Genre: Spy Action Thriller
Premise: (from Hit List) A former assassin, turned reformed housewife and mother, faces off against the revenge-driven millennial sociopath she accidentally left alive after she wiped out the rest of her family.
About: This script got 24 votes on last year’s Hit List, which put it in the top 35. Erica Schreiber was repped at WME (before the strike) and got her start working as an assistant in the writer’s room for Monk. Most recently she got a stab at the upcoming Micronauts movie.
Writer: Erica Schreiber
Details: 117 pages

Uma for Mia?

We’re sticking with the Russian theme this week! Which makes absolutely no sense, since July 4th is Independence Day in the U.S. Maybe tomorrow I’ll review a Murican script to balance it out.

Today we’re getting another radiation dose of the Jane Wick trend. But this one is a little different. Having finished the script an hour ago, I’m having trouble categorizing it. That should be a good thing. You don’t want your John/Jane Wick spec to feel like everyone else’s. But you don’t want it to be too out there either. We need a sense of what kind of movie we’re watching.

Mia is a CIA spy in the heart of Russia. Her and her partner, Dale, shake down a Russian spy for some weapons info. Mia not only shoots the man and his wife dead afterwards, but their 10 year old son as well. The two then use the info Mia retrieved to infiltrate a Russian bio-weapons lab. Afterwards, Mia runs off with another spy, Guy, to ditch the spy life and start a family in the suburbs.

Cut to 13 years later and the now 40-something Mia is living a boring life as a real estate agent with Guy and their 12 year old daughter, Case. But mere pages after we’ve established Mia’s new reality, both her workplace and every car on the block blow up. Out of nowhere comes a psycho chick named Serena who we’ll later find out was hiding in the house that day Mia killed her family. Mia tries to get to her family but watches in horror as Guy and Case are blown up in their car. Serena informs Mia that she’s not going to kill her yet, then disappears.

We then jump back in time to meet Serena as a little child. We watch her befriend a Russian gangster, learn how to kill, search for the woman who killed her family, move to the U.S. as a 17 year old via a Russian online wedding service, lose her virginity to her new husband, start killing all her new husband’s friends who she doesn’t like, and eventually locate Mia.


Meanwhile, while that ongoing flashback is happening, we’re watching Mia put the pieces together, reconnect with her old partner Dale, and try to find out what the heck is going on. Remember, she had no idea there even was a girl in the house that day. Eventually the two find out Serena wants to take her on at a mall for some reason. So Mia shows up there and we have a big mall battle, complete with a collapsing escalator that chews up pairs of mall shoppers.

After that showdown, when things are at their lowest, Mia learns that Case is still alive! Serena is holding her. Mia gets in touch with one last ally to come up with a plan to charge into the lion’s den and take this psycho girl down for good.

One thing I give 13 Years Later credit for is keeping me on my toes. Every time I thought I had a handle on this movie, Schreiber would throw a curve ball at me. It’s rare that you set up a character as extensively as Guy, the husband, was, then kill him off in a blink-and-you-miss-it car explosion. Case too. Although she later comes back into the story via a twist.

I also liked the initial setup – or what I thought the movie was going to be – which was two top-level killers laying waste to a suburb in an effort to be the last woman standing. The script’s best moments are when we’re focused on that. Like the mall showdown. But that’s not what the script ends up being. Just when we’ve set up our adversaries, we flash back to get to know everybody better and learn how they got here.

I’m not going to get into some big rant about flashbacks. We’ve covered that to death here. And to Schreiber’s credit, helping us understand Serena better does give the spy vs. spy set pieces more emotional weight. But to me, the juice (the flashbacks) wasn’t worth the squeeze. The story is the present, not the past. And when it comes to movies, that’s where you want to be 99% of the time. Novels are good for learning about character backstories. But movies shine brightest when they’re in the now. Especially with an action movie like this.

Another issue I had with the script was the tone. 13 Years Later wants to be this John Wick like piece of popcorn entertainment. That’s clear from lines like this one from Serena: “I remember thinking you were a monster. Watching you murder my family from a fucking closet. But now you’re just another suburban mommy in her 40s who only kills bottles of Chardonnay.” But then it also has a hero who kills a 10 year old boy in the opening scene and then later shoots a cop in her face. Or a 17 year old who sneaks into the U.S. as a mail order bride and has sex with her much older new husband. I can’t marry those two extremes in the same movie. You gotta pick one or the other.

