Genre: Period
Premise: A priest is brought in to be the puppet Bishop for the Emperor of Rome. But when he sees the suffering that the Roman people are going through, he dares to disrupt the status quo.
About: Leo Sardarian used to work in casting and broke onto the scene in 2013 with this script, which made the Black List. He just sold another script yesterday, that one about a rookie female marine who gets stranded on a hostile planet during earth’s attempt at colonization. Is it even possible to sell a script with a male lead anymore?? Inquiring minds want to know.
Writer: Leo Sardarian
Details: 112 pages

Yesterday’s kick-ass script got me all riled up for some period piece action, baby! This time, however, it’s back in the time machine 1600 years to Rome! Rome’s always good for some spicy conflict and sassy drama. They practically invented entertainment (killing people for sport? uhhh, geeee-nius). Also, it’s been a while since we’ve had a Roman swords and sandals pic. So you know one is coming soon. It’s either going to be Nicholas or it’s going to be something one of you guys write. Let’s check out your competition.

A note before I start. I’m probably going to get some things wrong here. This script attempts to cover so much ground that you spend the majority of your reading time trying to keep up.

We’re in Rome in the 3rd century. We’re quickly told, via voice over, that Rome is in a state of flux. Things aren’t going well. One of the biggest problems is religion, specifically Christianity. Diocletian, the Emperor of Rome, hates the religion, and routinely plucks Christians out to be sacrificed in the gladiator ring.

But Christianity is growing, and more and more people are standing up to Diocletian’s harassment. So Diocletian hires some nobody Christian named Nicholas and appoints him to be the Bishop of Rome. The plan is to make Nicholas a puppet, have him calm down the Christians whenever they get out of line.

But Nicholas isn’t as passive as Diocletian assumed. In one of the Gladiator matches where some Christian thieves are being slaughtered for sport, Nicholas leaps into the ring and reveals himself to be a seasoned warrior, killing all of the Gladiators easily. This surprise only makes Diocletian more wary of Nicholas.

So one night while Nicholas is out, Diocletian sends a group of orphans Nicholas has been taking care of to Crete, where they’ll be sold into slavery. Nicholas goes after them and Diocletian celebrates the victory of no longer having to deal with this disruption.

However, Rome continues to clash from within, and it feels like only a matter of time before the Christians rise up. An unexpected Nicholas team-up with one of the most famous figures in Roman history, Constantine, fortifies an army that actually has a shot against Diocletian. Rome. Get ready.

I’ll give Sardarian this. He’s done his homework. This is one of the best-researched scripts about Rome I’ve ever read. Every single page is dripping with detail about the famous city.

But it was far from an easy read. In fact, Nicholas was one of those reads where you looked up expecting to be on page 60, only to learn you were on page 15.

Not all stories need to be fast. But if you’re writing something this complex, something that requires tons of exposition and dudes in rooms talking, you need a plan counteract the pace.

Overwriting was a key problem. The script would often lose itself in its desire to write the perfect line. “He divests his breast plate and stakes his sword into the mud. His blue eyes gaze west — where the lands beyond the mountains are awash in golden sun-rays… The sublime beauty slightly breaching the darkness that’s clouded his eyes.” That was par for the course. Lines like “Moonlight BEAMS through the oculus of the coffered rotunda…” were common.

The reason this is a problem is because the writer is trying to impress rather than convey. As readers, all we want is to understand what we’re seeing, understand what’s happening. And if we have to read every fourth sentence twice because the writer was trying to win the Pulitzer with it, it’s very easy to lose patience. And loss of patience is the final step before boredom.

Overwriting is a common beginner mistake and should be avoided if possible. No, we don’t want our stories told in cave man vocabulary. But over-vocabularizing is just as odious…err… I mean bad.

This wasn’t the biggest problem with Nicholas, however. The main problem is that the script is trying to do too much. One of the first screenwriting tips that really resonated with me was: ZOOM IN.

Tell a SPECIFIC STORY. Don’t try to cover too much ground. For example, if you want to cover terrorism, write Die Hard. Don’t write about the five biggest terrorist countries in the world, jumping back and forth between each one, introducing us to dozens of characters and a similar amount of plotlines.

