How did a TV pilot about incest, drug addiction, and imprisonment lead to today’s writer getting Pixar’s “Inside Out” assignment? Read on to find out!

Genre: TV Pilot – Drama
Premise: We follow a group of adults in various stages of arrested development, highlighted by a strange man who’s secretly imprisoning his wife.
About: So you know that mega-hit from this past weekend, Inside Out? Well, it wasn’t just Docter who wrote it. One of the writers was Meg LeFauve. How did a relatively unknown writer score a writing gig on one of Pixar’s biggest movies? This pilot is how. Just goes to show that if you write something good, it might not sell, but it can open a lot of doors for you. “Girl in a Box” is said to have been LOVED by Disney and Pixar CCO, John Lasseter.
Writer: Meg LeFauve
Details: 66 pages

Ben Mendelsohn to play the evil “Frank” all the way

What I love most about this success story is that Meg LeFauve’s pilot about the terrors beneath the surface of our everyday lives couldn’t have been further from a children’s movie about animated emotions. Then why was she chosen for Inside Out? It’s because this industry celebrates one skill above all others – character development.

If you can write convincing interesting characters, you can do it in any genre. Sci-fi, Western, Drama, Comedy, Adventure, it doesn’t matter. Character creation is about finding the truth of the character, giving them unresolved issues in both their exterior and interior lives, and then throwing a bunch of shit at them and seeing how they react. To this end, Girl in a Box is a terrifying delight. With emphasis on “terrifying.”

Our seemingly unrelated cast of characters begins with Jane, a sort of zoned-out 24 year-old beauty who’s just moved into the neighborhood. When we meet her and her older, socially awkward husband, Frank, the two have crashed neighbor, John’s, home, so that Frank can find some clients for his one-man computer business.

It becomes clear to us that something’s off about Jane. She seems eternally zoned out. But that doesn’t stop John, who’s a few months away from marrying his wife, from flirting with her. Despite Jane’s beauty, flirting seems to be a new experience for her, but one she cannot reciprocate for long. There’s fear in the back of Jane’s eyes. That much is clear.

You see, Frank is imprisoning Jane. He keeps her in a box at night, and controls her every move. How long this has been going on, we can only guess.

Meanwhile, across town, we’ve got 20-something drug-addict Dara, who’s just moved back into town. Dara needs a place to shack up while she gets sober and hits up her cousin, Michael, a local attorney with a big future ahead of him. The two seem to have some kind of weird chemistry together, and we can tell that he’d never say no to her.

We also learn that when Dara was young, she snuck out at night when she was supposed to be babysitting Michael’s sister, Casey. While partying with her friends, Casey walked off and that was the last anyone ever saw of her. Needless to say, Dara’s never been forgiven from either Michael’s side of the family or her own. Which has only pushed her into using more.

Towards the end of the pilot, we figure out what’s going on. Jane, the girl in the box, is Casey. And neither Dara or Michael realize that their sister/cousin is only a few blocks away from where they live. Will they ever figure this out? And will Jane, who’s finally building up the courage to take chances, find a way out of this prison she’s lived in since she was a little girl?

Kristin Kreuk for Jane?

The first thing that popped out at me about Girl in a Box was LeFauve’s VOICE. The writing here was stronger than the writing I’ve been seeing lately. And you don’t realize how plain writing is until something comes along that’s better. LeFauve’s stuff is better and it’s because her words and her choices have more life to them.

For example, when we first meet Jane, we hop inside of her POV. And the world becomes FLATTER, less colorful, because Jane’s entire life has been a nightmare. She hasn’t lived a minute of freedom in 20 years. So naturally, she’s going to see the world differently. That was clever.

And there were little things – breadcrumbs almost – to keep you turning the pages. Like when Jane goes to the bathroom at this party and slips one of the pretty seashell-shaped bars of soap into her pocket. We’re curious. Why would she do that? We want to know more about this girl.

The conversations between characters didn’t have that nailed down stiff feeling to them I read in a lot of scripts/pilots either. There was an electricity floating just beneath the dialogue. Like when John meets Jane out in the garden.

John is out there hiding from his fiancé and her mother. So right away, the scene’s got some charge to it. We’re not standing in the middle of a room full of people boringly sharing backstory. John’s got a secret and since we just saw Jane steal that bar of soap, we know she’s got a secret too. This is how you bring a conversation to life.

And it’s also because these characters are so distinct. Creating distinct characters takes a long time for screenwriters to learn. The problem is that you’re only one mind as a writer. So even though you’re switching back and forth between characters on the page, you’re still staying in your own brain.

