Search Results for: F word
Genre: Sci-fi/Comedy
Premise: (from Black List) In the 1950s, a manufacturing company stirs up controversy when they publish a user’s manual to a time machine called the Gadabout TM-1050.
About: Today’s script finished number 37 on last year’s Black List with 9 votes. The idea came through Safe House (“Edge of Tomorrow”) and Sony, and newbie Ross Evans was brought in to write it.
Writer: Ross Evans
Details: 121 pages
Most of the Black List scripts these days are World War 2 stories, book adaptations, whatever the current trend is (Jane Wick this year), and biopics, biopics, and more biopics. Man are there are lot of biopics. So it was a nice change of pace to see amongst all that sameness, a classic Spielbergian story aimed squarely at the family crowd. We don’t usually get that in Blacklistville.
Don’t worry, this isn’t another 80s nostalgia bomb with four precocious 12 year-olds making vaguely inappropriate jokes about boobs n stuff. I think that trend’s about to die. Instead, Gadabout is more inspired by Back to the Future. And it does so better than most of the scripts that are inspired by Back to the Future in that it isn’t a beat-for-beat remake of Back to the Future. That’s the good news. But have the 80s Gods blessed it with a totally tubular story? That’s yet to be determined.
After his grandmother, Gennie, dies, a distraught 10 year-old Henry asks his mom if he can stay with Grandpa Wilbur for the night to help him deal with the pain. Grandpa Wilbur’s a bit of a weirdo and says that Henry can do anything he wants while he’s here, except go into his shed. That’s his sacred place.
Being a 10 year-old boy, that’s the first place Henry goes, and it’s there where he finds a manual for the Gadabout TM-1050 time machine, written by… his grandpa! No sooner has he found it than Wilbur appears, upset that Henry broke his one rule. But after Henry puts on the charm, Wilbur decides to tell him the story of the Gadabout.
Flash back to 1958, when Wilbur was a young inventor, trying to make his way. Wilbur was a classic scatterbrain inventor – good at inventing, terrible at explaining. So when he pitches his giant box called “The Go-Backer” to the bank in hopes of securing funding, they laugh him out of the room.
Once home, a young Gennie tells Wilbur she can’t wait for him to follow his dreams anymore and walks out on him. Only minutes later, Don, a sketchy vacuum salesman, arrives at the door and notices the time machine. Curious, he wants to know how it works. After Wilbur proves to him it’s the real deal, Don tells him that all it needs is a new name, a shiny makeover and they’ll make millions.
True to his word, it isn’t long before everyone in town owns a Gadabout. But there are limitations. Due to power restrictions, you can only go back 30 minutes in time. And traveling to the future requires more power than anyone can produce. So you can forget about that. Still, that’s enough for people to do stuff like re-run their dates if they go bad, or pick up an extra 30 minutes around the house if they’re running late.
It’s when Don wants to go national that things become a problem, particularly because the machine is faulty. For example, a local Gadabout addict has over 20 versions of herself living in her house. All of this leads us to the ultimate question, and the one Henry himself wants to know: If all of this really happened, how come nobody’s ever heard about it?
I’ll never forget a note I received on one of my first screenplays. “It’s all rather… easy.” I must’ve sat on that note for a month. Easy? Easy?? I’ll show you “easy” you ignorant mother&*%$#. It took time. And Bob’s Corner Liquor Store. But I eventually figured out what he meant. There wasn’t a whole lot of conflict in my screenplay. There weren’t any obstacles. If the script were a rollercoaster, it was one that went in a straight line with a few mildly high rises and a few mildly low dips.
For the majority of its running time, that’s how Gadabout felt to me. It was all very pleasant and sweet and nice. But it was one hell of a straight roller-coaster ride. Nothing went too well and nothing went too bad. Eventually, things do get out of hand and the blood starts pumping. But that isn’t until page 80. And that’s a really long time to wait for the good stuff.
Cause that’s all storytelling is when you think about it. It’s the storyteller manipulating the emotions of the story reader. And it’s not a bad kind of manipulation. The reader WANTS to be manipulated. They want those high highs and low lows. I mean look at a film this script was clearly inspired by, The Princess Bride. That movie probably has more highs and lows then any family film ever. Within the first 15 minutes, our princes is kidnapped by three bad men. The emotional manipulation starts immediately.
