Someone sent me a consultation script that was 180 pages. It was damn good. Now what!?

Telling a screenwriter they can’t write a script over 120 pages is the screenwriting equivalent of walking around Los Angeles in a MAGA hat. In other words, it’s gonna trigger some people. Never have I seen screenwriters react so passionately than when I tell them to get their scripts down to a more industry-friendly page count.

But Long Page Count Screenwriters rejoice!  Because I have found your champion!

I just read an awesome 180 page script.

This script was a consultation script. It’s from an amateur screenwriter. I’m going to try and convince him to let me review the script on the site. I don’t know if he’s going to say yes. But, until then, I can’t speak about the specifics of the script. I can only speak in generalities.

Here’s what I can tell you.

It’s a classic hero’s journey tale. This writer goes right back to the heart of Joseph Campbell’s teachings.

How good are we talking? I think there’s been only one truly good hero’s journey piece of screenwriting in the last decade. And that was Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. This is on par with that.

This is great news for anyone who wants to write a long script. But, in order to do so, you must understand the single biggest roadblock to writing a long screenplay. And that is: It’s incredibly difficult to keep a reader’s interest over that many pages.

How difficult?

Think about how many times you’ve read the first five pages of amateur scripts I’ve posted on this site. Like for showdowns. I’ve seen so many of you post in the comments that you weren’t even able to get past the first page of those scripts.

ONE PAGE!

That’s all it took for you to lose interest. So, imagine how difficult it is to keep someone’s interest over 180 pages.

Obviously, I don’t expect the majority of you to ever write a 180 page script. You’re handicapping yourself if you do. I mean, the very first thing I did when I saw that this script was 180 pages, was say to myself, “Awwww shit.” I was pissed off, I’m not going to lie. Cause it almost always means a script that’s scattered and goes nowhere. Like receiving the script for Southland Tales. Try getting through that monstrosity without a fifth of whiskey.

But here’s the thing about writing a 180-page script: if you can make that work, you can make any script work. A 100-page screenplay is the same game, just tighter. The difference is that at 180 pages, the underlying fundamentals have to be rock solid. Starting with your characters.

When our 180 page script writer introduces his main character, he does something very smart. He creates a really really really really gnarly bad dude who does something really really really bad. And then he brings in his main character to take down this gnarly bad dude.

Boom.

We now love the hero.

This is something so many writers get wrong. Or they never think about it in the first place. But if you can just win us over right away with something your hero does? You’ve got us. We now love your hero.

The reason this is so important is because if you’re going to ask us to stick around for 180 pages, you have no chance of doing so if we don’t love your hero. I mean, look at what happened in the script I just reviewed, Leverage. That writer did the opposite. He created this money hungry lady who didn’t do anything to make us like her. If anything, we thought she was too greedy. Which means that you’re now asking me, the reader, to stay engaged for 118 pages, for someone I don’t even like.

By the way, most writers don’t make the mistake that the Leverage writer made. But they make a mistake that’s almost as bad. They don’t create a main character we dislike. But they create a main character we feel nothing for. We don’t feel good about them. We don’t feel bad about them. We feel neutral.

It’s better than the reader disliking your hero but it buys you, maybe, 10-20 more pages before the reader checks out. You want to create a very strong character in some capacity if you’re going to write a 180 page screenplay because you need us rooting for that character the whole way through if we’re going to stay engaged.

What’s great about this Hero’s Journey script is that the writer understands that, at 180 pages, giving us a scene where the hero takes down a bad guy isn’t enough. So, in addition to that, our main character is steeped in mystery. He has a very messy past, which gives us yet another reason to keep reading. We want to learn what happened to this guy to make him this way.

Honestly, if you can learn that one skill of making us fall in love with a character right away (or just be fascinated by them or super intrigued by them) — if you can do that? That will solve 80% of your script problems. Cause you don’t actually have to be a great screenwriter if you can write great characters. So, learn that skill first!

But, with that said, you still have to know how to plot if you’re going to keep our interest over a long period of time. And this writer is a master at plotting. No exaggeration. I was saying that to myself as I was reading the script. The way he pushed the plot forward, revealed key details (such as the main character’s mysterious past), mixed in overarching goals (the goal driving the entire story) and mixed in temporary goals (goals for the next 15-20 pages) — all of it was acutely constructed.

I remember thinking, “If he would’ve moved this reveal up one scene earlier or pushed it back one scene further, the script would’ve fallen apart.” That’s how precise his plotting was.

So, with plotting, there’s actually no end point to how long you can plot a story. We know this because of TV. Breaking Bad went on for six seasons. That’s far more screenplay pages than 180.