This is why a common criticism a lot of new screenwriters get when people read their screenplay is: “All your characters sound the same.”

When creating characters, you have to define something unique about them, a dominant trait that makes them stand out. You do this for everyone and now, when you shift between characters, your mind shifts into that trait, allowing you to “speak” from a different perspective.

And we see that here. Jane is detached. Frank is socially awkward and creepy. Dara is mischievous. Michael is the golden boy trying desperately to live up to his reputation. There’s very little overlap in any personality traits here, which is another thing that helps each character feel like their own person.

This all might sound obvious to you. I can hear writers saying, “Duh, that’s what you do. You make characters different.” And yet time and time again when I read amateur scripts, the characters are laughably undefined. Either writers try to make them too complex, giving them so many traits that you don’t know which one defines them. Or they haven’t defined their characters at all, assuming you’ll get a “feel” for them because they, the writer, have a “feel” for them.

If you’re selling your characters on a “vague feeling,” I got news for you. Your characters suck.

Any time you read a script and each character in that script feels DIFFERENT, you know you’re reading someone who knows what they’re doing. Because most writers either don’t put the effort into making their characters unique, don’t think it’s important, or don’t know how. If you can nail character creation – if you can write 5 or more distinct characters that all feel like individual people – that’s when companies like Pixar start calling you.

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

What I learned: This is a really easy way to improve your character creation. Go through every character in your screenplay and assign them ONE DOMINANT TRAIT. Then make sure you hit on that trait over and over again. Han Solo – He’s a cocky motherfucker. Claire from Jurassic World – all she cares about is work. Anna from Frozen – she’s a goofball. Amy from Gone Girl. She was vindictive. The character will evolve out from that dominant trait to have a number of secondary traits. But you need that dominant trait as an anchor. That’s the trait the reader needs to identify that character.

Pixar continues to make a laughingstock out of the competition with its storytelling skillz.

Genre: Animation Drama/Comedy
Premise: We follow the physical embodiment of an 11 year-old girl’s emotions as her family makes the move from Minnesota to San Francisco.
About: Inside Out may not have taken down Chris Pratt and his dino-pals this weekend, but the animated feature did score a 91 million dollar take, making it the highest grossing original idea… EVER.
Writers: Meg LeFauve & Josh Cooley and Pete Docter (story by Pete Docter and Ronaldo Del Carmen)
Details: 94 minutes

One of the reasons Pixar is so successful is that they take chances. Unlike Disney or Dreamworks or Fox Animation, their first thought when coming up with an idea isn’t, “How many toys will it sell?” It’s “How can we write a great story that’s going to move people?” We’re talking about the company that brought the world an 80 year-old protagonist whose wife just died here.

Pixar also puts a ton of stock into feedback. They don’t follow the traditional model of “auteur Russian roulette” which offers a big ego-centric director carte blanche over their movie and whatever he comes up with, he comes up with.

Each draft of a Pixar screenplay is heavily scrutinized by the Pixar brain trust. If something’s not working, they’re going to tell you. And it’s one of the reasons the company has such a good track record. Their screenplays have been put through the ringer.

Inside Out is easily the most ambitious idea Pixar has ever had. Instead of featuring the go-to character groups of humans or animals, Pixar’s replaced them with things that don’t even exist. The movie doesn’t even take place in a realistic environment. It takes place inside someone’s mind, requiring the writers to create an entire new world with a new set of rules.

You’ve never seen anything like it and, outside of its impending sequels, will never see anything like it again. Nobody else would’ve had the balls to make this movie, and that alone is reason to take a closer look.

Inside Out is about an 11 year-old girl, Riley. Well, sorta. That’s another thing about Inside Out. Its main character isn’t really its main character. Its true main character is Joy, the feeling at the center of Riley’s brain. Joy isn’t the only feeling in this control center. There’s Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust. This 5-thing group are in charge of making Riley go.

That group meets its most difficult challenge yet when the family unexpectedly moves from the quaint confines of rural Minnesota to the urban closet of San Francisco. Riley loses all her friends and her dearest love, hockey, and it’s up to Joy to keep the group together. For Joy has one goal and one goal only, to keep Riley as happy as possible.

This is where we’re introduced to the biggest risk of all in Inside Out, its mega-complex inner brain workings. There’s a lot going on here but the basic breakdown is that whenever Riley records a memory, it rolls into her “file system” in the form of a sphere that is color-coded based on the emotion associated with it. Joy is yellow, so happy memories come in yellow. Sadness is blue, so sad memories come in blue. Etc., etc.

