Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: The guardians of the galaxy get split up when leader Peter Quill meets his estranged father for the first time, who promises Peter power beyond his wildest dreams.
About: Baby Groot!
Writer: James Gunn
Details: 136 minutes

On the surface, Guardians 2 has all the things required for summer blockbuster success. Action, humor, special effects, character development, at least three-dozen uses of the word, “family.”

So why did I leave the theater with a sad emoji face? Especially when the movie started off with one of the best blockbuster scenes ever? I’ll give you a hint. It has to do with screenwriting. So crippling were these screenwriting choices, I want to make sure I highlight all of them so that you guys never make these same mistakes yourselves.

For those who haven’t seen Guardians of the Fast and Furious, it follows our space-faring guardian group, Peter Quill, aka Starlord (Chris Pratt), Rocket Raccoon, Gamora, Baby Groot, and Drax, after they steal some next-level batteries from a group of Gold People. Afterwards, the Gold People hire mercenaries to chase the Guardians, which triggers a group split-up.

On the one side, Rocket Raccoon and Baby Groot are captured by the mercenaries. On the other, Starlord, Ghamorra and Drax, meet some dude, Ego, who claims to be Peter’s dad. Ego takes them to his utopian planet, tells Peter all about his past, and lets him know that this is all his, too, if he wants it. Life is good.

We bounce back and forth between the two storylines. Rocket and Baby Groot trying to escape the mercenaries, and Ego explaining their family history to Starlord. We gradually become suspicious of the all-too-perfect Ego, until we realize he wants to rule the universe. Like, literally. The ENTIRE UNIVERSE. Starlord will have to choose, then, between his real family (Ego) and his adopted one (The Guardians).

Guardians 2 starts out so damned good, I thought I was in for the best movie of the summer. The opening scene has the Guardians awaiting a giant blob monster they’ve been hired to kill. When the monster finally arrives, writer-director James Gunn makes the genius choice to not let us see the Guardians battle it. Instead, we focus on Baby Groot as he dances away on the sidelines.

Occasionally, we see bits of the battle spill into the background (Drax being hurled through the air, for example), but we never really see the fight. I can’t tell you how much I loved this scene. It wasn’t just an interesting choice, but an ingenious commentary by Gunn on the state of the modern blockbuster. He’s saying we’ve reached a state whereby we’ve seen so many giant monster movie battles, that we don’t even care if one happens off-screen.

And to Gunn’s credit, he sticks with that philosophy throughout the film. Gunn set out to make a character piece dressed in blockbuster clothes. However, in order to make ‘character’ compelling, you must make it entertaining. We don’t get that here. And there are a whole lot of reasons why.

The first is that the second act sucks. And when I say sucks, I mean it’s one of most boring second acts in recent memory. The reason for this is that Gunn chose to create TWO passive plotlines. The first plotline is people wandering around a planet talking about life (boring). And the second is characters being held captive (slightly less boring). In both instances, we’ve got people sitting around talking a lot. Not a smart decision for any film, but especially a summer blockbuster.

If you’re going to have a slow storyline, you need a more energetic storyline to contrast it against. For example, in Empire Strikes Back (another direct sequel), we have the slow moments of Luke training contrasted against the Empire’s intense pursuit of Han Solo. And even the “slow” storyline in that equation, Luke’s training, was still exciting and fun. It’s all slow all the time throughout Guardians’ second act. That’s because of another bad choice Gunn made.

**SCREENPLAY KILLER ALERT!!!**

The main problem with Guardians of the Galaxy 2 is that its main character is the least active character in the movie. All Starlord does is follow people around. I don’t think he made a single choice in the first two acts. To create a main character this passive is a screenplay killer.

Because when you write a passive main character, you’re shooting yourself in the foot twice. First, passive heroes aren’t interesting. So you’re putting a boring person on screen for the majority of the running time. Secondly, if your main character isn’t active, then he’s not driving the story forward. So your plot suffers as well.

Look at Raiders. Look at how ACTIVE Indiana Jones is, and how his actions propel the plot forward every step of the way. That’s the power of a strong active hero.