I know what you’re going to say. “Tell a serious story about terrorism with a movie like Die Hard? You crazy Carson??” I’m not talking about the tone. I’m saying it’s much easier to explore terrorism through the tight lens of a single terrorist than it is trying to cover five terrorists. You use specifics to make a bigger statement about the world.

Can that intricately woven five terrorist movie be written? It can. But only the best screenwriters in the world – those who have seen every kind of story and understand what they need to do to counteract and rein in that that narrative will be able to pull it off. And even then, it will be a writing nightmare. There will be a bigger chance that they fail than succeed.

And that’s because movies were meant for tight narratives. If your idea doesn’t fit into a tight narrative, go write a TV show or a novel. Those mediums are built for that stuff.

There was this moment in “Nicholas” where the title character sails into Rome and Sardarian details the elaborate harbor of this ancient city. Capable of docking 1200 ships. Half the ships are out of business because times are so tough. So there are criminals and barterers. It’s its own little crazy city.

And I thought: THIS IS A MOVIE! This here! I’ve never seen a film about Rome’s harbor before. That’s how you ZOOM IN. But therein lies the problem with “Nicholas” as a script. There are so many lovely details like this that get lost due to its novelesque narrative.

As much as I tried to stay invested in Nicholas, the story was too sprawling, too unfocused, and too overwritten, to keep me around. It’s a script that tests your patience. Which is unfortunate, because there are obviously many stories within this setting worth being told.

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

What I learned: “The endless montage.” Guys, don’t write long montages. What you’re trying to do with a screenplay is DRAMATIZE EVENTS. That’s why we tune in! To be entertained by your dramatization. A montage is a list. ANYBODY CAN MAKE A LIST. Lists are the OPPOSITE of dramatization. I advise never using them outside of comedies. But if you are going to use them, keep them short. There’s a montage in this script with, like, 20 events. That’s a huge no-no.

Genre: Horror
Premise: During their annual trip to an isolated cabin for Christmas, a family begins to suspect a supernatural force may be haunting them.
About: This script finished high on this year’s Blood List and comes from the writing-directing duo best known for giving us that creepy image of a mom with her face all bandaged up in the 2014 Austrian film, Goodnight Mommy.
Writer: Sergio Casci (current revisions by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala)
Details: 78 pages

Yeah baby.

The micro-screenplay is baaaaack!! 78 pages! Join the revolution. 78 is the new 100.

Truth be told, I watched this duo’s previous film after seeing that creepy ass trailer that played all over the indie circuit, but came away asking, “Did I just watch a movie or a David Lynch fever dream?” It’s the blessing and curse of foreign films. You’re thankful to see something outside of the American movie system. But by the halfway point you’re always saying, “This writer sure could’ve benefitted from learning inside the American movie system.”

A recent example is Personal Shopper. That movie felt like one of those goofy writing experiments where one writer writes the first 20 pages, passes it on to another writer for the next 20 pages, who passes it on to a third writer who writes another 20 pages, and so on and so forth til the end. The movie LITERALLY starts out as a ghost movie and ends up a murder mystery. For some reason, the word “focus” seems to get diluted whenever it crosses the Atlantic.

So I don’t know what to expect from The Lodge. But let’s check it out.

10 year-old Mia and her brother, 15 year-old Aiden, are prepping to stay with their dad, Richard, for the weekend. While they get ready, you can sense that their newly separated mother, Laura, isn’t happy with the arrangement. And when she gets to Richard’s, he drops a bomb on her. The woman he’s seeing? Grace? They’re getting married.

Laura casually drives home, retrieves a gun, puts it in her mouth, and pulls the trigger.

Cut to a few weeks later where Richard proposes something to the grieving kids. They’ll go stay at their holiday home in the snowy wilderness of Silver Lake and get to know his new fiance, Grace! Oh, Mia and Aiden are just soooooo excited about that! Especially since Richard plans to head out to work for the week, leaving the kids alone with Grace to bond.

Mia and Aiden have good reason to be skeptical of Grace. Richard is a psychiatrist, and Grace was one of his patients. I don’t know what that doctor-patient thing is called. The Hippocratic Oath? Whatever it is, banging one of your patients is definitely not one of the tenants.