Riley also has a series of “personality islands” inside her brain, each represented by a physical island we can see. There’s Goofball Island, Hockey Island, Family Island. When Riley acts like a monkey for no reason, for example, Goofball Island lights up excitedly.

Inside Out is about what happens when Riley’s core memories (another rule-set within the mind – basically the most important memories) start turning blue, which has never happened before. When Joy tries to fix this, her and Sadness accidentally get sucked into Riley’s long-term memory (think a never-ending stack of spheres), and must find a way back to the control center.

In the meantime, with only anger, disgust, and fear to guide her, Riley decides that she hates San Francisco and wants to go back to Minnesota. So she secretly buys a bus ticket and sneaks away to the bus station. It’ll be up to Joy (and Sadness) to get back to the control center in time to stop Riley from getting on that bus. The question is, how far will Joy go to save Riley? Will she ditch Sadness? And is eliminating sadness a good thing?

I went into a more detailed breakdown of today’s plot for a reason. This was a HUGE risk taken by Pete Docter and the crew at Pixar. While breaking storytelling rules often hurts a screenplay, it’s how you break the rules that makes your script unique, that differentiates it from everything else. So for that reason, rule-breaking empowers you.

I have no doubt that 99% of the executives outside of Inside Out would’ve told Docter that his screenplay contained too much exposition. It was like the anti-Mad Max: Fury Road (TLDR – George Miller avoids exposition at all costs). There are different emotions, multi-colored sphere memories, core memories, “islands” inside the brain.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that your average contest-reader would’ve laughed Inside Out out of the contest. The first 20 minutes of the movie are dedicated to our characters explaining how the brain works.

So why doesn’t this sink Inside Out? There are a couple of reasons. Those who have read my book may remember my rule for exposition in regards to The Matrix. The Matrix’s huge exposition centric sequence works because the thing that our characters expose is fascinating. The world we’re learning about is cool. And audiences are more open to accepting exposition when they’re rewarded with cool stuff.

Riley’s inner workings aren’t as cool as the secret of the Matrix. But they are pretty fascinating in their own right. I found myself curious how all this memory storage worked and while there was definitely a lot to keep track of, most of it was pretty neat. Where exposition kills your script is when it’s boring. When it’s not fascinating but rather feels like a test – like you’re being asked to remember a set of facts for later.

The second thing is that Inside Out has an “exposition friendly” character explaining how everything works. Exposition-friendly characters are characters who dole out information naturally. It all feels very obvious that this character would be explaining this stuff to us. Joy, who’s been working Riley’s controls for 11 years now, feels like the perfect guide in this scenario. Her telling us what’s going on makes sense.

This wouldn’t have worked as well had you added, say, an invisible narrator – someone whose sole purpose was to dole out exposition. This is the kind of thing that angered moviegoers in films like Blade Runner. Sure, our narrator was our hero, but conveying facts so people knew what he was doing didn’t sound like something that particular character would do. It felt unnatural.

Or, had Docter introduced, say, a therapist for Riley and tried to have the therapist be our window into how the mind worked. Can you imagine trying to fit all the relevant Inside Out exposition into a few therapy scenes? (“So you see, Riley, you have all these different emotions when you live your day-to-day life. There’s ‘Anger,’ there’s ‘Joy,’ there’s, ‘Sadness.’”) .

The point is, readers/viewers sense when you’re struggling to come up with a way to push exposition on them. If you can find an “exposition friendly” character to do that work for you (Ferris Bueller, for example), the exposition will come off invisibly as opposed to obviously. Exposition-heavy movies like Inside Out practically require you to come up with an exposition-friendly character.

One of the mantras I find myself offering more and more to writers when I give them notes is Pixar’s golden screenplay rule: “Simple story, complex characters.” 5 of the last 6 scripts I gave notes on fell into the “Complex story, complex characters” department. For whatever reason, new writers feel that it’s imperative they make their story as complex as possible.

A cursory glance at Inside Out might lead you to the conclusion that this story is complex as well. Like I pointed out, the thing has all these darn rules. In addition to having the control room, you have these islands in Riley’s head, long-term memory, abstract thought, daydreams and nightmares, the fact that we’re cutting between Riley’s brain and Riley’s life all the time.

But I want you to take a step back to see just how simple the story behind Inside Out is. The entire movie takes place in under 72 hours (it might be a little longer, but 72 hours is a good guess). Riley gets to San Francisco Day 1, hates school Day 2, and decides to go back to Minnesota on Day 3.