And that was my frustration here. I never felt anything throughout the first 80 pages of the script.
Part of the problem is that it wasn’t clear what was at stake. The only question that’s being asked is, if all this time machine stuff happened, how come there’s no record of it? And while that’s a fun mystery, it’s not enough to carry an entire movie.
Since the love of Wilbur’s life, Gennie, dies at the beginning of the story, why not build a high-stakes storyline around that? Maybe he never got to tell her something. And if he still had a Gadabout, he’d have the chance to go back and have one last conversation with her. But the Gadabout doesn’t work anymore. It’s permanently damaged. And so the flashback storyline is setting up a present-day storyline that actually matters, because maybe Wilbur realizes how to make the fix that gives him one more time-travel.
I admit that’s clumsy because I’m thinking it up on the spot. But this script needed something LIKE that. Where something BIG matters. Because there wasn’t once here where I said, “Ooh, I HAVE to find out what happens with that.” And with every screenplay, you want to have four or five of those things.
None of this is to say the script is bad. It’s fine. The last act is actually balls-to-the-wall crazy, as we start jumping all the hell over time. The question is, will people be able to muscle through a day-long walk in the park to race the Indy 500? I guess that depends on how much you like walking in the park.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: When it comes to time travel scripts, you need restrictions so every time your hero fails at something, the audience doesn’t say, “He’s got a time machine. Why can’t he go back and try again?” One of the best ways to combat this plot hole, and it’s something we see in Gadabout, is POWER RESTRICTIONS. You can always say that the time machine takes up so much power that it has limitations in how much it can be used and for how long. It’s logical and it saves you from having to deal with a bunch of “But why didn’t they just…” questions.
What I learned 2: If you’re going to write a time travel movie, I recommend doing a time-travel comedy. Time-travel is a complicated concept that, the more you use it, the more plot holes it creates. When you write a comedy, people are more forgiving of these holes as they don’t need everything to make perfect sense.
Genre: Superhero
Premise: (from IMDB – the worst logline writing site ever) T’Challa, after the death of his father, the King of Wakanda, returns home to the isolated, technologically advanced African nation to succeed to the throne and take his rightful place as king.
About: Going into 2018, Black Panther was seen as the weakest of the four Marvel offerings being released. But after a shocking weekend where it made over 200 million dollars (for the 4-day haul), it may prove to be the best return on investment of all four films. The movie stars a predominantly black cast, a first for a mainstream comic book movie, as well as being directed by a black director, Ryan Coogler. The film is now the highest box office release ever in the month of February.
Writers: Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole (character created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby)
Details: 135 minutes
I suppose it was inevitable that the media would politicize this movie. Politicizing is the new click-bait cuz there’s no money in posting stuff like, “Black Panther was a really good movie!” It has to be, “Black Panther Challenges Hollywood’s Diversity Problem” or “If You Don’t Like Black Panther, You’re a Racist.” I get it. Those titles are more provocative and more likely to make you click. So as long as people keep clicking on them, they’re going to keep posting them!
What’s interesting about Black Panther is Ryan Coogler clearly cared more about making a good movie than starting a movement, which is always the way to go. Nobody cares about your beliefs if they’re wrapped inside a bad story. So Coogler stripped away a lot of the trappings of comic book movies and focused on character development and story. The result is the strongest dramatic offering from Marvel to date. Indeed, this film made me think more than any other Marvel film. It’s a testament to the savvy writing on display from Coogler and Cole.
For those who haven’t seen the movie, it’s about a seemingly poor country in Africa called Wakanda that has a secret high-tech city in the mountains where they mine Vibrainium, one of the most powerful energy sources in the universe. After their king dies, T’Challa (Black Panther) rises to the throne, intent on keeping Wakanda and its energy source a secret.