Oh, but it gets better. The whole reason Grace needs psychiatric help in the first place is she grew up in some creepy cult where they had you stab people and pour their blood on you during dinner and kill animals and all those other neat culty things. You get the feeling this woman probably isn’t the most stable domino in the row.

After Richard leaves, Grace tries to bond with the kids, but only pushes them further away. Her creepy sleepwalking isn’t helping matters. But where it really falls apart is when everyone wakes up one day to find everything gone. No clothes. No food. No power. No firewood. Grace blames the kids, but as the days pass, it seems like something more sinister is at play. Could the trio have died? Have they all turned into… ghosts?

Man, I loved this script at first. Then hated it. Then loved it again.

Let me explain.

The Lodge had a kickass setup. The mom killing herself was a shocker. Didn’t see that coming. Learning that Richard was a psychiatrist and Grace was one of his patients? Juicy. Grace having that cult past? Loved it. The kids being forced to stay in this remote house with this woman to get to know her? Conflict written all over that setup.

But then the movie got dumb. It became clear that the writers hadn’t thought about this relationship nearly as much as I thought they did. Richard is a non-factor. He leaves the kids here and is no longer a part of the movie – a plot piece so plastic, he should’ve had his own casing. The cult stuff started out cool, but was never expanded on. It felt very generic and vague, the kind of cult activities you would find in any Cult 101 Storytelling Manual.

And Grace was thinner than that 4k TV you bought on Black Friday. Outside of her cult backstory, we know NOTHING about her. The writers make the mistake of not allowing us to get to know the “real” Grace before she goes crazy at the lodge. For that reason, the “crazy” Grace was our normal. And that didn’t work. It would be like if in The Shining, Jack Torrance started off as “Here’s Johnny!” Jack Torrance.

Overall, there was a decided lack of detail in the details. Bathroom mirror scenes where someone has traced crosses in the fog, for example. The “crazy” horror character who’s no longer taking her crazy pills. Little kids speaking to people who aren’t there in the dark. Lots of spooky nightmares assumed to be prophetic. It wasn’t the cheapest form of horror storytelling there is (that would be jump scares), but it was whatever resides just above that level.

However, once the characters began to suspect they were dead, the story found its way back home. It was an interesting story choice. What if the characters in The Others found out they were dead at the mid-point of the movie instead of the end? What would they do? Naturally, you start to go insane, as you suspect that you may be stuck in this house forever. And that’s when this became more than your average haunted house flick.

But it was the subsequent twist and the ending that really placed this in the “must see” category. There are two great scenes at the end, one that involves a woman who believes she’s already dead playing chicken with a fireplace fire, and the other a shocking turn of events when the entire family is brought back together again. A great ending can deodorize so much shitty writing in a script. And that’s what happened here. The ending made me completely forget about all those earlier problems. And solidified The Lodge as a creepy flick that should do a proper job haunting you next October.

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

What I learned: Your horror script needs ‘TALK ABOUT’ scenes – scenes that are creepy, weird, odd, unsettling, shocking – the kind of stuff people WILL TALK ABOUT after the movie. If you don’t have those scenes, you don’t have a horror film. You have a compilation of copycat scares from previous horror movies. The Laura suicide scene was unsettling. But it was the fireplace scene, where a Grace who thinks she’s already dead picks up a burning log, stands there with it, and allows it to burn her face, while we cut to the kids upstairs, and hear a screaming Grace slowly burning alive, that really freaks us out. Seriously, one of the first questions you should ask yourself after your horror script (and really after any script), is “What scene will everyone be talking about after this movie?”

Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: A janitor on an off-world secret prison is tasked with helping the prison’s biggest criminal escape or his family dies.
About: Today’s writer is one of the few out there who can say he’s sold a spec for 7 figures. Sascha Penn is known as a writer with lots of fun sci-fi ideas and sold this script, The Ditch, to Warner Brothers in 2009.
Writer: Sascha Penn
Details: 4/9/09 draft – 120 pages

I tried to get myself up to the Arclight to see Coco this weekend but there was something about the film that wouldn’t allow me to justify the $20 cost. Studios have to be careful right now. I’ve seen them up the prices across the board in both theaters and home rental. I’ve noticed that those extra few bucks have made me much more likely to think through a purchase. This isn’t a good time for the industry to be doing this. They need more people watching movies. Not less.