Personally, I would embrace the absurdity of this premise and just have fun with it. This is an 80s Schwarzenegger flick in disguise. I mean a showdown at the mall where people are falling into collapsed escalators? Why would you want to add extremely mature themes to that? This is a fun situation. An entire suburb as a chess piece with two characters using every gun and explosive in their arsenal to take each other down.

This was a good case where you could anticipate the problems in the logline itself. When you see the words, “faces off against the revenge-driven millennial sociopath,” you’re imagining a comedy. That word, “millennial,” isn’t typically used in a serious manner. So every time someone makes a joke here, you’re thinking, “Okay, I understand this movie.” But then your hero blows off the head of an innocent old man at a bar and you’re like, “Whoa. I don’t understand this at all.”

Tone is one of those things that’s hard to get a handle on. But basically, the larger the gap between your most humorous moment and your most serious moment, the more tonal issue you’re going to have. Put simply, the plot here isn’t serious enough to support a character this dark.

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

What I learned: Think real hard about who your character kills. If you’re going to have them kill an innocent person, the reader will struggle to like them. And if they willingly kill an innocent child? I can guarantee you they won’t like them. Truth be told, I don’t think it’s possible to come back from a hero willingly killing a child. If there’s a single example of the opposite being the case, I don’t remember it. But if anyone comes up with one in the comments, maybe we can figure out why it worked.

Genre: Drama
Premise: The fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown, whose damage was compounded by a corrupt government determined to cover up the severity of the incident.
About: Chernobyl snuck up out of nowhere to become a huge HBO hit. It has an unheard of 9.6/10 rating on IMDB. The show has stirred up controversy in Russia, where the Communist Party of Russia’s Sergey Malinkovich called the show disgusting and is trying to ban it across the country.
Creator: Craig Maizen
Details: This is a review of the first two episodes

I was sitting down this weekend, trying to figure out what I was going to review on Monday – the light as a buttery crepe “Yesterday,” or the heavy as a dead whale carcass, “Chernobyl.” The choice would’ve been easy had the two been evenly rated. I wanted to watch something fun. But Chernobyl’s review scores so outweighed Yesterday’s that I had no choice.

I bring this up because it’s something writers should be thinking about whenever they start a new project. They should imagine a consumer trying to make a choice. What is it about your movie or TV show that would make someone choose it over something else? It’s a bit of a mind f&*% because you can’t really get into the collective heads of everybody on the planet. But entertainment is one of the most competitive industries in the world. So if you aren’t at least considering the competition, you’ll come up short.

“Chernobyl” doesn’t waste any time getting down to brass tacks. After a brief flash-forward to show one of the chief inspectors hanging himself, we cut back to that fateful night where we see the Chernobyl reactor blow up. The chief engineer on site, Anatoly Dyatlov, dismisses the explosion, arguing that it’s a minor fire as opposed to a meltdown of the reactor core, which would be way more devastating. How devastating? Valery Legasov, the chief of the commission, later tells us that every hour that goes by where the core is exposed, it will be like 2 Hiroshima bombs going off. And unless they stop it, that could go on for 1000 years.

Back to Dyatlov, who informs his superiors that the radiation readings are only coming in at 3.6 R/s, which is bad but by no means lethal. He fails to mention, however, that their on-site dosimeters only measure up to 3.6 R/s. In other words, the meters are tapping out at the highest level they’re capable of showing. Meanwhile, Legasov, a professor who’s an expert in these matters, is flown to Chernobyl to assess the damage. He realizes immediately that this is no small fire. The reactor core has exploded. Which means Chernobyl isn’t spitting out a pithy 3.6 R/s, but rather 2000 R/s. In a meeting with Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev, he tells him that if he doesn’t plug up that reactor core, not only will tens of millions of people in Russia die, but millions of people in the surrounding countries will die as well.