I’m surprised that a seasoned writer like Gunn would make this mistake. My theory is that he liked his toys too much. He liked the quote-machine Rocket, the cute-machine Groot, and the goof-machine Drax. He figured that any slow passages would be alleviated by this trio’s zany comebacks and wily antics. And they are, to a certain extent. My favorite moments included Groot (as well as bad-guy-turned-good, Yondu). But that kind of stuff only works for so long. In a 2 hour movie, you need your ‘slow drama’ moments to be just as entertaining as your ‘fast drama’ moments.

This speaks to a problem a lot of writers have, which is they think “character-driven” means slow scenes where people talk about feelings. Watching Peter walk around for 40+ minutes confused about his daddy-issues isn’t entertaining. For character stuff to work, there needs to be drama, tension, conflict, suspense. And in blockbusters, you want most of your character work to play out via action and choice.

If ever there was a picture that captured the essence of a movie, this would be it.

Take the current season of Fargo, which itself focuses on family. In the first episode, a fuck-up loser comes to the home of his successful brother to ask for money. There are no discussions about feelings, just the tension born out of a lifetime of conflict between these two brothers. This is how you explore character through action. We learn so much more about these brothers’ relationship through this tense conversation than had we sat around with them while they discussed their feelings about one another.

But let’s take that a step further. In the second episode of Fargo, the brothers DO have a direct discussion about their feelings. The fuck-up brother asks the successful brother if he’ll come outside to discuss a truce. The two get into some heavy thoughts about their relationship and ultimately apologize.

BUT.

But it’s all a ruse. It’s a setup so the fuck-up’s girlfriend can sneak inside the brother’s house and steal something from him. So we’re cutting back and forth between them talking and her looking. This makes what would normally be a boring scene centered around feelings become a dramatically suspenseful one. Contrast that with Guardians, where it seems like there were 50 scenes of Ego (Peter’s dad) walking Peter around the planet talking about life and family and exposition. It’s really lazy, and therefore, boring.

The funny thing is, the one area where Gunn DID do this right – Gamora’s ongoing battle with her sister – didn’t register because Gamora was the least interesting character in the movie. So we didn’t care. This is another lesson. Give your big conflict relationships to your best characters, not the ones we don’t give two shits about.

I think Gunn had a four-prong attack for this screenplay he thought would be enough to make it work. First, theme. He believed the theme of the family you’re born into versus the family you choose would carry more weight than it did. As I’ve said here before, if you’re focusing more on getting your theme right than you are entertaining the audience, your script is screwed. Second, by splitting the group up, our need to see them get back together would be powerful enough that maybe we wouldn’t notice the slow pace. Third, he thought the eeriness of Ego would create more curiosity, making that section more suspenseful. And finally, he figured his cute toys could help distract from any of the script’s weaknesses.

The thing is, if you don’t have an active main character, especially in an action movie, it doesn’t matter what else you do. You’re putting yourself in a Houdini restraining suit every time you sit down to write. I don’t know why you would attempt that, and it proved to be the narrative choice that doomed Guardians 2.

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

What I learned: You can’t fix slow sections of a screenplay by adding additional cuteness and funniness. Yet another Baby Groot dancing scene will never solve a boring narrative. If you have slow sections in your story, there is something wrong with the foundation of your screenplay. Find out what’s wrong and those sections will fix themselves. Again, had Peter Quill been the active character driving this narrative, a lot of the slow sections in the script would’ve disappeared.

Commenter Challenge: I would love for commenters to list any good PASSIVE main characters in action or blockbuster movies. I think we did this once before but I can’t remember any good ones. How bout you guys?

If you’d like to submit your script for an Amateur Friday review, send your title, genre, logline, and why you think it deserves a review to carsonreeves3@gmail.com, along with a PDF of the script!

Genre: Action/Thriller
Premise (from writer): When a young CIA trainee, working low-level assignments in Europe, is framed as a traitor, he discovers he holds the key to preventing global warfare and must outwit both ‘The Agency’, and the terrorist cell that hunts him, before they can incite World War 3.
Why You Should Read (from writer): I don’t have much to say in this section. I would rather the logline and the script speak for itself rather than trying to sell it to you. I will say my tastes are very commercial in nature as are all my stories. I love action, suspense and excitement, and always try to imbue that in the read. I hope it’s something you like. Thanks to everyone for checking it out.
Writer: Dax Messer
Details: 102 pages

Jack O’Connel for Alex Sagen?

