Man, we’ve got a good line-up this week. A lot of times I’ll put a group of scripts together and think, “I don’t see a single winner in the bunch.” But today, we’ve got a few. I can’t share which ones I feel that way about, of course, because I don’t want to poison the voting pool. But this is the first pack I’ve seen in awhile that makes me confident a “worth the read” is on the horizon. For those playing Amateur Offerings for the first time, read as much as you can from each script and vote for your favorite in the comments section. The script with the most votes will receive a review next week!

And if you believe you have a screenplay that’s better than anything Hollywood is making at the moment, submit it for a future Amateur Offerings! Send me a PDF of your script, along with the title, genre, logline, and why you think people should read it (your chance to pitch yourself or your story). All submissions should be sent to Carsonreeves3@gmail.com.

Title: ABORT
Genre: Sci-Fi
Logline: Stranded on a remote planet with no memory of her past, a young woman struggles to fix her ship while trying to outwit a manipulative alien AI whose sole purpose is to repopulate its creator’s species by using her as a host.
Why You Should Read: ABORT is an edge-of-your-seat, unpredictable journey full of deception, twists, turns, and reveals, as our protagonist battles massive monsters, a dangerous climate, and conniving AIs… all while coping with amnesia. Billed as GROUNDHOG DAY meets ALIEN, ABORT provides constant goals and mini-goals, frequent ticking time bomb situations, and the stakes are as high as they could be… life or extinction. — While the use of color in the script has proven quite controversial, we are confident that it adds an extra layer to the read, and provides a much needed sci-fi ambiance necessary to set the mood of the futuristic, but isolated world we’ve created.

Title: A Writer’s Acts
Genre: Satire / Thriller
Logline: After a mysterious writer blackmails her through a pitch that reveals her darkest secrets, a meek female executive must take matters into her own hands to discover the source.
Why You Should Read: I constantly hear about how trendy “female-driven” and “Jane Wick” specs are, so I decided to write a female-driven Jane Wick that resulted in being about as far away from John Wick as possible. — This might be a cutting satire of Hollywood and filmmaking on the surface, but at its heart this is a story of female empowerment, institutionalised misogyny and liberal hypocrisy. So relevant in the era of #MeToo and Harvey Weinstein. And I guarantee you that all of these issues are handled without ever getting preachy or partisan. — Script also made it to the Semifinals of the Script Pipeline Screenwriting competition.

Title: Follow ME
Genre: TV – One Hour Drama
Logline: Follows the life of a cult deprogrammer who uses unlawful methods to liberate individuals believed to be brainwashed by controversial belief systems, all while struggling to find peace within himself.
Why You Should Read: I became fascinated by the world of cult deprogramming after reading strories about Ted Patrick, who is considered the “father of deprogramming”. Deprogramming refers to the act of forcibly removing someone from a cult, holding them against their will in an undisclosed location, and using psychological methods to unbrainwash them. The work of a deprogrammer can be liken to the job of an exorcist. You basically have a person who is under the influence of someone else, and it’s up to the deprogrammer to rid that person of that influence. With groups like NXIVM and Scientology being featured heavily in recent headlines, psychologist Steve Eichel estimates that up to 10,000 cults still exist today…and they are more dangerous than ever. People’s lives are being ruined. People who have families that love, care, and depend on them. These families hire deprogrammers to save their loved ones…no matter the cost. Although “Follow ME” is a fictional story set in present day New Orleans, a lot of what happens in the series is all too real.

Title: DEATH FROM ABOVE
Genre: Action/War
Logline: In WW2, during the darkest days of 1941 when Rommel was overrunning North Africa, a brilliant unorthodox Commando David Sterling singlehandedly recruits and transforms a bunch of unruly, undisciplined commandoes into the world’s deadliest strike force, the SAS.
Why You Should Read: WW2 is a period of military history which I love. For me, some of the greatest movies of all time have a link to this monumental, global fight for freedom. DEATH FROM ABOVE is a product of that passion, an unbelievable, untold, true story about the birth of the SAS in North Africa in 1941. DEATH FROM ABOVE fictionalizes real events to bring alive Sterling’s heroic battle against the stuffy British establish and Rommel’s formidible Africa Korps to form the world’s first strategic guerilla warfare unit — the SAS. It’s also a story of the unique men who formed this elite unit and their disastrous first ever mission OPERATION SQUATTER. DEATH FROM ABOVE has been written with franchise potential in mind, so just deals with the birth of the SAS and covers the period until the fateful first mission. The script also hopefully qualifies as one of the hot selling topics according to Scriptshadow, a based on true events WW2 story.