Ironically, I think this writer used that method of thinking to write his story. Instead of seeing the script as this giant never-ending piece of storytelling, he broke it into episodes. I believe it was six episodes of roughly 30 pages each. Each had its own title. And the goal for each of those episodes was different.

So, for example, one episode might be — we get stuck in this town and we need to get out. That doesn’t actually happen in the script. But that’s how you want to think as a writer. Your characters visit this town and something bad happens. Maybe one of them gets taken hostage or disappears. And now the goal is, find them and escape.

Again, the idea is that you want to break your giant story down into more manageable pieces. I can’t even imagine trying to write a straightforward story about a guy attempting to achieve something over 3 hours. But, if he only has to achieve something over 30 minutes, that’s doable. Then you just add the next 30 minute story. And then the next one.

So the idea is, come up with the overarching goal for the entire season (or, in this case, screenplay). For example, in Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, that’s for Dunk to become a knight. And then each episode has a goal unto himself. For example, for the second episode, after Dunk’s arrived in town, his goal is to simply sign up for the tournament. But he needs a sponsor. So he has to go find the sponsor and then go back and sign up before time runs out. That’s how you create an episode of TV. And you can mirror that writing strategy in long feature scripts.

And that’s how this writer was able to write a 180 page screenplay without it ever slowing down.

Now, to be clear, writing a long script is still very hard. The act of creating a character that people love might as well be screenwriting’s version of the City of Atlantis. If doing so was easy, every movie we watched would be great. But even though Hollywood knows this is the most important rule, and puts all of its mental resources into figuring it out for each movie, we still have a lot of bland protagonists who we barely care about. So, obviously, skill is needed to achieve this feat.

And it also takes skill to write a 30 page goal-oriented sequence in a script. That doesn’t just flow off the fingertips. But at least you now have the knowledge that that’s what you need to do. Cause most aspiring screenwriters (and a fair amount of professionals) don’t even know that. They just write whatever’s coming to their head in the moment and pray that it’s all going to come together.

The other two areas where this writer separates himself are in his scene-writing and in his secondary character construction.

We’ve talked about scene-writing a ton on this site. But, despite that, most of the amateur scripts I receive may have a total of one or two genuinely good scenes. And that’s because most writers think of scenes as “segments of the script I have to cram all of my relevant plot and character information into.” It’s more about fitting in exposition than it is figuring out how to write the most entertaining scene possible.

In this 180 page script, 9 out of every 10 scenes are strong. Which is an insane ratio. It’s very rare that I see that kind of ratio. And it’s because the writer understands that each scene is its own little movie that needs to entertain. And therefore, he builds scenes around that mindset.

So, for example, instead of writing a scene where our primary group of characters trade dialogue as they walk down the road to their next destination, he’ll have them go into a bar and, just like Star Wars, this is not a pleasant bar. It’s dangerous in here. And we can see that, already, people don’t like them. The writer can then add any exposition he needs to during this scene, but now that exposition is happening in a situation that is worsening by the minute. There’s a threat looming, which adds so much more entertainment value to a scene over characters casually walking down a road chatting to each other.

To be clear, that scene is not in the script. But there are similar scenes like that. That’s the mindset this writer has. Each scene needs to entertain all on its own.  Each scene is driven by a situation occurring rather than people talking in random locations.  That mindset ensures that the reader is always going to want to keep reading. Cause they know that each scene is being maximized for entertainment value.

And then finally, the writer REALLY FLESHES OUT all the secondary characters in this story. This isn’t just where advanced writers separate themselves from intermediates. This is where the super-advanced writers separate themselves from the advanced.

Cause nobody wants to do this extra work of making every character in the group interesting. That’s why we’re still getting Star Wars movies 50 years later. Because George Lucas made sure that every character in that original Hero’s Journey group rocked. Ironically, Lucasfilm can’t come up with a new great character to save their life. But that’s the power of doing that extra work. Is that it can literally pay dividends 50 years later.

I am going to do everything in my power to convince this writer to let me review his script. Because it would not only get an [x] impressive. It would probably end up somewhere in my Top 25. I don’t know how it would get made. I’m racking my brain about that cause it’s a period piece and it’s not IP and it would cost between 100-150 million. But who knows? If we can get some buzz building for it on this site, it just may happen.

In the meantime, if you’re looking to get feedback so that you can get your script up to this level, shoot me an e-mail (carsonreeves1@gmail.com) and we’ll get to work!

Is Beef officially Netflix’s White Lotus?

There isn’t a whole lot going on in the movie box office world at the moment. The kind of people who go to Super Mario Galaxy aren’t the types who run to movie websites and excitedly taunt how much money their favorite video game turned movie is making. Which has made box office talk pretty boring the last couple of weeks.

