So, originally, today, I was going to talk about Noah’s Choice and those pesky video cameras but, after reading Bedford, I’d rather use today’s post on helping Joseph make his script as good as it can possibly be.

When I do these script reviews, half of the review is dedicated to explaining what the script is about so I rarely get the time to suggest actual fixes. That’s what today’s post will cover. And if you like some of the notes I give here, hire me! I can practically guarantee your script will get better and, if you mention “Bedford,” I’ll give you 100 bucks off.

Now that I’ve had a day to think about the script, one of the things I’m worried about is that it does feel THIN. Scott put together a technical analysis of the screenplay and learned that it contained 16,000 words, which is low. You want to be closer to the 20,000 word mark. The low word count made sense to me based on how the script felt. The plot zips along like lightning but, in doing so, there aren’t many moments where you get to slow down and smell the flowers.

This is one of those universal challenges you face when you write a screenplay. You know you have to move things along to keep the reader engaged but you also have to make them feel something in order to stay engaged. And if all you’re doing is moving the plot forward, the experience feels empty.

This leads us to Bedford’s first issue, which is its stilted emotional subplot. Emily has a daughter. The daughter wants to spend more time with her father. Emily is not on good terms with the father. So she’s not supportive of this reunion. The irony, of course, is that the father ends up being on the plane that’s gone missing. Which ties our emotional plotline together.

But is that the best version of an emotional plotline we can get out of this story? I’m not convinced it is.

Let’s look at the father storyline. Emily doesn’t like the father. The father is on the plane. Well, is there much drama in that? If the worst-case scenario happens and the military gets rid of this plane, Emily’s in a pretty good position! Now she doesn’t have to worry about this a-hole father screwing up her daughter’s life anymore.

I know that Joseph would say the reason it works is because, even though it’s no sweat off Emily’s back if the dad disappears, Emily knows that it would destroy her daughter. So, in Joseph’s argument, it’s a more nuanced decision that Emily has to make. Does she save the man she despises in order to make her daughter happy? Theoretically, I understand this argument. But I didn’t feel any emotional way from that choice.

For starters, I winced when I learned the dad was on the plane. It felt too cute. Too “wrapped up in a bow.” You’re already asking for a huge buy-in with everything that’s going on. Throwing “dad on the plane” in there is the equivalent of, after asking a friend for a 500 dollar loan, you then, an hour later, ask them for another 100 bucks.

Here’s how I was thinking we could fix this. Move the father out of the story. The daughter, who’s at college, is flying in tomorrow. We would set this up through a conversation between Emily and Crane. He notes how happy he is that she’s finally taking her vacation days off. She points out that, yeah, her daughter is flying in for the week and she wants to spend as much time with her as possible.

If you really wanted the dad in here, We could reverse the Emily-Husband dynamic. In this version, the daughter goes to school next to her father and therefore spends most of the time with her father. She rarely comes home anymore. So Emily is making the most of her daughter’s visit. After we establish that backstory via a conversation between Emily and Crane, we would not hear anything else about that storyline for 25-30 pages.

Then, in the midst of the plane mystery deepening, either through the dad texting Emily or the daughter’s friend texting Emily, she learns, shockingly, that her daughter came in tonight on an earlier flight. She’s ON THE ATLAS FLIGHT.

To be clear, I’m still not sold on any family members being on the plane. It’s too much of a coincidence to me. But the reason I like this new version better is because the setup of Emily not coming until tomorrow makes the surprise that she’s on this Atlas flight TRICK the audience into focusing on the surprise rather than the coincidence.

Another reason I like it is because, in these contained movies, you need as many shocking moments as you can get away with. The repetition of the environment necessitates that we find exciting story beats anywhere we can. This would be a good one.

Okay, let’s move on to Mike and his lack of fuel. This is one of those story choices that feels right from a screenwriting perspective. You’re giving this important character a ticking time bomb (he’s running out of fuel and needs to land) which adds an additional layer of suspense and tension to the story.

But not every story component that TECHNICALLY works ORGANICALLY works. Sometimes the coolest screenwriting tricks in the world don’t work within the larger context of the story. That’s how I’d label this choice. We’re so baffled by how dismissive Emily is towards Mike and his SOS situation that we get annoyed by it. The guy’s got less than a gallon of fuel and you’re asking him to fly around and tell you what he sees?? That’s not realistic. For either Emily or Mike (if I were Mike I’d tell her to F off).