Title: Sway
Genre: Drama/Sci-fi
Logline: Sway, A talented high school pianist with a hard home life gains the power of mind control but must strengthen it if she hopes to escape the clutches of her abusive, drug-pushing cousin.
Why You Should Read: Hey, name’s Brittany! I may not comment much but I read SS everyday. Been reading, absorbing, mostly writing. I come here with a script I’ve been working on for a little while. I’ve always wanted to write a “superpower” story set in the real, real world with very personal stakes for the main character rather than world altering ones. There’s very little special effects and no over the top sci-fi jibber jabber. It’s pretty contained and written with a low budget in mind. Chiefly, this is a story about how abuse victims grow defense mechanisms to help cope with their abusers. In this case, the victim gains an actual superpower. I look forward to any helpful feedback from Carson and the awesome SS community!

One last note! If you’re going to criticize loglines or first pages, please do so in a way that’s constructive. I’ve seen a lot of bitter responses to loglines lately. We’re all here to help each other, not make each other feel bad. It’s easy to reword a negative critique into something that gets your point across yet inspires the writer to improve. Thanks.

One of the most important factors in getting noticed as a screenwriter is writing a screenplay that Hollywood actually wants to make. This is one of the BIGGEST pitfalls I see writers fall into. I receive an endless number of scripts – scripts I even put in Amateur Offerings – that I know Hollywood will never be interested in. It’s just not their jam to make that movie. The secret to selling anything in life is understanding what your buyer wants. These are the ten movies the buyer (Hollywood) wants right now.

1) Girl with a Gun – It’s still a trend. It’s still marketable. We’ll see what happens when the big studio versions of these films start hitting theaters en mass. Maybe the movies will fizzle and the trend will die. But that time is not now. I’d like to remind you that when a trend hits its downslope, there is still opportunity to pillage its fruits. You simply combine the genre with another genre. A Girl in a Western with a gun. A Girl in a Horror movie with a gun. But the spirt of the original idea has to be there. Don’t give me a Girl in a Western with a gun who shoots her gun twice the whole movie.

Shout Out To: Guy With a Gun! These movies still sell. You just have to be more clever with your premises than Girl With a Gun movies. John Wick and The Equalizer won’t work anymore. You need an idea with a bit more creativity behind it.

2) Biopic – Just to be clear, Biopics refer to long-form character studies, meaning we see the character grow up over several time periods. If you’re only covering a short section of a person’s life (a week or a month) I’d place that more in the “true story” category. Biopics would be movies like the upcoming Bohemian Rhapsody, The Theory of Everything, and The Aviator.

Shout Out To: Clever narratives. To compete in the competitive biopic market, come up with a clever way into the genre. Steve Jobs is a good example of this. Instead of following Jobs’s life continuously, Sorkin focused on his three biggest product announcements.

3) True Story – The true story genre often gets mixed up with the biopic genre because true stories focus on real people and therefore we assume we’re reading a biopic. But true stories are more about covering one specific event in a person’s (or people’s) life. Mayday 109, an upcoming movie about a young John F. Kennedy saving a bunch of people after their boat sinks. The upcoming Pale Blue Dot, about a female astronaut traveling across the country to kill the fellow astronaut she had an affair with. The upcoming I’m Proud of You, about a depressed man who found a new lease on life when he befriended Mr. Rogers.

Shout Out To: Trashy real-life stories. Everyone thinks that if they’re going to adapt a true story, it needs to be serious and say something about the world. Let’s not forget that the infamous Zola The Stripper Twitter novel is anything but serious. That didn’t stop it from selling and getting made into a future film.

4) Social Issues – It’s hard to tell what’s going to happen with Social Issues screenplays moving forward. In the past, these movies have been relegated to low-budget indie dramas, like Fruitvale Station. But with The Black List being so liberal leaning, more and more social issues scripts are dominating the list. Just this past year we have a movie about the power of abortion, a Malcom X story, the Civil Rights case of Dr. Ossian Sweet, a second script about a famous abortion clinic, and even a script called “Social Justice Warrior.” With the recent transgender revolution, I’m expecting 3 or 4 scripts about transgenders to hit the 2018 Black List. Might yours be one of them?

Shout Out To: Writers who aren’t using social issues as a means of virtue signaling. Many social issues are complex and require a balanced look at what’s causing the issue. Your script is going to stand out if you respect that complexity.

5) World War 2 – There were no fewer that EIGHT World War 2 themed scripts on last year’s Black List, including two (Ruin and Keeper of the Diary) in the Top 5. World War 2 is a genre that routinely goes up and down but can always be depended on. Eight scripts makes it the most dominant subject matter on the list by far.