Gorbachev teams Legasov up with Boris Shcherbina, a high ranking Russian general who seems more annoyed by this mess than worried. When they visit the heart of the site and see the devastating effects the radiation is having on the workers and residents, Boris changes his tune. The two will have to figure out a way to plug up the reactor core, an action that has no precedent in history. But it only gets worse. Legasov learns that the reactors’ tanks are all filled with water, which means a chemical reaction is inevitable. When that happens, there will be a gigantic nuclear explosion the likes of which has never been seen before.

One of the primary reasons Chernobyl is so good is that it builds its premise around dramatic irony. We, the audience, know a lot more than the characters onscreen. We know the radiation that’s been released is so devastating that this town is abandoned still to this day. So when the nuclear reactor workers are shrugging their shoulders saying this isn’t a big deal, we’re screaming at the screen, “YES! IT’S A HUGE DEAL! YOU NEED TO ACT NOW YOU DUMMIES!” That’s one of the great things about working through a dramatically ironic premise. The audience becomes actively involved because they want the characters to catch up to them.

This is the same reason Titanic worked so well. After the ship hits the iceberg, we’re gobsmacked that everyone is so calm. We’re screaming at them, “YOU NEED TO GET OFF THE BOAT! THIS THING’S GOING TO START SINKING AND YOU’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!”

Once the characters in Chernobyl begin to accept the gravity of the situation, traditional GSU sets in. Goal – Fill the reactor core. Stakes – Tens of millions of lives. Urgency – Not only could the core blow at any minute, but every second the core is exposed, Hiroshima levels of radiation are slipping into the atmosphere.

Actually, if I had to identify the single biggest factor for the show’s success, it would be the urgency. That’s because it isn’t your typical, “if we don’t find the bad guys, a bomb will blow up in three hours,” but rather EVERY SECOND they don’t do their job, more and more people are going to die. The “bomb,” in this instance, is ongoing. It’s blowing up every second. This provides the entire show with an unheard of level of urgency.

A geeky screenwriting thing Maizen does well is analogies. When you’re dealing with something complicated like a nuclear reactor explosion, you need the characters to convey to the audience what’s going on in a way that they understand it. Early on, Legasov gives Boris a rundown of what’s happening. He explains that radiation is composed of these tiny microscopic bullets. These bullets shoot out into everything, including humans, but we can’t see the damage as clearly because they’re so small. The higher the radiation, the more bullets there are. And he essentially says that the level of radiation being emitted from Chernobyl at the moment is the equivalent of a trillion times trillion bullets, all shooting at us at once.

That was the perfect analogy because now, even normal scenes where people are right outside the destroyed building, are tense. Because I’m thinking to myself, “They’re getting shot over and over and over again right now. Get away from this place!” That’s a huge part of what made this work so well. You’re constantly thinking, “Get this over with and get away from this place so you have a chance at a normal life.”

The human element in Chernobyl is almost as compelling as the white hot plot. The show continually puts its characters in the predicament of either telling the truth or towing the company line. Do you admit that the core has exploded or do you cover your a%&? Do you follow your superior’s orders even if it means thousands of people dying, or do you tell everyone to get off the island as quickly as possible? Even our most honest character, Legasov, finds himself assuring some Chernobyl residents that they’ll be okay because that’s what he’s been ordered to do.

The show only has one misstep so far, which is the subplot between Vasily, a firefighter, and his wife, Lyudmilla. Vasily is one of the first people called to the scene to put the fire out, but quickly becomes sick due to radiation, and must be transferred to Moscow. Lyudmilla goes from official to official, building to building, trying to find her husband, and eventually travels to Moscow to reunite with him.

The idea behind this subplot is sound. You want to humanize these events. You can’t just focus on the big plot points. We have to see how it affects the individuals, the “regular people,” who were ignorantly caught in the mess. The problem is that once Vasily is sent away and Lyudmilla follows him, they’re a million miles away from the story. The story is Chernoybl. Watching a couple of people nowhere near Chernobyl isn’t that compelling.

Contrast this with another subplot, Ulana Khomyuk’s storyline. Ulana is a nuclear physicist who lives far away from Chernobyl but senses something is off when she can’t get in touch with the facility. She then travels TO Chernobyl to tell them what she knows, and ends up helping the other scientists fill in the reactor core. The difference with this subplot is our character gets CLOSER TO THE ACTION, whereas with Vasily an Lyudmilla, they get further and further away. I call this the “Island Effect” and I’ll talk about it more in a second.

