Search Results for: F word
I am so mad at Disney right now for leading me on all week with the promise of a new Star Wars trailer only to give me some lame behind the scenes crap. Behind the scenes clips are exclusively for DVDs as extra material when you’ve already seen the film five times and there’s literally nothing new left to learn and you’re bored so you remember, “Oh yeah, there’s those behind the scenes featurettes. Let’s check those out.” And then you watch them and you’re like, “Eh, that was kind of cool. George Lucas grew another chin.” They are NOT meant as a primary piece of entertainment to get people excited for a movie. So Disney? SCREW YOU! And Mickey. And Goofy. And Elsa. But not Officer Hopps. I still love her. And if the new trailer is up by the time I wake up, then yes, I will forgive you. But until then, SCREW YOU!
Oh yeah, Showdown Saturday below. Read the scripts and vote for your favorite in the comments section! Winner gets a snazzy Friday review!!!
Title: Defend The Point
Genre: Thriller
Logline: 18 year old Kevin Crutchfield is having a hard time adjusting to his first year at West Point in upstate New York. He better shape up quick; a group of terrorists are on their way to webcast a massacre at the prestigious military academy.
Why you should read: Hello again, writer of Drone here. Let’s see… what did Carson think about Drone( that’s right I read your stupid ass newsletter) and I’m paraphrasing… “I think I’d prefer getting killed by a drone to watching that movie”. What a dick you are huh? Anyway, under the crushing disappointment of yet another contest where I have to pull on my bridesmaid’s dress I began to get angry. That anger led to drinking. And then more drinks. And then a bunch of drinks after that. A month and some days passed and I came out of a blackout with this script. It’s an angry script. Watching the news and seeing all the atrocities playing out across the world was very frustrating. I think a lot of that got put into the screenplay. If Inglorious Basterds was Tarantino’s revenge fantasy on Nazis, this is mine for the assholes who kill people on a whim. Hope you like it.
And yeah I know it’s long… whatever….fuck you.
Title: Red Light
Genre: Horror/Slasher
Logline: After their friends run a supposedly haunted red light and suffer horrible deaths, three disbelieving teens run the same red light to dispel small town superstition, only to find themselves the next targets of a sinister figure hellbent on revenge.
Why you should read: I’ve been teaching Pre-Kindergarten for seven years now, so trust me — I know horror.
Besides wanting to bring the slasher film back for the Z Generation, I’ve always wanted to write a movie that made an ordinary thing seem terrifying. Think of what Jaws did for going swimming, or Shallow Hal for, uh, going swimming.
One night, while sitting at an empty intersection waiting for the light to change, I found myself coming up with reasons not to go through it. A car could smash into me. I could get pulled over. An unflattering photo of me taken from a traffic camera could appear in my mail.
But it wasn’t until I convinced myself the vengeful ghost of a woman — a woman wrongfully killed at that very intersection by another red light runner — would follow me home that I knew I had something special.
I’m confident anyone who reads my script will never go through a traffic light the same way again.
But don’t just take my word for it. Professional script consultant Danny Manus gave it a strong consider and called it, “A fast and enjoyable read with a solid climax, a couple good twists in the plot, some strong scare moments, suspenseful scenes, and enough gore to satisfy PG-13 horror fans while still having a solid mystery.”
So how isn’t this a movie yet? How am I still without a manager or agent? How did I keep you reading this long without the exchange of payment or sexual favors? Maybe you can educate an educator. I’m hoping you’ll give my script the chance for some extra attention and critique, but more importantly, I just want everybody reading it to have fun. Because I had a blast writing it.
Title: Ripper Squad
Genre: Action/Adventure
Logline: In 1888, an ex-cop seeking to unravel the mystery of his daughter’s death is recruited into an organisation dedicated to protecting London from fantastical evils. As our hero hunts for answers, Jack the Ripper commences his reign of terror with an apocalyptic plan that transcends mere murder. Men in Black meets the Victorian macabre as the fate of the world hangs in the balance.