However, in London, this dude named Killmonger, a young black mercenary, steals an ancient Wakandan axe from a museum in the hopes that it will lead him to the hidden city. Killmonger eventually finds Wakanda (spoilers!) reveals that T’Challa’s dad killed his own father, demands a ritualistic battle for the throne, gets it, kills T’Challa, and takes over. But, of course, you wouldn’t have a movie called Black Panther where Black Panther died, so BP rises from the dead to take back Wakanda!
Like I said, this Marvel movie makes you think more than any other Marvel film. One of the things that separates professional screenwriters from amateurs is that professionals are always looking for contrast within their characters. If a character is generic and straight forward, he’ll fail to make an impact. Finding the right contrast within a character is often the key to unlocking them.
So here, T’Challa has this energy source that can help so many lives across the planet. However, if he were to announce that to the world, he would have to reveal Wakanda’s secret, something he’s reluctant to do. So here we have a hero with the power to help millions who actively chooses not to. I don’t know of any other hero in the MC universe who’s like that.
On the flip side you have Killmonger, who grew up on the streets of Oakland. He’s our bad guy. And yet the whole reason he wants to get to Wakanda is so he can use their resources to help disenfranchised people around the world. We’re talking about our bad guy here! One of the best lines in the movie is when he tells T’Challa and his council (paraphrasing) “You guys are all sitting pretty up here in your utopia when there are 2 billion people across the world just like us who are starving.” And he’s right!
I’d never seen that kind of maturity in a hero-villain dynamic before, where the villain’s motivation actually made more sense than the hero’s. And it’s a big reason why this was more than your average popcorn flick.
Black Panther also does a great job developing its secondary characters. This is something I also tell newbies. One of the easiest ways to spot a professional is someone who puts just as much effort into developing their supporting characters as they do their main characters.
Nakia and T’Challa are exes, infusing some tension into their relationship. Okoye, the lead guard, is loyal to the throne to a fault, to the point where she supports Killmonger when he becomes king. W’Kabi, the chief defense captain, doesn’t agree with T’Challa’s isolationist ideology, continually pushing him to change his stance. And Shuri, T’Challa’s sister, had more personality in her pinky than the entire DCU. In other words, there was thought put into each and every character here. Nobody was window dressing (well, except for poor Martin Freeman).
And kudos to Coogler and Cole for setting up a hell of a complex mythology. This idea of a secret African country with super-technology right here on earth is by no means an easy sell. Combined with the complexity of the tribal setup itself (I think there were 5 tribes in total), it could’ve easily turned into a head-scratching mess of information. But they lay everything out in a clear visual opening narration (via a father explaining Wakanda to his son) to make sure we knew which way was up.
So with all that praise, I must be giving Black Panther an [x] impressive, right!?
Not exactly.
Black Panther had a major problem. Black Panther himself, T’Challa, was kinda lame. This dates back to a discussion we had on the site a few weeks ago, where we asked if a movie can survive a “vanilla” main character. There were a lot of opinions, with some saying that if you put enough interesting people around the main character, the main character, by association, will become interesting himself. But this movie proves that to be very untrue.
There are three issues here. The first is Chadwick Boseman. Guy’s got a nice smile. He’s got some charisma. But he’s missing SOMETHING. I don’t know what that is. But it says a lot when you’re not even in the top 5 most memorable characters in your own movie.
The second is the writing. While they do give T’Challa that interesting inner conflict, they don’t do enough with it. When you pose the question, “Are we going to help people or aren’t we?” in your movie and then you never answer that question, what was the point of asking it in the first place? That needed more of a payoff.
Finally, while the Black Panther suit is the coolest looking superhero suit in the Marvel universe, it’s the least interesting power-wise. As far as I could tell, his power is, he’s really strong and can’t be hurt? So, um, every other superhero ever? The best superheroes are superheroes with clear – and preferably COOL – powers. If the power is unclear, the superhero’s not going to pop.
This was unfortunate as there were so many great things about this screenplay. However, if you don’t nail your hero, the ceiling for your film is only going to be so high.
The other big issue with the movie was that the action scenes were really bad. The big car chase looked liked someone had cut and pasted a CGI car into the streets of Korea. And the final battle between Black Panther and Killmonger looked like a discarded outtake from the 1982 version of Tron.
