Genre: Horror
Logline (from writer): A home-invading female serial killer stalks a true crime author whom she wants to write her bloody life story.
Why You Should Read (from writer): The most famous home invader in all of fairy tale history has never gotten her own movie. This is a modern take on one of the most globally recognized public domain characters that Hollywood hasn’t cracked. The script was a Finalist in two screenwriting contests: Fresh Blood Selects & Search for New Blood 3. For this new Amateur Friday draft, I took the AOW notes to heart and trimmed down the opening pages and minimized the early voiceover.
Writer: Brett Martin
Details: 99 pages (note: This is a new draft that was sent to me tonight! So it’s hot off the presses and different from the drafts you guys read on Amateur Offerings).

Today’s Amateur Offerings winner got a big reaction out of me.

At times I was impressed. Other times I was angry. Sometimes I was intrigued. A number of times I was disgusted. A lot of times I was frustrated.

Whichever way you look at it, I was feeing something while reading this.

The important question, however, is “Was the ultimate feeling a good one?” And I’m still not sure I know the answer to that. Because there were times where I felt this script was more about the writer than it was about the story being told. It felt like Brett so badly wanted to put his mark on this that the story may have ended up playing second fiddle.

Despite that opinion, the script definitely has a voice. It doesn’t fall victim to the “Seventy-Five Percenters” curse, which is a term I use to describe the 75% of scripts I read that are so average, I forget about them the second I put them down. Goldie does what a script should do – it makes you remember it.

But remember it how?

The plot follows our title character, Goldie, a 20-something hot blonde who likes to murder families in her spare time, particularly units with a mom, dad, and blonde daughter. So, suffice it to say, she has issues.

Goldie’s latest obsession is a woman named Sara Berenson, the author of a best seller who’s reached a bout of writer’s block so crippling that she hasn’t written a word in months. Sara likes to do the Stephen King thing, leaving her family in the city while she writes at a remote cottage. And right now, she’s up there trying (and failing) to force out her next masterpiece.

Goldie google maps Sara, pitches a tent in the forest, and starts watching her from afar, learning her routine and looking for a way to integrate herself into Sara’s life. She finds a local hunter, Peter, and pays him to scare Sara while she’s out riding her bike. Then, just before Peter and his buddies can “hurt” Sara, Goldie comes swooping in and “saves” her.

Once back at Sara’s place, Goldie admits she knows Sara is a best-selling novelist and came up to these parts looking for her. Sara is predictably creeped out, but this Goldie girl did save her, so she allows her to stick around. Eventually, Goldie pitches a book to Sara about a young woman who goes around killing families.

For reasons that remain unclear, Sara doesn’t consider the possibility that the creepy weird fan who admitted she stalked her up into the woods might be the very psychopath Goldie’s “story” is about.

In the interim, the girls must fend off a slew of horny men who include Sara’s secret lover, Rick, and Peter’s hunting buddies. Rest assured, there is a lot of bloody slaughtering that goes on. All of which needs to be taken care of before Sara’s family comes to visit and she can finally finish this book and move on.

Brett’s done something I’ve been telling everyone to consider – take the fairy tale genre and flip it on its head. Now, to be honest, this isn’t what I imagined when I said that. But maybe that’s a good thing. If it’s what I expected, then the idea probably isn’t fresh enough.

Brett also takes a lot of chances here. I mean, things get weird. We’ve got a fairy tale heroine who masturbates to photos of happy families. And that’s just the appetizer. I’m not surprised at all that this kicked ass in a couple of horror screenwriting contests. The writing is bold and strong.

With that said, a couple of issues kept popping up while I was reading. The biggest of which was that the writing felt like it was trying too hard. This script became more about shocking you than it did about telling a good story.

The family photo masturbation is one example. There’s also a moment where Goldie breaks the fourth wall and tells us she’s going to kill us if we tell anyone her secret. There’s a moment where we inhabit the body of someone Goldie brutally slaughters. There’s a moment where Sara, who, up until that point was, at worst, a cheater, becomes sexually turned on when she sees Goldie torturing a man to death.

I just felt like the writer was asking the question: How can I best shock the audience in this moment? Rather than: How can I milk the most drama out of this sequence? How can I illicit the most emotion out of this scene?