A couple of small notes are that horror is not bulletproof, despite being the only genre Hollywood has been able to bank on as of late. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy only took in 13 million bucks.

I liked the angle on Cronin’s script. I wrote about how, when you pitch major IP, or anything that’s been in Hollywood for a while, you need an angle to your pitch that’s going to stand out from everyone else who’s pitching. Shifting the mummy lore over to a little girl felt different and fresh and, no doubt, is the angle that got the movie greenlit.

But here’s the funny thing about this town. The thing that gets you greenlit isn’t always the thing the audience wants. Sometimes, audiences want a good old fashioned mummy movie. But, as a Hollywood producer, when you get pitched that, you think, “Been there, done that.” You’d feel like you failed at your job if you greenlit that take.

“Nobody knows anything,” right? The famous William Goldman quote.

Which is bullshit by the way.

The mantra is a useful myth. But it’s not literally true. Hollywood, as a system, understands a great deal, arguably 90% of what drives outcomes. There is deep institutional knowledge around story construction, star value, release strategy, and audience segmentation. These variables aren’t random.

What remains unpredictable is the final 10%, the intangible convergence of taste, timing, tone, cultural mood, and audience reception. That margin resists modeling. It is where otherwise well-calculated projects fail to connect, and where outliers like Iron Lung emerge and outperform their tracking.

In other words, the industry isn’t blind. It’s operating with high clarity right up to the point where clarity stops being possible.

I’m sad to see Normal do so terribly (3 million bucks). It probably signals the end of Bob Odenkirk’s unique leading man career. They should’ve limited that film to streaming and it probably wouldn’t have hurt him so much. But those are risks you take when you go theatrical! Somebody’s got to take the fall.

I was keeping an eye on the comedy, “Busboys,” starring Theo Vonn and David Spade. I was asking the question, could comedy podcasters usher in a new theatrical comedy renaissance? But the flick barely made a million bucks. The error with this one is pretty obvious. Why are you casting a third tier aging comic in a role that doesn’t even make sense (why is a 55 year old trying to become a busboy). For any comedic 2-hander, the audience has to look at the pairing and laugh even before they’ve seen a single second of footage. When you looked at this pairing, you thought, “Huh?”

Since there was nothing dragging me to the theater this weekend, I checked out the pilot for the second season of Beef. This is a powerhouse cast here, a creator with a lot of buzz, and a show with a lot more money. What has that resulted in?

A mixed bag.

The first thing I noticed is that Netflix is trying to make “Beef” its “White Lotus.” It’s a very specific voice that’s aggressively character-driven, built around strong filmmaking, an incredible cast, and an affecting score. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the main character, Joshua, runs a ritzy country club. The shades of Murray Bartlett’s “Armond” from season 1 of White Lotus are strong.

The writing here is quite awesome at times.

Early on, we see country club manager Joshua (Oscar Isaac) and his wife, Lindsay (Carey Mulligan) get home after working a long day at the club, and get into this big fight. Meanwhile, two young workers at the club, Ashley and Austin, are head over heels for each other. Every single moment for them is bliss. Just being around each other and getting to kiss makes their day.

So, creator Lee Sung Jin does this really clever thing where he cuts back and forth between these two couples, one trying to rip each others’ heads off, the other trying to love each other as much as humanly possible. And the reason why this works, besides the fact that it creates a jarring juxtaposition, is that one of the strongest ways to reveal character is through comparison.

If you want to make it clear that one of your characters is a bad person, you can just show them doing bad things of course. But if you want to turbo-charge that message, put them in a scene with the nicest person possible. That way, their meanness will truly pop.

Why is this important? Because easily one of the biggest mistakes I see in screenwriting is writers not clearly conveying who their characters are right away. So you want to look for any tools you can that help you set up exactly who your character is. And comparison is one of those tools.

We leave this montage knowing, very overtly, that one of these couples has deep deep set problems and the other loves each other more than anything.

Despite this, there are a couple of things that keep this from becoming the prestige event that is White Lotus. The first is that the stakes here are low. The pilot is built around this moment where Joshua left his wallet at the club. Austin is asked to return it by the president, and Ashley comes with him.

The two go to their house at night just as Joshua and Lindsay are in that huge fight. Ashley starts recording it on her phone through the window (unbeknownst to Joshua and Lindsay) and even though Lindsay is the aggressor, Ashley starts recording at a moment where it looks like Joshua is the aggressor. Right then, Joshua and Lindsay spot the two outside, and Ashley and Austin run away.

So, looming in the background of this story is Ashley’s possession of this video. And, presumably, she’s going to choose to show that to someone at the club, or post it online. And that will probably start the season’s “beef.”