Why you should read:
1. Am I a 20-something, college educated male?
Yes. Please don’t hold it against me.
2. In what ways are you fit to write for the screen?
I am a 20-something, college educated male. What else am I gonna do?
3. So your movie is PERIOD, BIG BUDGET and requires extensive WORLD-BUILDING? Sounds like a viable first script.
Yeah, right?
4. Why should I read it?
Because I think it’s a lot of fun. It’s puts a spin on a legendary figure from history (Jack the Ripper), funneling it through a commercial sensibility with strong action, and lively characters. I’ve always been fascinated by Victorian England, and felt that with its unique history of crime, tabloid journalism and mystique, the opportunity to write a Men in Black style adventure was super exciting. Hopefully the pitch whets your appetite, and even if it doesn’t, maybe you’ll give it a chance. I think it’s an enjoyable read.
Title: The Space Hotel
Genre: Sci-fi / Action
Logline: When a massive fire breaks out on the world’s first space hotel, a mismatched group of survivors must fight their way through twelve floors of chaos to safety.
Why you should read: After failing to win the Amateur Offerings weekend back at the start of the year I ripped everything out and started all over again with a page one rewrite, leaving only the unique setting intact (and even that has been developed and improved). Four months on, I have this new draft, with a tighter plot, more focused characters and plenty of new, not-seen-before, set pieces. Hopefully you’ll enjoy reading this version as much as I enjoyed writing it. Thank you in advance for any comments.
Title: The Siren Song
Genre: Thriller/Horror
Logline: A young doctor in a sea-side town becomes fascinated with a patient who plays a mermaid in the local carnival. After a series of strange occurrences, she reveals that she believes she may actually be a real mermaid that kills during the cycle of the full moon.
Why you should read: “The Siren Song” is a two year labor of love, that I think is ready to be put out into the world. Also, it’s a lean, mean 85 page reading machine.
Genre: Biopic
Premise: The true, and at times shocking, story of how the Oxford dictionary was created.
About: This was a big project around 2001. Mel Gibson’s company bought the rights to the book it was based on. At one point, Luc Besson was tapped to direct. The script’s original writer, Todd Komarnicki, has had a bit of a spotty career, but actually just landed a huge assignment. He scripted Sully, which you may remember me opining about in my newsletter. The script was then rewritten by writer-director John Boorman, who’s done a million things, including Excalibur, Exorcist 2, and a dialogue polish on Deliverance.
Writers: Todd Komarnicki (rewrite by John Boorman) (adapted from the book by Simon Winchester)
Details: 121 pages
How does one make the dictionary interesting?
How does one make any inherently boring subject matter interesting.
I’ll tell you how.
Murrrrrrrr-derrrrrrrrrrr.
Like Pokemon Go or Chewbacca Mom, murder makes everything more palatable! And that’s what caught my interest with this long forgotten project. You see, unfortunately for “Madman,” it hit the streets long before the biopic craze. Hell, even before the Black List craze. And therefore this offbeat tale of how the Oxford dictionary was conceived never built enough buzz to turn the light green.
If this had been written today, however? I have no doubt it would already be in production. True, Squirtel or Bellsrpout might have played a prominent part. But who ever said making movies was easy? Quentin Tarantino almost cast a no-name female actress as one of the gang members in Reservoir Dogs because her boyfriend promised to give the production 1 million dollars. Casting Squirtel as a dictionary is a no-brainer.
It’s 1872. It’s London. It’s dirty. But most importantly, it’s a definition-less city. All this language is being bandied about by 3 million people, yet nobody has a reference for how to correctly say any of it.
James Murray wants to change that. He wants to do what Oxford has tried and failed to do for decades now – write a dictionary. A container of every single word and its definition in the English language. The reason this hasn’t been accomplished yet is because nobody knows how to accomplish it! Nobody even has a game plan for rounding all these words up.