Remember that shock is just that – shock. It lasts for a second then it’s gone. So it’s not a great screenwriting tool to utilize. As a screenwriter, you want to look for tools that keep the reader’s interest over an extended period of time. That’s why suspense is such a great concept to learn. You can use it to draw a reader in over 20-30 pages if you do it right.

Another thing I had an issue with was that the characters didn’t act like real people. They acted like movie characters.

I’ll give you a couple of examples. Why would Goldie immediately tell Sara that she knows who she is and drove out into the wilderness to find her? You’ve just put your “target” on Terrorist Threat Alert Level 10. You might as well have worn a shirt that said, “I’m a crazy stalker who might kill you.” It would’ve made a lot more sense for Goldie to feign ignorance about who Sara was, then work her scheme in once she gained Sara’s trust.

As for Sara, I repeatedly asked why she was allowing this girl who was clearly a psychopath to stay with her. Goldie would scream at Sara, threaten her family, tell Sara she wished she had been gang-raped by Peter and his friends. Yet one scene later, Sara would be allowing Goldie back into her good graces.

True, there were times where there were extenuating circumstances (Goldie rushing to Sara’s defense when the man she was having an affair with was trying to rape her) but those scenes were so manufactured (How did Rick go from a casual affair to an obsessed rapist?) that you knew the only reason they were there was to create a scenario by which Sara giving Goldie another chance made sense.

This is something we don’t talk about a lot because these are the nuances of screenwriting and the nuances of screenwriting don’t have fancy names like “inciting incident” or “mid-point twist.” They’re mostly about feel. And where the mistakes are made in “feel” is when the writer wants something to happen so badly that he’s willing to look past a truthful moment in order to get the plot to where he needs it to go.

And that’s the thing that ultimately kept me from investing in this script. It was more about the writer than it was about writing a believable great story.

My advice to Brett, if he wants to write another draft, is to drop the gimmicks and the shocks. Instead, focus on writing a great story. Even if you made that one change of Goldie not telling Sara she knew who she was, you’d have a good 20-30 pages driven entirely by dramatic irony – the fact that we know Goldie is dangerous but Sara does not.

And really get into your characters’ heads and try to be truthful. Don’t write the movie scene. Write what people would really do. Because, right now, the swings in emotion (a character hates another character one second, then four dialogue lines later, they’re best friends again) just aren’t realistic. And the reason for that is you’re not treating these characters like real people. You’re treating them like pawns.

I hope you take all this to heart, Brett. You’re one of the most positive guys out there. And you clearly have talent. It’s just tweaks in the way you approach the writing that are going to pay dividends. Good luck!

Script link: Goldie (newest draft)

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

What I learned: One of the biggest problems I notice in the amateur scripts I’ve read lately is writers don’t treat their characters like real people. If a character is about to get shot, they’d rather write a cool move line (“Go ahead, do it”) than ask what that character would really feel and really say in that moment. In other words: THE TRUTH. Look, you have some creative license to massage reality in storytelling. And there are certain projects that are built around being unrealistic. But for the most part, you should look to be truthful. Because the more you manipulate reality to fit your writing agenda, the less we’re going to believe in what’s happening.

I once read a script that started off with a courtroom scene. A dirty cop was being tried for shooting a young man. Meanwhile, another cop (we’ll call him “Officer Jake”) who was friends with the victim’s family, and who had known the victim, was called in as a character witness, to make a case that the young man who had been killed was a good guy and that he never would’ve done anything to warrant being shot. Officer Jake made his case on the stand, but the scene ended with the jury ruling in favor of the dirty cop, and both the family and Officer Jake left the courtroom devastated.

I want you to think about that scene for a second. How does it make you feel? Is it a good scene? A bad one? Do you feel like an adequate amount of drama was mined from that situation?

The reason I bring this up is because this is the kind of scene most writers write. It’s not a bad scene. But nor is it a scene that makes an impact. And this is something you should always be thinking about as a screenwriter. Is your scene just “there” or is it making an impact?