I begrudgingly opted instead for Atomic Blonde, hoping my instincts about the film were wrong (it looked cold and inaccessible). But they turned out to be dead on. The film was cold and inaccessible. Seems like the director forgot what made John Wick so good. The fun factor. There was zero fun factor in this movie, a grim action piece with perfectly choreographed fights and slick cinematography, hampered by a main character who was as fun to root for as a bully at a chess meet. It continues to prove my theory that the Cold War is one of the worst subject matters to base a movie around. There have been like 2 good Cold War movies in the past half-century. And that’s being generous.

My weekend felt like it was heading towards failure until I got one of those pleasant surprises – a kick-ass consultation script. It was a Western from a Canadian writer who’d injected the very thing Atomic Blonde was missing – FUN! I was hoping to go 2 for 2 on the script front with this sci-fi offering. Let’s see if I scored.

The year is 2119 A.D., a year where they still need, unfortunately, janitors. Which is what our main character, Jake Pryor, is. Jake’s occupation is a sore spot for his family – his wife, teenager daughter, and newborn – but at least they get to experience the pioneer life, living on Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon.

Jake is a janitor at The Ditch, a giant prison outside of Ganymede’s main city. This mega-prison houses over 500,000 prisoners and 125,000 employees. And Jake’s under the impression that when he shows up at work, it’s going to be just another day of cleaning.

Boy is he wrong. Armstrong Praxis, the most ruthless terrorist on earth since Osama Bin Laden, has been sent to The Ditch to be executed, old-school style (electric chair), today! Jake senses something’s off when, while passing Praxis, Praxis asks how his wife is doing – BY NAME. Yeah, that’s never a good sign.

Jake is then contacted by some ex-workers, who inform him that they’re holding his family hostage. And if he doesn’t rescue Praxis and get him out of that prison, they’re all going to die.

With time-a-tickin’, Jake blows the main fuse to the building and manages to intercept Praxis’s escort back to his cell. After beating some ass (you knew this guy wasn’t always a janitor, right?), he leads Praxis through a series of back-alley rooms in the prison he knows so well, and out to safety. But will they be caught before they can get back to the city? And will Jake’s family become a casualty after all?

The Ditch is a cool, if standard, sci-fi script.

You’re not going to get anything too imaginative here. And that’s a reality of the genre. There isn’t a genre more copied than sci-fi. That’s why, if you’re one of those unique talented sci-fi writers who can come up with a bunch of shit that nobody’s ever seen before? You WILL work in this industry. Because all I see? And all anybody sees? Is sci-fi writers regurgitating the same four movies – Terminator, Aliens, Star Wars, and The Matrix.

I’ll give you a scene from The Ditch, though, that got my originality vote.

Penn cleverly sets up a main elevator that is the only elevator serving the entire prison tower. This elevator is so smart, it can actually detect extra heartbeats. So if an employee signs into the elevator but there is a second person that isn’t checked in, the elevator won’t move.

Well, there’s a moment where Jake has to use the elevator to take Praxis down to the first floor. So he tells Praxis to take these pills that basically kill him, and he’ll revive him once they get to the bottom. Keep in mind, it’s been made clear to Jake that if Praxis dies, his family will be killed.

We establish that Praxis can be dead for maybe 3 minutes before he has to be resuscitated, which happens to be the same amount of time the ride will take. So they initiate the plan, but because the building is still reeling from the earlier power outage, the elevator is only moving at 40% speed.

It’s a great little tense scene, with some lovely irony in it to boot. Paxis was brought here to be killed. But Jake’s whole world depends on bringing Paxis back to life.

If you can come up with 4 or 5 scenes like this in a single sci-fi film? People WILL make your movie. Only because it’s so rare that you get scenes that are actually original in science-fiction. It’s usually people shooting lasers at each other or driving futuristic cars after one another. You have to be crafty. You have to be clever.

The rest of the script never reached the heights of that scene but the setup was strong enough to keep me engaged. In these situations, if you give us a main character we care about and you give us a family (or wife) who needs to be saved that we care about as well, even if you execute a ho-hum plot, we’ll still be invested because we want to see the characters survive.