Enter Dr. Minor. Actually, let’s back up a little. Dr. Minor was a surgeon in an American war who branded a soldier with a giant “D” on his face after that man tried to desert the army. After the war was over, Dr. Minor became convinced that the soldier was attempting to find him and kill him.
Dr. Minor escaped to London, only to find the man still stalking him (or so he believed). He finally ran into D-Man and shot him dead. Except it turned out Dr. Minor didn’t shoot the correct man. It was just some random Londoner. After going through the English court system, Dr. Minor was considered crazy-town, and sent to an asylum.
From there, we cut back and forth between Murray’s tireless quest to find and define all the words ever, and Dr. Minor, who becomes sort of the “Andy Dufresne” of his asylum, helping others learn art and accumulating a mini-library in his cell.
When Dr. Minor hears that Murray is building a dictionary from scratch, he decides to help, meticulously going through every book he owns, writing down a definition for each word, and sending them to Murray.
In the meantime, Dr. Minor must deal with the guilt he feels over leaving a woman and her children without a husband and father. And when he tries to mend that fence, eventually meeting the widow for the first time, things don’t go as planned. I suppose that’s why life cannot be defined.
Have you ever thought of how difficult it would be to create a dictionary from scratch when one had never been written before? Think about that for a minute. You don’t have the internet, remember. You don’t even have a list of the words to define yet! Where would you begin?
That question definitely pulled me in. But then reality hit. How would you DRAMATIZE that? That’s the question you must ask with any idea you come up with. How do I dramatize this? In some cases, the idea itself incites drama. In other cases, you’ll have to go looking for it. It is my belief that if you have to go looking for it, it probably isn’t a movie-worthy premise.
Drama /drämə/ (noun) – an exciting, emotional, or unexpected series of events or set of circumstances.
To understand that statement better, here are two premises. Notice how one is dripping with dramatic possibility, while the other doesn’t have a dramatic bone in its body
1) When a private plane full of rich passengers crashes on a barren island, the people on board will devolve into the worst versions of themselves in order to survive.
2) A private plane escorting a soccer team to the West Coast allows its passengers to explore the power of friendship.
Do you see the difference here? How the first idea bleeds drama, meaning you can already imagine tons of scenes in your head. Whereas with the second one, you probably can’t think of a single scene. This is the kind of thing to be aware of when coming up with ideas. “Do dramatic scenes start popping up in your head after reading the premise?”
To “Madman’s” credit, it finds SOME dramatic elements. But it’s not as juicy as the title would have you believe. The big murder that takes place happens at the beginning of the movie, and then that’s it as far as murder.
Pokemon Go /ˈpōkiˌmän/ (noun) A video game by which people with little to no lives chase miniature monsters in a virtual world created by their phone.
I thought there was going to be some competition – like two dictionary groups trying to beat each other out to win the historic prize of first-ever-dictionary. And that they would’ve resorted to murder to win the competition.
The reason that would’ve worked better is that now you have something to BUILD TOWARDS. You can build towards the growing frustration, the growing tension, the impending murder. We know that things are coming to a head and we’re excited! But when you murder someone before the main story even begins, you’ve eliminated that chance to build.
We talked about this yesterday. We built towards this big rescue, but then were done with it by the midpoint. What’s left to build towards? That’s another question you want to be aware of. Am I still building towards the most powerful moment in the story? Because if the most powerful moment in your story is in the rearview mirror, there’s something wrong with your structure.
“Madman” does its best to mitigate these problems by creating a strange love story between Minor and the woman whose husband he killed. And then with Murray, we see him stressing out a lot under the pressure.
But where the story really struggled was in its stakes. The script never answered the question: WHY DID THIS NEED TO BE DONE? And WHY RIGHT NOW? If they failed, what would happen? Lots of bad grammar? Time has proven that we’re going to have that problem whether there’s a dictionary or not.