Those stakes are pretty low. In real life, the insanity we’ve seen through peoples’ worst behaviors being published via video are way way worse than anything that happens here. So it doesn’t really feel like Ashley has that much on Joshua. I suppose it’s enough to get him fired. And it probably will get him fired. But just as the inciting incident of a show, it’s pretty tame.

Compare it to White Lotus, where the inciting incident is always a murder. Those are real stakes. A video of an aggressive fight where nobody’s technically done anything illegal is not a high stakes situation. It’s a medium stakes situation. And you don’t want to build 8 episodes on top of a medium stakes situation.

I suppose the stakes could grow. We’ll see. But, for your sakes, as screenwriters who’re writing pilot scripts, you want to set up your stakes in that very first episode. Cause that’s the one you send out to everyone. You don’t send episode 2 out to anybody.

That’s another thing I find kind of weird about Beef. Nobody dies in Beef. There’s all this threat but the threat is all bark and no bite. At least in the first season and I’m guessing this season as well. So, despite the darkness it touts as its calling card, it doesn’t actually go to the furthest depths it can (death). I find that strange.

One thing that separates White Lotus from Beef is how they manage the audience’s emotional experience: whether the show pays you back for what it puts you through.

Every movie or show asks something of you. Your time, your attention, your emotional energy. If it’s going to lean into discomfort, tension, or ugliness, it has to return something on the other side. That can be humor, insight, release, momentum, even just the pleasure of watching it all unfold.

White Lotus understands that. It gets dark (sometimes very dark), but it constantly offsets that with sharp humor, absurdity, and a kind of voyeuristic fun. You’re never stuck in the discomfort. You’re riding it like a wave.

Beef, on the other hand, often sits in the discomfort longer without giving you the same kind of release. The tension accumulates, the situations tighten, and the emotional experience starts to feel heavier than what you’re getting back.

And that’s where you start to lose people. Not because it’s too negative but because the exchange stops feeling balanced.

The difference isn’t that one show is darker than the other. It’s that one understands how to make the darkness enjoyable, and the other sometimes forgets to.

With that said, it’s by no means severe. I’d say White Lotus is 60% positive and 40% negative whereas Beef is 55% negative and 45% positive. Which is why it remains watchable. And why I will continue to watch this season. Because I like all the actors here and the acting between Isaac and Mulligan, in particular, is next level. And creator Lee Sung Jin is good with plotting. He knows how to weave things around in unexpected ways. So, we’ll see what happens.

What did you think of Beef or any of the movies that came out this weekend?

This may low-key be one of the best dialogue tips on the planet

So, the other day, I was watching an interview with Drew Goddard for Project Hail Mary. I’ll be honest, I don’t read or watch a lot of screenwriter interviews these days. Mainly because I don’t learn anything new from them anymore. But this is one I wanted to check out because I think this guy is one of the best writers in Hollywood. He took two very hard books to adapt and made great movies out of them. And, if I’m being honest, after reading the book, I didn’t think this one was going to be very good. I thought the alien stuff had the potential to be a movie killer. Which is something I’m going to talk more about in this month’s newsletter. Stay tuned.

But getting back to Drew, he said something that struck me. He was asked how difficult writing dialogue was for this film and he immediately replied, “Dialogue is easy if you get the outline right.” Now, if I were a beginner screenwriter, I would hate that advice. Because outlining and dialogue don’t connect in any obvious way. But, having the benefit of hindsight of reading a million scripts and writing an entire book on dialogue, I can now tell you that this is one of the best pieces of advice for writing dialogue that you’ll find. And I want to break down why.

The first thing you need to understand is why we write an outline in the first place. Most people will tell you it’s a way to plan your story out. That’s obviously part of it. But the sneaky important reason you write an outline is to set up a story that always has FORWARD MOMENTUM. You’re making sure there is always an ENGINE underneath every sequence of your story. Because if you resolve a major thread early on in your script and you don’t replace it with a new engine, there’s nothing pushing your story forward. Which means your story will sit there, languishing, unclear where to go or what to do.

That’s what an outline should be doing. Making sure that each act has momentum. Making sure that you’re threading in plots and subplots that are always pushing things forward. How do you do this? The easiest way is to create characters with goals. A goal that spans the entire story, like Liam Neeson’s goal to save his daughter in Taken, is the easiest way to accomplish this. But not all stories are like this.

So if goals fade, you need to replace them with new goals. Or you need to switch the focus onto another character who has a goal. At first, in Star Wars, Luke Skywalker has no goal other than to get off his farm one day. So what’s the engine driving that section of the story? It’s Darth Vader trying to find those droids to retrieve the Death Star plans. Only once Luke’s parents are killed does he now have a goal – to help Obi-Wan deliver the Death Star plans to the Rebels.