This is an easy fix, though. Mike is already in a really crazy situation. He was in the UK five minutes ago. Now he’s in the U.S. What we should do here is establish that Emily isn’t allowed to land a plane that isn’t cleared in the US. But she can try and get a special landing clearance for him, which will take a few phone calls. That allows us to keep Mike up in the air while Emily attempts to solve his problem. And, as long as he’s up there, he might as well help her out.

Getting back to the emotional side of the story, there’s a version of the Mike storyline that’s A LOT DEEPER that allows for a bigger, more impactful, climax. It would go something like this. Similar to Wade Wilson in Deadpool and Wolverine, Mike is not in a great place in life. His life didn’t go the way he imagined it would. And he regrets the fact that he didn’t do something bigger with his life.

In this version of the story, Emily and Mike’s talks would be a little deeper. They’d get into some of that stuff.

This way, when the climax comes around, you could set it up so that the military is about to take down the aliens and the plane. It’s a foregone conclusion. UNLESS Mike sacrifices himself. If Mike could somehow disrupt the shot by crashing into the missile launcher, he could give them just enough time to get away. Essentially, Mike finally does something that matters in his life.

Obviously, that’s a darker ending. I suppose there’s a version of that ending where Mike could still survive the crash. Because I do like the idea someone had of Emily and Mike finally seeing each other in the end (similar to John McClane meeting the cop at the end of Die Hard). You could even hint that there’s some romantic potential there. All of these different choices will alter the tone so you have to figure out which concoction best suits the movie you’re imagining.

As for our ending where Emily and Crane leave the tower and drive out, I’m on the fence about this. On the one hand, it makes the ending different from the first two acts. I like that. All the movement does make things more exciting as well. So I like that.

But it’s also kind of messy, which I don’t like. And Crane is such a weak character that he almost single-handedly destroys this scene. Crane might as well be an AI powered human body, he has so little depth to him. And what’s frustrating about that is that it’s an easy fix.

Let’s establish who Crane is in that first act! I imagine him similar to the sheriff character Jeff Bridges played in Hell or High Water. He’s almost retired. All he cares about is his pension. The guy’s mantra is: Don’t rock the boat. When all this shit starts going down, Crane keeps saying to Emily, “Let it go. It’s above our pay grade.”

That way, when Crane is driving the car at the end, it actually means something. Because he’s transformed as a character. But even without that, note how much better you know my version of Crane than the version in the story. Just by that one paragraph I wrote. That’s how easy it is to give a character depth. So, even if it’s not my version of the character that you go with, come up with your own version. As long as Crane isn’t some faceless wordless shadow in the back of the room.

Finally, I want to talk about where this movie ends. I feel like it should end in the tower and I have two examples I want to share for why. The first is Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor is a terrible movie. But there’s one thing I remember from that movie. Ben Affleck plays a pilot who’s the greatest pilot in the entire Navy. When the Japanese start attacking and there’s pure chaos on the ground, all Ben Affleck is trying to do is get up in a plane. Because that’s where he belongs. That’s where he’s the best. He can’t do anything for anyone down here. He’s useless.

I like characters like that. They’re so great at what they do that that’s where they need to be to shine the brightest. Assuming Emily is great at her job, she should know that her best chance at saving the plane is up in that tower. Cause that’s where she shines the brightest.

The second example is Wedding Crashers. In that movie, the writers, Steve Fabor and Bob Fisher, couldn’t figure out their ending for draft after draft after draft. Then one day one of them said, in the most obvious of statements, “Our movie is called Wedding Crashers. It needs to end at a wedding.” And that’s how they came up with their ending.

This script is similar in that, it’s about an air traffic controller. It needs to end in an air traffic tower.

Yes, I understand that that makes the ending LESS cinematic. But if the FBI is guarding that tower and Emily has to sneak back in, there are elements there that can be cinematic (not to mention, it would be cheaper to shoot).

Those are my thoughts on how to improve Bedford. If any of these ideas have inspired you guys to come up with even better ideas, please share them. The more feedback Joseph has going into this next draft, the better. :)

I would even ask Jospeph to come up with a 2-3 page document detailing what he’s going to do for the next draft and I would post it here. That way, we can spot any potential problems ahead of time and adjust the outline accordingly.

Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: The crew of a ramshackle starship, stranded lightyears from the rest of humanity, stages a daring heist to infiltrate a rogue luxury transport, steal the spare warp drive it hoards, and escape the gaze of Eos — a volatile star tumbling toward supernova.
About: This script finished in second place in the Scriptshadow Mega-Showdown Screenwriting Competition.
Writer: Luke Secaur
Details: 118 pages

We sci-fi lovers are starving for a good sci-fi film. And I’m not talking about one of those clever-premised tiny films like Ex Machina. Something with some scope! We haven’t had one of those in a lonnnnnng time. We got Rebel Moon on Netflix. But that movie sat on the screen like a dead elephant.

