Worst promotional pictures for a film ever?

The schizophrenic 2015 Summer box office refuses to go away! Neither of this weekend’s contestants, Terminator: Genisys or Magic Mike XXL, finished in the top two. Those spots went to stellar holdovers Inside Out and Jurassic World. The studios responsible for the new entries, Paramount and Warner Brothers, are trying to blame a weird July 4th weekend layout (where July 4th didn’t fall on a weekday), but come on, let’s be honest here. Nobody wanted to see these films because of a simple reason: they didn’t look that good.

I mean Terminator: Genisys did so bad, it finished 20 million dollars below Terminator: Salvataion’s opening weekend box office, a movie that famously found a way to make a post-apocalyptic world dominated by killer robots boring. What’s strange is that every single person on the planet knew this movie was dead in the water EXCEPT for the Terminator producers and Arnold Schwarzenegger. How can a group of people be so out of touch?

Well, I have a counter-argument for that. I believe that if the script for Terminator: Genisys was good, and that script translated into a good film, word-of-mouth and slamming reviews could’ve saved this film. So why didn’t that happen?

Well, the writers of Terminator: Genysis made an age-old screenwriting mistake. They wrote a complicated time travel story. I’m going to say something here that I BEG all sci-fi writers heed for the remainder of their writing careers: COMPLICATED MAINSTREAM TIME-TRAVEL MOVIES DO NOT WORK.

Time travel is one of the trickiest sub-genres to get right. That’s because they intrinsically don’t make sense. If you travel back in time to stop something and it doesn’t work, you just travel back and try it again. The genre is a black hole for plot holes. And the more you keep travelling around in time, the more of these plot holes keep popping up.

Terminator: Genisys is all about characters travelling back in time to stop moments from previous Terminator timelines. Like an aging Arnold Terminator growing up with Sarah Connor and then fighting his younger Terminator self when he shows up in 1984.

This is a DEADLY but common mistake with young eager sci-fi writers. They say, “Ooh, that’d be so cool. The old Terminator fighting the young Terminator when he arrives in the past!” And it is kind of a cool idea. But if you manipulate a time-travel timeline that’s already iffy as it is solely to accommodate a cool scene, you’ve upset the entire foundation of your story.

When you write anything, whether it’s a complex time-travel plot or a simple coming-of-age film, you must avoid “But wait” moments. “But wait” moments are where your audience pulls out of the movie to ask, “But wait. If that happens, then the other thing doesn’t make sense.” Or, “But wait. If he did this then how come he couldn’t do it earlier?” Time travel movies are cess pools for “But wait” moments.

For that reason, when you write a time travel movie, you keep the time travel stuff as simple as possible. It’s why the original Terminator worked so well. A terminator came back from the future to kill a woman. The whole movie, then, was not about Sarah Conner jumping through time portholes to escape the Terminator. It was a chase movie. Plain and simple. No gimmicks. That’s why it worked.

James Cameron knew this going in for the sequel as well. He didn’t add some silly time-travel plot. The only thing he changed was adding a new Terminator. There was some stuff about trying to destroy Skynet before it could take over the world, but that was still easy to understand and buy into.

Another example of time travel screwing up a movie was Back to the Future 2. Now I can already hear some of you guys grumbling. “Back to the Future 2 was great, Carson!” No, it wasn’t. The plot was borderline ridiculous. What you liked about Back to the Future 2 (as did I) was that it still had 2 of the most lovable characters in cinematic history, Marty McFly and Doc Brown. Those two are what made Back to the Future 2 watchable.

But the travelling to the future only to find out that they needed to travel to the past to save an alternate present. It was a mess. And I remember Roger Ebert pointing out that even the characters looked confused trying to explain it (needing a chalkboard to do so). And this is yet another reason to avoid complicated time travel movies. They require tons of exposition, which eats up valuable story time.

Now some of you might point out movies like Primer as examples of complicated time travel movies that work. But Primer isn’t a mainstream movie. It’s a $7000 indie movie that nobody outside of cinephiles saw and when you make a movie for that kind of money for that kind of audience, you can take risks and play around because you’re not necessarily required to make sense (and it’s debatable whether Primer does make sense).

My point is, time-travel is a plot device that you can get lost in. And I get it. It’s fun to play with. Who doesn’t want to solve a time travel problem by adding more time travel! But I’m warning you as someone who reads A LOT OF BAD TIME-TRAVEL SCRIPTS, if you’re writing a sci-fi movie, it’s best to keep the time-travel plot as simple as possible. You can be complex with character development and the plot itself. But don’t add layers upon layers of time travel unless you want to “But wait” yourself out of a movie.