You can, of course, have multiple characters pursuing multiple goals, which is the best case scenario, because it supercharges your story engine. But as long as at least one major character has a goal, and that goal has some level of importance behind it, it will be enough to keep the engine revving and keep the story moving along.

So, how does this relate to dialogue? Well, if you have a strong outline, and you’ve used that outline to make sure that there’s a strong engine underneath each part of your story, then we get to the real nitty-gritty of how this all works. Creating engines for pieces of your story ensures that each individual scene is moving the story forward. More specifically, the characters in the scenes want something (their “goal”). That want, that desire to get something (often from the other person) is what creates good dialogue.

Why is this? Well, one of the elements of strong dialogue is that, when a character speaks, he’s speaking because he wants something. That want is what gives his speech direction. Now the scene has a point. Main Character wants something. Will he get it or not? In that scene, because the character is speaking to achieve something, every line of dialogue will have purpose. And then, when he either succeeds or fails at achieving the goal, the scene is over.

When Goddard says that poor outlines result in poor dialogue, what he’s saying is that the opposite chain of command occurs. The outline is thin. There are parts of it where you don’t yet know what’s going to happen. This creates large gaps in the story where no clear engine is pushing the story forward. When you try to write a scene inside one of those gaps, characters often don’t have clear goals. Or if they do have goals, they’re weak. When you try to write dialogue inside a scene like that, it becomes infinitely harder.

Think about it. What does a character say if they don’t want anything?

In fact, if you’ve ever had that scene in your script where you’re constantly trying to rewrite the dialogue because it never quite feels right, there’s a good chance that that section of the script is weak, which is creating a lack of a story engine, which is weakening the goals inside the individual scenes, and if you try and place two characters speaking inside one of those scenes, you’re basically guiding lambs to the slaughter. Why are these characters speaking if they don’t have anything to say?

What then often happens, is you start trying to jestermaxx your dialogue. You try to make the jokes funnier. You try to liven up the observations and hot takes, pushing with everything you’ve got to make the conversation entertaining. Sometimes you even come up with some really clever stuff. But deep down you know the truth, which is that your characters are just babbling at each other. And when people read that scene, they’re not praising your dialogue for being clever. They’re bored out of their mind because nothing’s actually being said. That’s the dirty secret of dialogue. Nobody cares unless you’ve written an entertaining story where people need to say things to move storylines forward. And if your outline isn’t in place to make sure that that’s always happening, no amount of clever dialogue is going to save your script.

How does this look in practice? Let’s say you’re writing a scene about a young man meeting up with his father. The two don’t have the best relationship. They haven’t seen in each other in a while. The young man is struggling in life. He and his girlfriend are close to getting kicked out of their apartment. So he’s called this meeting with the intention of asking his dad for money.

It’s easy to write good dialogue for this scene. Why? Because the young man has a clear goal and the goal is important.

How would you write this scene? Well, the son knows he can’t come right out with, “I need money.” He’s got to at least pretend he cares about his father’s life a little. So he might ask his father what’s going on right now. Maybe ask about mom. Ask about work. The ultimate goal of getting money from the dad is buying time in the scene. The subtext is strong since we know he’s only saying all this other stuff to make the money ask feel more organic. That’s the ideal situation for a scene. Clear directive. Resistance from somewhere that creates doubt. You can write a million different variations of that scene and most of them will work.

Now let’s change the setup a bit. Let’s just say it’s a 22 year old young man meeting up with his father after they haven’t seen each other in a while. The son doesn’t want anything. The dad doesn’t either. It’s just them reconnecting after a long time.

I want you to imagine writing that scene. Notice how much more difficult the plan for the scene becomes. Where do you even start? You can start with, “Hi,” then awkward silence. Yeah, there’s something here because of the scarred relationship. But without establishing what each character wants, chances are you’re going to have these two mumbling at each other for two and a half pages and call it a scene. You’ll justify it by saying it’s “true to real life” but readers don’t care about that shit. They care about being entertained. And a vague meeting scene between father and son without any real direction is not entertaining.

I want to make something really clear here. Because when most screenwriters think of dialogue, they think of flash. They think of trying to make the dialogue as interesting as possible. In reality, though, what the reader really cares about is being pulled into the emotion of the scene. They want to wonder what’s going to happen next. And so “great lines of dialogue” are not what’s going to win them over. What’s going to win them over is: This character wants something important and, therefore, I want to see if they get it.

As long as you have that, your dialogue can be pretty barebones and readers will still be pulled into your scene.