I’ll give you an example of stakes from another English period piece with a somewhat similar setup: The King’s Speech. The King attempts to get rid of his stutter in order to warn the world of Hitler (just like Murray is attempting to finish this dictionary) with the difference being that HIS SPEECH MATTERED. It needed to be done. And fixing his stutter did matter RIGHT NOW because time was running out to stop Hitler.
As far as I can tell, finishing this dictionary is more of a prestige thing. Everyone involved just thinks it would be rad to achieve it. That’s fine. But that’s not movie stakes.
Despite this, “Madman” moves along with just enough strangeness to keep you curious. Dr. Minor, for example, was convinced that the man chasing him could raise spirits from Hell to find him. And who would’ve thought he’d bag the woman whose husband he killed?? I mean I’ve seen some strange attempts to get a woman’s attention before, but never one quite like that.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If your script covers a long period of time, and therefore doesn’t have a lot of urgency, a nice trick is to add a cross-cutting storyline that will help move through time effortlessly. We saw this with The Martian. By cutting back to earth, we could come back to Matt Damon 3 months later and the audience wouldn’t blink. That same 3-month jump becomes a lot more prominent if we’re with Matty the whole time. We do that here too. One of the ways they disguise the years it takes to write this dictionary is by cutting back and forth between Minor and Murray. Each time we cut, we do so 3-6 months ahead. So if masking a huge swath of time is a problem, consider a second narrative you can jump back and forth from.
What I learned 2: Potentially mundane subject matter is the perfect subject matter to add weirdness to because it’s unexpected. For instance, if I said I’m writing a movie about the ice cream truck business, you’d be like, “Wonderful. Let me know how it goes.” But if I said I was writing about a war between two ice cream truck drivers fighting over the same turf (a real project that just got picked up), that combination of mundane and weird would intrigue you.
The writer of today’s script does something I’ve NEVER SEEN BEFORE in all my script-reading. Read on to find out what it is!
Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: When a blitzkrieg-style alien invasion occurs during a couple’s divorce proceeding, they must run back home by foot to save their children.
About: This is the hot spec of the moment, picked up by Spielberg’s Amblin shingle in what I think is a renewed dedication to finding projects that capture the wonder that Amblin used to be famous for. This is writer Pete Bridges’ first sale!
Writer: Pete Bridges
Details: 107 pages – undated
No less than three days ago, I called a writer out for some suspect choices on his title page that painted him as an amateur. So what am I to make of today’s script, where we not only get a map of the route our main characters take during the movie, but a Google Maps link that notes every single beat of the screenplay? For example, we get a marker for the “All is Lost” moment.
Now may be a good time to remind everyone that when I say, “Don’t do this!” think of it more as a suggestion than a rule. Because while I stand by my belief that doing out-of-the-ordinary things with your script (Huge titles in unique fonts, pictures, taglines, etc.) has more of a potential for disaster than success, none of it really matters as long as the writing is good.
Is The Fall good?
Megan and Sam Girard have just finished getting their divorce finalized in downtown Atlanta. It’s an odd moment. It’s not like these two hate each other. They have two beautiful children back in the suburbs. They seem to have a lot in common. They even consider grabbing a coffee before calling it a day!
As they work through this oddness, a plane falls out of the sky. And then another plane. And another. And everything turns off. Phones, cars, elevators. What’s going on? An EMP bomb? A solar flare?
Try aliens.
Before the two can say “E.T.,” a bunch of alien bombers swoop down and drop these magnetic blue balls that paralyze everyone nearby. It’s around this moment that the divorced duo realize: We gotta get home and save our kids. So they start running.
It doesn’t help that Megan is diabetic and getting ever closer to a diabetic seizure. They need to find her some insulin fast. And since everything – especially pharmacies – are being looted, that ain’t going to be easy.
As they make their way through the city, they discover more and more about these aliens, such as their on-the-ground soldiers, 7 foot tall alien thingeys called Slims, which move to the paralyzed people, zip them open, torture them, then take their insides. Yeah, not a fun way to die.