So how could we improve this scene to make it an “impact scene?” Well, here’s what I suggested to the writer. Keep Officer Jake’s relationship with the victim’s family the same. Make them very close. However, this time, make it so Officer Jake works in the same precinct as the cop on trial, and have their Captain force Officer Jake to be a character witness for the dirty cop – “take one for the team,” if you will.

Notice how all of a sudden, this scene becomes a lot better. We’re no longer experiencing something obvious. We’re experiencing something traumatizing. A character is being forced to help a man go free who he knows is guilty of murder in front of the family of the victim who he’s good friends with.

Think about how that scene plays out now. How Officer Jake has to force every lying word out of his mouth to help a man he despises, all while betraying his friends, who are staring him down from the audience.

So how do you create a scene like this? What’s the magic formula?

There are three parts to it. Let’s start with the first one. Don’t give your character something they want to do. Force them to do something they don’t. The idea here is that if your character is ever comfortable in a scene, it’s probably not a good scene (unless you’re setting up the character for a later fall – but that’s another discussion).

So let’s say your character, Nick, goes to a party he’s been looking forward to for awhile. If that party is comfortable every step of the way? You’re not doing your job as a writer. So maybe you have his evil ex-wife show up. Now the party is anything but comfortable, as our character has to navigate around the party to avoid her.

That’s screenwriting 101 stuff there.

Let’s move on to the second part – UP THE STAKES. Remember that nothing bad you do to your character is that bad if the stakes are low. In the scene I highlighted at the beginning of the article, a man is either going to prison for rest of his life or get away with murder. The stakes are very high.

So if we stay with our party theme, we might tweak it so that the party is now a networking event and Nick needs to land a big client who’s going to be there. Now that there’s something to lose, the scene has a bit more weight. His ex-wife isn’t just an annoying presence. She could screw up the deal.

Finally, we have our third component. And this, my friends, is the secret sauce – the thing that really makes these scenes impactful. Wanna know what it is?

MAKE IT PERSONAL

In my first example, that scene doesn’t play the same if Officer Jake isn’t friends with the family or if the family isn’t there at the trial. What makes the scene work is his personal relationship with the family and the fact that he has to betray them right in front of their eyes.

So, in our “party” scene, an option might be for Nick to finally make his way to the company he’s trying to land as a client, only to see, at the last second, his ex-wife step up. He then realizes that she works for the company he has to land, which means he has to suck up to the very woman he hates more than anything to get the deal done.

I’m not in love with that option. I’d probably keep working on it until I found something better. But that’s the idea behind the formula. Force your character to do things they don’t want to do. Up the stakes if possible. And turbo charge it by making it personal.

Another famous example of this is The Good Wife. A wife who sacrificed her life to support her State’s Attorney husband finds out he’s been cheating on her over the years with dozens of hookers. She hates this man more than anything. Yet she’s asked to stand next to him at a news conference and tell the world that she supports him and still loves him. That’s the essence of this device. A woman who has to support a great husband? Boring. A woman who has to support a terrible one? Impactful.

Just remember that if Sophie doesn’t have to make a choice, you don’t have a scene.

If you’re looking for notes on your latest script, I offer screenplay consultations. If you want me to break down your script and tell you how to fix it, e-mail me at Carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line “CONSULTATION” and we’ll get started!

Genre: True Story
Premise: How the best-selling autobiography of all time, The Diary of Anne Frank, navigated an endless number of rejections to get published.
About: This is one of, if not the, most prestigious spec sale of the year so far. It sold to Fox Searchlight in January after a bidding war. The spec comes from the writing team of Samuel Franco and Evan Kilgore, who leapt onto the scene last year with their spec, Mayday 109, about a lesser known heroic tale from John F. Kennedy’s youth.
Writers: Samuel Franco & Evan Kilgore
Details: 107 pages

I have a feeling Natalie Portman will play Barbara.

Today’s script is part of a new growing trend of specs about deeper weightier historical subjects. The trend is seen as an evolution of the biopic craze dominating the market these last few years. There are only so many cradle-to-grave (or young man-to-crowning achievement) stories you can tell before audiences rebel. So writers have adapted and are giving us true stories that are more contained, and as much about the story as the person.