Shout Out To: Using real life events in World War 2 as inspiration to create your own story. One of the problems with true World War 2 stories is that the best ones have all been taken. If you use events and people as inspiration for a jumping off point to write a gnarly new take on the war, you have a shot at standing out from the crowd. This is what Ruin, the number one script on the list, did. Likewise with the newest script to make my Top 25, Max Landis’s Shadow in the Cloud (sorry no link – this review can only be accessed on the Scriptshadow Newsletter).

6) Contained Horror – Contained horror is still the NUMBER 1 WAY TO BREAK INTO HOLLYWOOD. If you can, make sure your contained horror movie contains either a ghost or a monster. Horror films without monsters are much tougher sells (though there are exceptions, like Get Out). How easy is it to break in with horror? They made a movie about the game Truth or Dare. It doesn’t take much to impress, guys. As long as your script is scary.

Shout Out To: Event Horror and Creature Features. After the success of It, we’re going to be seeing more big budget event horror in the coming years. Right now, this is an IP only avenue. But I expect that to change if someone writes a really scary big budget horror spec. Creature Features, while not as popular as they used to be, still have huge upside. Hollywood’s going to look at anything that has franchise potential for the next 30 years.

7) Contained Thriller – A Contained Thriller is typically a one-location thriller. Something like Phone Booth, Panic Room, or 127 Hours. This genre does well because it’s easy to market (you see a guy, a gun, a bomb, and time running out, and you instantly know what you’re getting) and doesn’t cost much.

Shout Out To: Limited Thrillers. A Limited Thriller covers more area than a Contained Thriller but is essentially the same thing with a higher price tag. The Commuter, where Liam Neeson is on a train, would be a Limited Thriller. Obviously, since the pool of people who can produce your movie goes down once you increase the price tag, you’ll have less of a chance at a sale with a Limited Thriller.

8) Female-Centered Comedy – I think there are more comedies in development with females at the moment than with males. So the odds are in your favor by writing something with a woman in the lead role.

Shout Out To: Scripts that don’t just take a male-lead idea and switch the lead to a female. Try and build your female comedy idea from the ground up. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Bridesmaids remains the cream of the crop in this genre.

9) Action Comedy – If you’re thinking of writing a comedy, seriously consider making it an action comedy. Remember, comedy doesn’t travel well. People in Myanmar don’t laugh at Seth Rogen getting high jokes. Central Intelligence, Spy, Tropic Thunder, Rush Hour, the upcoming The Spy Who Dumped Me. That’s where comedy is going right now.

Shout Out To: Male-Female Team-Ups. In the past, all we got for action comedy was male team-ups. More recently, we’ve focused on female team-ups. This leaves one slot left to take advantage of: a team-up with a man and a woman. They’re doing this with the upcoming Night School. Expect more of this in the immediate future.

10) Old IP – Old IP is IP that’s now in the public domain and can therefore be used by anyone. This is one of the biggest cheat codes there is in the business. You get to write about someone that everybody in the world knows and don’t have to pay a dime for it. Last year they made a King Arthur film. Later this year we’re getting a Robin Hood movie. There are several other Robin Hood movies in development. You’ve got Shakespeare. You’ve got The Count of Monte Cristo. The Wizard of Oz, Tom Sawyer, The Three Musketeers. Hollywood will always buy this stuff if you can come up with a fresh take.

Shout Out To: Anyone who can take these characters and place them in the modern day in a cool way. I’ve seen so many Robin Hoods set in 1740. I’m numb to that image. But a Robin Hood set in the present? Or the future? That I would be into.

One final thing before I go. If you have THE GREATEST MOVIE IDEA EVER and it doesn’t fall into any of these categories, you should still write it. A good movie idea is a good movie idea. But do me a favor and run the idea by a couple of friends (or me, if you want someone who’s heard every idea imaginable) first. At least one of them should be bonkers excited and agree that the idea is amazing.

Carson does feature screenplay consultations, TV Pilot Consultations, and logline consultations. Logline consultations go for $25 a piece or 5 for $75. You get a 1-10 rating, a 200-word evaluation, and a rewrite of the logline. If you’re interested in any sort of consultation package, e-mail Carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line: CONSULTATION. Don’t start writing a script or sending a script out blind. Let Scriptshadow help you get it in shape first!

Today I take a look at one of my Top 25! scripts and how it translated to the Netflix screen.