In no movie is this better proven than Die Hard. Die Hard is a super generic premise. Terrorists take over a building. But we love John McClane. And even though we met his wife for only a couple of scenes, we love her too. So we want to see them survive and be together again.

Just think if you could do both these things? Write an insanely original sci-fi script with characters we love and want to see survive? You’d freaking clean up. You’d be getting checks in the mail for the rest of your life.

Easy right? :)

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

What I learned: Judgeable Moments – There are moments in a script where the reader is judging the writing heavily. These are moments that shine a light on just how hard the writer is trying. I know if the writer nails that moment, they’re giving it their all. In The Ditch, there’s a moment right before Paxis is about to be executed, when the warden asks him, “Any last words?” Now think about that for a second. As a writer, this is one of the highest honors you can take on. You are crafting the LAST WORDS a human ever thinks they’re going to say. This is not something to take lightly. You need to come up with a line that’s not only powerful and memorable, but that encapsulates everything that character is. You have some understanding of who Paxis is. What last words would you write for him? Because I’ll tell the last words that were chosen. They were: “Fuck all of you.” I don’t know about you? But that’s the most generic line that could’ve been chosen. And I say that because ANY CHARACTER could’ve said it. There’s nothing unique about it. To bolster this point, think about what Darth Vader would’ve said here. Or Hannibal Lecter. Or Annie Wilkes. Or Nurse Ratched. Or The Joker. Or Gollum. Their answers would’ve been entirely unique to their character. Which is why I need for these moments in a script to be perfect. Because they’re the moments that highlight your writing. So, I ask you. What line would have you chosen for Paxis’s last words?

Welcome to the newest trend in screenwriting, the “micro-screenplay!”

Genre: Horror/Post-Apocalypse
Premise: A farming family must communicate without speech in order to avoid a violent creature which seeks out its prey via sound.
About: For those of you who think the only way to break into Hollywood is to have an Oscar-winning producer as an uncle, look no further than Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, graduates of University of Iowa, a state with plenty of uncles, but no Hollywoods! Beck and Woods are filmmakers who have been slowly moving their way up the ladder, finally selling this script to Paramount for John Krasinski and wife, Emily Blunt, to star in. While Krasinski would later do a pass on the script (he’s also directing), this is the spec that sold before his involvement.
Writers: Scott Beck & Bryan Woods
Details: 67 pages

Say it with me now. Miiiiiiiii-cro screenplay.

It’s the new trend, brother. Haven’t heard of it? Where have you been? Off writing your behemoth 100 and 110 page screenplays I suspect. How dare you. Between A Quiet Place (67 pages) and Meat (73 pages), thin is in! With everyone’s attention span being stretched to the bone – as the 24 hour news cycle turns into the 28 hour news cycle, people have less time to read. So you better make your scripts as tiny as possible.

The proof is in the pudding, guys. Justice League? 120 PAGES! And what happened to that movie? Only the lowest opening weekend for a DC film. If that doesn’t prove it, I don’t know what does. No more pages for ages. Recede word greed. 75 is the new 110.

Just in case you were wondering, I’m joking. Today’s slim shady screenplay is due to the fact that there’s barely any dialogue in it. Which turns out to be the reason it’s so awesome. Tell your cubicle neighbor to turn down his radio. I’m going to need some quiet for this review.

After sweeping into a beautiful farmland utopia, we meet two children, April, 8, and her brother Will, 10. The two are moseying about, each doing their daily chores. We then meet the very pregnant Mia, their mother, and the patriarch of the family, John.

They seem to be your typical family of farmers. But it doesn’t take long to notice that something is off. That something is the fact that nobody speaks to one another. In fact, everyone goes out of their way not to speak.

It turns out the reason for this is that the world has been wiped out by creatures that prey on sound. If you so much as whisper, it’s the equivalent of screaming as loud as you can in these creatures’ ear. And since they now know where you are, they come and kill you. As long as you don’t say anything, though, you’ll be fine.

This is something that, up until this point, has been controllable. The family has a system down. They don’t need words to communicate. But remember that Mia pregnancy? Yeah, that baby’s due soon. And the last time I checked, babies don’t know how to shut up.