I’m gearing up for some Guardians of the Galaxy madness this weekend, and it got me thinking. Everybody knows this movie is going to make a trillion dollars. In fact, everybody knows exactly how much money every movie is going to make these days.

That’s because opening weekends are paid for. The studios use an algorithm that if they put ‘x’ amount of dollars into advertising they will get ‘y’ return at the box office. And that makes the box office thing, well, not as fun anymore. There used to be a time when you didn’t know what was going to happen. And it was exciting. Now it’s just, “I’ve seen 10,000 commercials for Pirates of the Caribbean so it will make 130 million dollars this weekend.”

However, streaming services are changing that. They’re actually bringing back the days before box office was reported and you found out about a movie (like The Godfather, for instance) because people saw and liked it. There was no number that told you whether something was worth of watching or not. 13 Reasons Why and Stranger Things are great examples. Nobody has any idea how many people have seen these shows. But they loved them, so they told people about them, and the shows’ successes evolved organically from that word-of-mouth.

As Netflix and Amazon delve further into the feature world, it’s only a matter of time before that starts happening there as well. Which bring us to The Operative. The Operative seems tailor-made for the new streaming model. It’s not too big. It’s not too small. It’s right in that mid-budget sweet spot that Netflix seems to be loving right now. Let’s see if it delivers.

33 year-old Alex Sagen (cool character name!) just failed The Farm field exam, which means he doesn’t get to become a CIA field agent. But the intelligence agency still likes Alex’s spark, particularly agent Jennifer Monroe, who encourages Alex to take a desk job in Paris, where, if he’s lucky, he might get to interrogate a few terrorists.

Alex reluctantly takes the gig, and, while out of the office one day, gets the heart-stopping news that the office was raided and 17 agents were killed. The terrorist behind the raid, Reza Konesh, is quickly captured, and since there are no longer a ton of agents to choose from, Alex gets the gig to transport Konesh to an interrogation house outside the city.

Once they reach the outskirts, however, their caravan is attacked. Konesh is accidentally killed by his own men, while Alex and another agent escape. But not without suspicion from headquarters. Asshole senior agent Jonathan Brubaker is convinced that Alex is a mole and that he has something to do with this.

With his own agency now wanting to take him down, Alex must figure out what Konesh was up to. So he goes to the morgue where Konesh’s body is being held and locates a microdot on him. He later finds out that dot contains information about a secret U.S. satellite capable of killing millions. Alex will try and use this information to get back into the CIA’s good graces. But as he soon learns, the CIA might be involved.

Before I begin my analysis, I just want to say that this script NAILED its structure. Probably one of the best structures for an amateur script I’ve seen in a year. Messer deserves big props for that.

However, the heart and soul of the script need work. And that’s the main issue I want to talk about.

Look. I get that the bar for originality in the spy genre is low. Like “I need a metal detector to find it” low. Spy-heads want their spies. They want their car chases. They want their espionage. And that’s it. They’re good after that.

And if you’re judging The Operative by that criteria, it delivers.

But if we’re judging this on The Scriptshadow scale, I found the concept and the execution of The Operative to be way too generic. Everything from the plot to the characters to the twists to the dialogue were way too familiar.

Take the fact that we have a micro-disc in The Operative. And that disc has plans for a weapon on it that could kill millions. I read scripts with micro-discs and weapons that kill millions every Sunday. I mean, come on. We’re not even going to try and improve on that trope?

And then there’s the dialogue. Here’s an exchange between Alex and the woman he’s secretly seeing at the agency, Maria, after she survived the terrorist break-in…

Alex: “What happened to you?”

Maria: “I thought… I thought I was going to die in there.”

Alex (checks her body): “You’re not hit. You’re fine.”

Maria: “I’ve never… experienced anything like… My god…”

Alex: “Are you going to be okay?”

Maria: “Yes… I’ll be okay. (beat) I can’t stop shaking.”

Alex: “You’re just in shock, that’s all. It’ll pass. You’re going to be just fine.”