I have to give it to Maizen. He really stepped up here. On top of everything he did within the story itself, he also made the wise decision to go with a contained miniseries format. If this would’ve been a traditional TV series, he would’ve had to sacrifice the urgency in some way so that the story could last. But since the urgency is everything here, it had to be a mini-series in order to work. Very well done. Can’t wait to watch the rest of the show.

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

What I learned: “The Island Effect” is when you take a subplot and move it far enough away from the center of your story (to its own “island”) that the audience doesn’t care about it. Vasily and Lyudmilla were too far away from the exciting stuff for us to care about them. I see this mostly with writers who overestimate side characters in their script, giving them major subplots that are independent enough of the main storyline that we don’t care. One of the most popular recent iterations of the The Island Effect would be the Canto Bight stuff in The Last Jedi.

Over the next five Thursdays, I’m going to be talking dialogue with the Scriptshadow Community. We’re going to be exploring the five main factors that go into writing strong dialogue, and today we’re starting with scene prep. The objective of this post is to show you how to prep a scene in order to get the best dialogue out of it.

Before we get into what you should do, it’s important to understand what not to do. As a screenwriter, we’re taught to look at scenes as situations that move our story forward. For example, as you plan your scene, you may think, “I have to have Chloe tell Jack about the time machine glove here so that when they meet up with Dr. Frank after the graduation scene, they can go back in time that night.” In other words, you see the scene as a means to communicate information as opposed to an entertaining experience in itself.

That’s the switch I want you to make in your mind. Of course you want your scenes to push the story forward. But what’s more important is that each individual scene be entertaining. It may be scary to hear but three boring scenes in a row and the reader is out.

The most basic step in dialogue prep is making sure that one character in a scene WANTS SOMETHING. The reason for this is that it gives your character purpose. And when a character is purposeful, his words have meaning behind them. Words without purpose, without meaning, are lifeless. To see this in action, write up some dialogue where two characters don’t want anything from each other. See what comes out. I’m guessing a bunch of boring nonsense.

Here’s where things get fun. Once you have a character who wants something, you can set it up so that the other character in the scene doesn’t want to give it to them. Go write a scene right now where Nick wants to break up with Tara but Tara doesn’t let him. I guarantee that scene is going to have better dialogue than if Tara agrees with Nick that they should break up. By following this simple formula, you’ve added CONFLICT to your dialogue. And conflict is where most great dialogue lies.

While this setup works great, not all conversation is this cut and dry. To be honest, if you only wrote scenes where one character wanted something and another character didn’t want to give it to them, the script would get repetitive fast. Conversation is more varied and nuanced than that. However, I want you to master this basic setup, because we’re going to use it as a jumping off point for all the other dialogue situations.

A close cousin to the “want – don’t want” setup is the “talk – no talk” setup. This is where one character wants to talk about something and the other character doesn’t. How many times have you been in a relationship or a marriage where you came home and your spouse hits you with the last thing you want to talk about in that moment? That’s an ideal dialogue situation right there. I actually think one of the most fun types of scenes to write is a “talk – no talk” where the secondary character literally says nothing the whole scene. Character A is the only person who talks in the scene. These scenes are always good.

Because conversation is so complex, these two setups are not going to be enough to complete the 40 odd dialogue scenes you’ll write in a screenplay. There will be a number of scenarios where neither character wants something and where both characters want to talk to each other. How do we still make the dialogue pop in those situations? It’s called the “Tension Question.” When dialogue lacks bite, simply ask the question, “Where is the tension coming from?” If you don’t have any, the dialogue will lack spark.

An example of tension is sexual tension. I was watching The Office the other day and Michael Scott was talking to his female boss and neither of them wanted anything from each other. But the scene worked because there was sexual tension bubbling up underneath their conversation. You could even make the same scene work if the sexual tension was one-sided. AS LONG AS THERE’S TENSION. That’s how important the Tension Question is.