And with new alien ships coming in to suck up all the humans that remain, it’s looking less and less likely that they’re going to get out of this alive. But with the strongest motivator in the world pushing them (the desire to save their children), our duo achieves the impossible, making it past the majority of the chaos. But will they make it to the finish line? Not if the Slims have something to say about it.
So is The Fall good? Let me answer that question this way. It’s very tuned into the spec process. We have a light spin on a common setup (an alien invasion, but told in a single shot). We have tons of urgency. We have a clear goal with high stakes. We have an “event” like setup. This script bleeds GSU.
On top of this, Bridges makes a ballsy choice that I’ve NEVER seen before. There isn’t a single sentence outside of the dialogue that’s over a line long. Everything is one line! I don’t know if I love that idea but I sure as hell respect the dedication required to achieve it.
But let’s get down to the nitty-gritty and why these scripts are so hard to write. Anything that moves really fast is difficult to mine emotion from. You don’t have time to delve into your characters. Sure, you can have your occasional quiet moment where your characters hide out, catch their breath, and remember an incident from their past that helps us connect with them.
But it’s not the same as when you have real time passing. That’s the reason that “Allied,” the WW2 script I reviewed in my last newsletter, got into my Top 25. I felt like I spent a ton of time with those characters because I did. 2 in-script years passed before the second half of the screenplay, where everything was contained to 3 days.
Had we started the film as those 3 days had begun, it wouldn’t have left any emotional impact on us. Who cares if these two betrayed each other if we didn’t know them?
Ultra-urgent setups leave the writer in a tricky situation where they’re required to build emotion into these tiny little pockets where characters remember “emotional” things from their past. And while it’s better than nothing, it’s still hard to care since we weren’t there when any of these things happened. We’re only hearing about it in retrospect.
The best way to create emotion in fast-paced stories is 3-fold. You do it through:
Action.
Choice.
Interaction.
With action, you look at someone like Han Solo. His repeated ACTION throughout Star Wars is one of selfishness. He always acts selfish. Then in the end, he saves the day by acting selfless. Note that Han Solo never tells us about how his dad left him when he was four. That kind of thing doesn’t matter to most people, unless the story the character is telling is earth-shatteringly compelling. And it’s really hard to do that. The emotion comes from the actions he takes connected to his flaw.
With choice, I’ll give you an example from one of last year’s best movies, Inside Out (another script that takes place inside a very short time frame). The most emotional moment in that film occurs when Joy and Riley’s imaginary friend, Bing Bong, are trying to make it out of a deep cavern by riding a rocket up its side. They keep trying and keep trying and can’t seem to get enough power to reach the top. At that point, Bing Bong realizes that his extra weight is preventing the rocket from getting them all the way up. So he makes the CHOICE to stay behind. Joy makes it up on the next turn, but we’re devastated because Bing Bong is now gone forever. Choice creates emotion.
With interaction, you’re creating emotion through a desire to resolve character conflict. You have two people who don’t see eye to eye on something, yet they have to work together to achieve a common goal. If you’ve done your job and we want to see these characters resolve their issue, we will feel an emotional connection to them and their journey.
Of the three, this is the one The Fall executes best. It never goes overboard with Sam and Megan. But there are still things they never hashed out in their marriage. And we see a few of those things pop up as they make their way home. Was it perfect? No. But it was the right idea and the execution was solid.
I liked The Fall. It wasn’t perfect. It did borrow a lot from War of the Worlds. But it moved, it was entertaining, and you could see the movie in your head.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: In the immortal words of Bonnie Raitt: “Let’s give them something to worry about.” Have you ever gone out to enjoy your day but in the back of your head, you couldn’t stop worrying about that one thing? Maybe you didn’t know how you were going to pay this month’s rent. Maybe your sister was having a big surgery tomorrow and you didn’t know how it was going to go. While this may suck in real life, this is EXACTLY what you want to make your reader experience in a screenplay. Instead of ONLY focusing on the goal at hand (get home to the kids), you want to have your characters (and by extension, the reader) worried about something in the meantime. Here, it’s Megan’s diabetes, specifically, where are they going to find her some insulin? This creates a sense of anxiety in the reader that keeps them invested. They will not be able to put your script down until your character solves that problem. So that’s today’s tip. Keep your reader worried!