There are actually some screenwriting lessons to learn here, although they’re more for those of you working in the professional ranks. Don’t include big animals you’re going to have to CGI in into any big battles. They always look awful. And avoid, if possible, creating an entirely CG environment for any hand-to-hand combat scenes – ESPECIALLY if it’s your climactic scene. It’s going to look bad.
So there you have it. We’ve cut through the hype to give you the real scoop on Marvel’s latest money-maker. It was good. But it made too many mistakes to be great. With that said, I think Wakanda makes the Marvel universe a lot better. We have this awesome energy source just waiting to be tapped. Once a bad guy gets his hands on it, it’s going to be chaos. And I want to be there for when that happens.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Two Lowest Points for the price of one! Black Panther reminded me that there are TWO LOWEST POINTS at the end of your movie. The first low point is at the end of the second act. There’s usually some death involved here, since death is the lowest low point you can reach. Here, (spoiler!) it’s Black Panther dying. The SECOND big low-point will happen during the climactic battle. Think of your end battle (or showdown) as its own three-act movie. Therefore, it too will have a lowest point at the end of its second act. This will usually be shown as the villain getting the upper hand and our hero looking defeated. Your hero will then get one last life/chance/burst, and figure out a way to defeat the villain.
One of the more common story setups is the “Group of People Gets Lost In the Woods” scenario, and it’s not surprising why. It fits into a clear genre (Horror), it’s marketable (all horror is), it’s cheap to shoot (all you need is actors and a camera), and there’s something universally scary about getting lost that all audiences can relate to.
The problem is that nearly every one of these scripts is bad. It’s not surprising why. The Lost in a Forest setup is what I call a “45 page idea.” Since there’s only so much you can do walking through a forest (How many times can two characters argue about what to do next?), you inevitably run out of scenes by page 45. That’s the trap of this sub-genre. It looks so easy but it’s deceptively hard to pull off.
The Ritual is one of the few movies to do it. The reason for that you’ll hear from most outlets is the creature design. Indeed, the creature is awesome, unlike anything you’ve seen before. I love how they pull a Jaws, as well, holding it off until the very end of the movie. If you’re a creature geek, you’ll love The Ritual. But that’s not why this movie is so great. It’s great because of a single scene.
For those who don’t have access to Netflix, The Ritual follows four middle-aged friends who hike the Swedish mountains in honor of their friend who was killed in a violent convenience store attack during a robbery. When one of the friends gets injured on the trail, they try to take a short cut through the forest. And that’s where the trouble begins.
Simple premise, right? So why was this version of “Group Gets Lost in a Forest” so much better than the hundreds of others that are so achingly boring?
The second scene of the movie.
Our five friends are at a bar, deciding what their next vacation spot is going to be. There’s Luke, our introspective hero, Hutch, the alpha male of the group, Dom, the chubby dude who always complains, Phil, the anxious one, and Robert, the fun-loving best friend to them all.
After the bar, Luke and Robert head inside a convenience store to grab some beer for the after party while the others wait outside. As they joke around, they glance over to see that the checkout girl is on the floor, bleeding. We see the back door open and two thugs emerge. Robert, who’s closest to them, is frozen, while Luke, due to the angle at which he’s standing, can’t be seen, so he quickly hides at the back of the aisle.
What happens next is what you expect. The thugs demand money and jewelry from Robert, who obliges until he gets to his wedding ring, which he refuses to part with. All this time, Luke is sitting there. These men don’t have guns. He can go help his friend. But he chooses to stay there. The situation escalates and the thugs bash Robert over the head with a bar, killing him.
It’s from there that we cut to the mountain, six months later. Like I said, Dom injures his leg, forcing the group into the forest in pursuit of a short cut, where they start seeing markings on the trees as well as scattered cabins that seem to have been inhabited by people who worship a creature. Before long, they start hearing the creature stalking them. And it picks them off one by one.
Why was this convenience store scene so important?
