialogue – characters saying big outlandish things that they would never say. This happens when writers construct uninteresting characters and then try to shove interesting words into their mouths. It doesn’t work because it never feels like the real character. It feels like the writer.

In the coming weeks, we’re going to learn how to apply these tools to actually write good dialogue. Should be fun!

Hey, do you have a logline that isn’t working? Are people not responding to it? Try out my logline service. It’s 25 bucks for a 1-10 rating, 150 word analysis, and a logline rewrite. I also have a deluxe service for 40 dollars that allows for unlimited e-mails back and forth where we tweak the logline until you’re satisfied. I consult on everything screenwriting related (first page, first ten pages, first act, outlines, and of course, full scripts). So if you’re interested in getting some quality feedback, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com and I’ll send you a quote!

Genre: Sci-Fi/Drama/TV
Premise: The kids from Hawkins, Indiana are back, this time with a mysterious Russian signal to decode and a possessed Billy to fend off.
About: Stranger Things is beloved. How beloved? A seasons 1&2 recap with the show’s stars released two weeks ago garnered 4 and a half million views on Youtube! Just for going over old stuff! Word on the street is that the series is generating more conversation than that Marvel flick we reviewed yesterday. Does this mean Stranger Things seasons 4, 5, and 6 are inevitable? Are we going to follow the lives of Dustin, Mike, and Eleven into their 30s? The way studios are pulling their properties away from Netflix these days, don’t bet against it!
Created by: The Duffer Brothers
Details: This is a review of the first three episodes of Season 3

Yesterday, a commenter brought up the idea that I’d become one of these bitter movie reviewer types who hate everything. I mean, who couldn’t like Spider-Man: Far From Home?? The ONLY thing it wants to do is give the audience a good time!

If I’m being completely honest, the commenter has a point. I think this is something everyone in the business worries about. At what point does it only become about technique, as opposed to how a movie makes you feel? Recently, Gwyneth Paltrow was raked over the coals for not knowing her character, Pepper Potts, was in Spider-Man: Homecoming. Had Gwyneth too, become so blind to the magic of film that she no longer paid attention to her contribution to the community?

Once you’ve figured out whether I just compared myself to Gwyneth Paltrow or not, we can go deeper into that question. I think everyone in movies – especially critics – worry that because they watch so much stuff, they’ll eventually become desensitized to the medium. A french fry is the most amazing invention in the world until you learn that it started out as a big ugly brown thing covered in cow manure.

So to answer that commenter, yes, I do think bitterness shines through at times when I review something. And no, I don’t like when it happens. I don’t want to be the “everything sucks” guy. There are plenty of those people on the internet already. But it’s also hard to endorse something when you’re not feeling it. Spider-Man may have wanted to be the most fun movie in the world. But that doesn’t mean it was. Marvel got to where it got because it took chances. Far From Home was the anti-chance. Like the taco truck selling 99 cent tacos outside the bar at 2am. No matter how uplifting I want to be, I can’t endorse that. At least not sober.

So where does this leave us today? Ironically, Stranger Things isn’t that different from Spider-Man. It’s about high school kids. It’s about having a good time. It’s a big event series. You could argue that these properties are fighting for the same demographic. So who wins in a Spider-Man 2 versus Stranger Things 3 showdown? Let’s find out.

It’s summertime in Hawkins, Indiana and a new mall has opened up, giving our Stranger Things crew of Mike, Dustin, Lucas, Will, and Mad Max something to do besides ride their BMX’s around town. At the mall, Studly Steve now works at an ice cream shop with a girl named Robin who looks eerily like a cross between Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman because, oh yeah, she is a cross between them!

Meanwhile, Mike and Eleven are doing a lot of kissing, as Eleven tries harder than ever to be a normal kid. This is going to be difficult because after Dustin builds a giant antennae to try and communicate with his long distance girlfriend he met at science camp, he overhears a foreboding Russian transmission, which he writes down and later tries to decode.

But things really take a turn for the tubular when Billy, now a life guard, tries to hook up with a MILF, but crashes his car on the way to her house and gets pulled into the upside-down. There, Billy meets… another Billy, and when Billy is sent back to the rightside-up, we realize he’s the alternate possessed Billy. If that’s confusing, you’ll be happy to know that Winona Ryder is now obsessed with the magnets on her fridge, which don’t work anymore. These kids might be growing up but it’s nice to know some things in Hawkins never change.

Here’s the thing about Stranger Things. It’s not a very well-written show. There are too many characters and storylines to keep up with and a good portion of them feel like filler. I mean, do we really need an entire subplot built around Jim Hopper working up the courage to tell a 14 year old boy to cool it on the kissing with his adopted daughter? There’s a scene with Hopper getting drunk and watching Magnum P.I. as he becomes further and further irritated by the idea of kissing that may be the most wasteful two minutes in TV this year.