Then, inside Riley’s brain, we have a very simple GSU model pushing the story forward. The GOAL is for Joy to get back to the control center. The STAKES are the dangers of Riley heading out into the world on her own. And the URGENCY is that the bus leaves in a few hours. If Joy (and Sadness) don’t get to the control center quickly, Riley will be off to Minnesota.

I can’t stress the importance of this choice enough. Docter and the Pixar Crew realized that they were already asking a ton from their audience to sit through this very complex explanation of how the brain works. They knew if they then came up with some super complex storyline that lasted six months or something, it would’ve been too much for the audience to handle.

And I commend them for that because one viewing of Inside Out and you can tell they wanted this to be a lot bigger. This was originally meant to be a film about a girl entering puberty and all the complex emotions that come along with it and how do you deal with those emotions. But it looks like the Pixar Brain trust made Docter aware that if he went down that road, he was going to be biting off more than he could chew.

I have no doubt the subsequent drafts kept simplifying the storyline, cutting the timeline down again and again until it was only a few days long. And this led to the only real “knock” against Inside Out, which is that the physical character of Riley doesn’t go through all that much.

Since we only have a couple of days with her, her emotional breakdown is bare-bones. She kind of pouts and then decides to go back to Minnesota. But this was the right choice and it’s one of the hardest things about writing screenplays – is recognizing when your story is too ambitious for the medium and that you have to dial it back to make it work.

And that’s the reason Pixar is so good at what they do. They recognize these things and make the relevant changes so that the story works.

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

What I learned: For a new writer, this has to be confusing. You read about Mad Max: Fury Road, and the celebration behind its minimalist exposition. Then you hear about Inside Out, which has more exposition in it than all of the Harry Potter films combined. Which one is right? Neither. Every story has its own exposition requirements. It’s something that should be taken into consideration before every movie you write. “Is this going to be an exposition challenge?” If you come up with an idea that requires a ton of exposition, then you better have a plan for how to include that exposition that doesn’t grind your screenplay to a halt. However, once you commit to an idea, commit to its exposition. If something requires a lot of exposition and you try to pull a George Miller: Fury Road (boil 15 pages of exposition into 1), you’re going to have a lot of confused readers because you’ve excluded a ton of information required to understand the story. A script’s exposition requirements are a script’s exposition requirements. Minimize as much as you can, but make sure to include every piece of info the audience needs to understand the story. You can see the value of that approach here in Inside Out.

One of the questions I’m often asked is, “Do I need to obtain the rights to someone’s life in order to write about them?” I’ve brought in Lisa Callif, a partner at the law firm of Donaldson and Callif, to help answer that question. Callif has helped steer many independent producers through this process, including on such films as “Devil’s Knot,” the real life story of three teenagers who were wrongfully convicted of killing three boys, and “Welcome to New York,” about Dominique Strauss Khan.

Reese Witherspoon in Devil’s Knot

SS: Let’s start off simple. A lot of writers ask me, “Can I write about a real life person or do I need the ‘rights’ to them?” Is there a simple answer to this?

LC: The simple answer is yes. The law does not require you to obtain life story rights to make a movie that accurately portrays that person.

SS: What is one of the biggest misunderstandings about obtaining the rights of a person to write a movie about?

LC: That a life story rights agreement is an acquisition of an underlying right. The facts of a person’s life are in the public domain, so there is no need to acquire them. Rather, it is a person’s waiver of certain personal rights and an agreement by them to cooperate and consult in the making of the film of which they are a subject. The agreement is formatted like a normal acquisition of underlying rights because that is the tradition in Hollywood, and because most lay persons have the notion that they own something called “life story rights.” Besides, no one would sign it if it were correctly labeled as a “waiver of right to sue no matter how badly you muck up my life.”

SS: I notice that in almost every case with the studios, when they have a movie about a real-life person, they’ve either purchased a book about that person or obtained life rights through the person themselves or the family. If it’s okay to write about people without obtaining official permission, why do they do this?

LC: Despite one’s legal right to make a film without life rights, there are lots of good reasons to obtain them. Let’s look at the two most important: first, when you purchase someone’s life story rights, they waive the right to file a lawsuit based on a violation of their personal, privacy and publicity rights. In fact, it is the waiver of the right to sue you, no matter what you do to the person’s life story, that is at the heart of the life story rights agreement (especially for a deep-pocketed studio). This waiver not only provides you (and the others involved in the film) with great protection, it makes it easier to obtain Errors & Omissions (E&O) insurance, which provides you with coverage if anyone portrayed in your film decides to sue you. Second, the agreement gives you access to the person about whom you are writing. The person who lived the story always has information that is not publicly known and perhaps more interesting than what has already been published. Simply put, you often make a better movie with the participation of these people.