To understand that, you have to understand what this movie looks like WITHOUT THE SCENE. And I say that because I’ve read TONS of scripts with this setup that didn’t have this scene or a scene like it. And they almost always sucked. Instead of witnessing the traumatic event ourselves, we hear it alluded to in retrospect, we see it in the characters’ eyes, and occasionally hear it in their monologues. Every once in awhile, the writing is so good and the actors’ performances so strong that they take us back to these traumatic moments without having to see them. But usually, since we didn’t see it with our own eyes, we feel nothing for that person or how it’s affected our characters.
What’s that old saying? A picture is worth a thousand words? This may be the world’s best example of that.
The scene in the convenience store is harrowing. It’s shot in a gritty realistic style to ensure it stays with us. That can’t be discounted. But even if we only focus on the script, it’s a great choice because the scene informs EVERYTHING that happens throughout the rest of the film.
For starters, our main character’s flaw is established. He’s a coward. We see him battling this in every single scene. He hates himself. He can’t live that day down. He knows that the reason they’re even in this mess to begin with is because he was too afraid to save his friend. Having a main character not just going through an inner conflict throughout the movie, but one that actually feels authentic and real, turns a basic horror premise into something much deeper.
Second, it affects all the relationships in the movie. Luke’s struggle isn’t just that he was cowardly and didn’t save his friend. It’s that his friends don’t know the truth. All they know is that he was lucky to escape. This means that Luke is also battling the fact that he’s living a lie. That his own friends don’t know he’s responsible for the death of their friend. This informs almost every conversation in the movie. You can see the guilt in his eyes, the regret, the anger at keeping his secret. When you hear criticisms about your dialogue that, ‘there’s no subtext,’ this is one way to create subtext. No conversation here is solely about what’s happening on the surface. There’s always another audio track playing underneath.
But where things get really fun is the creature. Clearly, the creature is used as a symbol of fear. We’re not talking about Pumpkinhead or Freddy here, empty vessels designed for cheap thrills that have no connection to the people they’re stalking. We know that if Luke can defeat this monster, he’ll finally overcome his flaw – his cowardice. That raises the personal stakes of the hero and makes us way more invested than we’d usually be. We want to see Luke stand up to this thing and redeem himself!
Finally, that scene allows us to create scares that are ORGANIC to the story. Pay attention because this is important, guys. What’s the worst kind of scare? An empty jump scare, right? A guy gets out of his tent at night, goes to take a leak, hears something. Then something jumps out of nowhere and attacks him – FLASH – he’s back in his tent. It was just a nightmare! Zoinks!
By setting your movie up with a scene this powerful, you can give us scares that are connected to the story. Some of my favorite scenes were Luke waking up at night, leaving his tent, only to find himself in a hybrid convenience-store-forest setting. There Robert was again, before the thugs kill him. Luke has a chance to redeem himself. But once again, his best friend is slaughtered and – FLASH – he’s right back in the tent. It was a nightmare. You tell me which one of those scares is more effective.
One scene – ONE SCENE – set this all up.
The lesson today isn’t that you should write a horror movie where someone gets killed in the beginning. That’s not what I’m saying. The lesson is that when you have a simple plot such as people getting lost in a forest, you should be utilizing big moments in your first act that affect your main character and as many supporting characters as possible. This will allow there to be something going on beneath the surface throughout every moment of your movie. That will both take the pressure off your plot and give you more places to go, since you’ll be exploring what’s going on INSIDE of your characters as well as outside.
Genre: Drama
Premise: A circus family attempts to keep its lucrative business going by utilizing a dark and horrifying secret.
About: Katherine Dunn, the author of the 1989 breakout novel, Geek Love, was a single mother working three jobs when her novel became an unexpected best seller. The Portland-based writer was, all of a sudden, thrust into the position of the city’s most recognizable female author. Portland author Rene Denfeld said of her: “She believed the job of a writer is to tell the truth—not the truth that Aunt Mabel wants to hear, not the truth that will sell books. She always said she was waiting for a male writer to write a memoir that was not about all the women he’d slept with, but about having a problem with premature ejaculation.” Geek Love is said to have inspired many artists, including Terry Gilliam and Kurt Cobain. Magician and actor Harry Anderson optioned the book for film rights and wrote this script, which still hasn’t been made.