Genre: Action/Thriller
Premise: (from IMDB) When a mysterious disaster turns the country into a war zone, a young lawyer heads west with his future father-in-law to find his pregnant fiancée.
About: How It Ends shot into my Top 25 back in 2011. Since then, it’s gone through many “almosts” in getting made. It took the determination of the Netflix machine to change the project’s fortunes. The film debuted this weekend on the streamer. It stars Theo James (The Hunger Games) and Forest Whitaker. It was directed by David Rosenthal, whose previous credits include The Perfect Guy and A Single Shot. Brooks McLaren was an unknown writer when his script made The Black List back in 2011. He’s currently working on the “Rambo: New Blood” script.
Writer: Brooks McLaren
Details: 113 minutes

Some of you may remember this script from a looooong time ago. I read it and instantly fell in love with it, enough to clear room in my Top 25. Finally, after seven long years, the movie’s been made. And thank goodness for Netflix. I have no doubt How it Ends wouldn’t have seen the light of day without the service.

I may have issues with Netflix. But you have to love the fact that they’ve single-handedly brought back the mid-budget film. They don’t make these movies for theaters anymore. Especially if they don’t have a marketable genre component to them – like zombies. Every time I dog Netflix, I have to remind myself of that.

For those who don’t remember, How it Ends is about a lawyer, Will Younger, who’s on a business trip in Chicago, talking with his fiancé back in Seattle on Skype, when all of a sudden a loud banging noise occurs off-screen. Scared, his fiancé says she needs to check it out and then – FWIP – the feed cuts out. And it’s not just the Skype feed. All feeds from the West Coast cut out. Nobody knows what’s going on over there.

It just so happens that Will’s fiancé’s dad, Tom, lives in Chicago. Will’s been avoiding Tom because Tom doesn’t like him. But he has to see him now. As the West Coast situation worsens, Tom and Will decide to drive to California to get to the fiancé. Along the way, their car breaks down near a Native American reservation, and they’re forced to ask for help from a young Native American woman, who ends up coming with them. However, the closer they get to the coast, the more chaotic the world gets. Will they be able to overcome these odds and get to Seattle in time???

Before I get into the script stuff, I’m going to say some things that are going to make it sound like I’m making excuses for a script that some people thought was never that good in the first place. And I’m okay with that. Because I know I’m right. :)

Never has it been so apparent how much a movie suffers when it doesn’t have a good director. This film was terribly directed. For starters, the cinematography was awful. Every shot had the background blown out and the actor’s faces in darkness, making it impossible for me to see basic things like facial expressions.

But the silent killer was the sound design. The entire movie was done through ADR. ADR (additional dialogue recording) can work as a patch. The problem with doing it the whole movie is that nobody sounds real. The voices are too smooth, too calm. And the reason they’re too smooth and too calm is because the actors are in a quiet comfortable booth recording their lines. In addition to there being a disconnect between the true performance and the more relaxed audio performance, the audio quality is too slick and too clean to not draw attention to itself.

I can’t convey enough how much this pulled me out of the movie. It was like watching one long lip-sync.

There were other problems with the direction as well, such as the fact that the night-time car scenes looked like they were shot on an iphone with a 3-point Lowell lighting kit from BP Photo. And I get it. This movie doesn’t have a huge budget. But part of your job as a director is to make stuff look better than the budget you’ve been given. Can you imagine what Coralie Fargeat would’ve done with a movie like this? Her film looked amazing and it was shot for a lot less than this one.

Coralie’s movie, “Revenge.”

I read How it Ends at a time when I was in full GSU mode (Goal, stakes, urgency). It was one of the best embodiments of the formula I’d read up to that point. We’ve got a clear goal – get to the fiancé. Clear stakes – if we don’t, she dies. Clear urgency – Every passing moment society is falling more and more apart.

On top of that, we have a turbo-boost to the GSU formula: a giant mystery at the center of the film. What’s happened that’s causing all of this? Even if you’re not totally invested in the pursuit itself, you can’t help but wonder what’s going on.

On top of THIS, you’ve got a central character pairing that’s packed with conflict – the dad who doesn’t think the fiancé is good enough for his daughter. When you’re sending a character out on a long journey, you need a way to build drama into each scene. Stuffing two characters who don’t see eye-to-eye into a tight space for two hours is guaranteed drama.

All of these things were in the script yet I felt none of them onscreen.

Why?

That’s hard to figure out. I’d begin with the situation itself. In the script, the implosion of society and threat of an unseen menace was way more intense. Whereas in the script, things were ramped up to a 9. In the film, they were around a 5 or a 6. Wherever they went, things seemed calm. There weren’t a lot of crazies running around. You were convinced they could handle any problem.

For example, there were two major roadblocks early in the film. And they were able to get through simply by asking. In screenplays, you gotta make everything tough for your hero. Especially in a movie like this, where the world is falling apart. This idea is built for making things tough.

Then, later, in the one roadblock scene that wasn’t easy – a bridge they needed to cross – they turned it into this really cheesy Karate Kid scene with a couple of guys on dirt bikes who chased after our heroes. You gotta WIN each scene as a filmmaker. And in three of the biggest scenes, they lost.