SS: Let’s take a specific example. Studios are constantly trying to make movies about Martin Luther King and getting rejected by the family. Why don’t they just ignore the family and make the movie anyway?

LC: Well, they just did. As I understand it, the filmmakers of “Selma” did not have the rights from the estate. That said, the hesitation to make a film without rights is the fear that someone will get upset and file a lawsuit. No one wants that. The King estate is very protective of its rights and not afraid to file a lawsuit. However, if a story is told accurately, the chances of a lawsuit lessen dramatically. It’s only if the filmmaking is sloppy or people aren’t honest that you can really get in trouble.

SS: But I’ve heard things like that the family owns the “I Have a Dream” speech and that you can’t use any parts of that speech in print or movies without paying them ridiculous amounts of money (I heard a recent quote of 300 words from the speech were going to cost one journalist $10,000). I’d consider that “facts” from the character’s life, but maybe speeches fall under a separate category that’s treated differently by the law?

LC: It’s true that the MLK estate has established copyright ownership over that speech, however, that would not prevent a filmmaker from using portions of it pursuant to fair use (of course, the use would have to fall within the parameters of fair use and that is something we would determine based on how it is used). And yes, a speech is quite different from “facts,” especially a speech that is written before it is recited. Under the 1976 copyright act (our current law), copyright protection attaches the minute you put pen to paper. It is debatable whether the “I Have a Dream” speech should have been granted copyright protection due to certain formalities that may or may not have been met, but the bottom line is that the estate was able to establish copyright ownership over that speech. The fact that MLK delivered that speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 is a fact and may be used freely, but his written words, which have been copyrighted, may only be used with permission from the estate or pursuant to fair use.

SS: If there was ever an opportunity for a subject to sue over a movie about them, it was The Social Network. Mark Zuckerberg had gone on record as saying everything about that movie was false. Here’s a guy with a multi-billion dollar bank account. A lawsuit is a drop in the bucket for him. And there seemed to only be a positive outcome for him filing a suit (he repairs the bad image that the movie painted of him). Yet he did nothing. Did the studio dodge a bullet or did Zuckerberg not sue because he had no legal cause?

LC: I didn’t have any direct involvement in this film, but I would certainly guess it was the latter. There are potential other reasons as well – perhaps Zuckerberg/Facebook have other skeletons in the closet that they didn’t want known. Litigation is not only costly, time consuming and lengthy, but it also has the potential to expose things a person may want to keep private. Perhaps there were business and public relations reasons they did not file. Is it the right move for Facebook to sue, even if some of the allegations made in the film were false? How would Facebook users view that? Do Facebook users care about the allegations made in the film? Did it harm their business? Obviously not. Would it have if they filed a lawsuit? Probably not, but maybe litigation would not have provided any real benefit to the company.

SS: Just the other day, I reviewed a script called “Pale Blue Dot,” that covered the real life story of an astronaut love triangle (the famous “astronaut drove 500 miles in a diaper” story). The writers, however, changed all the names. Is this a simple way to avoid a lawsuit? Can I pick any real life story and simply change names and be immune from litigation?

LC: Short answer, no. Simply changing a name does not get a filmmaker even close to being safe. If you really don’t want a person to be recognizable, then you must make that person unrecognizable. Changing a name doesn’t do that.

SS: Last year, one of the studios optioned a huge article about the famous Venezuelan case where a dead man accused the president of assassinating him in a posthumous Youtube video. Do they now officially “own” that story? Would a rival studio be able to release their version of the exact same story without an option on any material? Or would the first studio be able to sue them?

LC: The studio will own that story as it was told by the author. However, the studio won’t own (and no one will own) the facts of that event. Anyone can write about these facts without obtaining permission to do so. What another filmmaker cannot do is take the way in which those facts were told in the article and use that expression without permission. The essential ingredient present in creations, but absent in facts, is originality. The question to ask yourself is – am I telling a story that has already been told? Or am I using facts to create my own story?

SS: One final question. There was another script sale awhile back that covered the real life story of that girl who freaked out in a Los Angeles hotel elevator and was later found floating dead in the hotel’s water supply. The writers just went ahead and created this whole ghost story out of it (with supernatural elements and all). So can you just take a real-life person and create an entirely made-up story around them?