Speaking of time travel, I bet the producers of Magic Mike XXL are wishing they could go back in time and not make their sequel.

Is this image from the first Magic Mike or the second? The fact that you don’t know is the problem

Granted, my understanding of why this movie didn’t work isn’t as complete as Terminator: Genisys, but I have some ideas. For starters, this isn’t a sequel-type movie. Sequel movies are action movies, adventure movies, sci-fi movies, and comedies. There’s nothing about this particular concept that screams “need more of these.” It feels very much like a “one-off.”

The producers didn’t seem to realize this and that cost them. Because even without that issue looming, sequels need to abide by one law. You need to give the audience MORE. Something bigger. And when you watched the Magic Mike XXL promos, it looked like we were getting the same.

This was the same mistake The Avengers 2 made, which isn’t coming anywhere near the domestic box office of the original. They went as big as they could in the original, leaving them no room to go bigger with the sequel. So people said, “That looks the same.” And it was. It was the same movie (probably even smaller). And that’s death for a sequel.

Using Terminator as an example here, Terminator 2 brought in a bigger badder Terminator. That’s why people showed up to that movie. Because we were getting something new. Magic Mike should’ve realized, “We aren’t a typical sequel film. So we definitely need to find something bigger to bring people in.” I don’t know what that would be. The promise of Channing Tatum full-frontal? Based on the audience for the film, maybe. But a carbon-copy stripper film isn’t going to be enough to lure people to theaters.

Unfortunately, next week doesn’t look much better. Minions is the only major film opening. But the following week we get Ant-Man AND Trainwreck, so that should be fun. And remember, screenwriters – following and dissecting box office is an essential part of your jobs. You need to know what’s doing well and what isn’t, and also WHY. Studios are fickle and terrified and reactionary and one major bomb in a genre can change the development tracks of all six studios. For example, you don’t want to go out wide with your complicated time-travel stripper script this week. Table that for awhile and work on something else. Like dinosaurs attacking Los Angeles or something. I’m only half-kidding. It’s not like Jurassic Park has IP on dinosaurs. Man, the more I think about it, the more I think a studio would actually buy that. Anyway, as always, good luck!

So a few weeks ago I was watching a short film (actually, it was the one I linked to in my newsletter) and I marveled at how easy it is to stand out in that medium. You have so many tools available to you. You can do something funky with the color grading (the green tint used in The Matrix). You can add a weird soundtrack (Gregory Go Boom). You can play with the camera angles, add creative camera movement, dress the set in a weird way (a la Wes anderson). The opportunities are endless.

Then you slide over to the screenplay side and… all of that is gone. You’re working with black and white. Not even images. Just words. There’s no musical cue to set the tone or sound effect to heighten the atmosphere. And that got me thinking. What can writers do to make their scripts stand out? I started thinking back to all the scripts I’ve read and specifically to the ones that left an impression. Was it only about the story? Or were there specific areas where you could make an impression? That’s the question I want to answer today. Here are six things you can do to make your script stand out from the pack.

Take pride in your presentation – Scripts riddled with weird presentation issues leave a bad taste in my mouth. Like the other day I was reading a script where a character name was at the bottom of the page, and the dialogue for that character was at the top of the next page. How am I supposed to see you as a professional after that? So start using professional screenwriting software, whether it be Final Draft, Fade In, even Celtx. This takes care of 90% of your presentation issues. From there, aim for a zero-mistake policy with your grammar and spelling. And avoid manic writing styles (lots of capitalization, underlining, italicizing). You may think you NEED TO WRITE WITH A BUNCH OF CAPITAL LETTERS AND BOLD AND ITALICS TO STAND OUT but all this does is make you look unsure of yourself – like you don’t think your story is good enough to be told without screaming. Whether I like a script or not, I always respect the writer who takes pride in their work. Those scripts always stand out to me.

Voice – Identifying something you want to write about is only half the battle. The other half is identifying how you’re going to present it – how your specific presentation is going to make it unique. This is the most effective way of standing out in screenwriting – writing in a unique voice. Take note, however, that “voice” has a volume dial. You can turn your voice up to “10” (tell your time travel story through the subconscious of a rabbit with Tourette’s Syndrome) but that might be too weird. On the flip side, if you don’t turn the “voice volume” up at all, nobody’s going to hear you. Take Tuesday’s two Narcos pilots. The first draft was slow, droll, painfully linear, and something we’ve seen a million times before. It lacked a single unique trait. The second draft shifted the perspective to a disembodied voice over and focused on a whirlwind retelling of Columbia’s exciting drug trade history. The exact same subject matter went from being boring to being fun – and it was all due to the voice it was told in – one that was more energetic and that changed up the perspectives of the main characters. So think hard about how you’re going to present your material. It has a huge impact on the read.