Then there were little problems that added up. Such as the fact this entire icy relationship between the father and the fiancé-in-law is built on the idea that the son isn’t good enough for his daughter. Yet the son was a) strong and chiseled out of stone, an ideal protector, b) smart, c) presentable, and d) had a good job. This is the kind of man any normal father would be ecstatic his daughter was marrying. Yet we happened to have the one dad who didn’t like him.

Why is this an issue? Because when there’s a disconnect between what the audience is seeing and what the father is seeing, it feels like the only reason the father is acting that way is because the writer needs him to to act that way for his story to work. They could’ve solved this by casting someone who looked more like the kind of person a father didn’t think deserved his daughter. A Shia LaBeouf type, for example. Untamed, rough around the edges, a wild card.

And there were these tonal missteps. At one point, the group gets to an abandoned water park and the Native American girl jumps out of the car with a giant smile on her face and leaps into the pool, laughing excitedly at the chance to cool off. It was supposed to be the scene equivalent of a drink. Something to take the edge off after a long day.

Except that in every scene up to that point, Native American Girl had been the most dire, sad, miserable, human being in the world. The act disobeyed the very essence of her character make-up. You can’t just change who people are to fit a scene. You have to stay consistent. And the irony is, the movie could’ve used a sense of humor. It would’ve been smart to have more scenes where the characters were laughing so as to break up the enormously intense heaviness that permeated the movie.

I always try to remind writers that. The reader can’t appreciate the bitter unless they get the sweet. And vice versa. You can’t go crazy of course. You shouldn’t be putting Anchorman scenes in a movie like this. But you need the occasional bright spot if only to jolt the reader out of their malaise.

I’m not sure how to categorize this one. It’s on Netflix so it won’t cost you any money. So is it worth a free watch? I suppose it is if you’re doing background watching. But if you’re setting aside time just to watch a movie, you’ll probably be bored.

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

What I learned: As much as it pains me to say this, movies like this struggle to get made because they don’t have a clear monstrous presence that can be marketed. In other words, there are no aliens. There are no zombies. There are no monsters. When audiences see trailers like this, it’s confusing for them. Because they ask, “Where’s the threat?” The threat, of course, is us (humanity). But people who just want to watch a fun movie don’t see it that way. They see a hole that hasn’t been filled. Anyone who watched this probably left saying, “That’s it?” The reason is the lack of that marketable element.

I’ve noticed a trend in a lot of the amateur scripts I’ve been reading in regards to scene-writing. To many writers, a scene is a way to dispense information that the reader needs in order to understand what’s happening. For example, they know that in this scene, they must explain to the reader what a flux capacitor is, so that they understand how time travel works. In the next scene, they know they must introduce Henry the Neighbor, since Henry the Neighbor will play a crucial part in the story later on. The problem with this approach is that their focus is on themselves as opposed to the reader. They don’t care if the reader is satisfied. As long as they were able to successfully dispense the relevant information, they’re happy.

Here’s the problem though. You may have achieved what you’ve needed to achieved. But you sure haven’t kept me entertained in the process.

Writing a good screenplay isn’t about getting your checklist of story points down into a cohesive narrative. It’s about telling an entertaining story. So many writers want a cookie for the mere fact that they finished a screenplay that makes sense. Sorry, but if you want to play with the big boys, you have to tell a story that’s entertaining all the way through.

That’s the focus of today’s article. Making sure every single scene in your script has entertainment value. Now before we get started, I want to make something clear. I’m not using “entertain” in the hyperbolic sense. I don’t mean it like a roller coaster ride or a giant car chase. “Entertain” simply means that there’s something about the scene that makes it compelling on its own.

The most basic way to add entertainment value is through conflict. Conflict comes in many forms, and essentially refers to an imbalance in the scene. There’s something unresolved which adds tension to the proceedings. Let’s say that your hero, Joe, is at his son’s baseball game. You could certainly write this scene to establish the basics: Joe’s son plays baseball. But why not add some entertainment value to make the scene more interesting?

Let’s say Joe’s son is batting, and the pitcher’s belligerent father is sitting a few seats in front of Joe. “C’mon Frankie! Strike this bum out!” We can see the discomfort on Joe’s face, but he doesn’t want to make a scene. “Look at this kid! He’s afraid to swing. Lay it right down the middle!” Joe’s getting more angry now. Is he going to say something? This example may be a little excessive, but you get the point. You’ve taken what could’ve been a straight-forward establishing scene that your hero’s son plays baseball and turned it into a moment that’s entertaining on its own.