The reason this is happening is because movie stars need vehicles. The blockbusters have become bigger than them, leaving their only route to prestige and notoriety the Oscars. How do you win Oscars? True stories about real people that resonate with audiences. Hence why this spec trend is growing.

Do I like this trend? Not really. At heart, I’m a sucker for a great idea born purely out of a talented writer’s imagination. But until one of you Scriptshadow readers blows the doors off of Hollywood with some killer fictional spec and start a new trend, I’m stuck with what we’ve got.

And, truth be told, when these scripts are good, they can be really good. I actually reconnected with Anne Frank’s diary recently. It itself is a masterful demonstration of the power of simplicity in writing. So I’m curious to see where Franco and Kilgore take this.

Keeper of the Diary follows two main characters. The first is Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank. We meet Otto when he and his family are first found by the Nazis in the Annex, then when he’s released from his concentration camp a year later. Otto is devastated when he finds out that his wife and daughter, who were at a different camp, are dead.

Five years later and an Atlantic Ocean away, we meet 23 year-old Barbara Zimmerman. Barbara was set to marry a wealthy man and live a comfortable life when she realized she didn’t want to be comfortable. She wanted to make a difference. So she canceled the wedding and ran off to New York to be a publisher at the prestigious Doubleday & Co. Unfortunately, because she’s a woman, she’s thrown in the typing room and forgotten about.

Meanwhile, Otto has zero reason to live. Everything he held dear has been taken away from him. But that changes when he reads his daughter’s diary. He sees a side of his daughter he never knew, one who was painfully insightful and impossibly optimistic. After he finishes it, he has purpose again – he must publish his daughter’s work. He must bring this same hope to others.

Back in New York, Barbara, while looking for a manuscript in the discarded bin, comes across The Diary of Anne Frank, which had already been discarded by two of Doubleday’s most trusted readers.

Barbara decides to give it a shot and is transported by the writing. She falls in love with Anne and her message, and she, too, makes it her destiny to publish her work. There’s only one problem, the two men who rejected the manuscript are her boss’s personal assistants. It seems that men don’t understand what a little girl could possibly know about war.

Otto isn’t having much luck with publishers in Europe either. Everyone seems to think that the book is too mature for kids and too juvenile for adults. The only publishing house even considering publishing it wants Otto to cut out 50,000 words and pay to produce the book himself.

Will Barbara finally convince the bigwigs at Doubleday to give the manuscript a chance? Will Otto give up spreading his daughter’s message? We all know the answer. But what we don’t know is how it all came together, a question that Keeper of the Diary answers.

Let’s start with the first question that most people who’ve read this script will have – What’s up with the prose?? The prose here is thick. Like really really thick. If you told me to count how many times light was described reflecting off surfaces in Keeper of The Diary, I’d probably lose count.

What’s the deal, Carson? I thought you said we couldn’t write thick prose. Especially on the first page!

A couple of things are going on here. First, this is an historical weighty true story. And when you’re writing one of those, you have more leeway to thicken up the prose. It’s important when you’re writing about history to transport us there. That requires more detail, more description, more atmosphere. So I get it. Still, there was a TON of prose here. And I think the same thing could’ve been achieved with 20% less of it.

Another thing to keep in mind – and I know it’s something amateurs hate hearing – is that these guys had recently sold a big spec. This gives them a lot more leeway with reads. As an unknown, you simply don’t have that leeway, and therefore need to write for shorter attention spans.

Despite this, it’s important to keep in mind that there’s one rule that supersedes all others. If you do this one thing right, you can break every rule you want. And that’s write a great story. If your story is interesting, if it has great characters and suspense and mystery, and you’ve managed to create a big question (Will the diary get published??) that we want answered, that’s the most important thing.

To help drive this point home, imagine a flying saucer came down and beamed some guy into its ship then flew away. Then imagine you showed up literally one minute later and had missed the whole thing. It wouldn’t matter if the least qualified person to tell you that story – a drunk homeless man slurring every word – you would still be riveted by his story.

However, if you happened to run into JK Rowling at Starbucks and she began to tell you about a woman a second ago who almost spilled her coffee, you’d be like, “That’s great J.K. But I gotta get to work now.”