Now, when you look at this dialogue, there’s nothing technically wrong with it. The problem is that it’s just so achingly generic. From how the interaction plays out to which words are used is too expected. The dialogue has no personality, no life of its own.

For example, another option would’ve been for Alex to see that Maria was in shock and used a couple of jokes to bring her out of it. But we never get anything like that here. Everyone speaks as if they’re a spy-novel automaton reading lines off a spy-lines teleprompter.

We also get lines like, “Just another day at the office,” “Who the hell are these guys?” “I want to hear answers, not excuses.” “Please, you’re scaring me.” “That’s what I intend to find out.” “It’s been a long night.” “They’re dead. They’re all dead.” “He’s been off the grid for almost a decade.” “God help us.” I mean there wasn’t one line in this script that I hadn’t either heard before or felt like I’d heard before. This is unacceptable if you want to compete on the big league level. You have to come up with your own stuff, not rely on lines from past spy movies.

What this script needs is an “Originality Rewrite” from the top down. Concept, plot, character, dialogue. Everything needs to be upgraded in the originality department. And there’s really only two requirements for originality. The first is the desire to be original, which you have total control over. The second is your imagination – how capable you are of coming up with original ideas. This you don’t have control over. Some people are imaginative and some aren’t (and most of us are somewhere in between).

But if you can execute the first, just the fact that you’re not settling for average (plot points, characters, dialogue, etc.) means you’ll be more original than most, boosting a generic idea like this into something exciting. Remember, 13 Reasons Why could’ve been set up as a 90210 clone. Instead, it rearranged the formula to come at high school drama from a different lens. That’s originality. And that’s the standard you’re being held to in Hollywood.

Script link: The Operative

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

What I learned: The whole point of constructing a building with superb structure is to then populate it with heart and soul. Nobody builds a house to then decorate it with generic rooms and generic furniture. They do it so they can populate it with their own unique personality. The Operative had the structure but it didn’t have the personality, giving the script a lifeless feel. Let’s take care of that moving forward.

No personality.

Personality.

Loyalty, bruh!

Today we’re going to talk about summer madness and all the shapes, colors, and sizes it comes in. With Fast and the Furious dropping their bi-annual supercharged nonsensical treatise of loyalty and family on an all-too-eager public this weekend, how could you NOT get excited about the summer box office? I know I am. For both the good and the bad. Here are the key projects I’ll be keeping an eye on…

Dunkirk
It’s hard to have much of an opinion on a Christopher Nolan movie before it’s released since he’s so darn secretive. But even the most hardened Nolan films will agree that this is a pivotal movie for Nolan. His last two movies (The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar) were major messes, with progressively sloppier screenplays. Exploring another genre was a good idea. But now we’re getting details on the plot, which involves soldiers… running away? Hmmm… that doesn’t sound very active or heroic to me. I’ll see any Christopher Nolan movie. They’re events. But if this doesn’t work, the Nolan shrine may need to be placed in storage.

Thor: Ragnarok
Wow. Where the hell did this movie come from?! As if Marvel didn’t have enough success. They take their worst character, pair him with the Hulk, put him back where he came from (another planet) and all of a sudden this looks like the freshest coolest comic book movie out there. There’s a screenwriting lesson to be learned here. You need to play with ideas more when you come up with a concept. If you go the obvious route, you come up with Thor 1 & 2. They found the right combination of ideas with this one and, out of nowhere, it’s awesome. This is now one of my most anticipated movies!

King Arthur
This movie was supposedly shot, then reshot, then one half of that reshoot was reshot and then someone shot themselves for shooting it in the first place. You can tell when a studio movie had extensive reshoots cause that money then comes out of the special effects budget. I suspect the effects to King Arthur were outsourced to a guy in Korea with an Atari 2600. You know a movie is bad when you don’t even know what it’s about after the trailer. What is this about? I suppose they should get credit for giving us a fresh take on King Arthur. But it just goes to show that fresh takes are still gambles. You have one that worked out (Thor) and one that didn’t (King Arthur). It’s time to put that sword back in the rock.