Start telling a story and never stop – Too many writers start their scripts in “set up” mode. They’re focused on setting up characters, relationships, backstory, jobs, plot exposition. As a result, we feel like we’re back in 6th grade reading comprehension class. Like, “Oh man, I better write down that John here lost his brother when he was 10 or I’m going to get an F.” Scripts should never feel like work, especially spec scripts. To that end, start telling a story from the very first line of your script and don’t stop until you type “The End.” The other day I rented this amazing foreign film called “Wild Tales.” It starts out on a plane, and an older man begins hitting on the woman next to him. Within 90 seconds, the two realize that they have a mutual friend. As they begin talking about this friend, someone in a nearby row pops up and says, “I’m sorry. I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation. I know that man as well.” And then another person pops up, and then another. We begin to realize that everyone on this plane knows this man. I’m not going to tell you what happens next to drive my point home. You’re already hooked. You want to know how all these people know the same person and you want to know what happens next. That’s what telling a story is about – it’s about hooking the reader immediately and not letting them go. Too many writers believe in some unwritten rule that it’s okay to bore the reader for awhile as long as you entertain them later. I’m sorry but it doesn’t work like that.

Thoughtful character introductions – It always leaves an impression on me when a writer writes thoughtful descriptive character introductions. Characters are really important. They’re the lifeblood of your story. And when you watch a movie, you get a sense of the character right away just by the way they look. Think about any of the characters in The Big Lebowski (or any Coen Brothers film for that matter). They really make an impression when they arrive onscreen, right? Well, you should try to replicate that on the page. And the only way you’re going to do that is with a thoughtful description that captures the character’s essence. To achieve this, identify a character’s defining characteristic and make that the focal point of their description. Here’s how The Dude is introduced in The Big Lebowski: “We are tracking in on a fortyish man in Bermuda shorts and sunglasses at the dairy case. He is the Dude. His rumpled look and relaxed manner suggest a man in whom casualness runs deep.” Isn’t that so much better than, “This is the Dude, a bored-looking man who walks through the supermarket isle?”

Paint a picture when you write – Lots of writers use the Dragnet approach to screenwriting (“Just the facts ma’am.”). So they’ll describe a bedroom this way: “The room is messy and has a single bed in the corner.” There’s nothing wrong with this. But come on. You’re a writer! Be creative. Paint us a picture. Maybe, “The room is populated with endless stacks of old Popular Science magazines. The bed in the corner is buried in various fast food bags.” You see how much more information the second description gives us? How much more you know about the person living in that room? And I know what you’re thinking: “But you tell us to keep our writing sparse, Carson.” That’s true. If a room isn’t relevant to the story, a quick and dirty description is fine. But if a location is relevant to the story or your characters, take a little extra time and paint a picture for us. Just do it in as few words but do it. If your entire script is told in a “just the facts ma’am” manner, it’ll register in the reader’s head as a big ball of genericness.

At least one larger-than-life character – When I read a script, I need at least one character who pops off the page. It doesn’t have to be the main character. But it’s gotta be someone. That way, I’m always looking forward to that character coming back (and that keeps me reading your script!). The most obvious example of this is Hannibal from Silence of the Lambs. Just a larger than life character who’s constantly surprising us. But your memorable character can be someone who’s crazy (The Joker), funny (George Clooney’s character in Gravity), a little bit dangerous (Quint from Jaws). If every character in your story is stuck firmly on the ground, you’ve probably got a pretty boring screenplay. You need that one character who’s at least 500 feet above sea level.

To sum up, I think the biggest way to stand out as a screenwriter is to be creative where others settle for being ordinary. Are you the writer who’s going to mail in one more generic car chase? Or are you going to put your character in a stationary bullet-proof super car with 20 cops firing AK-47s at it from less than 10 feet away and your hero has nowhere to go (Captain America 2). Are you going to give us one more generic boy-meets-girl rom-com? Or are you going to put that relationship in a blender like 500 Days of Summer? Are you going to demonstrate your main character’s detachment from life by making him yet another drunk? Or are you going to pull a Collateral Beauty and have him mindlessly building domino sculptures all day? Remember guys, it’s easy for readers to measure effort. We know when you’ve really put a lot into a scene and when you’ve mailed it in. You can never trick the reader. So put every ounce of your soul into every ounce of your screenplay and I promise you, you’ll stand out.