Again, this all goes back to the outline. Make sure that every section in that outline, that takes you from page 1 to page 100, from Act 1 to Act 3, from Sequence 1 to Sequence 8, all of it needs at least one primary character with a strong goal. That will ensure that each section has a powerful engine running beneath it. And every scene you write within that section will have a character with a goal in it, which’ll make your dialogue write itself. I’ll leave you with a very simple example of this from Project Hail Mary. This is where government worker Eva first shows up to Grace’s work to recruit him. She has the goal. The goal drives the dialogue. Happy weekend!

What is the gangbusters screenwriting lesson within Project Hail Mary that nobody’s talking about?

Project Hail Mary dropped just 23% in its third weekend. Is this amazing hold because of Ryan Gosling? Yes. Is it because of a stellar marketing campaign? Yes. But when a movie holds this well, there’s one reason that rises above all others – THE SCRIPT.

Only awesome stories have 23% drops. Because awesome stories hit audiences more powerfully. Which means audiences come back from this film and tell other people about it, who then go see it themselves. It is the oldest and most effective form of marketing there is.

Now, there are many reasons why this screenplay is great. I’ve gone over some of them on the site. But I want to tell you a secret screenwriting reason this movie is killing at the box office that nobody’s talking about. It’s a reason that Hollywood keeps forgetting. But it’s been around forever and a day.

Here are some of the movies that should cue you in on the tip…

Step-Brothers
Bridesmaids
Swingers
Back to the Future
Good Will Hunting
Midnight Cowboy

Know what it is?

Okay, let’s put up the final movie that represents this tip, what some say is the greatest movie of all time.

The Shawshank Redemption.

Now do you know what the tip is?

It’s FRIENDSHIP.

Actually, it’s more specific than that. It’s a love story told through the lens of friendship. A platonic love story. Audiences absolutely love this simple formula. Two people fighting against the world to achieve what they need to achieve.

And Project Hail Mary falls into that category perfectly. It’s a love story told through the lens of friendship between Grace and Rocky.

Here’s how to make this formula work. You imply that the friendship has to end at some point. Just like a love story. You have to tell us that the lovers may not get together at the end.

I was just watching Back to the Future the other day again. Doc and Marty’s future is threatened by the fact that Doc is dead in the future. So, the very act of succeeding results in a friendship dying. That’s what makes these narratives so special.

And it’s the same thing here in Project Hail Mary. Grace and Rocky are trying to save the galaxy together but by doing so, they will never see each other again. That creates this looming feeling of worry and sadness in the audience, that makes things all the more amazing when the two end up together at the end.

So, why aren’t there more movies about friendship? We’ve established it’s a powerful blueprint to create an exceptional film. Well, until recently, Hollywood always thought you needed the female love interest to make a movie work. So, that was the relationship that always took precedence.

That’s why, when you saw The Shawshank Redemption back when it came out, it felt so different. There was no love interest.

But anyway, building a story around friendship can be dramatically powerful. And if you can couple it with a high concept like Project Hail Mary did, well then watch out, because you can take that movie to the box office stars.

Not all the entertainment news out there is as peachy as Ryan Gosling’s hair, unfortunately. There’s a really bad show that just debuted this week. It’s called The Miniature Wife. Now, you may say, “Uhhhh, Carson? Why would you think that show would be anything other than terrible?”

I assumed it was probably bad, yes. But I love Matthew McFaddyen! And I like Elizabeth Banks. Also, I really want someone to make the movie, “Kitten,” (scroll down in link for review) from a script I reviewed a few months ago. And I was wondering if this show would, in any way, negate that project.

That answer came pretty quickly: DEFINITELY NOT.

Cause this show is terrible.

I mean ACHINGLY terrible.

But here’s the good news. Failures like this can teach writers something and this show actually has a powerful lesson you can learn from the poor writing on display.

It’s something I call “SETUP BLOAT.”

I’m highly aware of Setup Bloat at the moment because I’ve consulted on several scripts recently, all of which had setup bloat in them. And setup bloat is a uniquely evil issue in that it kills your script immediately. Because it’s happening during the setup. And the setup is where readers decide, quickly, whether they’re in or out. If you have Setup Bloat, the reader will not make it through your first act.

So, what is Setup Bloat?

It consists of two things.

One: THERE’S WAY TOO MUCH GOING IN YOUR STORY
Two: THE EXPOSITION REQUIRED TO INTRODUCE ALL OF THOSE PLOT ELEMENTS

Exposition will always be required in your first act. You need to set up your story. Which means you need to write exposition. But here’s the thing about exposition in your setup: The reader only allows for you to provide so much exposition before they tap out. (if you want to learn how to effortlessly add exposition, my dialogue book has an entire chapter dedicated to it)

I think you know where this is going. If you don’t have a ton of plot to set up, then you won’t have to write that much exposition.