It
If you’re anything like me, you’re skeptical about this new Hollywood benchmark that’s taken over the internet: Most trailer views in 24 hours. It seems to be the only thing that anybody cares about anymore. However, everyone knows that the studios pay for at least a portion of these views. So how seriously can we take them? “It” is the new record holder, with something like 250 million views. Regardless of my trailer view skepticism, the movie looks great, and their adaptation approach was very clever. This book can’t fit into a single movie. However, a trilogy would’ve been too much. To split it into the kids film and the adults film was a stroke of genius. And we all know how much I loved Andres Muscietti’s previous effort, Mama. So count me in!

Guardians 2
There is no franchise more tuned into what the public is looking for than this one. Guardians 2 has just the right blend of character, humor, action and Groot. And you can already tell that this film is more confident than its predecessor, a movie where director James Gunn admitted that he thought he might be making the next Pluto Nash. Guardians will probably win the summer box office prize, a prize it will, unfortunately, have to hand over to Star Wars at the end of the year.

Spiderman: Homecoming
I’m neutral on this one. It seems to me like they’re making a smart play though. You know that old saying, “When you try to please everybody, you please nobody?” That’s clearly what was going on in the last two Spiderman movies. They wanted so badly for everybody to like them that you could feel it permeating off the screen. With this new version, they’ve kinda said, “Let’s move away from that” and gone back to Spiderman’s roots, which are in high school. So they’re targeting a more specific demographic, the teenage crowd, and we’ll see how it works. I know I liked Cop Car (the director of that tiny film landed this job). And if there’s a lesson to be learned for screenwriters, that may be it. Make a small passion project and direct it yourself. Who the hell knows what might come of it?

The Fate of the Furious
I don’t care what you say about Fast and the Furious. It still has the best and most inventive set pieces in the action game. It beats out Mission Impossible, Bourne, and James Bond in that category. In fact, one of the most common notes I give on action specs is to be more inventive with your set pieces. Fast and the Furious had two cars dragging an apartment sized vault through the city streets. You need to do better with your set pieces if you want to compete. Now regarding this plot point of Dominic turning on his team. How probable is it that it’s part of a bigger plan to help his team? One thousand percent? One million?

Valerian
For super movie nerds, this is a project all of us have been following for awhile. Why? One answer: The Fifth Element. This was going to be what Luc Besson would’ve done with The Fifth Element had he had more money. Besson is a great filmmaker. And he was supposedly creating sequences and techniques that had never been used before to give the audience a one-of-a-kind experience with Valerian. But after seeing the trailer, I was shockingly disappointed. This was it?? Sure, it seemed okay. But it hardly felt like something I’ve never seen before. Then it struck me. It wasn’t the visuals I was having a negative reaction to. It was the characters. How fucking boring do these two characters look? They mumble. They have no chemistry. There doesn’t seem to be any conflict between them (in fact, it’s the opposite, they seem to like each other – major screenwriting mistake!). Watch the Guardians and Thor trailers then watch this. Note how much more personality the characters have in those trailers. Valerian is in trouble. And let this be a lesson to screenwriters everywhere. Don’t get lost in your world-building. Make sure the characters are compelling first. Or nothing else matters.

Alien: Covenant
Why do I get the feeling that Scott’s only making these movies out of spite? And when Scott goes spite, he goes FULL SPITE! After this film, he has three more Alien movies lined up. Say what?? Not to jump on Thor’s jock yet again. But the idea with any franchise is to elevate, find fresh new ways to explore the subject matter. This looks like the same exact movie as the last one. I don’t get it.

Rest of the movies: I’m not a fan of the DC films so I’m not looking forward to Justice League or Wonder Woman. It seems that their big mistake is hiring visual directors, whereas the Marvel guys are hiring storytellers. As for “maybe” movies – Pirates, The Mummy, and Apes – the reinvigorated Pirates looks like it’ll be the breakout (can Disney do no wrong?). But The Mummy doesn’t look bad either. Don’t get me started on Transformers (they could slip one of the previous four films in theaters, slap a “5” on it, and I swear nobody would notice. Save 200 million bucks). One day somebody’s going to do a documentary on how the five worst movies ever made became five of the biggest box offices successes of all time. Of the two Stephen King offerings, The Dark Tower was never my cup of tea. “It” was so inspired. Tower just dragged on. I never made it to the end (8 books!), but I hear the ending was terrible. All that investment for no payoff. I have a feeling this franchise isn’t going work. Still, one for two ain’t bad.