The Scriptshadow Newsletter is Out! If you didn’t receive it, check your SPAM and PROMOTIONS folders. It should be there. And it’s a good one. I review the hottest screenplay in town!

Genre: Thriller
Premise: When a newly minted partner at his firm goes to spend the weekend with his old friends, the three of whom own a successful hedge fund, he begins to suspect that they’re involved in some major illegal activity.
About: The 1983 film, The Osterman Weekend, is probably best known for being directed by the legendary Sam Peckinpah, as well as having a stellar cast (Rutger Hauer, John Hurt, Craig T. Nelson, Dennis Hoppper, and Burt Lancaster). It was around 2007 when people first got the idea to remake the film, and since then, it’s gone through a series of rewrites and restarts. The original book was written by Robert Ludlum, who’s best known for birthing the Bourne franchise. This is the most recent known draft and was written by Jesse Wigutow, who’s been doing well for himself lately. He wrote the latest Tron movie before it was cancelled by Disney. And he also wrote the latest Crow film, which we’re being told is coming soon.
Writer: Jesse Wigutow (based on the novel by Robert Ludlum)
Details: 121 pages- 6/12/12 draft

The Damester for Tanner?

I think it was Steven Soderbergh who once said, “Why do we keep screwing up all these classic movies. If you’re going to remake a film, find one that had a good concept but bad execution.” In other words, find great ideas that they screwed up. And that appears to be the idea with an Osterman Weekend remake, a 1983 film that was loved by, well, nobody.

But I’m a big fan of these types of ideas. Seemingly small films with big concepts at their core – high stakes, the potential for lots of conflict and surprises. A guy stuck in the middle of nowhere with friends who may or may not be planning to kill him? That’s a movie there. In fact, this is the exact type of idea I’d like to see in a Scriptshadow 250 entry. Cheap to shoot but bursting with ideas inside.

Does The Osterman Weekend do its job and improve upon the original? Well, I can’t answer that question because, like the rest of America, I never saw the original. But now that I’ve read the script, I have a better idea of what may have held the film back.

The Osterman Weekend follows 35 year-old John Tanner, a tax attorney who’s just made partner. Tanner’s life is looking up, as in addition to his promotion, he and his wife are planning to have their first child.

Every year, Tanner heads up to an island off the coast of Maine, to join his three best friends – Loewy, Tremayne, and Osterman. The four of them descend back into their frat boy days, drinking, fishing, and generally being idiots. It’s a harmless weekend of rekindling their friendship.

Except this weekend isn’t going to be harmless. Loewy, Tremayne, and Osterman own one of the hottest hedge funds in the country. Their returns have been so incredible, they’ve left competing hedge funds in the dust.

On his way there, Tanner is confronted by a couple of men from Homeland Security, who inform Tanner that his buddies are bad news – they’re stealing money. And they want Tanner to help take them down.

Tanner’s not sure whether to believe this or not, but when the men tell him that Tanner could land in prison if he doesn’t help, he’s forced to wear a wire and collect intelligence on his buddies.

The weekend basically follows Tanner as he tries to extract information from his friends. As the weekend goes on, he learns that his buddies are involved in something far more complicated than simply building an elaborate money scam. And maybe their situation is more sympathetic than his pals at Homeland have made him believe.

Who does Tanner trust? Who does he help? In the end, he’ll have to decide whether to go with what’s best for him and his wife, or go with what’s best for the friends he’s known all his life.

When I heard about The Osterman Weekend, I thought I was going to get a really subtle thriller about a guy who ignorantly shows up at his buddies’ weekend party, only to slowly realize that they were criminals capable of doing something horrible – possibly even killing him. That’s the movie I wanted to see.

Instead, The Osterman Weekend comes at you like a giant hammer, banging its way into your skull. Gone is all hope of subtlety when before we even GET to the weekend spot, we’re already bombarded with two agents who are telling our hero that his friends are evil.

From that point on, I found myself completely distanced from the story. It was just so BIG and IN YOUR FACE. Even the writing screamed at you, with lots of CAPITALIZATION EVERYWEHRE YOU LOOKED.