However, if you have a super complex plot with a ton of moving parts, then the majority of your first act is going to be exposition. Every moment is going to be you introducing information that the reader needs in order to understand the story. That’s Setup Bloat: When your first act is so over-stuffed with exposition that very little entertainment is allowed to breathe through.

Which is exactly what happens in The Miniature Wife. First we set up the unnecessarily complex situation that two people who are already married are deciding to stay married. Then we set up the husband’s miniaturization invention. Then we set up the complex funding requirements for this invention. Then we set up the wife breaking up with her secret boyfriend. But not a boyfriend she physically cheated on her husband with. This was just an emotional affair. We also set up that she used to be a famous author but hasn’t had a best seller in 15 years. Then we set up that her emotional affair boyfriend secretly pretended to be her agent and submitted a short story she wrote without her knowledge to the New Yorker. But what he didn’t know was that she stole that short story from one of her university students. Stole it to secretly keep on her hard drive in order to pretend to herself that it was hers. So now she has to go to that student and convince her to leave the country for six months, isolate, all so that she’ll have no idea that she, the wife, stole her short story when it gets published in the New Yorker.

And that’s just some of the setup!!!!!!

Do you see, now, how Setup Bloat can destroy a script before it even gets going? I don’t think William Goldman in his prime would’ve been able to manage that level of setup in a first act.

To be clear, part of what makes a good screenwriter a good screenwriter is making exposition invisible. It’s finding ways to make scenes entertaining on their own, before covertly slipping the necessary exposition into them. But if you don’t know how to do that, you end up with setups like The Miniature Wife, where it’s not only all exposition, but it’s clunky obvious exposition. It’s clunky setup scene after clunky setup scene.

How do we avoid this? Don’t write a billion threads into your plot. Or, if you do have a lot of plot, space it out. Especially if you’re writing a TV show. You have so much more time to delve into your plotlines in TV writing. You don’t have to stuff all of them into the world’s biggest trash bag and dump it on your reader in the first act of the first episode.

I’m kinda disappointed. I wanted a cool Matthew McFaddyen TV show to watch. But if there’s a silver lining to this, it’s that he’ll be able to look for another job right away after this one gets canceled next week.

I hate when Hollywood promotes terrible films. And today, I’m speaking my truth!

I’m tempted to spend the next 1500 words unloading on the atrocity of a movie that was The Secret Agent. Let me explain why. People were trying to tell me this movie was good. People were hyping this movie up. But all I needed to do was see the poster, see 10 seconds of the trailer, and I was willing to bet my life that this movie would be terrible.

You know how I knew that? Because I’ve seen this song and dance for decades now. An indie distributor picks up a movie specific to another country where the production value is competent enough that you can distribute it in the US and not get laughed at. They then rev their spin machine up, throw out words like, “masterpiece,” “brilliant,” and “auteur director,” and I’m pretty sure the trades are co-opted into this wool-over-the-eyes tomfoolery, resulting in high RT scores, convincing everyone under the sun that this movie is amazing.

What’s The Secret Agent about?

I DON’T KNOW!

I watched 50 minutes of it and I STILL DON’T KNOW WHAT THE MOVIE IS ABOUT.

“You can’t judge a movie if you’ve only seen 50 minutes of it, Carson.”

YES YOU CAN.

IF THE AUDIENCE DOESN’T KNOW WHAT A MOVIE IS ABOUT AFTER 50 MINUTES, THAT MOVIE SUCKS.

One of the truest screenwriting rules there is: SET UP WHAT YOUR MOVIE IS ABOUT AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

This is such basic screenwriting advice, it’s on the verge of no longer needing to be taught. Cause people just know. Duh, tell the audience what your movie is about.

The Secret Agent starts off with a decent scene. It’s 1970s Brazil and a man is getting his car filled up at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. There’s a dead body covered up with cardboard off to the side. The gas station attendant says the man was a thief who tried to rob the place a few days ago so they shot him and the police haven’t come to pick up the body yet.

Then a cop car shows up and very methodically inspects our hero’s car. The scene is tense. It’s suspenseful. I thought, “Maybe I’ll be wrong about this movie. Maybe it will be good.”

Nope. It’s all downhill from here.

We then follow this random dude, our main character, driving this car across Brazil. He shows up at some random collection of apartments and starts staying there. Why? No idea. It takes the writer 20 minutes to, literally, set up arriving at an apartment.

Oh, you know what comes with the apartment? A cat with two heads. I’m not kidding. This is a serious movie by the way. It wants to be taken very very very seriously.

Cat with two heads though! Gotta throw that cat with two heads in there.

Why?

Because that’s the kind of random bullshit hack screenwriters think is good writing. Throw in random nonsense that does nothing for the story.