And that’s my roundup! What about you folks? What are you looking forward to? What movies do you think are undervalued? Overvalued? Chime in in the comments!

Genre: Drama
Premise: (from Black List) A precocious young writer becomes involved with her high school creative writing teacher in a dark coming- of-age drama that examines the blurred lines of emotional connectivity between professor and protégé, child and adult.
About: If you weren’t paying attention, you may have missed Jade Bartlett’s script, which appeared near the bottom of last year’s Black List. Bartlett started as a playwright and occasionally acts, grabbing a bit part in last year’s, The Accountant. She’s looking to direct Miller’s Girl as well.
Writer: Jade Bartlett
Details: 121 pages

Maisie Williams for Cairo?

One of the things I’ve been struggling with lately is the balance between reality and cinematic license. Movies are a heightened version of reality and are therefore subject to a different set of rules than real life. A common example is that old movie setup of the directionless loser grabbing the attention of the hottest girl in town. Sometimes audiences just go with that stuff.

But I don’t see this as an excuse to completely ignore reality. Storytelling is still subject to suspension of disbelief. If your characters start doing or saying things that are too far removed from the realm of believability, the reader/audience will feel the writer’s hand, pull out of the story, and begin to observe it from the outside as opposed to where they should be observing it, which is from inside.

For example, I was originally going to review a script called “Coffee and Kareem” today, another Black List script about a 9 year old boy who teams up with a cop to take down a drug lord. It starts off funny, but at a certain point, the boy is joking about extremely advanced sexual situations that there’s no way a 9 year old boy would a) know about or b) care about. I’m talking: “As I suck the meat off yo clit, won’t stop till ya squirt” level situations. The writer went too far off reality’s path and the suspension of disbelief was broken.

Miller’s Girl never goes that far. But the script is a strange one, skirting that line so sharply that it was hard to take what I was reading seriously all the time. With that said, Bartlett’s unique voice and almost magical mastery of the English language ensures that Miller’s Girl is a rewarding experience.

Awkwardly pretty Cairo is a gifted 17 year-old writer. Her new high school creative writing teacher, Jonathan Miller, used to be a writer, but has since regressed to the point where he hasn’t written a word in years, hiding behind his teaching job as the reason he no longer pursues the craft.

Miller immediately recognizes how talented Cairo is, and the two start hanging out with one another after class, trading the occasional quote and seeing how long they can quip each other before someone says, “touche.” Needless to say, Cairo starts to become fascinated with Miller, and looks for more opportunities to spend time with him.

Meanwhile, Miller’s best friend and fellow teacher, Boris, has his eye on Cairo’s best friend, the gorgeous Winnie. Whereas Cairo is cerebral, Winnie is all about the physicality. And when she picks up on Boris’s interest in her, she milks it for every ounce it’s worth, basically broadcasting that he can fuck her any time he wants.

Things get complicated when Jonathan assigns Cairo to write a short story and Cairo writes up a Hustler article about a teacher who seduces a student. Horrified, Jonathan tells Cairo to destroy the story and reminds her that they are only friends. Feeling rejected, Cairo instead gives the story to the principal, resulting in a series of events that may destroy Jonathan’s career, and with it, his life.

First of all, there is no doubt that Bartlett is a gifted writer. I mean, when you read this, you will immediately notice the limitations of your own intellect. The woman is a wordsmith who has few equals.

But here’s what I mean about reality. Most of the conversations here, particularly the ones in the first half of the script, reek of a writer showing off her skills rather than one who’s trying to write the best story.

There are a lot of lines like this one: ”Can you keep a secret?” “I’m keeping Victoria’s in my pants. Does that count?” And while, on their own, these lines are harmless, when they’re strung together with 50 other variations of the same exchange, they stop feeling like real people and start feeling like, “Check out my dialogue skills, bitches.”

On top of that, there are moments where both our male teachers and 17 year old female students are hanging out before class and Boris will say to the girls something like, “So did you get laid last night?” I know I haven’t been in high school for awhile. But doesn’t that kind of question get you fired these days? When people say and do things that aren’t realistic, it’s inevitable that the reader will be pulled out of the story.