Keeper of the Diary was a great story. What’s so great about it is it doubles up in the underdog department. Underdogs are obsessively likable. Even more so if their cause is noble. Even more so if they’re good people. And that’s the case with both Otto and Barbara. These two are basically impossible not to root for. And when you’ve got that, you’ve got the foundation for a great script.

The script also does a clever job of integrating dramatic irony. We, of course, know that The Diary of Anne Frank is one of the most important books ever published. So whenever somebody tells our heroes “no” or that the book “sucks,” we’re screaming through our screen: “Are you guys f&*%ing idiots!!??? This is the freaking Diary of Anne Frank! The most important autobiography ever!”

I call this “breaking the fourth wall” and it’s a clever way to approach well-known true stories because it engages the audience’s knowledge of the event and, sort of, uses it against them. James Cameron did the same thing with Titanic. We all know the ship is going to sink. So every time some smarmy oil magnate says it’s unsinkable, we’re screaming, “No it isn’t! Slow the damn thing down!”

Above all, Keeper of the Diary does the thing I always tell you to do: FIND A UNIQUE ANGLE INTO THE STORY. Had they simply adapted Anne Frank’s diary, it probably still would’ve been good because it’s a fascinating story. But it wouldn’t have been FRESH. And that’s why I’ll continue to bring this up whenever I see it. One of the biggest mistakes rookie writers make is they don’t find a fresh angle into their stories. They’re always giving us retreads of their favorite movies or favorite genres. Find that unique point-of-view and tell your story from it. It makes a huge difference in setting your script apart from the pack.

You’re going to want to bring your tissues to this read. It was really good. And despite debuting in January, it will probably finish atop this year’s Black List.

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

What I learned: You can break rules if you offset them by more important rules. In our opening page, the writers do something I tell you not to – provide a wall of text. However, they also follow a far more relevant rule – SOMETHING IS HAPPENING. The Nazis are charging towards the secret Annex and are about to find Anne Frank and the other families.

There’s an old saying in baseball. “You can’t win the pennant in April. But you can lose it.” For the uninitiated, a baseball season is 162 games long. The first month of the season is April. And what that saying means is this: Even if you win every game in April, you haven’t won the pennant. You still have 140 games to go. BUT. If you lose 17 of your first 20 games, no team ever comes back from that. You’ve ensured that your team is screwed.

The same thing can be said for a screenplay. You can’t write a great screenplay in one page. But you can prove that you’ve written a bad one. This is why, when a reader or producer says they read “one page of a script” before “throwing it away,” it’s not as asinine as it sounds. There are lots of things a writer can do on that first page to kill a script. And that’s the topic of today’s article.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way. Make sure there are no misspellings on your first page. No misused words. No grammatical errors. No screw-ups when it comes to tense. And make sure the formatting is error-free (easy if you have reputable screenwriting software). If there’s a single spelling or grammar mistake on the first page, I don’t bail on the script, but a huge red flag goes up. If there are two, I know the script is bad. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. That’s right. In the 7000+ screenplays that I’ve read, when there were two errors on the first page, the script was bad 100% of the time. So don’t make that mistake.

The above should be a given. But the rest of this stuff isn’t. Some will depend on your skill level and the amount of time you’ve put into the craft. But don’t let that deter you. This is what I call the “weeding out” process. Those screenwriters who don’t have the stamina to master the craft will eventually drop out during this phase, leaving you with less competition and a better chance to succeed.

ACTIVE VOICE

Writing in the active voice is part of the unique writing-style of this medium. Because it’s so specific to screenwriting, when you don’t see it, you know the writer’s a newbie. “Active Voice” means conveying things as they happen. The idea is, we’ll be seeing it happen on screen, so you should write in the way that it will be seen. “The man cuts the rope,” as opposed to, “The man is cutting the rope.” There is some leniency here, as there will be times when you want something to happen in the moment: “He starts cutting the rope.” But you should be using the active voice 95% of the time.

SENTENCE CONSTRUCTION
The style in which you write is how you distinguish yourself as a writer. However, there is a basic truth that must be present in every style. Your sentences must be readable. They must be smooth and easy to digest. If your sentence construction is clumsy, overlong, too descriptive, wrought with pretentious vocabulary, or confusing, people won’t want to keep reading. To some degree, subjectivity comes into play. A writing style that is pleasing to some may not be pleasing to others. But there’s a mantra here that should serve every screenwriter well: Keep your writing simple and easy to read.