Yet another great dialogue setup is to introduce an external problem into the scene. A problem forces your characters to work the problem out. But wait. Doesn’t that violate our first dialogue commandment, which states that our characters can’t want the same thing in a scene? Actually, the tension comes from a slight adjustment. They may want the same thing, BUT THEY’LL HAVE DIFFERENT OPINIONS ON HOW TO GET IT. Have you ever tried to lift something really heavy with people you barely know? Within seconds, you’re getting wildly differing opinions on how to execute the task at hand: “No no no, you got to be in front.” “Wait, you should put your hands here, not there.” “You’re the tallest so you should be in back.” If characters want the same thing, they should have differing opinions on how to get it. That’s going to inject the necessary tension.

These final three structural tips aren’t required for great dialogue, but if your dialogue is lacking punch for some reason and you can’t figure out why, try throwing one of these in there. STAKES. The more that’s on the line, the more the words will matter. Think about a scenario where absolutely NOTHING is on the line. Say you’re meeting up with a friend for coffee. Neither of you want anything from each other. This is a zero stakes conversation which means it will be 100% boring. What if, however, using the same setup, Character A needed to borrow a large chunk of money from Character B to pay off his bookie, or else that bookie is going to break his jaw tonight? Granted, that’s an extreme scenario. But do you see how stakes increase the conversation’s worth? It doesn’t need to be this drastic every time. Just ask yourself, “What’s on the line in this scene?” If nothing is on the line, putting ANYTHING in there will improve the dialogue.

The second tip is URGENCY. A conversation where characters have all the time in the world to chat away is usually a boring conversation. For this reason, you want to put a time constraint on your conversation. I was watching a TV show not long ago and Character A needed to talk to Character B about something important. The writer didn’t have the two meet later for a beer to discuss the issue – a place where they would’ve had an endless amount of time. Instead, Character A came to Character B’s work. Character A spotted him in a meeting and waved him out. Annoyed, Character B came out and said, “What are you doing, I’m in the middle of an important meeting,” and Character A laid the issue on him. Of course, he had to hurry because Character B’s coworkers were waiting for him to come back into the meeting. Lack of time equals pressure. Pressure equals tension. Tension is conflict. Conflict is entertainment.

Finally, we have circumstance. When and where a conversation is had will have a major influence on what’s being said. The same conversation plays differently in a bedroom than it does in a plane than it does at a wedding than it does in the supermarket line than it does at a funeral. That’s because different circumstances create different levels of tension (not to mention different types of tension). A good rule of thumb is that if a conversation is going to be entertaining on its own, you don’t need to think too hard about circumstance. But if your conversation is weak, try altering the circumstance to a time and place that’s going to add more tension.

That’s all for today. Come back next week where we’ll talk about character. In the meantime, you better be writing a bunch of practice dialogue scenes with these tips in mind!

Carson does feature screenplay consultations, TV Pilot Consultations, and logline consultations. Logline consultations go for $25 a piece or $40 for unlimited tweaking. You get a 1-10 rating, a 200-word evaluation, and a rewrite of the logline. They’re extremely popular so if you haven’t tried one out yet, I encourage you to give it a shot. If you’re interested in any consultation package, e-mail Carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line: CONSULTATION. Don’t start writing a script or sending a script out blind. Let Scriptshadow help you get it in shape first!

Genre: Drama/Period/Conspiracy
Premise: A young upstart at NASA suggests that in order to beat the Soviets to the moon, the US have Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing.
About: For those of you who caught yesterday’s post, Stephany Folsom is the co-writer of Toy Story 4. She got that job after writing this script, which made the 2013 Black List. Pixar is known for finding fresh writers who write darker/sophisticated material, presumably because they like themes that go further than skin deep. Folsom’s influences include Lou Reed, Steven Soderbergh, Kurt Vonnegut, Jean Renoir, and John Hughes.
Writer: Stephany Folsom
Details: 10/13 draft – 115 pages

One of the downsides of the Black List is that 70 scripts all get bunched up together with one big thumbs up and you don’t know which of them are actually good. The only way to find out is when they get written up on other sites and the only site that goes through them to find out is, well, this one. So until I read a Black List script myself, I never know what’s good. Apparently, this script was featured in several publications outside of the Black List and therefore was one of the few scripts getting legit endorsements (as opposed to making the list because an ambitious agent lobbied a bunch of development kids to vote for his client’s script). How I missed it? I don’t know. But, hey, better late than never.