After I finished the script, I found out that Bartlett is also a playwright, and that made sense. I know dialogue is a big focus in playwrighting and that the idea is to go bigger and snappier. So maybe that explains some of the more outrageous dialogue. But in screenwriting, you have to watch out for that.

And, see, that’s the thing. When this script got really good is when it dropped the pretense and focused on the conflict. The best scene in the script happens on page 74 when Jonathan confronts Cairo about her short story.

Gone are the quips, replaced by a genuinely intense conversation. Every word matters. If Jonathan isn’t clear to Cairo that there’s nothing between them, he could get in some deep shit. But if he goes at her too hard, she could get upset and fuck him over anyway. So it’s a very delicate balancing act that goes to show – genuine conflict and drama is always better than trying to force something out of nothing. If you go into a scene without clearly understood directives from both characters, you’re going to be flailing around like a fish, inevitably trying to dress up a body that isn’t there.

It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that that’s when Miller’s Girl really picked up. Things get dark fast and this script leaves you with a number of feelings – anger, frustration, confusion – that you don’t typically get from a read. Whereas Bartlett struggles to keep things truthful, she excels at coming up with situations that there are no simple answers for.

The hardest scene for me to read was Jonathan’s scene with his bitch wife after he’s been suspended. Holy shit was that intense.

If the same sort of truth and genuine conflict used in that scene could’ve been used throughout the first half of the script, this would’ve gotten an “impressive.” Still, while flawed, it’s a script that stays with you. And we all know how rare that is to find.

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

What I learned: Playwrights moving to screenwriting – You have to expand your scope. While reading this, I didn’t get any sense of the school at all. This is likely because, as a playwright, you don’t have to worry about those things. But as a screenwriter, even though your focus will be on a handful of characters, you want to bring more of your surroundings in. We need to see other classes, meet other students, feel like there’s a real world to explore here. When your scope is too narrow, something will feel off about the story that the reader can’t articulate. That’s usually it. Bring in the rest of your world and the problem will be solved.

What I learned 2: The word “vituperation,” which means “bitter and abusive language.” I have never, in the 7000 scripts I’ve read, come across that word before. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to casually drop the word “vituperation” into conversation today and not get called on it. Let us know how it went in the comments!

Genre: Fantasy
Logline (from writer): A team of Victorian monster hunters must save the universe from their biggest threat yet, themselves.
Why You Should Read (from writer): I’m a Benihana chef, mandolin player and a broke as a joke screenwriter living in LA now for two months shy of a year and I’ve written about 10 screenplays. I’ve got about thirty dollars in my bank account so there’s not much there to submit this screenplay to a formal contest which sucks, but I’m living the dream…which is cool. It would be very helpful if you would review it so I could know if I was heading in the right direction and if my diet of peanut butter jelly sandwiches in front of my computer monitor is paying off.
Writer: Kathryn Whipple
Details: 106 pages

Okay, before we get to the script, let’s talk about this logline. I’ve been reading lots of loglines for the shorts contest and it continues to be a destination of disaster for aspiring writers.

Everything about this logline works until you get to the word, “from.” “…from their biggest threat yet, themselves.” The best way to describe that ending is that it doesn’t clarify what the movie is about. And what did we just talk about yesterday? Making sure the concept is clear!

Now, after reading the script, the logline does, in fact, make sense. But that’s the problem. It only makes sense AFTER you’ve read it. The point of a logline is to tell us what the script is about BEFORE we read it.

In this case, “themselves” refers to our protagonists’ doppelgangers, who travel through a rift and try to kill our heroes. So, we need to clarify that in the logline. Therefore, the logline should look more like this:

A team of Victorian monster hunters must battle a group of doppelgangers who invade our planet on a mission to destroy our universe.

Now, the question is: Is that premise any good? That’s something I’ll answer after the plot summary. But the point is, that’s the real premise you’re working with, so you have to be honest about it and include it in the logline. You can’t be coy.

England. 1850. It’s the Victorian era. Reason to be optimistic. Except for the monsters that keep popping up through inter-dimensional portholes threatening to kill everyone. If only there was someone to combat these monsters.