Genre: Thriller
Premise: A paralyzed man who can only communicate by blinking is kidnapped by a nurse who knows his secret, that he robbed a bank eight years ago and has hidden the money.
About: Blink finished on the Black List a couple of years ago and managed to pull in Jamie Foxx to play the lead, with 300: Rise of an Empire director Noam Murro helming. Screenwriter Hernany Perla has spent most of his career producing, with his most well-known film being The Last Stand, starring Arnold Schwarzenneger.
Writer: Hernany Perla
Details: 90 pages
Can you believe what happened this weekend? Spielberg gets beat by The Purge 3? What kind of alternate universe am I living in? Everybody has their theories on why The BFG didn’t do well. Some say the title caused confusion. Others say the marketing was generic. I have my own theory. And it’s going to get me ripped in the comments, but I’m okay with that.
I think the reason nobody showed up to this movie is because the main character looked like a mini Lena Dunham. There, I said it. They took one look at that girl and went, “Nuh-uh.” And before you go nuts, remember that the face of a story is the person we have to relate to and care about. And I don’t relate to or care about a mini-feminazi.
Anyway, segueing to today’s unrelated topic: Gimmick scripts. While the word “gimmick” exudes a negative connotation, gimmick scripts are a legitimate option for the spec screenwriting crowd.
We don’t have many avenues to drive down as screenwriters, since Hollywood blocks the majority of them with their “IP or Die” rally cry. And for whatever reason, something about this quirky format encourages a good gimmick. Which leads us to the question: How do you write a good gimmick script? We’ll get to that after the synopsis…
Eddie Locke is paralyzed. The only thing he can move are his eyelids, leaving him with a binary communication process of “yeses” (two blinks) and “no’s” (one blink). Eddie’s been this way for eight years. Lying in the same hospital room staring at the same ceiling and the same stupid ass TV reruns. His nurses are pleasant but you get the feeling that if Eddie had the use of his hands for just 30 seconds one more time in life, he’d use that time to strangle them.
But Eddie’s life is about to get more exciting. A new nurse, country bumpkin, Moe, seems to know a thing or two about Eddie’s past. Like that he was paralyzed by a stray bullet during a bank robbery. A bank robbery where three men made off with a safety deposit box and were never seen again.
Moe, who’s clearly done his homework, is convinced that Eddie was the unknown fourth member of that team, and that he knows what they grabbed from that safety deposit box – a series of access numbers to an offshore account containing 40 million dollars.
Moe forces Eddie to answer all of his questions with blinks. And maybe now’s a good time to tell you, we never see Eddie. The whole movie takes place from his point-of-view. This allows us to experience the blinks from Eddie’s perspective, as well as all the other shit that happens. And a lot happens.
Moe kidnaps Eddie, brings him to his fellow bank-robbing brother’s house, only to find out his bro is dead, but that his daughter, Hayley (Eddie’s grown-up niece), knows a thing or two about the heist. Moe grabs Hayley and the three of them go on adventure to find those account numbers, which have been re-hidden.
With Eddie observing the whole ordeal helplessly, he’ll need to depend on Hayley to get him out of the mess alive. That’s assuming Eddie wants to be alive after this is all over.
So, the gimmick script. How do you write one? First, you gotta find the gimmick. I famously loved the gimmicky coffin contained-thriller, “Buried.” I reviewed a gimmicker not long ago, “The Shave,” about a cop who kills a man then goes to get a shave from the man’s father, where each side will make their case for whether the killing was justified. And it seems like every year we get a couple of “Balls Out” scripts, which are built on making fun of screenwriting conventions.