But the magic of Stranger Things is not that it’s the best written show on television. It’s that it’s the most watchable show on television. I can’t just throw on an episode of Jessica Jones. Or Narcos, or Mindhunters, or even Orange is the New Black. But I can throw on an episode of Stranger Things and, for a little under an hour, every problem in the world fades away. This show takes you back to a simpler time, it surrounds you with incredibly likable people, and it throws just enough zany yet entertaining plot points at you to keep you wanting more.

There are a lot of things we can talk about in regards to this season. But I want to highlight one in particular. The Not-Who-They-Seem Character. The Not-Who-They-Seem Character is any character who, for story reasons, isn’t the person everyone else thinks they are. In this case, that’s Billy. They think he’s Billy. But he’s actually Upside-Down Billy. You see this character everywhere. We just saw it with Spider-Man. Nick Fury is actually Mysterio for a scene. We see it in Mission Impossible. Whoever wears the masks becomes someone else. You see it in more down-to-earth narratives, like Alias. Jennifer Garner is just a regular girl to her friends. But in reality, she’s an international spy.

These characters do double-duty because one, actors love to play them, and two, the very nature of their duality provides numerous avenues for drama. For starters, every conversation they’re in has dramatic irony because they’re lying. They’re not providing the other person with the truth of who they are. And that makes any interaction interesting. These characters become even more valuable in a TV show because you don’t have the spectacle that you do in movies. Your budget-per-minute is a lot lower. So you need to look for clever ways to keep things interesting and utilizing a “Not-Who-They-Seem” character is one of the most cost-effective ways to do that.

Another thing you have to constantly be on top of in TV writing is love stories. But not love stories that are going well. Those never work. Love stories that either have the potential to happen or love stories that are happening, but have too many roadblocks to survive. In this season of Stranger Things, we have the potential romance of Steve and Robin, the potential romance of Jim and Joyce, the potential romance of Billy and the Mom. And in the one romance that’s supposedly going well – Mike and Eleven – we have Jim coming in and telling Mike to stay away from her, effectively ending their relationship. Call this what you want – but relationship management needs to be a strength of yours if you’re going to write in television.

I still struggle with Stranger Things at times. I don’t know if the Duffer Brothers just use 80s homages because they like them or because they don’t have any original ideas of their own. But like I said, this show is so watchable that whatever beef you have with it fades away the further you get into each episode. It and Black Mirror are currently the only must-watch shows on the streaming giant. I hope I still feel this way after finishing the season! What about you guys? What did you think?

[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Our interest in each storyline will depend on the stakes of said storyline. A big reason the “Jim Hates Kissing” storyline doesn’t work is because the stakes are so low. Who cares if they kiss? I have a feeling that early drafts of this may have had them working up towards having sex but that someone stepped in and said that’s too much for these characters. If that were the case, Jim’s anxiety about the relationship would’ve been justified. But innocent kissing? There’s zero stakes attached to that.

Genre: Action/Drama
Premise: When a terrorist group takes hundreds of hostages captive in the Empire State Building, a fearless CIA agent sneaks into the famous landmark and climbs 66 stories to take down the bad guys.
About: Today we get a script from S. Craig Zahler, who STILL holds the #3 spot on my Top 25 List (look over to the right side to see the Top 25). Zahler’s recent foray into directing has finally gotten him enough clout to get Brigands of Rattleborge made. Park Chan-wook, the director of one of the best movies ever, “Oldboy,” will steer the Western. Matthew McConaghey is almost a go to star. A little known fact about Zahler. He’s a metal head and scores his own films!
Writer: S. Craig Zahler
Details: 121 pages

Zahler is at an interesting point in his career. For an entire decade, he was one of the most successful unproduced screenwriters in the business. Maybe even THE most successful. He sold a ton of scripts. But his heavy-handed novelistic voice was both an ally and an adversary. It helped him stand out from the pack. But people weren’t sure his scripts would translate to the big screen.

At some point, Zahler had enough. If you’re not going to make my movies, he said, I’ll make my movies. And he made Bone Tomahawk. Then Brawl in Cell Block 99. And most recently, Dragged Across Concrete. Perhaps his ten years in waiting was a predication of what was to come after all. His movies have been received fairly well from critics. Hard core cinephiles also enjoy them. But the jury’s still out on if there’s a mainstream audience. This is one of his most commercial scripts. So maybe it changes the conversation.

Rhett Westermark feels guilty every day for not being there when his older brother died. The two were firefighters when 9/11 went down. While he eagerly waited to be called in, he heard over the radio that the building his brother was in collapsed. Twelve years later, Rhett, now a CIA agent, finds it tough to open up to anyone. He’s so detached from his relationship with his girlfriend, Danielle, in fact, he tells her she can go out with other men while they’re together.

New York City is already on heightened alert when terrorists take over the Empire State Building. The president is in town, deflecting heavy criticism for America’s participation in the Breznian war. The terrorists secure floors 66 and 67, huddling up 500 hostages, then announcing their demands. The government is to deliver them the president of the United States by 5pm or they will start throwing one hostage out of the building every half hour.