Which is why the family has been meticulously sound-proofing their shed. They hope to have it silent as a church by the time Mia goes into labor. Oh, one problem with that. Mia goes into labor early. This causes pandemonium, as the family is forced to improvise, all with the creature now aware of their location.

Somehow, John’s able to get everyone into the bunker. Everyone, that is, except for April, who, in all of the chaos, got lost in the field. John will now have to go out and save his daughter, with a highly alert sound-hunting creature nearby. But how do two people find each other without the ability to speak? Without the ability to yell? I guess we’ll have to find out.

This was a really clever idea.

It’s funny how that works. We’re all looking for that singular idea that’s so great, so complex, so unlike anything anybody’s seen before. When, usually, the cool hip idea that comes out of nowhere is the one that’s painfully simple.

A world where if you speak, you die.

I always say that the key to avoiding cliche is to come up with a unique concept, as it will, in turn, lead to unique scenarios. And that’s exactly what happened here. Every scene felt different from the stuff I usually read.

Take, for example, when Mia goes into labor early. She’s in the house, by herself, while the rest of the family is working on the shed. Here’s this woman, who’s going through the most physically painful experience of her life, and she not only can’t make a sound, but meanwhile, her family is across the field, casually working on other stuff, having no idea that she’s in labor.

I haven’t read that scene before. As was the case with virtually all of these scenes. Everything felt new because of this “can’t talk” rule.

I also like how Beck and Woods crafted this setup. They didn’t just stop at the gimmick part (nobody can speak or the monster gets you). They asked, “What’s the WORST thing you can do to a family who, if they make a noise, they’re dead?” It’s a question, as storytellers, you should always be asking yourself. “How can I make things even WORSE for my hero?” The answer was the genius: a baby is coming. A baby can’t keep quiet. A baby is a bomb in this situation. Which leads you to wonder, how the hell is the family going to get out of that??

Beck and Woods also explore the emotional side of this question, which is another thing you guys should be focused on. They extrapolated the concept of not talking and made it the family’s flaw from before the creatures arrived. Through a series of flashbacks, we learned that the family wasn’t talking to each other EVEN WHEN THEY COULD. Specifically John, who had a hard time expressing his feelings to the family.

This is easily the cleverest concept I’ve read all year. And the writers did so much right that I’m reluctant to even point out the bad. But there were a few things that bothered me.

For starters, the baby is conveniently quiet for the majority of the time after it’s born. I mean, I don’t know a lot about babies. But I know they aren’t little angels for the first 24 hours after they’re born. They’re crying a lot. And I would’ve liked to have seen the family have to deal with more crying.

At least on the page, the geography was hard to figure out. And when April is lost and John has to find her, I thought, April has lived here her whole life. She knows every landmark like the back of her hand. How could she not find her way back to the house/shed? I’m curious how that’ll be dealt with in the movie.

Finally, the emotional stuff was okay, but not great. There was another family member who died, a dead sister, and we find out through a flashback she died in a car accident. Just a heads up for those wondering. As a reader, I read SO MANY PEOPLE DYING IN FLASHBACKS THROUGH CAR ACCIDENTS. It’s the most cliche choice you can make. And I didn’t understand why they did that when it would’ve made so much more sense to have the other sister die by the hands of the creature.

I’m also VERY CURIOUS to see how the final line of the movie plays. It’s a HUGE GAMBLE. Like, major. It’s either going to crush or fall flat. Have people crying in the aisles or rolling their eyes. I’m so curious to see this movie not just for its clever concept, but for that moment.

I’ll finish off by saying these frustrations are mainly due to the fact that I think this idea is so awesome and so clever, and so even when the writers made the smallest misstep I was like, “No!” Cause I wanted this movie to be perfect. And it has a chance to be that. It’s that film everyone is looking for – something unlike anything else out there that’s still commercial.

I will DEFINITELY be seeing A Quite Place when it comes out. This is what spec screenwriting is all about. The bar has been raised.

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

What I learned: Take advantage of your unique upbringing to write a great scene! There’s an awesome scene here where April falls into a silo full of grain and begins to drown in it. It’s a scene written in startling detail and with facts that I suspect only someone who grew up in the farmlands of Iowa would know. So keep writing what you know, people! Chances are it’s what will separate you from everyone else.