LC: Because that girl is deceased, the filmmaker has a lot more leeway. When a person dies, their personal rights die with them, including defamation. One does need to be cautious about claims by heirs and others connected to the subject who are still alive. But if you’re writing about a deceased public figure, you can pretty much write anything. Also, even with living subjects, a filmmaker can take some creative liberties in establishing elements that are unknown (such as conversations). Courts call this “fictional embroidery.” This is permissible so long as the fictional elements naturally flow from the known facts and do not violate the personal rights of that individual.

I hope this was helpful. I might be able to send a couple of follow-up questions Lisa’s way. I’ll do so for the two most upvoted questions in the comments section and put those answers up within the next 24 hours. ☺

A rare treat. An extremely solid amateur script! But will not owning the rights to the material doom the screenplay??

Next week is a SPECIAL WEEK here on Scriptshadow. It’s WEIRD SCRIPTS WEEK. I’ll be reviewing five really strange scripts, saving the weirdest and oddest for Friday. Your life will never be the same after you hear about that last script, I promise you. This means there will be no Amateur Offerings this weekend. So check out Damn Nation instead. It’s a good script!

Genre: Horror/Action-Thriller
Premise (from writer): Five years after a plague has overrun the United States, turning most of the nation into feral vampiric creatures, a Special Ops unit from the President’s current headquarters in London is sent back into the heart of the US in a desperate attempt to find a group of surviving scientists who claim to have found a cure for the disease… but not everyone wants to see America back on its feet.
Why You Should Read (from writer): I believe screenplays are evolving. With the advances of technology in the last couple of decades such as the internet, computers, ipads, smartphones, etc, screenplays can be more than words on paper, they can be visual and even interactive experiences. I’m not the first and I won’t be the last person to integrate artwork into my screenplay, but I think this approach, if done right, can add a lot of value to a project. Integrated artwork is just the tip of the iceberg though. I believe soon people will be adding a lot more elements, such as photo references, storyboards, video, sound effects, music, and other audio-visual components embedded into their scripts. The possibilities are endless. — However, I know that my view on things is going to be vastly unpopular right now. I think most people will have an old school attitude and believe that writers should write, leaving the fancy bells and whistles to someone else. — With that said, I do believe nothing is more important than the words themselves. Above all else, I hope my script is judged on the words, not the images. Everything else I’ve added is just a bonus.
Writer: Adam Wax (Based on the comic, “Damn Nation,” written by Andrew Cosby and illustrated by J. Alexander)
Details: 110 pages

I guess you could say today’s entry is a little controversial. We don’t usually review adaptations on Amateur Friday. But there’s nothing inherently wrong with writing one. I know some people get upset by it but as long as you give credit where credit is due, which Adam does, it’s fine.

As far as whether it’s legal to adapt something you don’t have the rights to – it’s perfectly legal. If you went and wrote your own Fifty Shades of Grey script tomorrow, nobody’s going to come knocking at your door. The only time it becomes illegal is if the studio buys it and turns it into a movie without obtaining the rights. And even then, it’s not you who gets sued, it’s them.

Wax has also decided to infuse artwork from the comic into his script. As I’ve stated before, I have no problem with this either. I think, under the right circumstances, art can enhance the read. I just wasn’t a particular fan of THIS art. I’d prefer art that actually gives me a clear idea of what’s going on. This art here is almost the opposite – as evidenced here.

The setup for Damn Nation is pretty straight forward. Five years ago, a lost Russian tanker wanders into U.S. waters, full of dead bodies. When a group goes to inspect the ship, they find that these “dead” bodies aren’t as “dead” as they thought. We cut to five years later, where we learn that that event was the beginning of a fast-acting virus that took down the entire United States.

Back in Britain, where the remainder of the United States government now resides, they receive a signal from Buffalo, New York, with a simple message: “We have the cure.” The Americans and the Brits put together a team of about a dozen soldiers and send them off to Buffalo to see if there’s any truth to this message.

The team is led by the always cynical Captain John Cole. He’s joined by the non-shit-taking Lieutenant Emilia Riley, a Brit who’s not a huge fan of the American way. The two command a group of both Americans and Brits, and head into Buffalo where they immediately find our scientist with the cure.

Except that’s where shit starts going wrong. A sub-division of the team turns on them, killing everyone within sight. They try and kill Cole and Riley, who just barely escape with the doctor, a few other soldiers, and the cure. We eventually learn that the Brits, the Chinese, and the Russians, like this new world where the U.S. is no longer a player. And if there’s a cure, that puts the U.S. back in the mix.