Here’s an example:

He watches Vivian in the adjoining kitchen as her arthritic fingers bring a nub of a cigarette to her angry lips.

VS.

With his mother in the kitchen, he focuses on her, from which he notices her cigarette in her fingers, which are arthritic, but also angry, and which twitch in tiny angry spurts every time she lifts the cigarette to her mouth.

The first is a sentence from the opening page of “Palmer,” a script I reviewed a couple of weeks ago. The second is a butchered version of that sentence which is the kind of thing I’ll see a lot of in amateur scripts. You’ll notice that, technically, the sentence is fine. But it’s overwritten. It’s redundant. It goes about describing things in a roundabout way (“With his mother in the kitchen…”). The first sentence is clean and direct. There is no confusion when you read it. And that’s the important lesson here.

GENERIC WRITING
The other kind of writing you want to avoid is the opposite of the above: GENERIC writing. This is when the writing has no style or character at all. Writing needs some personality. And as long as you don’t go overboard with that personality, you’re good.

Joe opens a coke. He drinks it. He finishes it. He throws it in the garbage can.

If you give me an entire script of that, I’m going to kill myself. Here’s a line from the first page of Juno…

She swigs from an absurdly oversized carton of juice and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.

There’s a little more color here. A little more style. But not TOO MUCH style. Just enough to create an image in your head.

HUGE PARAGRAPHS (AKA “WALL OF TEXT”)
If I see a first page with a TON of description, I’m on high alert. That means any paragraphs that contain 5 lines or more or pages that have multiple 4-line paragraphs (four or five in a row). This isn’t a script-killer. And if the writing is pleasing and smooth, I’ll look past it. But more often than not, this is an indication that a) the script is overwritten and will be a chore to read, or b) this is a newbie screenwriter who doesn’t understand that “less is more” when it comes to description.

DIALOGUE
Since we don’t know the characters yet, I don’t put a whole lot of stock in first-page dialogue. For example, if a character has really boring dialogue, that may be because he’s a really boring character, something I’ll find out once I keep reading. But there are one of two criteria I want met with first page dialogue.

1) I either want to notice that the dialogue is really good.

OR

2) I don’t want to notice the dialogue at all (it’s so natural that it’s invisible).

If I’m reading the dialogue and it’s extremely on-the-nose (“I hate that you abused me when I was a child, father!”) or doesn’t sound anything like how real people talk (in a drama script: “How are you? I haven’t seen you in so long.” “I contracted cancer recently. How are you?”), I know the script is in trouble.

SOMETHING HAPPENING
Okay so, everything we’ve gone over so far is the technical end. The other thing you have to nail in your first page is that something needs to be happening to grab us, to pull us in and make us want to keep reading! What does that mean, “happening?” It means one of these four conditions must be met:

1) Jump into the story immediately.
2) A great intro for your hero.
3) A teaser.
4) A story is told.

Jump right into the story – The first option is the easiest. Introduce your character as soon as the story is ready to begin. So in the example I used above, from Palmer, that first page has Palmer being released from prison. It’s not big. It’s not flashy. But we’ve jumped right into the story. Had we spent 15 pages hanging out with Palmer in prison or fuddy-duddying around the neighborhood before meeting our main character, that wouldn’t have worked. Unless you used one of the remaining three options…

A compelling hero intro – If you’re not going to jump into the story, you better jump into your character. Give us something that makes us interested or excited about your hero. Put them in a scenario that tells us who they are. The classic example of this is Indiana Jones going into the cave. More recently, Deadpool. Juno is a good example. The first Star Trek reboot. This option is a great choice if you’ve got a flashy main character. Throw him and all his glory at us immediately.

A teaser – If your story starts slowly, consider adding a teaser. The cool thing about teasers is they don’t have to linearly line up with your story right away. You could start with a scene from 200 years ago. You could jump to the end of the movie first, showing your main character dead. You can show a drug deal between two characters that gets ugly, despite it seemingly having nothing to do with your story yet. A teaser is an easy way to grab us right away. The Sixth Sense, an otherwise slow movie, starts with an intense break-in from six months ago where an old patient shoots our hero.