What I learned 2: NOTHING should go according to plan in a movie. If Mia’s pregnancy goes according to plan? BORRRRR-ING. It’s the very fact that she goes into labor early (NOT PART OF THE PLAN) that makes the movie so exciting.

A common theme kept popping up in the last three consultation scripts I’ve read. A theme so prominent in the screenwriting trade, its primary descriptor sends chills down screenwriters spines. I’m talking, of course, about THE CLICHE.

We’ve spoken generally about cliches in the past, and how to avoid them. If there’s a line or a scene or an idea that you’ve heard before, it’s in your best to interest to go with another choice.

But all that does is put the onus on you to think something up. And thinking stuff up is hard! The reason we come to Scriptshadow is so we don’t have to think! So that Carson can give us the answers that make screenwriting easy.

Okay, okay. My apologies. I’ve been slacking.

So here’s a more active way to solve the cliche problem. It came to me while reading a classic movie scenario. Two soldiers on a battlefield. One gets shot and he’s not going to make it. This is the final conversation they have before the injured soldier’s death.

In the scene, the writer wrote a beautiful interaction between the two characters, whereby they were each able to say the things they’d always wanted to say to one another. Time stopped so that this idealized exchange could continue unimpeded until the very last breath.

Which is the reason it didn’t work and felt so cliche.

It was at that moment I had an epiphany about what exactly “cliche” was. Cliche… is the absence of truth. Cliche is the idealized “movie logic” version of a moment. The lighting is perfect. The characters speak in poetic prose. It’s a romanticizing of what a real world moment might be.

To avoid cliche, you must turn to truth. And truth is messy. The lighting is never perfect in truth. People never say the perfect thing at the perfect moment in truth. Whatever you pursue in life never happens the way you plan for it to. To avoid cliche, look for the mess. Look for the things you DON’T want to happen. Not the things you do. Look for the things that will make the scene MORE difficult to write, not less. The more you mess things up, the further away from cliche you’ll be.

So let’s get back to that scene. We’re on the battlefield. One of two soldiers has been shot and they’re dying quickly. You could make the argument that this scene is doomed from the get-go. You’ve already created an idealized cliche situation. So it’s destined to be bad.

But that’s not true. In real life, we do have war. In real life, we do have soldiers who get shot and die in front of other soldiers. So there’s truth to mine from this situation. What you want to avoid is playing those last moments out in an idealized fashion. Instead, look for the mess.

And that’s not easy. Because unless your name is Ernest Hemingway, chances are you’ve never been on a battlefield. But that’s okay. You’re still a writer who’s capable of imagining a realistic scenario. So again, I’d ask you, look for the mess.

For example, let’s say these two characters do need to say some last words to each other. Let’s start by making that difficult. Maybe the Captain is off to the side, screaming to our hero, “LET’S GO LIEUTENANT! WE’RE GETTING PICKED UP IN 20! WE NEED TO LEAVE NOW!” And he doesn’t just say this once. He KEEPS yelling it over and over again. This erases any chance for a well-lit smooth uninterrupted final conversation. Already, the dialogue is getting messy. And as we’ve established, messy is good.

Maybe the hero wants to go for that big heroic moment and carry his friend back to safety. So he gets him under his shoulders, waits for the gunfire to stop, lifts him up and starts to run back for cover, takes two steps, collapses, and crashes back down. He’s not strong enough to carry his friend. THAT kind of shit is real life – when you realize just how heavy a man is when you’re exhausted and in the middle of a firefight.

Maybe, instead of our dying soldier begging our hero to tell his wife and kids that he loves them more than anything, he tells our hero that he knows of a secret massage parlor down by Lower Wacker and to ask for this woman named Cara, because she’ll do anything you want for a hundred bucks. That’s the kind of weird messy shit people really say when these once-in-a-lifetime moments happen. They don’t speak to each other in pre-rehearsed loving lines that make total sense.

Are you starting to get the picture here? Whenever you find yourself inside a moment that has the potential to be cliche, seek out the truth of the moment. And never forget that truth is messy.