That’s why I picked this concept for the contest. It’s a cool idea! A heist film in space? Sign me up! To be honest, the logline implied that there was a little too much going on. Maybe that’s something to look at going forward for Luke. Should we streamline this into a more straightforward space heist film? Let’s find out.

The Eos sun is about to go supernova in 10 hours. The last people on a space station in the star system are fighting for the last few seats on the final evacuation ship. Through a miracle, our hero, Nathan, gets his wife and daughter onto the last two seats . He promises them that if he can see them again, he will. And off they go.

Cut to 7 years later and, what do you know, Eos is still burning, the stubborn old star that can’t quit us. Nathan is now the captain of a small ship and crew (pilot Lenora, guitar-playing Diego, droid H3-NRY, and freshman Opal) who dart around looking for leftover spaceships. They scavenge these things for fuel and food, all to live a little bit longer.

But what they’re really hoping to find is an Alcubierre drive. These drives allow ships to jump to light speed, which would allow Nathan to reunite with his wife and daughter. During their latest scavenge, they run into another crew and are able to kidnap one of them, the perpetually sick Mako.

Mako informs them that there’s a ship run by a cult that is set up for a front row seat to the supernova. It just so happens that they have a spare Alcubierre drive on their ship. Which means all they have to do is sneak on, steal the thing, and they’ll finally be able to escape this potentially-but-not-yet-but-will-probably-blow-up-soon-although-we’re-not-100%-sure star. Can they do it???

Outpace The Dawn is better than Rebel Moon. If Netflix made this movie, it would be more popular than that movie. There are some caveats to that – like several rewrites. But the idea is better than Rebel Moon for sure.

I thought the script was okay but something was bothering me as I wrote this review up.  I wanted it to be better and I couldn’t figure out what it was missing.  It was only once I finished the review that it came to me.  Outpace the Dawn doesn’t understand its tone yet.  I think the best version of this story is Guardians of the Galaxy meets Ocean’s 11.

It KIND OF gives you that.  But it gives you a muted version of that.  The characters aren’t as fun.  The jokes aren’t as sharp.  And I don’t know why that is.  I’m wondering if Luke wants to make a more serious version of this story and, therefore, keep the characters grounded.

I say f*&% that.  Let’s have fun here!  This is a fun premise.

The problems start right there in the opening scene.  We’re told that the sun is going to go supernova in 10 hours, which is why there’s a race to get on this final escape ship. But then as soon as the escape ship leaves, we cut to 7 years later and the sun is still there. No supernova.

Sure, this is explained by Luke. Supernovas are not an exact science. Nobody knows when they’re going to blow. But it did feel cheap that we frame the opening with this extreme urgency then, as soon as the scene is over, throw that urgency out like a used Coke can.

This is followed by a scene where our team of scavengers attempts to infiltrate an abandoned ship for spare parts. As they’re scavenging it, another group of scavengers appears and tries to do the same. We just got out of a very rare scenario (a star that’s going to go supernova) and now we’re in another one (what are the chances that right when you scavenge a ship in the middle of nowhere that someone else does so at the exact same time?). Are these ships getting scavenged every 10 minutes?

Those opening scenes, while by no means catastrophic, gave me pause. I would label both of them as sloppy. Or, at least, not as clean as they could be.

But that’s okay because the success of every script comes down to how you deliver on the aspects of the script that matter. For example, if you write a horror script, all that TRULY matters, is that it’s scary. If you write a comedy script, all that TRULY matters, is that we laugh. Every other aspect of the script can be mediocre, as long as we laugh.

When it comes to heist scripts, two things matter – You have to have a great heist and you have to have a fun group of characters. On both those fronts, Outpace The Dawn did okay.

Unfortunately, audiences don’t go to movies for okay. They go to be entertained. Nathan was fine. There’s a decent emotional component to his character whereby he’s trying to reunite with his family. Diego was kinda fun. Lenora and Opal were all right but, if I’m being honest, kinda forgettable. My favorite choice on the character front was Mako. I love the idea of putting a villain on the team, someone you can’t quite trust. So that was cool.