A story – This is the hardest thing to do, but the thing that best conveys you’ve written a good script. Write a first scene that’s a mini-movie in itself. Construct a scenario that has mystery or suspense or dramatic irony. Give it conflict or an unexpected twist. Make sure it has a beginning, a middle, and an end, just like a movie. The best example of this, in my book, is the opening scene in Fargo (the movie) where a husband meets two criminals who he’s hiring for an undisclosed crime. There’s mystery (we don’t yet know what he’s there for). There’s conflict (the other guys are pissed off that he made them wait for an hour and he won’t acknowledge it). There’s suspense (we have no idea what’s going to happen here. It could go any way). And an unexpected twist (they reveal that he’s hiring them to kidnap his wife). That last piece is what sets this scene apart from so many others. He’s not hiring them to kill a drug dealer. He’s hiring them to kidnap HIS WIFE. That bizarre request is what makes us want to watch the rest of this movie.

It should be noted that the first page may only carry a portion of the above four options. You don’t have to begin and end the scene in one page. But the point is, that first page will have a purpose, since we’ll see that it has a clear plan. Which means we’ll want to turn the page. And in the end, that’s the goal of screenwriting. To make the reader want to turn the page. As soon as they stop wanting to turn the page, your script is dead to them. And that process begins on the very first page of the script.

Genre: Action
Premise: (from the Black List) An underwater earthquake decimates a research crew working at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, leaving two survivors with limited resources to ascend 35,000 feet and reach the surface before their life support runs out.
About: This script finished on the 2015 Black List with 6 votes. Newbie writer, Pete Bridges, would later sell his second script, The Fall, to Amblin Entertainment. Not bad. Not bad at all.
Writer: Pete Bridges
Details: 104 pages

Plot.

Character.

Every time you come up with an idea, it’s going to be heavily weighted one way or the other. So you have a movie like The Force Awakens, plot-heavy with every character needing to do things and other characters trying to stop those things. Goals, stakes, urgency galore.

Then you have a movie like Manchester by the Sea. Almost no plot. A character-focused script if there ever was one. With that movie, it’s more about emotional beats, introspection, overcoming inner obstacles.

One of your jobs as a screenwriter is to identify which kind of idea yours is. Is it a plot-heavy idea? Or a character-heavy idea? Once you have your answer, form your plan of attack. And this is how that plan of attack should go:

If it’s a plot-heavy concept, YOUR PLOT MUST BE FUCKING AWESOME. This is what your idea is selling. The plot. So that plot better be something to write home about. If it’s a character-heavy concept, same thing. YOUR CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT and CHARACTER EXPLORATION better be the kind of thing that makes other writers shiver in their boots because they know that they can never touch your expertise on the character front.

The point is – whatever you’re selling your script on, that thing better be great.

Now here comes the second part. And this is the one most screenwriters screw up on. You still have to do a solid job in the other department. So if you have a plot-heavy script, you still need to spend some time making the characters compelling, going through tough inner obstacles, and having problems with one another.

Same with a character piece. Don’t forget you still need to add some plot.

Cause here’s the thing, see…

If you only focus on the side that you’re selling, your script is going to feel thin. Who here has watched an action movie or a thriller where you didn’t feel any emotion towards the characters? Or who here has watched one of those aimless character pieces that’s all about feelings and crying but GOES NOWHERE? That’s what I mean by thin.

The reason I don’t review scripts like Resurface as much anymore is because the writers who write them make this mistake all the time. They have this plot-heavy premise, which inevitably leads to them making both mistakes. The narrowness of the plot means it’s going to be predictable. And because it’s so plot-focused, the characters are going to be underdeveloped.

In that way, an idea like Resurface is fool’s gold. It seems so movie-friendly. And yet it has so many traps it can fall through. And I don’t even fault the writers of these movies for falling into these traps. While I was reading this, I thought, “You know, I probably would’ve made a lot of these same choices.”

The difference is, I know after reading a lot of these scripts how dangerous they are, so I know not even to attempt them.