The city calls their bluff and, sure enough, they toss someone out with a noose around their neck. When the rope goes taut, the hostage’s head snaps off. These guys are nothing if not dramatic. The city then sends in a SWAT team. But the terrorists easily take care of them. They subsequently announce a punishment for the SWAT team. Now TWO people will be thrown off the building every half hour.

Westermark tells his coworkers that there’s no conventional way to handle this situation. He has an idea. He’ll go in, all by himself, then use an elevator shaft to pull a bin full of weapons to the 66th floor. He’ll then arm the hostages and make it a fair fight. Before they can agree with Westermark, he’s off. He’s not going to wait around for people to die this time.

But people do die. As Westermark painstakingly moves up the Empire State Building one floor at a time, he keeps encountering terrorists. And when these terrorists report up to their boss, more hostages are tossed off the building. But Westermark eventually gets to the hostage floor and meticulously arms the hostages one by one through bathroom breaks. Finally the signal comes in and it’s an all out war between captives and captors!

One of best ways to find a big idea, something that’s going to attract producers, is to take a famous movie and find a fresh way into the idea. Here, Zahler has basically created a fresh take on Die Hard – which is: what if we did the serious/realistic version of Die Hard?

The problem with looking for fresh takes on popular ideas is that there’s still no guarantee that the idea will be interesting to people. In other words, just because you have a new take doesn’t mean it’s going to be a good take. Is a serious version of Die Hard something people want to see? I don’t know, to be honest. I’m lukewarm on the concept. But that doesn’t mean others won’t be into it.

The strange thing about “Breaking” is that it spends a lot of time setting up its characters and yet I didn’t feel like I knew any of them. Westermark, in particular, was relegated to “guy who lost his brother in 9/11.” There wasn’t anything deeper than that. And since the 9/11 survivor thing is used so often in storytelling, you need to bring more context to it in order to overcome the cliche.

A big issue was that Westermark never spoke. The only time he said anything was to take care of logistics (“I’m going to go here and then you can meet me there.”). His character was very introspective and the problem with introspective characters is that they emit very little personality on the page. So it’s hard for the reader to connect with them. And this could pretty much be said for all the characters.

The one character I felt like I knew the best was Danielle, the girlfriend. Which was ironic because she had nothing to do with the main plot. She just leaves lots of voice mails for Westermark opining about the state of their relationship. This goes to show that how much a character speaks has a big influence on how well the reader feels like they know them. I shouldn’t feel after this script that I know Danielle better than the main character, but I did.

Another issue with the script is that there’s a ton of jumping around in the first act. We meet Westermark, the girlfriend, the bad guy, the agents, some people in China, several other bad guys, hot dog vendors, a few more people who I didn’t even know what they had to do with the story. When you jump around that much early on, it becomes very easy for the reader to lose focus. Since we’re not sitting down and getting to know any one character, we don’t feel like we know any of the characters. I had to keep reeling myself back in to focus.

You can still create memorable characters within this format. But you have to give them a really strong introduction. Westermark’s introduction is waiting to hear if he’s going to the World Trade Center and then realizing his brother is dead. Again, dying in 9/11 is not an original backstory. Is hasn’t been for 18 years. So unless you can find a way into that scenario that’s unique and memorable, it’s probably not going to leave much of an impact. When you couple that with a dozen quick ambiguous character introductions, you’re making it really hard on the reader.

The thing is, I like the central plot here. Painstakingly moving up a skyscraper one floor at a time to kill terrorists. That’s good. And the hero’s plan is a unique one. He’s going to arm the hostages once he gets there. Also good. But this is a great example of how important the first act is. If we’re not intimately connected to your main characters after the first act, then even when they’re involved in a cool plot like this one, we’re not going to be emotionally invested.

And all of this is rather baffling because it’s not like Zahler isn’t putting attention on the characters. You get the feeling he thinks about them a lot. But the combination of an introverted non-emoting hero and a scattershot never-ending introduction pattern prevent us from knowing them as well as he does. That’s a mistake we writers make all the time. We assume that the character is just as clear in the reader’s eyes as he is in our own heads. But a reader only knows a character from what they say and what they do. So if the writer doesn’t pick the right scenes to highlight those qualities, we’re (the reader) seeing a different character than you (the writer).

Not a bad script at all. But the lack of a hero to connect with left me wanting more.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: 9/11 is a tricky topic. It hasn’t led to a single strong movie or TV show (a couple of minor successes, but let’s be honest, nothing great). I think it has something to do with the inherent melodrama that comes with the territory. It’s almost too sad to write about. And whenever people try and incorporate it, it feels try-hard, maudlin, cliche. I would stay away from it unless you have the greatest can’t miss 9/11 idea ever. But if you’re like, “I have this great idea about a brother and sister trying to pick up the pieces after their dad dies in 9-11”… uh, yeah, don’t write that.