Then there was the heist. The heist had some problems, the biggest of which was that I couldn’t quite imagine the ship we were infiltrating and where we were all the time and what all the different parts of the ship looked like. This is one of the challenges of writing sci-fi and fantasy. There is no frame of reference for the reader visually. So it requires very clear descriptions, something that’s challenging to achieve within the abbreviated format of screenwriting.

But the bigger problem was, the people that we were trying to steal the warp drive from didn’t feel that scary. The thing you want to do with heists is you want to make the heist feel impossible. This was some hippy cult in a ship. Not exactly the most threatening of folks.

I liked that we didn’t have guns. That’s more in line with what you want to do – make the goal as hard as possible. But it starts with the difficulty of the heist itself. And this heist difficulty level reminded me of Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon Jinn going into the separatist ship and being attacked by a bunch of harmless droids.

That doesn’t even broach the fact that I wasn’t sure how many people were on the ship! If you told me it was 3, I would’ve believed you. If you told me it was 303, I’d believe you. Again, we have to know what we’re up against before we head into the ship.

Some of these details may be in the script and I just missed them. I’m sorry if that’s the case. But it’s hard to pay attention 100% of the time in a script where there’s no visual reference for anything. In other words, if I read a romantic comedy script set in New York, I never once have to use my brain to figure out where we are, what’s around us, and what everything looks like. I already have those references in my head.

But in this script, nearly every scene requires me to do some mental work to visualize what’s happening. And if the reader’s forced to do that all the time, I guarantee you even the most dialed-in reader is going to experience some mental drift. Readers don’t like working when they read. They like enjoying.

The last script I read that did a good job with all this stuff was Street Rat Allie. The writer created this entire world but did so in a clear and concise way so that we were always able to visualize what was going on.

So, in summary, I think more work needs to be put into the characters. I don’t want them to be kinda okay. I want to aim for “greatest characters ever.” You won’t get there, of course. Nobody does. But by aiming way higher than you’re aiming now, you’ll upgrade them for sure.  We need things to be more fun, more wild.  The final heist needs to be bigger and more impossible.  And there needs to be an obsession with clarity in the description.

What did you guys think?

Script Link: Outpace the Dawn

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

What I learned: Be careful about trying to have your cake and eat it too. Readers notice that. Is it fair to build your opening scene around a ticking time bomb only to learn, right afterward, that the ticking time bomb was a false alarm? Probably not.

Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: Halfway through its 120-year journey to save mankind, the hypersleeping passengers of the spaceship A.R.K. begin to fall victim to a serial killer.
About: This script finished in third place in the Mega-Showdown Screenplay Contest!
Writer: Mikael Grahn
Details: 112 pages

I was thinking about how Scriptshadow is a script review site and that I spend a lot of those reviews on scripts from the Black List – which I’m okay with. But it’s not as exciting as it used to be when the Black List script quality was better.

So, in the lead-up to reviewing the winner of Mega-Showdown, I thought to myself, “Why only review the winner? Why not review the top three scripts? If we’re going to review scripts on the site, we should be celebrating homegrown scripts over others, right?”

So that’s what we’re doing this week. I’ll review 3rd place Noah’s Choice today. 2nd Place Outpace the Dawn tomorrow. 1st place Bedford on Wednesday. On Thursday, I want to talk more about feedback. And then Friday, to add one last flavor to this contest, I’m going to tell you which of the final three scripts I liked the most.

That all begins today. So, let’s review… Noah’s Choice.

Noah’s Choice follows a deep-space ship with the final 100+ humans in all of the universe onboard. They’re headed on a one-hundred-and-twenty-year journey to a new planet where they will reboot the human species. The ship itself was hastily constructed because the earth was dying quickly so they had to make some technological sacrifices.

The mission commander, Trevor Norman, 35 years old, is awakened from his cryo-sleep halfway through the trip by the onboard AI, Keeper. Keeper informs Trevor that 20 of the females in hypersleep have been murdered, possibly sexually assaulted, and even eaten. Trevor is quickly on the case and starts looking into it.

Keeper starts waking up other relevant parties as well, like mission agriculturalist, Ahsan, mission astronomer, Kahaan, and physician (as well as Trevor Nemesis), Flavia. After the three make initial assessments, Trevor orders Keeper to wake up the rest of the men (there are only 10 of them) so they can do DNA cross-checks on some of these cryo-crime scenes.

Soon, all sorts of people are awake and everyone’s giving their opinions on who they think the killer is. The prime target seems to be a South Korean man named Moon who, it’s discovered, upon some extra research, was a sexual offender back on earth. The other primary suspect is a Chinese man named Yichen who didn’t have to qualify to get on the ship as his rich father was the one who built it.