Another way to conjure entertainment out of a scene is to place your character in a situation of discomfort. As soon as you introduce something that impedes on a person’s comfort, they have to react. And, in doing so, you create an entertainment seed that can grow. Let’s say your character is a prisoner who keeps to himself. And you want to show his daily routine, specifically how meal time works. The boring screenwriter will simply put the prisoner in line and sit with them as they move their way forward until finally getting their food. Again, you’ve achieved your technical goal. You’ve shown us a component of the character’s shitty day. But you didn’t entertain us in the process. How can you change that?

Well, what if there are two options on the menu that day: pizza and a casserole that looks like vomit. As our prisoner is getting closer, we’re showing those pieces of pizza fly off the pan. It’s going to be close by the time it’s his turn, but it looks like he’s going to get one. Then, when he’s almost there, you impede upon the hero’s comfort. Four thugs come up. “Yo man, you mind if we jump in front of you?” Our hero glances at the last three slices of pizza, then at these guys. We can see the torture in his eyes before he finally relents. Sure enough, the thugs take the last slices of pizza, and our hero’s stuck with the gruel. You’ve just turned a scene where nothing happens into a scene where we’re entertained by a man who wants pizza.

Another easy way to add entertainment value is to introduce a problem. If there’s a problem, the audience will want to see if it can be resolved. In Thor: Ragnarok, one of the most entertaining movies of last year, virtually every scene is prefaced with a problem. We meet Thor while he’s hanging, tied up in a net. Later he gets stuck in a waiting room that he needs to get out of. Then he gets placed in a gladiator arena where he must survive. Afterwards, him and Hulk are placed in a holding bay that they have to escape from. The simple act of needing to solve a problem, no matter how small, adds instant entertainment value to a scene.

Something as simple as a time limit can make a scene entertaining. If a character has to clean up his extremely dirty apartment because his parents are in town, you could certainly show us a typical yet boring montage of him cleaning up. Or you could have his father call and let him know that they’re coming an hour early and should be there within the next 30 minutes. Now the clean-up session is a race with an uncertain ending. Much more entertaining.

You can add entertainment value by raising the stakes. Let’s say your character is a waiter. You could certainly give us a boring scene of him doing his typical waiter duties. Or you could have a fellow waiter point out that his new table is a famous food blogger. “Don’t screw it up or none of us will have jobs next week.” All of a sudden, a normal waiting scene becomes packed with tension.

A scene can become entertaining merely by changing the order in which the information is given. For example, let’s say your hero, Beth, has a long day at work. Later, when she gets home, she finds out her husband died in a work accident. Why not show us her husband dying in that accident BEFORE we show Beth’s work day? That way, we’re filled with anxiety as we wait for Beth to find out what we already know. Even a mundane task such as driving home becomes compelling since we know it’s only a matter of minutes now before she finds out what’s happened.

The lesson here is to assess when a scene is boring and to CREATIVELY SOLVE THAT PROBLEM. You don’t even need to know any of these tips to do this. You just have to be honest with yourself about the scene and come up with a way to make it more interesting. You’d be surprised at how easy this is.

Changing locations can do wonders for a scene. If you have a typical boring scene where two characters are talking, you can move them from a coffee shop, where it’s okay to talk, to a movie theater, where it isn’t. Now, every word risks someone nearby telling them to shut up.

Adding characters to a scene can do wonders as well. If you have a typical conversation scene between a guy and his girlfriend, add the girl’s best friend, who HATES the guy. Same conversation, except now the friend is constantly looking up from her phone, giving our guy judgmental looks after everything he says.

I’m sure you’re thinking, “Come on, Carson. Not EVERY scene can be entertaining. What about quick scenes whose sole purpose is to convey information?” Yes, even those scenes. You’ll vary the intensity of the entertainment value to fit the smaller scale, but you still want to entertain. For example, let’s say Alice calls her friend Claire to set up a later dinner party scene. “Pick you up at 7 for the party?” “Could you make it 7:30? I’m running late.” “Sounds good.” They hang up. Sure, that could work. But you could also throw a joke in there to make the conversation more fun. “Pick you up at 7 for the party?” “I can’t go. I have the flu.” “You used the flu excuse last time.” “I mean influenza.” “That’s the same thing, Claire.” “Fine. But come as late as possible.” It’s a small adjustment, but it makes a difference.

We live in a world where people don’t give a shit about anything other than how they feel in the moment. Back in the 70s, you could go 15 minutes in a movie without worrying about whether the audience was bored. These days, people are used to options. Entertainment is a phone-pull-out-of-a-pocket away. More than ever before, you have to make sure you’re keeping people entertained. I’d go so far as to say if you write two boring scenes in a row, the reader is already drifting out of your story. I don’t say that to scare you. I say it to keep you honest. Go into every scene with the intention of adding entertainment value and you will be fine.