It’s 1969 and two American spies in the Soviet Union have determined that rising leader Mikahil Suslov is less than a month away from launching a manned mission to the moon, three full months before the US will send their team. The American government believes that if the Soviets beat them to the moon, Suslov’s power will skyrocket and he will initiate an all-out nuclear attack on America.

A little known U.S. government NASA liaison named Barbara comes up with a solution for this: Fake the moon landing. Everyone ignores her until she gets an official government letter approving her request. Barbara believes there’s only one man for the job: eccentric director Stanley Kubrick. She practically barges into his home and makes her pitch. Kubrick declines until Barbara offers him an elusive government-made camera lens that can shoot in lower light than any other lens in the world. Kubrick is in.

The kooky Kubrick begins playing his games immediately, waiting until Barbara has driven him to the airport to tell her he doesn’t fly. She’s forced to drive him from New York to Florida. Once there, nobody at NASA seems to pay attention to Barbara and Stanley’s sideshow. I’m not sure why since I thought this was the key to saving the world. Kubrick busts out all the hits. He only communicates with Barbara via written notes. He shoots until the astronauts physically can’t move anymore. And after entire sets are built to his particularly stringent standards, he decides at the last second to tear them down and start over again.

At the last second, Kubrick decides to quit. Despite everything he shot being perfect, he never filmed the astronauts walking out of the module onto the moon – the most important part of the whole movie! So it will be up to Barbara to find Kubrick and convince him to come back, film the ending, and save the free world.

I’ll cut straight to the chase. Your reaction to this script will depend exclusively on whether you’re a Kubrick fan or not. If you love Kubrick’s movies and you love all the rumors surrounding his eccentric directing style, you’ll flip for this. Me, on the other hand, I’ve never connected with Kubrick’s work. It’s too dark and nihilistic for my taste. So while I love the stories about what a weirdo Kubrick was (i.e. doing 60 takes in a row and never asking for anything different from the actors), I’m far from what you’d call a Kubrick sycophant. Which is probably why I didn’t respond to this script the way others have.

My first issue with the script is that it’s too dry.

The characters only speak to say what the writer needs them to to move the plot forward. Outside of Kubrick, they don’t have a life of their own. They all sound exactly alike – government drones trying to do a job. Even Barbara. If you’re worried that your dialogue isn’t up to professional standards, this script should give you hope. The dialogue here is as standard as it gets and it made the Black List.

The bigger issue, however, is how unclear the overall goal is. While I knew they were filming a fake moon landing, it was never clear how it was going to be used. We’re being told that, concurrently with Kubrick shooting the landing, NASA is still going forward with the real trip to the moon. So was this a backup plan in case they didn’t launch in time? Was it to be used in conjunction with the launch (show the launch then cut to the fake moon landing footage)? Was NASA going to try a moon landing the legit way, and, if they didn’t make it, throw the fake footage up at the last second? Was the plan not to televise the launch and just say to the world that they’re at the moon then show the fake footage?

A big reason this was so hard to follow was because Barbara’s fake landing was a side hustle nobody in the White House or NASA cared about. It made the whole movie seem like it didn’t matter. Honestly, half the time we’re with Kubrick on set, it feels like play time. An excuse to get to the next Kubrick shenanigan.

That’s not to say there weren’t stakes. If Russia’s top engineer beats the U.S. to the moon, he would win the presidency and launch a nuclear war against America. But that only confused the narrative more. If it was so important that this fake landing work, how come nobody in government was paying attention to it?

If I’m being completely honest, I don’t think the writer thought about anything other than the Kubrick/Barbara scenes. These are the only scenes that pop. And I use that word generously. Outside of the scenes with Kubrick screwing around, we haven’t got one character who stands out. Not to mention a plot with an extremely hazy goal.

Here’s the thing with readers. Every time we see a script with a good concept, we prepare ourselves for one of two outcomes. Either the writer is going to give us exactly what we’re expecting from the concept. It will be serviceable and nothing more. Or the writer is going to elevate that concept into something way better than what we imagined. This script definitely lies in the former pile. There’s nothing here that a thousand other screenwriters wouldn’t have done with the same idea. It honestly seems like an excuse to write eight scenes where Kubrick is acting like a weirdo. Everything else is tossed in there to fill up space.