The group doesn’t have a lot of time to figure things out because they’re limited on oxygen. They actually have to use these little oxygen candles to generate an hour of oxygen at a time. All in all, they only have hours to solve the murders. Or else they’ll have to go back into their cryo bays and pray that the murderer doesn’t take them out next.

The central conflict is between Trevor and Flavia as Flavia is convinced that Trevor is the killer since he was so cold in the lead-up to the launch, cheating on his own wife with one of the mission members. But as time ticks down, Flavia begins seeing holes in her theory and must reevaluate who, indeed, the killer is…

Whenever I read a script with a good concept, I’m desperately hoping the writer meets the promise of their premise. That doesn’t mean I have a pre-formulated idea of what the narrative should be. It’s more of a feel thing. I want the feeling of the script to match up with what I felt when I read the concept.

When I saw this concept, I imagined a slow burn – something akin to the beginning of Alien with shades of David Fincher’s “Seven.” Something has happened and the crew members are trying to figure out what it is. As the story continues, as more clues are discovered, the pace steadily increases, until a suspect is identified and now they have to eliminate them.

That’s not what we get. Noah’s Choice hits the ground running the second people come out of hypersleep. A ton of characters are thrown at us all at once and we spend a lot of those early pages trying to figure out who’s who. I thought Mikael did a solid job differentiating all of the characters, something that’s hard to do in these scripts.

But by unleashing a ton of characters, we never get that slow build-up. Everyone is launching theories at us at once and, at times, it felt like a bunch of drunk college kids being dropped into an Escape Room. Everyone’s clumsily yelling at each other, spouting out theories, throwing out blame, and running from area to area as soon as a new clue is found. There was no grace to the proceedings. The plot was being knocked forward with a blunt object, giving the investigation a lack of sophistication.

My guess as to why that happened is because Mikael was determined to use GSU, specifically the “U” part (“Urgency”). So he creates this rule with these limited supply oxygen candles whereby there isn’t a lot of time to figure things out. Theoretically, that’s a good idea. But when you use it to dictate the actions of 10 bickering people, it becomes a circus.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind here. One, if your central mystery is strong enough, the reader will give you ample runway to build your story up. You don’t need these intense ticking clocks nipping at your characters’ heels right from the start. Two, in serial killer movies, the Urgency is almost always measured by the next kill. There’s rarely some Police Captain saying, “You have 24 hours to find the killer or else!” It’s more that, if they don’t figure things out soon, the killer kills another victim. That allows for a slower, but still effective, type of urgency.

There’s this scene in Seven where Somerset and Mills just sit down in Mills’ place and share theories on what might be going on. It’s a deliberately slow scene that’s more about getting to know these characters and how they work together. We never get a scene like that in Noah’s Choice. It’s more like a Mr. Beast video where everyone’s just yelling at each other the whole time.

Now, when I peeked through the comments on Noah’s Choice’s day, I saw that Mikael was using Agatha Christie as a guide for this story. And, if that’s the type of movie he was trying to make, fair enough. The notes I just shared aren’t as applicable. But I would argue that a Seven-like tone is more conducive to a deep space murder mystery than Agatha Christie is. So I think that was the incorrect creative choice to make. I just didn’t like the bickering tone. I would rather we follow 2-3 people around who come across spookier and spookier clues. The mummy-kid was a great example of this. I wanted more stuff like that.

One of the biggest discussions all week has been the lack of cameras on the ship. Mikael had a spirited discussion with everyone who thought there should be cameras on the ship and I have to give him credit for being the only screenwriter I know who has been given the same note from 20 different readers and insisted he was still correct. But I don’t want that to be a big talking point today because I’m actually going to dedicate Thursday’s article to it. I want to talk more about feedback in a broader sense. So save your opinions about the cameras for Thursday!

Look, I’m aware that my expectations of what I hoped this script would be are coloring my analysis of it. However, even if I had wanted this to be “Agatha Christie in space,” I still think it needs work. Even the basics aren’t there yet. Like Trevor. I felt nothing for Trevor. I didn’t like him. I didn’t dislike him. I was 100% neutral. There was no effort made to make me feel anything about our protagonist. And no, a couple of family video messages isn’t enough. I need to like this character by seeing him take actions that make me like him.

If I don’t feel anything about your main character, nothing you write afterward will matter. But, let’s say I did like Trevor. The rest of this story is still messy. The way these characters interact is clunky and juvenile 70% of the time. There’s no elegance to how these character scenes are crafted. Everyone’s just thrown into a blender and a piece of food eventually spits out and Trevor goes to see what it is, which leads to another blender being turned on. That’s the basis for almost every interaction in this movie.