Cole and Riley are thrust into a dangerous country where these… things lurk around every corner. They’ll need to come up with a plan not only to avoid them, but find a way to safety, and find someone who actually wants to use this cure to save the United States.

A page from the comic.

In the spirit of being completely honest, permission-less adaptations are usually the worst scripts I read. I’m not sure exactly why this is, but my guess is, these scripts tend to come from first-time screenwriters who fall in love with a property (movie, comic book, what have you) and want to write a movie in that universe. They do this before learning how to actually screen-write, which is why the scripts are often complete messes.

My advice to writers thinking about adapting a high-profile property you don’t have the rights to: don’t do it. I can guarantee that the rights to anything you’ve found are already owned by some producer working for some studio, which means you have approximately ONE BUYER for your script. If that one buyer doesn’t like what you’ve done, you’re shit out of luck.

There is a less cynical side to the approach, though. If you write ANYTHING that’s good, whether it sells to that single buyer or not, the town will take notice. And while you may not sell this specific script, you’ll get tagged as a good screenwriter and get some meetings out of it.

I don’t know where Adam Wax is in his screenwriting career, but he deserves some meetings after Damn Nation. This script is good. The first word that comes to mind is: polished. This isn’t something that was thrown together quickly, like so many amateur scripts we read here seem to be. Rather, there’s a clear structure to the story, and Wax moves it along quickly.

We start with that great teaser – A Russian boat that’s been lost for 15 years. Inspecting that boat to find 200 dead bodies that suddenly come to life. If that doesn’t grab you, you are incapable of being grabbed.

We don’t waste any time when we jump to five years later either. We immediately jump to the “cure” signal and within pages, our team is on their helicopters, heading to the U.S. Spec scripts HAVE TO MOVE FAST. And Damn Nation eschews the Prius approach in favor of the Lamborghini.

The first big twist is maybe a little predictable (the soldiers turning on their leaders), but Adam’s such a good writer, he makes it work. And it places our characters into a seriously terrifying situation – being alone in a country dominated by blood-sucking creatures with no one to come save them.

I often discuss on this site using ideas that DO THE WORK FOR YOU. This is the kind of idea that does the work for you. Putting your characters in this kind of peril ensures that you’ll have a bevy of terrifying scenes and sequences. Every moment counts. Every wrong choice could lead to death. There’s never a moment here where the audience can sit back and relax, which is a sign of a really good story.

Some of the character stuff is really good too. For example, Captain Cole isn’t just some tough-as-nails vanilla captain. He learns that the whole reason he was picked to lead this mission is because he’s been such a terrible captain (killed two platoons in Afghanistan). He was chosen for the specific purpose of ensuring failure. Cole is going to have to dig down deep and overcome all his demons and past failures in order to prove to others, but more importantly, himself, that he can lead.

If you’re a fan of The Walking Dead, 28 Days Later, or really any post-apocalypstic literature, I can guarantee you’re going to LOVE THIS. I could see this being a hit movie TOMORROW. But I don’t know who owns Damn Nation, and I don’t know if whoever has the rights plans on making the movie anytime soon. But they should. And they owe it to themselves to at least check out Adam Wax’s version.

Script link: Damn Nation

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

What I learned: I’ll say it again, guys. A spec script NEEDS TO MOVE QUICKLY. The specs that never seem to slow down, that never allow the reader to sit back and relax – these scripts have a HUGE advantage over the slow-moving specs with stories that take forever to get going, and which spend too much time sitting around in that second act. If you can, I’m BEGGING YOU to infuse URGENCY into your spec idea. Urgency and specs go together like peanut butter and jelly.

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A lot of what we talk about here at Scriptshadow comes from a reactionary place. We assess someone’s work and then discuss how it either a) worked or b) didn’t. And if it didn’t, we discuss how it could’ve been fixed, or how it could’ve been done better. This is all well and good, and we certainly learn a lot from it. But it doesn’t address one of the hardest things about screenwriting: the blank page.

Staring at a blank page is a whole different ball of wax than trying to come up with a solution to a bad scene.

There are two types of “blank page” problems. There’s the “On the fly” blank page problem and there’s the “Outlined script” blank page problem.