Writer: Harry Anderson (based on the novel by Katherine Dunn)
Details: 107 pages – 1990 draft
Haven’t you heard? Circuses are all the rage. The Greatest Showman continues to have a strong hold at the box office, finishing in the Top 5 for the 7th weekend in a row. Sounds like Hollywood might be interested in a new circus project. Make no mistake. The misleadingly-titled “Geek Love” doesn’t have any dance numbers. But it does have darkness, secrets, and kids who swear a lot.
I love that truth statement Dunn uses above. As our society moves in a direction where saying anything that doesn’t tow the company line gets you beaten up on social media, it’s become harder for writers to be brave and tell the truth. So what we get instead is a bunch of safe vanilla b.s. with whip cream and cherries on top. The more I read, the more I realize that TRUTH is the secret ingredient that lights up a screenplay. When characters say and do things that REALLY HAPPEN in life, it gives the script an authenticity that can’t be matched.
Which is an odd way to begin this review, since Geek Love is about a freak show circus family. But it’s not so much the situation that’s truthful as it is the characters.
Geek Love introduces us to 40 year-old Oly, a humpback dwarf. Don’t feel sorry for Oly, though. She’s a tough woman who’s managed to become a successful DJ at a local radio station. After we observe her daily routine, we cut back to 30 years ago where we meet the Binewski family and their circus company.
There’s Al, the father, Lil, the mother. There’s Arty, a little boy with flippers for hands and feet. And then there’s Elly and and Iphy, Siamese twins. Arty and Elly and Iphy are the show’s main attractions, while Oly is the operations manager. Her deformity, you see, isn’t flashy enough to make an act out of. She’s just… ugly.
The family, as you’d expect, is an eclectic group. Al seems like a cool guy. Lil is sweet as can be. But Arty is pure evil, the devil incarnate, and has plans to kill off his parents so he can take over the business. Elly and Iphy hate Arty, and the three are always bickering. And when I say bickering, I mean there isn’t a curse word that isn’t used in this story.
When Lil becomes pregnant with another child, we learn the family’s dark secret. Al, you see, is feeding his wife insecticide. Why? Because the more poison his wife ingests, the more likely it is that she’ll have a deformed child, which means one more performer for the show! Al experiments with each pregnancy, having his wife take in a variety of poisonous artificial supplements. And what happens if the child is born normal? I don’t want to say because I don’t think you can take it.
When the new child is finally born – Chick – they realize he’s unlike any of the other children. As in, he has the power to levitate people and heal things. He also ages at a rapid rate, quickly catching up to the other kids. Chick’s powers allow Al to add new acts that he never could’ve dreamed of. But this new attention angers Arty, who sees his star fading.
Suffice it to say, you can only poison your family to create deformed children to work in your circus for so long before it backfires. And boy does it backfire. The only one who makes it out of the mayhem in one piece is Oly, who has some business to settle in the present day before she, too, joins that great big circus in the sky.
Is it possible to write a plotless script that’s entertaining?
That’s the question Geek Love poses (unknowingly).
And the answer is yes. But it’s a complicated yes. I only experience it every so often and it’s always for the same reason – the writer has such a unique voice that that voice overpowers the absence of plot. You read because everything is so fresh and different. Not because you’re trying to find out if the main character’s daughter will be saved.
So I say to all you plot haterz, go ahead and write something without a 3-act structure or GSU… but only if you’ve been told you have a voice unlike any other writer. You are Charlie Kaufman. You are Quentin Tarantino. You are Kurt Vonnegut. You are Katherine Dunn. Otherwise, I would stick to the basics.
With that said, Harry Anderson, the writer who adapted this, missed an opportunity to build a plot into the story. If you have a movie that takes place in the past, you can give it a “plot” by introducing a present-day storyline with a mystery. You then occasionally cut back to that present day mystery throughout the movie. This allows you to be weird and formless in the past. But the audience still feels like there’s a purpose to everything since there’s that unanswered question in the present.