And that sucks because I was really looking forward to this script. I guess it goes to show that when you get to work with the Pixar storytelling team, you are getting the best screenwriting help in the world. So many characters fall flat on the page here whereas in Toy Story 4, they’re all fun and memorable.

All right you Kubrick nuts – feel free to tear me to pieces.

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

What I learned: That 2001 was originally deemed a failure. It only became cool when the hippie counter-culture began dropping acid and going to screenings. It then miraculously became a “masterpiece.” This helps explain why I never never saw what others saw in this film.

Due to a combination of movie economics and the audience’s desire for balance, you need to include “slow” scenes in your script. I put “slow” in quotes for a reason. As you’ll soon find out, “slow” is a relative term. However, I would argue that learning how to write entertaining slow scenes is one of the biggest steps to becoming an advanced writer. I say that as someone who’s read tens of thousands of slow scenes that were abysmally boring.

The reason beginner and intermediate writers struggle in this area is because they don’t have a plan when they’re writing these scenes. Their “plan” boils down to having characters talk and hopefully that talk will be interesting. If that’s your plan, you’re writing a lot of lousy scenes. And because readers have such a short leash (look no further than in the mirror – you guys give up on an Amateur Showdown script after one paragraph!), one boring scene could be what does your script in.

Before I explain how to make slow scenes entertaining, I must first explain what makes a scene boring. There are a few scene-types that are particularly crippling. The most common is the Coffee Shop Scene. The Coffee Shop Scene doesn’t need to take place in a coffee shop. It’s any stand-in scene where two characters get together to talk about stuff. We’re not moving the plot forward. We’re not solving any issues. The characters talk about or debate something. The scenes exist for no other reason than to hear the characters talk. In short, there’s no dramatic purpose to the scenes at all.

But there’s an even worse version of the Coffee Shop Scene, which is the Backstory Monologue Scene. This is that serious scene where the main character shares their traumatic backstory. Unless the backstory has a revelation in it that literally makes the reader gasp, these scenes are screenplay killers. Remember in Chinatown, there was originally a Backstory Monologue Scene about what happened to Jack Gittes in Chinatown. Robert Towne knew that 98% of Backstory Monologue Scenes put the audience to sleep, so he got rid of it. That’s how crippling these scenes are. The screenwriter thought it better to get rid of the scene that literally explained the title of the movie than keep it in.

Then we have the Chain Link Scenes. These are the 2-5 scene chunks (sometimes longer in dramatic films) that exist between the bigger plot points. Often times it’s a combination of Coffee Shop Scenes, exposition scenes, and scenes that reveal stuff about our characters but aren’t entertaining in and of themselves. Chain Link Scenes are an easy way to tell whether you’re dealing with an advanced or beginner writer. Beginner writers will expand their links out to 8-10 scenes before anything major happens in the story. And the scenes have next to ZERO dramatic value. In other words, NOTHING interesting or entertaining is happening in them. The writer believes that as long as they’re writing something down – anything – then the reader must be entertained by it. Figuring out how to tackle these scenes is the focus of this post.

The best way to keep a slow scene interesting is to have something dramatically interesting happen within the scene. Let’s take the famous scene of Luke Skywalker chatting with C-3PO and R2-D2 for the first time. This is a slow scene trap. A bad writer could’ve had Luke talk to the droids, learn a little about the Empire, and complain about his boring life on the farm. Instead, what Lucas does is, while Luke is cleaning R2-D2, have the famous recording of Princess Leia pop out, talking about Obi-Wan Kenobi. The revelation isn’t only exciting in itself, but it propels the story forward because now Luke has to get this message to Obi-Wan. So whenever you’re writing a scene that could be considered “slow,” throw a revelation in there that moves the story forward.