That’s where our team comes in. There’s the gorgeous Baroness Whitetower, our de facto leader, the monster-fighter on the rise, Victoria, and finally the always serious, Gunner, who doesn’t get rattled no matter how big the monsters get.

These guys can easily take out a 150 foot caterpillar in a couple of hours. But here’s where things get tricky. They don’t want to kill these monsters. They want to send them back where they came from. This requires a complicated method of creating a rift in the space-time continuum and pushing them back through that rift so they can go back to their parallel world of origin.

All of this is going gorgeously until the police arrest the Baroness for all the destruction she’s caused around town (they have no idea what this destruction was in service to, of course). That’s followed by a new rift opening and – get this – the EVIL REPLICA versions of our monster killing crew arriving.

These folks aren’t nearly as friendly, and inform us that they’re here to destroy our universe because if they don’t, the universes will start collapsing in on each other.

The doppelgängers bring with them many rifts from many different universes, all spewing about fresh monsters of every conceivable disposition, making our crew’s mission of taking out their doubles all the harder. Will they do it? Or is our universe doomed for collapse?

So this is what I was getting at earlier. On the one hand, you have a team of Victorian monster hunters hunting monsters. That’s pretty cool, right? However, halfway into Rift, that isn’t what our script is about. It’s now about a group of evil doppelgängers using the rift-system to travel to parallel universes and extinguish them.

That’s not a bad idea. But it’s not really what we were promised, was it? You could argue that our doppelgängers do open up rifts from which new monsters do arrive and must be fought off. But, ya see, by adding the doppelgänger element, you’re essentially doubling up your concept. You now have two concepts competing for the same movie…

Concept 1: Victorian monster hunters taking on monsters.
Concept 2: Space-time continuum protectors who must fight their parallel universe doubles.

The reader’s like, “Wait, which movie am I watching here?”

Luckily, the solution to this is rather simple. Drop the doppelgänger element. You can still have someone come through the rift and threaten our group, but make him a normal villain, not a double. That way the focus can be squarely on the monster element, which is the bigger sell here.

As for the script itself, I thought the execution was okay, if a little scattered. In the attempt to add character depth, we lost sight of prize. Case in point, when Whitetower gets back from the opening monster battle, she’s greeted with a 16 year-old nephew she didn’t know she had.

This nephew, Everett, is hers through her dead sister’s husband, Cal, a man we just met moments ago once we arrived home, who also seems surprised to learn he has a nephew.

I don’t know about you, but why would I care about the nephew of the main character’s brother’s dead wife, a man who wasn’t even important enough to be on the opening monster killing mission? It was an odd character to spend so much time working into the story.

Speaking of, there wasn’t that one character who stood out. That wasn’t through lack of trying, but I almost felt like more of a “hero’s journey” approach was needed here, where you bring in a “chosen one.”

Instead of having Victoria be a well-established member of the crew, why not make HER the “Everett” of the bunch. Whitetower and their crew get home after the opening battle and Victoria, reimagined as a nervous 18 year-old, is waiting on the doorstep. And instead of making her someone’s cousins’s brother’s half-sibling’s son, make it simple: she’s Whitetower’s daughter.

She’s then taught the ropes and becomes an integral part of taking down the Rift-jumping evil villain. That’d be how I’d approach it, anyway.

Finally, I thought the second act was too short. I consider the beginning of the third act to be the opening up of all the rifts with all the monsters needing to be fought off, and that comes at the midpoint of the script, giving us 55 pages of battle. That’s too long.

The better approach would’ve been to have a single rift open up at the midpoint with a rather nasty monster that they’ve never seen before needing to be killed, and then the threat of multiple rifts opening later on, which would happen at the end of the second act, leaving the entire third act to be our “one giant battle.”

The big takeaway here, though, is that this concept’s strength is its monsters, not its doppelgängers. So that’s where I’d focus the story if I were Kathryn.

Screenplay link: Rift

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

What I learned: Unnecessarily complicated familial ties having major story implications is always a lose-lose. If you’re going to bring a major character into the story, try to make the familial connection as straight-forward as possible. A son. A daughter. No half-nephews or twice-removed uncles. I suppose if Cal was the main character here, Everett would make more sense. But Cal is some afterthought who wasn’t even on the original mission. So he feels as peripheral as peripheral gets.