Here, Anderson starts the story with Oly in the present, secretly obsessing over a strange woman who lives near her. It’s intriguing, but it’s completely abandoned once we jump back in time. It’s only at the end of the screenplay that we revisit the mystery, which does have a nice payoff, but because it’s been so long since the setup, we don’t care.
Anderson should’ve made this mystery storyline a bigger deal, cutting back to it throughout the screenplay. Instead he adds an unrelated present-day storyline that was kind of interesting, but because it didn’t have anything to do with the first one, it made the present-day stuff feel just as random as the past.
Luckily, JUST ENOUGH happens every 20 pages in the past that you keep hanging on. It was the revelation that Al poisons his wife to get freaks for his business that kept me reading a little longer. Then the emergence of Telekinesis Baby that kept me a little longer. Before I knew it, I was invested in all of the characters. They were all so weird and interesting, I had to find out what their fates were.
And that advice Dunn gives about truth is on full display in this story. Parents take advantage of their children in unimaginable ways. We just saw it with basement dungeon family. So as uncomfortable as the Binewski secret is, there’s truth in there. That’s why this book sticks out. And probably why people are afraid to make it into a movie. It’s too close for comfort.
I don’t know if I Geek Loved this. But I Geek Liked it. It’s unlike any script I’ve ever read.
Script link: Geek Love
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: (re: truth) Neil Strauss, who wrote The Game, a book about sleeping with a bunch of women, uses the book to chronicle his failures in seduction as well, such as the only time he’d ever had a chance with a Playboy model, but couldn’t get an erection due to performance anxiety. The book went on to become an enormous best seller. I wonder if Strauss knew that Katherine Dunn had predicted his success just ten years prior!
Genre: True Story
Premise: (from Black List) Google’s Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt struggle with their corporate motto, “Don’t Be Evil,” in the face of their meteoric rise to a multi-billion dollar valuation and a major Chinese hacking incident.
About: This script finished with 10 votes on last year’s Black List, putting it in the top 25. It’s based on a couple of books, the more popular being “In the Plex,” about Google. The three writers who adapted this are all newbies. Two of them, Diani and Devine, have mostly focused on acting.
Writers(!): Gabriel Diani & Etta Devine & Evan Bates, based on “In The Plex” by Steven Levy & “I’m Feeling Lucky” by Douglas Edwards
Details: 122 pages (June 2017 draft)
The Big Short and The Social Network ushered in a new quasi-genre I like to call the Tricked Out Geek True Story. They take what should be nerdy subject matter and INFUSE it with a hip style, cool characters, and loads of energy. The reason the genre’s worked so far is that it orders up a powerful item on the screenwriting “secret menu,” that being irony. They present a GEEKY story in a COOL way. If you present a geeky story in a geeky way, that’s kind of on-the-nose, isn’t it?
“Don’t Be Evil” is Google’s introduction into this genre and boy does it want you to love it. This script is so intent on winning you over that it will do whatever it takes. Ongoing hip voice over narration. You got it. Staring into the camera and breaking the fourth wall. You better believe it. Recklessly cutting between six different time periods. You bet your ass we’re not stopping at five. Characters constantly referencing screenwriting terminology. Oh, hell yes. We got that too. How does this overcranked CPU stack up? Let’s find out.
It’s 2009 and Google’s just been hacked by the Chinese. At least that’s what Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, believes. Larry is our eyes and ears in this story, our “Ferris Bueller” if you will. That’s a good way to think of him because… well because the script tells us to think of him that way.
The story uses the Chinese hack as a starting point into how Google was born. We jump all the way back to Larry’s childhood, when he read a biography on Nikola Tesla, the famed inventor. The moral of Tesla’s biography was – you can’t just be a good inventor. You have to be good at business too.
Larry’s right hand man is Sergey, a programmer who grew up in communist Russia and therefore hates other communist countries, like China. He’s joined by Google’s head of security, Heather Adkins, and Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, a man who was forced upon Larry by his investors since Larry didn’t know jack about running a business.
Amidst this Chinese hack, the team desperately tries to hold onto its company motto: Don’t Be Evil. After jumping back through a million time periods, we learn that this motto came about due to Larry’s belief that all corporations put their profits in front of their customers and he wanted Google to be the first company that didn’t do that.