This goes back to yesterday’s post where you’re always looking to find that angle into an idea that’s fresh. Because fresh angles create fresh scenarios. You’re not burdened with going through the “been there done that” checklist.

For example, with Resurface, you know you’re going to have a “losing air” situation. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. But when the audience already knows your dramatic scenarios before your film has begun, you’re at a disadvantage. The writer should always be ahead of the viewer, unless he wants them to be ahead of him.

Resurface follows Josh Strand and Hannah Bradford, co-workers with way too much sexual tension, working in a submersible in one of the deepest parts of the ocean. They’re joined by several other submersibles, finishing up a project they’ve been hired for, when there’s an underwater tectonic shift. We’re talking the sea-bed shifts an entire mile.

Everybody’s sub is damaged in the quake and, after the subs succumb to the damage one by one, Josh and Hannah find themselves the only ones left. And it’s not looking good. Their sub doesn’t even have power. They’re able to use a backup battery to get their sub to the nearby supply sub, and transfer everything into there.

The problem is, the supply sub wasn’t made for people, requiring Josh and Hannah to hack the system and turn this puppy into something that can take them to the surface. As you can imagine, that journey is fraught with a dwindling air supply and an unreliable GUI.

Meanwhile, Josh and Hannah try to make the best of the situation, slowly transforming from sarcastic jokes to expressing their true feelings for one another, which, it turns out, are love. Let’s just hope that love has the chance to last a lifetime.

I give credit to Bridges for doing the best with what he had. But I was so ahead of this story. Which is what I was afraid of to begin with. That the logline was the movie. The logline needs to convey the main conflict in the movie. But you then add twists and turns to keep things unexpected. There was nothing unexpected here. They encountered technical obstacles to getting to the surface and they talked to each other. That was it.

A good movie to compare this to is The Martian, as that script had a similar setup. Here’s what The Martian did that Resurface didn’t, though. IT GOT SPECIFIC. When you have a limited premise, specificity can become your best friend. Find things or research things that you know about that the audience doesn’t. That way, you’re feeding them new information. New information FEELS FRESH.

The perfect example of this is the potato growing sequence in The Martian. We don’t know anything about growing potatoes. It’s actually a pretty weird concept in the context of a movie about a guy stranded on Mars. But that’s exactly why it worked. It was UNEXPECTED, unique, different. And I know I keep harping on that word lately. But it’s so important as a screenwriter. If you’re not giving us unexpected things, then we know what’s going to happen in your story long before you show us.

On the character front, a screenplay like this is a huge challenge. Lots of screenwriters see the beginning of this idea, imagine two people in a sub, and think, “I’ll just come up with things for them to say to each other.” But them talking to each other is the whole movie. It will take up 100 minutes of the running time. It can’t just be “people talking.” It’s got to be a compelling situation between the two that evolves, that reveals, that changes, that’s UNEXPECTED.

And while I didn’t think Josh and Hannah’s situation was very compelling, I don’t pretend to know what would’ve worked better. You could’ve had two people that hated each other. But that’s kind of cliche. You could’ve had them be a married couple on the outs, but that’s cliche. You could have had them be divorced, forced into this sub by their boss. But that’s cliche.

This is the stuff that drives me crazy about screenwriting, is that there are a lot situations that have limited answers. I mean I’ll kick the question down to you guys. What would you have done with Josh and Hannah to make their storyline compelling? Because I learned early on that putting two people in a small trapped space for 100 minutes is a lot harder than it looks. What the f&*% are they going to say to each other for 2 hours?

And for that reason, I couldn’t get into Resurface. With that said, the writing is solid. The plot moves quickly. And there’s a bigger story here. With this script, Bridges got noticed. Once you get noticed, you’re in the game, and your odds of selling something increase tremendously. Bridges used the heat he got from Resurface to later sell The Fall to Steven Spielberg’s company. So it’s safe to say, everything worked out for the best.

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

What I learned: Remember to add ticking time bombs to not just the entire plot, but to individual scenarios. There’s a scene early on in the script where they’re moving from the broken sub into the supply sub, and a battery is leaking so badly, that the whole thing could blow up in an instant. It added a nice bit of tension on top of what was already a tense scene. That’s good writing.