Doesn’t this story work better if Tanner shows up on this island, thinking he’s in for a fun weekend, and then slowly discovers clues that his friends aren’t who they say they are? That they’re planning to do something horrible? And he has to quietly investigate what that is without them catching on? I think so.

Another frustrating thing about The Osterman Weekend was the lack of hand-holding. Whenever you’re covering a complicated job, or subject matter, or plan, it’s your duty as a writer to hold the hand of the reader and take them through the details so they know what’s going on.

The Osterman Weekend is about law firms and hedge funds, things I know next-to-nothing about. This left me playing “catch up” throughout most of the first act. In fact, since we were talking about hedge funds so much at the start, I thought Tanner worked at a hedge fund. It was only after a later throwaway line that I realized he was a tax attorney.

If the details aren’t important to the story, you can get away with less help. But the hedge fund here is the cornerstone of the plot. So to leave us on our own to interpret it was frustrating at best. Always be mindful of the fact that the reader knows less than you. If you have complicated subject matter, help the reader through it.

Maybe The Osterman Weekend’s biggest problem though – and the reason that despite a legendary director and stellar cast, it didn’t do well – is that it has a main character who doesn’t do anything. He’s just a pawn in the middle of two way more active parties.

It’s preferable you pick stories where your main character is DRIVING THE ACTION. He’s the most active party in the story. Here we have the Homeland Security guys (I’m still not sure why Homeland Security is trying to bust a hedge fund) targeting Osterman. We then have Osterman mounting a complicated escape plan. And Tanner is stuck in the middle, doing whatever people tell him to do. Someone needs him to wear a wire, he wears a wire. His buddies tell him the hedge fund issues aren’t their fault, he believes them.

This has been a debate since the beginning of screenwriting. Can your main character make it through an entire movie without being active? I suppose it’s possible but your audience is always going to respond better when your main character says, “Fuck this, if I’m going down, I’m going down my way.”

I mean look at Ludlum’s most famous series of novels. They revolve around one of the most active characters out there – Jason Bourne.

I think things are different in novels when you’re inside the hero’s head. We get a running commentary on what he’s going through. Therefore, it’s not as evident that he’s inactive. Because there’s all this activity going on in his brain. In movies, it’s different. All we have to go on are a character’s actions. So if they’re simply jumping when other characters tell them to jump, they look weak. And nobody likes a weak hero.

I’d love it if they went back and started from Square 1 here. Make this a slow-build story. Inject some curiosity and suspense into Tanner’s arrival. Make it so that everything seems great before everything falls apart. That was my biggest issue with Osterman. They introduced a problem before we had a chance to settle in and consider that there might be problems. There was no patience here.

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

What I learned: Hold the reader’s hand when it comes to complicated subject matter. Tax attorneys? Hedge funds? The average person knows nothing about these things. So make sure you explain them to us, as well as how they fit into the story. If you leave us behind, we’ll mentally check out, and from that point on, we’re unable to enjoy your story.

Quickly, there will be NO AMATEUR FRIDAY POST TOMORROW. There will be Amateur Offerings Saturday morning, but that’s it. The good news is, I’m sending out a Newsletter tomorrow evening. So make sure you sign up to reap all the yummy screenplay-news benefits. Now on to today’s article!

The spec screenplay market has to be one of the most confounding, one of the most confusing, one of those most frustrating, markets in existence. You’d think all you have to do is write something slightly better than the last movie you saw and you’d be able to start cashing checks and put a down payment on that Bel-Air mansion Redfn keeps reminding you about. Yet time after time, aspiring screenwriters come to Hollywood writing multiple screenplays only to leave a couple of years later with their tail between their legs, attributing their failure to buzz words like “nepotism.”

What is the common mistake these screenwriters make that facilitates their failure?

They never learn the system.

In fact, they probably never even knew a system existed. Their understanding of a screenplay sale is based on a New York Times article they read once about a 3 million dollar spec purchase from a writer, the paper implies, who started screenwriting last week. Nowhere is it mentioned that the writer has actually been studying the craft of screenwriting for 15 years, has three previous sales, and has an amazing relationship with the studio he sold the script to that dates back a decade.

To be clear, most scripts sell through some version of this method. The writer will have a prior relationship with the producer/studio and the producer will say, “You know what I’d really like to make right now? A creature feature.” The writer then writes a creature feature with the understanding that, at least with this buyer, he has a good chance of selling it.

But this is not the system you, the unknown screenwriter, take part in. The system you send your scripts into is more like the Wild Wild West. Instead of known entities collaborating on potential projects they want to make, you’re an unknown entity screaming your idea into a void, hoping one of many others in that void hear you and scream back.