Carson does feature screenplay consultations, TV Pilot Consultations, and logline consultations. Logline consultations go for $25 a piece or 5 for $75. You get a 1-10 rating, a 200-word evaluation, and a rewrite of the logline. If you’re interested in any sort of consultation package, e-mail Carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line: CONSULTATION. Don’t start writing a script or sending a script out blind. Let Scriptshadow help you get it in shape first!

Genre: Action-Adventure/Sci-Fi
Premise: After being left at the alter, Indiana Jones tracks down his would-be wife only to find out she’s part of a top secret military clean-up of a mysterious crashed airplane.
About: This was the biggest Indiana Jones project that never got made. George Lucas was serious about its development, hiring one of his favorite writers at the time, Jeb Stuart, who wrote both Die Hard and The Fugitive. The legend goes that a very busy Spielberg and an even busier Harrison Ford were primed to do the film as soon as Spielberg finished Schindler’s List, but that they didn’t like all this hooky-pooky sci-fi stuff in regards to an Indiana Jones movie and therefore passed. It would take another 13 years before the three titans could find time to finally film another Indy film.
Writer: Jeb Stuart (story by Jeb Stuart and George Lucas) (characters created by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman)
Details: 2/20/1995 (Revised Draft)

There were some comments in my Ant-Man and The Wasp post questioning why people even go to see these giant Marvel films. They’re vapid emotion-free adventures designed solely to sell you merchandise. I pushed back on that because I find Marvel movies to be entertaining and that’s the only reason I physically go to the movies these days. I want to be entertained. I don’t want to spend 20 dollars to watch Jon Hamm in “Beirut.” I’m sorry but I can wait for the small screen for that.

With that said, I see the Indiana Jones franchise the same way commenters see Marvel movies. It’s a franchise that’s dangerously close to sliding into ATFT. Yes, I’m talking about Alien Terminator Franchise Territory. They just announced that the 5th film in the franchise has been pushed back to 2021, this after previously announcing that the co-writer of Solo, Lawrence Kasdan’s son, would be taking over writing duties.

So let me get this straight. They’ve got the co-writer of one of the biggest box office bombs in history to shape a script around a 79 year old action star. Does anybody see anything wrong with this? I’m asking honestly. Do you have any hope that this movie could be good? Because I don’t find any data that suggests it would be.

Which is why I’ve decided to go back to a more innocent time. A time when George Lucas still loved movies. The year was 1995 and George was actively developing the next Indiana Jones film. The reason I’m curious about this script is that it includes aliens, which was George’s only “MUST HAVE” for Indiana Jones IV. A big reason Crystal Skull suffered was because Spielberg didn’t want to do the alien thing. So the two kind of meshed their opposing visions into a single film and, well, you saw what happened.

With Mars, we have George Lucas’s unimpeded vision of how that alien storyline would play out. Let’s see if a potentially great movie was overlooked.

It’s 1949 and good old Indiana Jones is out of the game. Welllllll, at least until he finishes stealing a gold idol in Borneo. After that adventure, Indiana runs into a hot linguist named Elaine McGregor who he’s forgotten he promised to escort upriver to search for an old temple. Indie falls head over heels for Elaine and within a couple of months, they’re getting married!

Except that just before the ceremony, Elaine gets cold feet and runs away with her former boyfriend. Indiana is heartbroken and must hear it from Elaine herself why he wasn’t enough. He gets word that her and her former man, Robert Bolander, have flown to New Mexico, so off he goes.

Once there, he learns that things are more complicated than he assumed. Elaine didn’t run away with Robert because she loved him. She ran away because Robert, a military officer, was working on a top secret project that he needed her help on. After Indy shows up, he learns that Robert and the rest of the army believe they’ve found a crashed flying saucer.

Indy is skeptical until Robert shows Indy an old object from the crashed ship that’s covered in multiple ancient languages. They must translate these languages to see what the object says if they’re going to understand why these aliens are trolling them. But before anybody can do anything, THE RUSSIANS SHOW UP and STEAL THE OBJECT. Not only that, but they take the one person who can figure out the scripture on it – Elaine.

Indy’s able to catch up to his not-quite-wife and recover the object before getting chased through the desert by a flying saucer. At some point, they realize that this object is some sort of timer and when it gets to zero – game over! Pretty soon, the Russians, more aliens, and a suspiciously frantic Robert Bolander are all in pursuit of the timer object. Who will get it? And once it reaches zero, what will happen?

Before I get to the analysis, I need to address something for the Indiana Jones geeks. The NUKE THE FRIDGE scene IS in here. Which I find curious. This version of the script was developed, supposedly, without Spielberg. Spielberg famously copped to adding the “Nuke the Fridge” scene in Crystal Skull. So now I’m wondering if he was just sticking up for his friend. Of course, Spielberg could’ve suggested this scene to George even back then. But it’s always been presented as a scene that came about recently. The mystery deepens, I guess.