The Chinese hack is the first time Google is faced with a decision that threatens their fabled motto. The quandary goes like this. The group feels they have a moral obligation to let their users know that their data has been compromised by China. However, if they do this, it would expose the Chinese, who would likely then kick Google out of their country. Since China represents billions of dollars in potential profits, this is an extremely hard decision.
As we get closer to the decision, we continue to take more diversions into the past, where the characters self-referentially remind us that they know they’re relying heavily on backstory and flashbacks, but that it will all make sense in the end. That end comes with Larry making the final call on the hack, which will inform the path that Google takes from this point forward.
Something we haven’t talked about in awhile is level of difficulty. If your routine incorporates six triple-axels and this is the first time you’ve ever skated, you’re probably not going to execute your routine. Don’t Be Evil was like three skaters trying to win the Olympics their first time out. Not even a brand new Zamboni could clean up the aftermath.
My newbie antennae goes up whenever I see FLASH. If a script is dominated by flashiness – talking to the camera, lots of self-referencing, tons of flashbacks, etc. – it’s usually an indication of a new writer. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. After an NSA agent is introduced, we get: “She’s completely fictional because there’s no way anyone is giving the screenwriters any information about Google’s very real relationship with the NSA.” Seasoned writers have failed enough times to know that flash is fool’s gold and that substance – deep characters, a well-designed plot, conflict-filled scenes, etc. – is your best bet at writing a good script.
What complicates this analysis is that the theme of this story is actually pretty strong, this question of is it possible for a corporation not to be evil? So it masks, at times, the attention deficit disorder writing that surrounds it. But, in the end, the script can’t escape this obsessive need to make you love it. It wants to be The Big Short. But it’s like The Big Short written by Max Landis, if that makes sense.
For example, the creation of deep characters. Outside of that first Larry Page flashback scene where he reads Tesla’s biography, I can’t remember a single scene where we actually get to know someone. And that’s because the script was so intent on never staying anywhere for any amount of time. It was like BAM, time to jump to the next flashback!! Contrast this with The Social Network, which gave you 8 entire minutes with our main character in the film’s very first scene (the breakup scene). We learned so much about Mark Zuckerberg in that scene.
Not to mention, reading a book is a lazy way to introduce a character. If you want to introduce a character in a way where we get to know them, do it through action. Preferably, give them a tough choice. We learn so much about characters when they’re faced with a choice. If you try and jump the line and never write the 4-5 scripts that teach you this, you’ll never know how to properly introduce a character, which is one of the most influential moments in a screenplay.
And I couldn’t for the life of me understand why the writers kept referencing screenwriting! Here’s a real exchange between characters in the story: “I found something important.” “I thought you were in New Zealand?” “I came over during that flashback.” It was bizarre. This story had nothing to do with screenwriting. It’s about Google and hacking. Maybe had they referenced movie cliches, that would’ve made more sense. But for some reason screenwriting became this huge theme in the script.
Now does all of this mean you should never use too-cool-for-school writing techniques? No. The Big Short obviously proved that it’s possible. But The Big Short was written by one writer, Charles Randolph, whose credits dated back over a decade, and another, Adam McKay, who had over 30 credits. These guys know how to navigate the potholes that come with this kind of writing style.
Figure out how to write simple stories first. Introduce a big problem, which results in a strong goal, for a compelling main character, with some urgency and high stakes. There wasn’t a single compelling character in this movie. The problem the characters are dealing with is arguably compelling. But we know nothing about anyone so it doesn’t matter. And that’s the kind of thing writing a simple story forces you to learn – how to construct a compelling character.
Reading my review back, it sounds harsher than I meant it to. This is the kind of thing everybody who jumps into a new medium does. They go for big and flashy because big and flashy gets noticed. And with this making the Black List, you can say that it worked. But if you want to work in this business a long time, you gotta learn the basics. And no basics were on display here.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If you jump around in time too frequently, the reader never gets pulled in. I’d say this script jumped to a different time period, on average, once every 5 pages. I couldn’t get invested in the story because the story never slowed down enough for me to understand what I was investing in.