Once you understand that this is how the spec market works, you can start weaponzing your script to attack it. The idea is to write the ultimate “spec-friendly” screenplay, a screenplay specifically designed to do well within the unique parameters that make up the spec market. And this brings us to our first spec-friendly rule. If you’re going to yell your idea out in the hopes that someone yells back, you better make sure your idea is really fucking good. So, rule #1:

1) Generate a concept that’s going to excite people.

80% of spec screenwriters either don’t know the importance of this rule or ignore it. But it’s the heartbeat of every spec sale. Your idea has to be exciting. You guys see it every Saturday morning here on Scriptshadow. You gravitate to the bigger ideas, the bigger concepts, while ignoring the ones that sound bland, small, or uninspired.

What’s troubling is that half the writers out there KNOW that their ideas are small and they still write them, convincing themselves that they’re the “one exception.” Guys, we’re trying to arm our scripts here, not cripple them. If you’re not walking into the spec market with a big idea, it’s like walking onto the battlefield without a gun. You might as well just pose in the position you wanna be dead.

Once you’ve convinced someone to read your script based on that awesome idea, you run into a new problem – the Hollywood Reader, a perennially overworked and hard-to-please soul-crushing individual who may or may not drink the blood of failed screenwriters. The large majority of scripts readers read are terrible, so they’re pre-programmed to think that your script is terrible as well, putting you at an extreme disadvantage before they’ve even opened your screenplay.

What’s important to remember about the reader is that reading for him isn’t an enjoyable experience. Reading for him is work he has to complete by the end of the day. You know that work you’re doing right now? That document you have to send off to your boss or that TPS report you need to make copies of? Readers see your scripts the same way you see those TPS reports – they’re obstacles they must finish in order to get to the things they really want to do that day.

This is a major truth that the average screenwriter either doesn’t know or doesn’t want to acknowledge. That the person they’re giving their screenplay to is actually an ADD riddled fellow screenwriter who wants to whip through and cover their script in record time so they can start working on their own screenplay. And it’s this reality that dictates the bulk of the rules in writing spec-friendly screenplays. Here are rules 2-4, which help navigate this admittedly complicated problem.

2) Write a clear easy-to-follow plot. The heavier the plot is, the more sub-plots there are, the more subtle and nuanced the story beats are, the less of a chance your reader will understand what’s going on. With spec screenplays, you want your story to be clear, in your face, and strong. It’s gotta keep your reader awake!

3) A low character count. The more characters you ask the reader to remember, the more your script becomes an exam as opposed to a script. The reader wants to be entertained, not have their memory tested.

4) A sparse writing style. Again, readers are zipping through your screenplays as fast as they can. Big blocky chunks of text (5-7 lines) slow them down and piss them off. Throw enough of these mega-text blocks in there and a reader will get so pissed he’ll start skipping them entirely.

Let’s take yesterday’s script, “The Revenant,” (about a fur-trader who avenges the men who left him to die) to see how spec-friendly it is. It isn’t the best example because it’s a book adaptation and it was developed in cooperation with a production company. However, The Revenant is a pretty spec-friendly premise and here’s why:

– The plot is easy to follow (clear destination, motivation and goal).
– The character count is low (revolves around 3-4 guys).
– It’s a marketable storyline (revenge plot).

Not convinced? Well, imagine The Revenant next to another script about fur trading. In this other script, we follow the evolution of the fur trade between the years of 1770 and 1910, centering on a Navajo family whose fortunes disintegrate over five generations as the commercialization of the trade eventually puts them out of business, leaving them homeless. Do you see how “un-spec-friendly” that is? The story is long, sprawling, complicated, with lots of characters to remember. It sounds like I’m going to need to take notes. I got news for you. If you ever write a script where the reader has to take notes to remember what’s going on, you haven’t written spec-friendly. You’ve written spec-enemy.

One of the unfortunate side-effects of the spec screenplay system is that, due to factors I mentioned above, it favors genres that fit into an “accelerated reading” state. Therefore, slow period pieces don’t do well on the spec market. Nor do straight dramas. Nor do Westerns. Spec-friendly genres are up-tempo. And this leads us to our fifth rule.

5) Write in one of the six “fast” genres: Comedy, Horror, Thriller, Adventure, Sci-fi, Action.