The “On the fly” problem refers to writers who are writing their script on the fly. They didn’t start off with an outline. They had their idea and figured they’d jump straight into the script. This method is notorious for leading to a lot of blank page problems. Since you didn’t outline, you have no idea where your script is headed, and when you don’t know your destination, it’s hard to map out a route to get there.

For this reason, the writer eventually runs out of scenes (curiously, they almost always peter out around page 45), and subsequently start “grasping at straws.” They write to shock, they throw a twist or two at the reader, all to energize what they perceive to be a dying story, not realizing that it’s the lack of direction in the first place that’s the problem.

To these writers I say, “This is why you outline.” You outline to destroy the blank page. If you’ve already figured out your ending, and you’ve come up with a general idea for the majority of the scenes in your script, you’ll at least come into each scene with a plan. And plans mean less blank pages.

If outlining scares you, here’s another option. Make sure that every character in your screenplay HAS A GOAL. If you give every character a goal, then every time you cut to one of those characters, you’ll know what scene to write to push them closer to that goal.

If you know, for instance, that your 5th most important character, Tracy, is desperately trying to make enough money to pay for college tuition next year, then you know to put her in a few job interviews. And if she doesn’t get hired, and subsequently gets more desperate, you know she might start doing some unsavory things to get that money.

On the contrary, if all you know about Tracy is that she’s your main character’s sister, then when she comes around, you won’t know what to do with her, and the story will drift or come to a stop when she arrives.

To use a recent example, look at Mad Max: Fury Road. The goals were clear from the start. Furiosa wanted to get back to her hometown. And Max wanted freedom. The bad guy, of course, wanted to get his five wives back. Every scene was dictated by the desires of those three characters, which is a big reason why not a single scene in that movie felt wasted.

Now if you’re a seasoned screenwriter, outlining is a huge part of your process. And for the truly hardcore, you’ve likely outlined every scene in your script (scene 1 to scene 60!). To these writers, having no idea what to write next isn’t really the problem. The problem is HOW to write what you write next.

Let me give you a real world example. A couple of weeks ago, a writer came to me needing to write a scene that took care of two things – introducing his main character’s wife, and conveying the fact that the two were struggling financially.

Notice that we know what to write, but we don’t know how to write it. I mean sure, we could take the obvious route. Our main character comes home from work, and there his wife is, at the dining room table, bills spread about everywhere, looking dire. Does the job, right? Sure.

But is it a good SCENE?

No.

Any time you give us the same scene/solution that the average Joe on the street could’ve come up with, you’ve given us a boring scene. Even the best version of that scene gives us information (exposition) and nothing more. Which puts us right back at the blank page. So what the hell do we write?

I’m going to let you in on a big secret here – the key to writing a scene that destroys the blank page. Are you ready?

CONFLICT

You want to approach your scene with the goal of injecting some conflict into it. And by conflict, I mean an imbalance that needs to be resolved. Maybe one character is mad at the other and starts yelling at them. Maybe one character is mad at the other and is passive aggressive towards them. Maybe one character is hiding a secret from another character. Maybe the two characters are avoiding talking about something. Maybe the characters desperately want to be together but can’t for some reason. Maybe the characters are fighting off a common enemy.

Conflict comes in many forms. But the important thing is that once you include conflict in a scene, you move away from merely conveying information, and you instead add an element of entertainment. Telling us that these characters are in financial straights is boring. Having one of the characters fed up that they’re in financial straights and taking it out on their partner in a passive-aggressive manner, now you have a scene.

I can already see it. The wife doesn’t NEED to have these bills out for when her husband comes home. But she wants to make a point. She’s reminding him that he can’t keep ignoring their reality. They’re in financial straights and he’s got to do something about it. He shakes his head, storms by her, and all of a sudden we have tension in the air. We have conflict. We have a scene, even if it’s a mere quarter of a page long.

But let’s say that one of the things you ALSO want to convey in this scene is that our husband and wife characters love each other very much. Having them pissed off at each other may make for a juicier scene, but it conveys the exact opposite about their relationship than what you want. Okay, that’s fine. Just shift the conflict so that it’s external.

Maybe our husband gets home, and the neighbors are, once again, playing their music loudly. As our couple work out which bills they need to pay first to stay above water, the music only seems to get louder, until the husband can’t take it anymore. He storms over to the neighbors and tells them off.

Remember, the most boring scenes in any script are the scenes where nothing’s happening. And “nothing’s happening” is universal code for “No conflict.” So always look for an angle into the scene where some kind of conflict is taking place, even if it’s subtle. Assuming that you know what needs to happen next in your script, the right level of conflict could be the key to busting past that blank page.