The big pitfall with gimmick scripts is that the audience is onto the gimmick quickly, usually between 10-30 pages. Once that happens, what’s left? Because if all you’ve got is a gimmick, and we’re onto your gimmick, boredom sets in.
The secret to writing a good gimmick script is NOT RESTING ON THE GIMMICK. Yes, you want to exploit your gimmick. That’s what’s going to set your script apart. Find everything you can that’s specific to your gimmick and make sure you write a scene that exploits that.
In “Buried,” for example, you better put a snake or some other freaky animal into that coffin at some point. That choice specifically takes advantage of your unique setup.
But after that, you need to make sure you’re doing two things. Going back to storytelling basics.
1) Always move your story forward
2) Always explore your characters.
If you’re not doing those, we’re not going to care. Your gimmick can only keep our interest for so long before we need more. And those two things are your “more.”
Blink achieved the first half of that equation. Unfortunately, it didn’t do enough of the second, and that’s where it fell short for me.
And this is an EXTREMELY common problem with scripts – moving the story but not the characters. I think it’s because the one thing that’s drilled into your head early on as a screenwriter is: KEEP THE STORY MOVING KEEP THE STORY MOVING KEEP THE STORY MOVING.
And you’re so focused on that, that you don’t think about anything else. You just care about getting to the next story goal or the next plot twist or the next deception.
And while that’s good advice. If that’s all you’re doing, and you’re not working to create a bond between us and the characters, we’re not going to care. It’s like the difference between me telling you that a man in Thailand got in a car accident and your best friend from high school got in a car accident. The first one you don’t even think about. Why would you care about some random man in another country getting in an accident? But as soon as I tell you it’s someone you know, you’re affected on a deep level.
To achieve this in screenwriting, go back to basics. Create an unresolved struggle WITHIN your characters and create an unresolved struggle BETWEEN your characters.
One of the unique attributes of Blink is that we don’t see the main character. So it’s hard to connect with him. That leaves us with Moe and Hayley. Moe is only about moving the story forward. There isn’t a single thing going on underneath the surface. He just wants money and that’s it. And while that’s great for the plot, it doesn’t help us FEEL anything in relation to his character.
I was just rewatching The Bourne Identity and the girl character that Jason Bourne picks up – we meet her in a very vulnerable place financially, where she’s just trying to get from paycheck to paycheck. It’s a small thing, but it creates some level of sympathy in us for the character. So we care about her on a deeper level.
With Hayley’s character, it’s a little better, since she seems to be more of an emotional person in general. But Eddie never really knew this girl. There’s no unresolved issues between them, outside of her belief that her father is dead because of Eddie. And she gets over that quickly, leaving us with nothing to resolve.
We do experience some internal strife with Eddie during his memories, and this is where the character exploration had the most potential, since Eddie was a terrible human being before he became paralyzed. But all exploration of that came late and it wasn’t very deep.
All this resulted in a fun setup and and an interesting gimmick (watching everything take place from a helpless POV). But that’s it. There wasn’t much more. And this is a great reminder for you guys. A good gimmick script can you get noticed. But if you write a gimmick script with a solid story THAT GENUINELY EXPLORES ITS CHARACTERS, that’s the kind of script that changes writers’ lives.
Blink isn’t a bad script by any means. It just didn’t have enough emotional juice to pull me in.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If the only thing that’s getting resolved in your screenplay is your plot, you’re not doing enough. You need to resolve internal characters issues and you need to resolve broken relationships. That’s how you add dimension to your screenplay.
I don’t know what to make of Finding Dory’s success or what it means to screenwriters. There have been few sequels less necessary than this one. How do I know this? Because in ten years, I’ve never heard someone say, “I wonder when they’re going to make a Finding Nemo 2.”
I suppose we can chalk it up to a couple of things. Number 1, there is NOTHING good out right now. Nothing. And there hasn’t been in months. People are desperate for something good – heck, even AVERAGE will do. And boy is this movie average. The plotting and exposition are some of the laziest in Pixar’s library. And it feels like entire sections were borrowed from Toy Story 3.