Not only should your genre be fast, but your story itself should be fast. Any time-frame in excess of one month means your story’s probably too slow-moving for your average reader. Remember, this is a guy whose brain is exhausted from constantly reading junk. He could fall asleep at any moment. So the story most likely to keep him up is the one that’s taking place quickly, the one that’s moving along FAST. Look at some of the recent spec sales. Parents Weekend (about parents who party at their son’s college for one weekend), The Babysitter (about a kid who gets stuck one night with a psycho crazy babysitter), In The Deep (about a girl stuck on a buoy being hunted by a shark). So, rule #6

6) Keep the timeline of your script as short as possible. Under a week is good, but under 72 hours is better.

Finally, in order to write that perfect spec-friendly screenplay, you have to be aware of this simple reality: studios want to make money. The readers are reading for the producers who are producing material for the studios, who are trying to do one thing: Make movies that make as much money as possible. To that end, your spec needs to cover one of the 20 proven subject matters that Hollywood makes money on.

7) Write in one of Hollywood’s 20 proven subject matters. These include:
A. Superheroes
B. Monsters
C. Dinosaurs
D. Pirates
E. Cars
F. Aliens
G. Dystopian Future
H. Apocalyptic Future
I. End of the world/mass destruction
J. Adventure (Indiana Jones, Goonies)
K. Time travel
L. Robots
M. Secret agents
N. Large scale action (Mission Impossible)
O. Large scale sci-fi (Gravity, Star Trek)
P. Fantasy (Lord of the Rings)
Q. Fairy tales
R. Magic
S. Creatures (Vampires, Ghosts, Werewolves, Witches)
T. Sci-fi Fantasy (Guardians, Star Wars)

Look, I know the system is flawed. It isn’t set up to find the best scripts. It’s set up to find easy-to-market high concept screenplays that move quickly and are easy to understand. This is a direct result of the Hollywood Reader system that’s been put in place. But you can either bitch and complain about that and continue to write your epic multi-century fur trading opus that you’re pretty sure is going to be 3% better once you add that knitting accident on page 147, or you can arm your script to excel in this system. You can write the “spec-friendly” screenplay. If I were you, I’d do the latter.

Genre: Drama/Period/Thriller
Premise: Set in the early 19th century, a group of fur traders leave one of their own to die after he gets injured. Unfortunately for them, he survives, and he’s got vengeance on his mind.
About: You may not have heard of The Revenant yet, but you will. The movie is poised to win so many Oscars, they might as well let everyone involved produce that night’s show. It’s directed by the guy who did Birdman. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio. It co-stars Leo’s best bud, Tom Hardy. It’s also got one of the hottest actors in England, Ex Machina and Star Wars 7 star Domhnall Gleeson. Throw in one of the hippest young actors around, Will Poulter, and this thing bleeds Oscar juice. The script has been in development at Leo’s company for a long time. This draft was written by Mark L. Smith in 2007. However, Inarritu did a director’s pass on it before shooting (and is actually taking a screenplay credit). Also, they’ve changed the ethnicity of the main character, Hugh Glass, from African-American to white, so that Leo can play him. Don’t worry though. As far as I can tell, this isn’t a Rachel Dolezal situation.
Writer: Mark L. Smith (based on the novel by Michael Punke)
Details: 104 pages

I’ve heard so many great things about this script, I’ve needed to open an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of the compliments. Over ten members of the Scriptshadow Community have checked it out. Seven of them told me it was great. Two liked it. And only one actively disliked it.

Even with those expectations, I came out of this one shaking. I don’t know if this is an acceptable way to describe a period piece. But basically, The Revenant is Gravity set in 1820. Confused? Read on.

It’s 1820, Missouri. Fur trading was the Uber of the time, and we’re following a group of fur traders down the river when they’re attacked by a particularly nasty tribe of Indians known as the Arikara.

Half the traders are killed and it would’ve been more had Hugh Glass, a badass navigator, not beaten some Arikara ass. Glass ends up saving two men in particular, the mentally unstable John Fitzgerald and eager young buck, Jim Bridger.

After they’ve escaped, in a freak attack, Glass gets pummeled by a bear that practically rips his face off. He kills the bear somehow (He kills a fucking bear!), but it leaves him a barely recognizable twisted mass of blood and guts. Somehow, the captain of the operation stitches Glass up, but he can barely breathe, much less move.

The traders wait for Glass to die so they can continue on, but Glass is a fighter. He will – not – die. The Captain eventually convinces Fitzgerald and Bridger to watch over Glass while they get help from the nearest outpost. But Fitzgerald gets bored and convinces Bridger to leave Glass to die. He’s barely clinging to death anyway. It’s not like he’s going to live through this.