By the way, quick screenwriting tip. This is the easiest way to judge a creative choice as a screenwriter: Does it do anything for the story? This did nothing. That’s how you know it’s a garbage choice.

Then our hero goes and retrieves his son, who he hasn’t seen in a long time. It’s not explained who’s taking care of his son. Maybe it’s our hero’s parents? This screenwriter has no interest in helping us understand even the basic beats of what’s going on in this story.

Seeing his son again is treated like a really heavy deal.

BUT NOBODY TELLS US WHY!!!

God forbid the writer, Hacky McHackems The Screenwriting Wonderboy, share information that might help us enjoy the story.

Randomly, we cut to another plot about a shark with a human leg in it. No, I’m not kidding. It’s a shark story now. Then we come back and hang with our hero as he lounges around at his apartment complex, carelessly stripping away minutes that could be used for, you know, SETTING UP AN ACTUAL STORY.

Oddly, his son isn’t with him anymore. It’s never explained why. We literally just had this super intense scene where he comes and gets his long lost son back.  But now he’s banging some chick up in Apartment 2C and I guess Little Johnny doesn’t matter anymore.

We’re getting to about the 45 minute mark of the movie and NOTHING HAS HAPPENED! Just complete randomness with no character goals set up or overarching story set up. Atrocious screenwriting on full display.

Then, without any context, we cut to our hero…. WHO NOW WORKS AT A NEWSPAPER! How did this happen? Nobody tells us. Actually, it’s worse than that. We just see him at some work and are expected to know he’s a journalist now and this is a newspaper.

You don’t move a character to a brand new location in life and then just cut to him working. You have to SHOW HIM GET THE JOB, lol. There has to be a progression so that we understand a) what kind of job he wants, b) why does he want that job, c) what are his options, d) how difficult is it to get the job? e) show a freaking interview and the aftermath so we can build suspense around whether he gets the job or not. You know, basic drama.

This just cuts to him working. I didn’t even know this guy was a writer until 50 minutes into the film!

You’re probably wondering, at this point, why I’m so angry.

Here’s why.

Because I spend my life trying to teach people how to be good writers. It consumes most of the minutes in my day.

So when Hollywood unleashes this trash on us and brainwashes young ignorant writers into believing that this is good storytelling, it pisses me off. Because now you have young writers believing that randomly introducing cats with two heads into an extremely serious drama is great writing. And that writer is going to go off and write a bunch of garbage and be confused why nobody likes his screenplays. And he’ll give up because nobody ever taught him the correct way to write.

With that in mind, let’s try and use this failure of a film for good. Let’s at least learn a lesson here. So, here’s the big lesson I want you to take away from this film.

SET UP WHAT YOUR STORY IS ABOUT AS SOON AS POSSIBLE

The more “Hollywood” a film is (by that I mean: a film made by a major studio) the earlier that setup should be. This means that if you’re writing a spec script, you want it to be very clear what your movie is about as soon as possible. This doesn’t mean you have to state the exact plot. But we should have a very good idea of what the movie is about within ten minutes.

We know we’re going to have people on an island full of dinosaurs in Jurassic Park within ten minutes.

You have more leeway with setup time in an indie-type script. But you’d be surprised at how quickly you’ve known what your favorite indie movies were about when you first watched them. It was likely within 15 minutes. And, at the very latest, it would’ve been 25 minutes in, by the end of the first act.

That’s because if you push the setup of your movie past the first act, it’s the equivalent of a drunk guy telling you a story at a party and they never get to the point. They’re telling you about all these little things (a shark with a leg in it, a cat with two heads, and then I was at this gas station and there was this dead body in front of my car covered up by cardboard) but you don’t know what it is they’re trying to say. This movie, The Secret Agent, is the cinematic equivalent of the drunk babbling party guy.

Now for those of you who will inevitably tell me that if I just kept watching, I would’ve gotten to the “good part.” Try telling a producer that the next time you don’t reveal the point of your story until page 50. “Well, Mr. Producer, if you just would’ve kept reading, you would’ve gotten to the good part!”

Yeah, tell me how that goes. Cause I don’t think it’s going to go like this: “Ohhhhhhh! You mean the good part came after the first hour!!?? Why didn’t tell me! If I would’ve known that, I would’ve kept reading!”

My final message to use is this: Don’t let Hollywood brainwash you. They try to tell you that every movie is great. They’re lying the majority of the time. And it’s up to you to use your own discernment to evaluate these movies. Don’t listen to other people. Pay attention to how the story is affecting you. Pay attention to if it’s propulsive or if it’s wandering. Pay attention to how the main character makes you feel and if you care about their journey. If it’s providing good feelings in those areas, it’s a good movie. If not, it’s probably bad, like The Secret Agent.