Now let’s get down to brass tacks. We need to use brass because all the gold was stripped out of this franchise a long time ago.

Raiders of the Lost Ark was famously constructed as a series of set pieces that Steven Spielberg wanted to shoot. Lay the set pieces out and let some screenwriter figure out how to connect them. Turns out that screenwriter, Lawrence Kasdan, did a pretty good job, since Raiders remains one of the most beloved movies ever.

Saucer Men From Mars attempts to do the same thing. We have a boat chase on the river. We have fridge nuking. We have a military plane being chased by a flying saucer. But there’s one major difference between the two films.

Raiders uses an overarching goal. Saucer Men does not. Raiders has the goal of getting the Ark. That objective dominates the entire movie. Saucer Men has no ultimate objective. It’s more about Indy and Elaine finding a mystery cube and trying to figure it out while running from aliens and Russians.

Why does this matter when building a story off pre-established set pieces? Because when you have a final destination worked out, it’s easy to guide the story to that destination. We know that Indy has to get that Ark. So the story will come to a conclusion once he does. You don’t have that in Saucer Men, which means you’re linking pre-established set pieces randomly. There’s no framework to guide the major story beats to a clear conclusion.

It’s like preparing a meal when you don’t know what you’re trying to make.

What happens in this scenario is that the plot becomes bigger than the characters. You’re not making decisions based on where the characters need to get to. You’re making decisions based on which set piece you need to get to. That’s going to result in a movie where the characters are dragged along. They have no free will (a common theme this week).

I’m telling you. When you give your hero an overarching goal, writing a good script is so much easier.

But there’s a bigger problem here. The character of Indiana Jones isn’t built for this story. George Lucas is obsessed with the idea that every iteration of a franchise has to give us something new. That’s what he did with the prequels. And that’s what he did with Crystal Skull. And I understand where he’s coming from. You don’t want to repeat yourself.

With that said, you created Indiana Jones for a very specific type of adventure. Look at his weapon. It isn’t a gun. It’s a whip. A gun helps you against spies. A whip helps you in a cave. Everything about this character was built around raiding tombs and finding treasure.

Therefore, when you put him in the desert against aliens, everything feels off. This character wasn’t built to fight aliens. He wasn’t built to avoid nuclear missile blasts. As a result, Indiana Jones stops being relevant in his own movie. You could put any alpha male hero in this role and it would be the same.

So there’s a balance here that Lucas ignores. Yes, you have to create something new. But you can’t go so far away from the source that the hero’s unique skills become irrelevant. And this is coming from someone who loves alien storylines. So if there’s anybody who’s going to buy into this premise, it’s me. But I didn’t, and that’s because of this error.

Did I like anything about the script?

I liked the opening boat chase. You had this little steamer being chased by a WW2 PT boat. That was fun. I liked that Indiana got stood up at his own wedding. That was unexpected. Cause now we’re wondering, what woman would leave Indiana Jones? And I liked the design behind the love triangle. Love triangles are often on-the-nose. Two people like the same person. Big whup. But in this case, Robert and Elaine used to be together. She left him. Now, she’s run off with him, but only because he needs her for a top secret mission. Yet we get the sense that he’s slyly taking advantage of this proximity to weasel his way back into the mix. So it’s not as simple as two guys fighting over the same woman. It’s a bit more nuanced.

But there are no game-changing set pieces in the script. Which isn’t surprising. Anything that had a modicum of potential was ushered into Crystal Skull. It goes to show how difficult it is to come up with original set pieces, in that even when something isn’t right for a movie, they’ll put it in there because it’s hard to come up with something better.

One final thought. If they changed just one letter in this title – ONE LETTER – this movie would’ve been awesome. Change the “R” at the end of Saucer to a “Y.” Boom, you have a movie for the ages.

Indiana Jones and the Saucey Men From Mars

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

What I learned: Every time you write a line of description, you have the option of turbo-charging the line. I’ll give you an example. Early in the script, when we’re boating down this river, Stuart describes the crocodiles that are hovering nearby. The functional description of these crocodiles is this: “ALONG THE RIVER – crocodiles, twenty feet long.” It’s a serviceable but ultimately boring line. It does the job and nothing more. Stuart turbo-charges the line, however. This is what he writes instead: “ALONG THE RIVER – crocodiles, twenty feet long and six months between meals.” It’s a small change, but a powerful one. In our minds, these imposing beasts become imposing beasts that are starving and looking for any opportunity to gulp down a human. Always look to turbo-charge key descriptions. It makes a difference.