But Glass somehow lives through this. A man who can’t even move somehow figures out how to feed himself (eating grass), drink (he rolls into a marsh), travel (he crawls onto a floating log in the river), fix the hole in his throat (he burns it closed with gun powder).

He survives rattlesnakes, gangrene, waterfalls, boulders at the bottom of waterfalls, maggots eating away at his open wounds, Vultures who eat him alive, racism, and multiple attacks from Indians. Glass can’t go a step without something attacking him. And somehow, he survives it all.

All so he can find the men who left him to die – the men he will not rest until he kills.

There’s this show I used to watch called “I Survived.” It’s a brilliantly simple concept. People who survived all sorts of crazy shit are interviewed about their experience. They take you through their story step by step, reliving the impossible way in which they cheated death.

In this show, you hear about people who survived F5 tornados, mountain lion attacks, having their arms ripped off by farming machines, airplane crashes, house fires. But all of these stories would pale in comparison if Hugh Glass told his story.

I mean this guy’s survival skills are insane. There’s this scene early on, after he’s been left, where he’s trying to move five feet. Just FIVE FEET. And all he has is a gimp arm and a barely-operational leg. And he’s just SLIDING, millimeter by millimeter, forward.

Or later, when he finally gets to water, he desperately tries to take a drink, only to watch the water leak out of the hole in his throat left from the bear attack. So what does he do? HE LIGHTS HIS NECK ON FIRE AND BURNS THE HOLE CLOSED. That’s when I realized I was onboard for the full trip on this one. Any character who does THAT to survive, I want to see what he’s gonna do next.

You see, not enough writers write characters that you want to ROOT FOR. They write characters who are mean or dumb or apathetic or boring and expect us to be like, “Yeah! What’s going to happen next!”

You know the guy I want to follow? The guy who wants to live so badly, he will snort out snot and blood to crawl five feet in 60 minutes. That’s the guy I want to follow. The guy who WANTS TO SURVIVE. The guy who WILL KEEP FIGHTING UNTIL HIS LAST BREATH.

The Revenant also taught me that if you want to make a character likable, do so THROUGH HIS ACTIONS as opposed to THROUGH HIS WORDS. For example, I see a lot of writers who say, “Okay, what can I have my hero say so that he’ll be likable?” And they’ll try to make him funny. Or they’ll have him compliment other characters. Or they’ll try to give him a “magnetic” personality.

And it’s not like those things don’t work if done right. But if you REALLY want to make a character likeable, do it through his actions. When the Arikara attacked, Glass was one of the only traders SAVING OTHERS. He was one of the only guys unafraid of the moment. His bravery saved lives, and THAT made him likable. Then later on, when he’s clinging for life, he KEEPS FIGHTING. Audiences admire that. They like people who fight.

Moving on, one of the best ways to make a script spec-friendly is to give your characters a PHYSICAL DESTINATION they’re headed to. Here, the traders are headed to an outpost. Even after they leave Glass, we know Glass is headed to that same outpost so he can kill the men who left him.

The reason physical destinations work so well is because the audience is never confused. I read so many amateur screenplays where I have no idea what’s going on because characters are just running into each other and babbling about who knows what. When you have a “physical destination” story, your reader will never be confused. He knows exactly what your hero is trying to do and this trick keeps the story on point. Not to say it’s the only way to write a script. But if you have this, you have a huge advantage in the clarity department.

The only reason I’m not assigning The Revenant an “Impressive” is because of Glass’s motivation. He wants to avenge these two guys who left him. But the thing is, they actually had good reason to leave him. They were in dangerous Indian territory and Glass was barely clinging to life. Any doctor in the world would’ve told you he had a .000001% chance of surviving. And they barely even knew Glass. It’s not like they were best friends. So to leave him made sense on some level. And you’d think Glass would understand that.

I mean, contrast this motivation with the motivation in The Brigands of Rattleborge. The bad guy had raped and killed the hero’s wife. THAT’S something you avenge. It’s a seemingly small detail but if you’re going to base an entire story around revenge, you want the matter that the character is avenging to be as intense as possible.

Still, holy shit. This was an awesome story. And proof that if you write an awesome character (the “never give up” Glass), A-list actors will want to play the part. Hell, they’ll even make you change the character’s ethnicity to play the part.

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

What I learned: “Physical destination” stories work particularly well as scripts because the reader is never confused about what’s going on. There’s a comfort and a clarity in knowing exactly where our hero is headed.