Which leads us to number 2: Never underestimate family films, particularly animated ones. The hardcore screenwriters don’t think much of them. But these are the movies that keep studios afloat, no pun intended. It’s the Parent Principle. Leaving young kids at home while you go see a movie is a major hassle for parents. Which means no one shows up. But give parents a movie they can take their kids to, and both of them show up.
So what’s the secret to getting nobody to show up? Ask Independence Day 2, which squeaked into the box office number 2 slot with a little over 40 million bucks. The irony here is that Will Smith just gave an interview where he admitted that studios can’t fool audiences anymore. You can’t go seven days at the theater before word gets out that your movie sucks. These days it happens on social media instantaneously.
The studios are still trying to control things though. Fox wouldn’t screen this for critics before its release. Here’s the funny thing about that. People are using social media to talk about how the studio isn’t letting critics see the film, which actually creates more of a negative buzz than had they just let critics see it in the first place.
Now this may seem like a weird vendetta I have against the film. But I’m really happy this happened. The original film ended with someone uploading a mac virus into the alien computer system. To me, that’s highway robbery. You pulled us in with this fun invasion story, and you concluded it with an ending a 3rd grader could’ve written. You are stealing money when you do that. I’m serious. It’s borderline unethical. So I’m happy that they’re paying the price for that now. I guarantee you, if that movie had ended strong – or just where it was clear that they tried, people would’ve begged for a sequel.
I know I sound like a broken record. But you need to start writing better scripts if you want us to show up. There’s no summer that’s proven that more than this one. Audiences aren’t responding to your lazy concepts (part of writing) and lazy execution (the nuts and bolts of writing). People in positions of power are going to have to look at themselves in the mirror come Labor Day and ask if they’re still okay with churning out risk-averse product. Sure, they can keep throwing ancient IP at us, like Tarzan and Universal’s upcoming monster universe, but they’ll pay the price if they do.
And let me be clear about something. Writers, directors, producers – these people are DYING to create original content. The only reason they’re not is because the studios won’t let them. The studios hold the keys to all movies that cost north of 40 million bucks. If you want to play in that sandbox, you have to make the movies they want to make. So the people that need to be targeted for the garbage we’re seeing are the studio heads and their executives.
The one highlight from the weekend is the showing of The Shallows. This is a spec script that made 16 million dollars on a 19 million dollar budget in its opening weekend in the heart of summer. For comparison’s sake, that’s a little less than half of what Independence Day 2 made, yet Independence Day 2 had a budget NINE TIMES that of The Shallows. It goes to show that if you choose a juicy subject matter (sharks always sell), and create a clever storyline that keeps the budget low, you could see your spec script opening strong against major tentpole franchises in the heart of summer. Pretty cool.
Before we wrap up, I want to share a conversation I had with a professional screenwriter this weekend. And he vocalized something I’d always considered but never had a term for. He calls it “burning reads.” And I thought it was apropos with our script rewrites coming up this Thursday.
The idea is this. Every time you read your script, you become one step more numb to it. More numb to the plot machinations, to the characters, to the dialogue exchanges, to the jokes, to the emotional beats. This becomes dangerous because, after a certain amount of reads, you feel nothing when reading your script. You know everything so well that it’s just words on a page. And how can you continue to improve your script if you can’t feel anything while writing it?
Because of this, this writer rarely reads his script from start to finish. He’ll identify a problem section (say, the sequence after the mid-point) and work on that individually. And he’ll do that for a number of other sections as well. Then only once he’s applied changes to everything does he go back and read the script all the way through.
And when you think about it, it’s a good strategy, because the more you can mimic the experience of a reader reading your script for the first time, the better. Now I realize this is an imperfect and somewhat tricky science. But I do believe in the principle of it. Only burn full reads when you absolutely have to. Otherwise, you’re numbing yourself to everything that works so well in your screenplay.
We’ll discuss more about rewriting on Thursday!
Until then, eat a crumb cake.