So even if you’re going for Agatha Christie, I think we need to go for a calmer space-version of Agatha Christie. Less characters. Conversations with a clearer purpose. Scenes with clear beginnings, middles, and ends. The plot to Noah’s Choice has structure. But the conversations within that plot have zero structure and that’s what frustrated me the most. I couldn’t make it through any scenes without getting agitated.

I still believe in this idea. But I would look at this draft more as an exploratory draft as opposed to a draft that we build future drafts on. Cause I think we need to rethink how this starts and how it evolves. Curious to hear if you guys agree or disagree.

Script link: Noah’s Choice (Contest Draft)

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

What I learned: The goal with a murder mystery is not to line up the plot and character variables in a way that makes things the easiest on you, the writer (aka, eliminate cameras so you don’t have to come up with a reason why they can’t check camera footage). It’s to line things up to make them the hardest on you. In other words, if your story is about a man who needs to save a cat stuck in a tree, don’t make it a bansai tree. Make it a freaking redwood.

The Mega-Showdown Screenplay Contest deadline is THIS THURSDAY. Go here for details on how to sign up!

Genre: Comedy/Supernatural/High School
Premise: A nerdy father secretly signs up to be the chaperone of his daughter’s high school field trip to an old Native American reservation, only to have a killer king take over the history teacher’s body and start killing people.
About: Verve is one of the few outlets that still cares about screenwriting so I’m typically encouraged when I open up one of their scripts. The writer, Sarah Rothschild, has one film credit, the 2020 movie, “The Sleepover,” for Netflix. Rothschild is also writing the remake of the 1984 film that made every young boy fall in love with Darryl Hannah, “Splash.” I have no doubt that it was today’s script that got her that job.
Writer: Sarah Rothschild
Details: 118 pages

A lot of times I’ll open a script, not with a sense of doom, but a sense of acceptance. I know this isn’t the kind of story I like. And so the next 90 minutes are going to be painful. They’re going to feel a lot more like 190 minutes.

I can’t even begin to describe the stupid stuff I, all of a sudden, need to look up on the internet when I’m struggling to read a script. Here’s a brief peek into what that looks like: “What page am I on? Seven? Hmm, I thought I was on page 30. (Stares at the wall) I haven’t bought almond butter in over two years. I used to love almond butter. What happened? Now that I think about it, during those two years, some new almond butter brands have probably entered the market. I should find out what the best new almond butter brands are.” I then proceed to, I kid you not, research new almond butter brands for half an hour.

But I’m also reminded, time and time again, that if you’re a good writer, you can override almond butter syndrome. Doesn’t matter how much a reader dislikes the genre you’re writing. Good writing trumps all.

And that’s exactly what happened with today’s script.

40-something Pete McGuire lives in Oak Park, Illinois, coincidentally the exact same town I grew up in – no that didn’t affect my review. The only thing he cares about these days is spending time with his 15 year old daughter, Cora. Which isn’t easy considering she stays with Pete’s ex-wife, who’s now married to a third baseman for the Chicago Cubs.

In a desperate bid to spend more time with Cora, Pete secretly signs up to be a chaperone on the school’s next big field trip, to the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, which once housed the biggest Native American city in all of North America, with 20,000 people. Then, one day, all those people disappeared.

One of the other chaperones, Cal, informs cluless Pete that these trips are often used by the teenagers to sneak away and have sex. This totally ruins Pete’s good vibes and now all he can think about is watching Cora like a hawk. But when they get to Cohokia Mounds, she immediately disappears with a group of other teens.

Meanwhile, two other kids stumble into an off limits dig site, find an old tablet, and accidentally drop it just as the history teacher, Mr. Truitt, arrives. A soul shoots out of the broken tablet, enters Mr. Truitt’s brain, and now all Mr. Truitt wants to do is kill people.

All of a sudden, it starts raining, so all the kids are huddled into the central building, clueless to the fact that there’s now a demon running around trying to kill people. Oh, and the operating thesis is that it only wants to kill virgins. When the other chaperones find out what’s going on, they assure Pete that, wherever Cora is, she’s fine, because she’s definitely not a virgin.

Still, Pete must find his daughter. So he teams up with another chaperone, Lindy, who, coincidentally, is her boyfriend’s mom. They head off to find them, realizing, along the way, that they kind of like each other. So if they can somehow save their kids (and save them from having sex), maybe there’s a future romance that will blossom.