A big way to infuse a slow scene with some entertainment value is to up the conflict. I’m assuming that there’s already conflict in your scene. I hope so, at least. If there’s no conflict at all, there’s a good chance you’re boring your reader. I’m here to tell you that conflict is 1-10 scale. If your scene is boring, you may only have the conflict dialed up to 3. So look for ways to bring it to a 7. In Netflix’s Murder Mystery, there’s a scene where Jennifer Aniston sneaks into the bar lounge of the plane. The scene is purely plot setup. It’s where Aniston meets Charles Cavendish so he can invite her to the boat where the murder will take place. The scene is technically slow, but there’s a ton of sexual tension between Aniston and Cavendish, to the point where you wonder how far she’s going to take it. And that makes this exposition-laden scene move a lot quicker than its run-time would suggest. Had the writer sent Sandler in to meet Cavendish instead, there’d be no sexual tension, no conflict, and the scene would’ve moved a lot slower.

Another movie where we can see the power of conflict is The Dark Knight. There’s a moment about 15 minutes into the film where we get a series of weak scenes. First we have Commissioner Gordon asking Harvey Dent for a favor. It’s a dry scene with a teensy bit of conflict, but mostly boring stuff. This is followed by a board meeting for Wayne Enterprises to potentially buy another company. The scene has a nice little joke where Bruce is asleep the whole time, but again, it’s sort of boring. Then we have Bruce asking Lucious Fox for some adjustments to his bat suit. There’s no entertainment value to these scenes whatsoever. If there’s a lesson to learn from them, it’s that if you’re going to have a slow scene, try to keep it as short as possible. All of these scenes may be slow but they’re also short. Anyway, we then get to the scene where Bruce bumps into Rachel at a restaurant. Rachel is on a date with Harvey. Bruce, meanwhile, is on a date with a famous Russian ballerina. Now THIS is what you call a good slow scene. Technically, it’s just characters talking. But the tension and the conflict and subtext going on here is top notch – Bruce’s obvious attraction to Rachel, the dick-measuring contest between him and Harvey, Rachel’s jealousy over Bruce’s perfect 10 date. All of that leads to a big juicy fun scene.

Conflict Pro-tip here. If your script revolves around two main characters, make sure those characters are like oil and water. If you do that – and I’m going to put this in capital letters because that’s how important of a tip it is – YOU WON’T HAVE ANY SLOW SCENES. You have built in conflict in every scene in the movie without having to do anything. Go watch Zombieland. Tallahassee thinks Columbus is an annoying geek. Tallahassee will do anything to be Columbus’s friend. They’re never on the same page. Same thing with Hell or High Water. Those brothers see the world in completely opposite ways. This ensures that even though there’ll be numerous “slow” scenes, the scenes will always have some level of entertainment to them.

Yet another way to write a good slow scene is to not write the scene at all. Often, I’ll read a scene where two characters are talking to each other about, say, their day. One of them points out they got into a fight at work with someone and now they’re in a war with that person. Ask yourself this. What’s more interesting? Two people talking about a fight at work or the actual fight at work? In other words, the scene you should be writing is the one at work. That’s the scene with entertainment value in it. Two people talking about that is boring.

One more way to make a slow scene work is to place a problem at the center of the scene. This works especially well in exposition-heavy scenes. Naturally, the bigger the problem, the better the scene will play. In Infinity War, one of the early scenes has Dr. Strange, Tony Stark, and Bruce Banner discussing the problem of the Infinity Stones and how they need to get them before Thanos does. It’s a lot of exposition and even more talking, but the scene plays well because the problem – obtaining the stones – is so big (the conflict between Stark and Strange also elevates the scene – power of conflict, baby!). But make no mistake, a problem can be just as powerful with personal stakes. For example, if a wife just got offered her dream job but it’s in another country and the husband doesn’t want to move the family there, the subsequent scene of them deciding what to do will be entertaining.

Finally, if all else is lost, make sure something is always PULLING at your character. Your character always has to be somewhere OTHER THAN THE SCENE THEY’RE IN. They’re only here because they have to deal with whatever issue has come up in the moment. But we always feel the PULL of needing to be elsewhere. What this does is create a unique form of conflict where both us and the character are on edge. And that’s a good thing. It means there’s always something that needs to be done. This makes sense when you consider the primary setup that leads to boredom, which is two characters with all the time in the world sitting down and talking about anything they want. That’s the ultimate boring slow scenario. If you want to watch a movie that does this “PULL” better than any movie in history, watch Back to the Future. Marty always needs to be somewhere else. And that tension makes even the movie’s slowest scenes move at a rocket-fast pace.