Today’s script is a great example of finding fresh angles into time-tested concepts. Kids going on a field trip. We’ve seen that before. But that doesn’t mean the subject matter is permanently closed off. If you can find a different way into a field trip, you can still write a unique entertaining movie.

These field trips are chaperoned. Why not tell the story from that point of view? Already, we’re starting to see a different movie. But there’s an amendment to this approach. And it’s one a lot of writers ignore. That amendment is: YOU MUST COMMIT TO IT.

In other words, you can’t write “chaperones” into your logline, have the 5 chaperones show up at the beginning of the story, then just write your average funny high school horror flick. No, you have to go all in on the chaperone thing.

You have to establish five chaperones, give us their backstories, tell us what their relationships are with their kids, figure out what’s uniquely funny about them. For example, Cal is a “worst-case scenario” guy. He tells you exactly how bad high school kids can get on these trips any chance he gets.

And you should tell the story almost exclusively from the chaperone POV. Which is what we get here. Which works out great. Rothschild fully commits to the idea. We even have a little mythology. Each chaperone is assigned a group “color”.

That might seem insignificant to the newbie writer. But that stuff resonates with readers. The reader knows they’re not phoning it in. They’ve thought this through. Cause a bad writer will easily assume that there’s nothing to chaperoning but showing up and winging it. I’ll read a lot of bad scripts where characters are winging it simply due to the fact that the writer has no idea what they’re writing about.

I’m sure some people are going to compare this to the movie, Blockers. But this is a WAAAAAAY BETTER SCRIPT than that. That script was awful. I was so confused when people actually liked it. This script is actually good and if you’re into these types of movies, read it. It’s a great template for how to approach this genre with just the right balance of humor, horror, character, and craft.

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

What I learned: I always love when writers SHOW as opposed to TELL in some clever way. Early in the script, Rothschild needs to convey to the reader that Cora doesn’t think about her father as much these days. The way most writers would handle that is through dialogue. NO! DON’T DO THAT! Figure out a way to SHOW IT. So, before I tell you what Rothschild does, you tell me how you would convey this by showing. ** I’m waiting. Have you thought something up? Okay… here’s what Rothschild did.

When Pete comes over to pick up his daughter from his ex-wife’s house, he realizes there was a scheduling mistake and Cora is going to hang out with friends tonight. Pete says no problem. They’ll do it next week. Here’s the ‘show don’t tell’ part from the script itself.

Cora hugs her mom. Pete holds his hand out for a handshake. Their special “thing.” Cora smiles, uncertain. After a few flubbed movements, it’s clear she doesn’t remember it. Pete laughs, hiding his disappointment.

What I learned 2: What I’m learning from a lot of these scripts that make the Black List is that they often get the writer chances at rewrites for old franchises. My friend Leah got a shot at Grease after writing Voicemails for Isabelle. Rothschild got a shot at Splash. And I’ve heard of lots of other cases where that’s happened as well. So, whatever franchise you want to reboot, write something in the same vein.

Actually, now I’m curious. If you could reboot one franchise, what would it be?

Script sale! Just sold!

Genre: Thriller/Horror
Premise: A young Asian woman becomes concerned when her Asian roommate begins dating a white man and she slowly starts becoming white herself.
About: This script has gotten a lot of heat in the last 24 hours because the trades announced it had been sold. It’s not clear if the actual sale just happened or it happened a while ago and they’re just now reporting on it. I know that happens sometimes. The script has been floating around for a year now which is good news for writers who feel like their script’s been passed up by Hollywood. You’re never passed up! You just have to find that one producer who loves it. So keep hitting people up. Keep pushing them to read your script. It’s like dating. You can have nine bad dates and on the tenth date, you find the love of your life. But does the love of your life have an artificial face?
Writer: Ran Ran Wang
Details: 96 pages

Sonoya Mizuno for Jo?

At the end of the day, screenplays are subjective.

You like some. You dislike others. It’s all part of the game.

But that doesn’t mean you throw up your hands and give up. You can still weight things in your favor so that you’re more likely to end up in the “YES” pile than the “NO” pile. One of the first things you can do is give us a new twist on an old formula. If you do that, you’re ahead of the majority of screenwriters.

And today’s writer does that. This is a serial killer movie. But it’s a serial killer movie with a twist we’ve never seen before. The killer is dating Asian women, slowly turning them into white women, and then murdering them.

Haven’t seen it! And I’m guessing you haven’t either.

The question is, is that a *good* different idea? Or just a different idea? Cause if it’s only different, it’s not going to get you into the YES pile.

20-something Rina, a Korean American lawyer, is out on a date with 20-something Preston, a very white man, who’s also a lawyer (at a different firm). Usually, Rina hates dating app dates. But there’s something intriguing about Preston. She likes this guy.

Not long after the date, we meet Rina’s roommate, Jo, a lesbian who’s secretly in love with Rina. She’s not happy at all to hear that Rina’s date with Preston went well but because she’s such a good friend, she encourages Rina to pursue him.

But then Jo actually meets Preston and he freaks her the hell out. He’s super pale. He’s socially unaware. And he looks psychotic. Sometimes you’ll be talking to him and he just stares at you. Creeeeeeep-y. Jo notices that Preston keeps giving her sexy eyes when Rina isn’t looking.

As the weeks go by, Jo sees less and less of Rina and whenever she does see her, Rina seems paler. As Rina’s relationship progresses, we keep hearing about these blond girls getting murdered by a serial killer. One night Rina starts looking into these dead girls and realizes that one looks exactly like her Asian friend who went missing a year ago. But how can an Asian woman become white and blonde? It doesn’t make sense!

One day when Rina isn’t around, Preston shows up and corners Jo in the kitchen. He then kisses her, biting her lip. Jo gets away and, over the course of the next few days, she becomes super strong. At this point, she knows something crazy is up with Preston and desperately attempts to get Rina away from him. But Rina is now a blond blue-eyed white girl. Which means Jo needs to act fast.

This is a very ambitious screenplay and I’m not sure I was always able to follow along.

I liked a lot of the early stuff. In particular, I liked the subtext behind Jo being in love with Rina but Rina being obsessed with this new guy she met. In screenwriting, you’re constantly looking to build relationships that allow conversations to have subtext.

So when Jo is poo-pooing Rina’s new boyfriend, she’s not literally hating on the boyfriend. She’s got a dog in this fight. She wants Rina. So of course she’s going to hate on the new guy. But she can’t say she loves Rina out loud and therefore has to convey these things through subtext.

I also liked how casual the writing was. Sometimes we writers can obsess over every single word so much so that we end up with these technically correct paragraphs but those paragraphs read like jagged edges. The action description throughout this script read like butter.

My issues with the script had to do with the mythology.

I had a hard time following it. The antagonist, Preston, is fashioned after a vampire. For example, if he bites you, you gain superhuman strength. And there are many allusions to how pale he is and how pale he makes others. So we’re at least partly in vampire land.

But then I don’t know what that has to do with turning Asian women into white women. That whole aspect of the mythology seemed to have different rules. And once you create a mythology that contradicts itself, the reader gets confused and loses confidence in the story.

This is quite common, actually, especially in the early stages of a screenwriting career. We tend to see mythology as this giant candy store where we can pull out any piece of candy whenever we want. But good mythology is the customer who walks into the candy store and only buys the candy that he really needs.

Cause I had a tough time figuring out what the point was here. I know there’s this “toxic masculinity” theme running throughout the script. But there’s also this toxic friendship theme running throughout the script (Rina is terrible to Jo). I suppose, if you wanted to dig deeper, you could even say that this was a story about toxic heterosexuality since Jo is gay and the two people who screw her over are straight.

That’s not how you present your theme.

You don’t give the reader a bunch of choices and say, “Pick one.”

Yes, good movies explore multiple themes but the best movies have a dominant theme – one message they’re trying to get across.

And the problem with a script like this is that it’s clearly a THEME script. It’s created to be deconstructed for its message. So if that message isn’t clear, then you’re not executing the most important part of your presentation. Us moviegoers don’t need a theme when we watch The Fall Guy. But we do when we watch indie movies like this.

Even the title confuses me. “If I Had Your Face.” At first I think that’s coming from Rina’s perspective. She’s eager to have a white woman’s face. But then, later in the script, we get all these shots of mirrors and Jo’s face becomes Preston’s face sometimes and Rina’s face sometimes and the last dead girlfriend’s face sometimes. It just felt like we were throwing spooky stuff up on the screen even if we didn’t understand why.

By the way, this is something newbie writers do all the time in horror. They write trippy stuff and expect the reader to do the work for them. The writer doesn’t know exactly why they’re doing it but they’re HOPING the reader will come up with an explanation. You never want to write like that. You shouldn’t ever expect the reader to do your work. Even though it’s harder, you should always do the work yourself. You should always write things that make sense.

There’s a good lesson to be learned here, even if it’s a confusing one. I believe that Ran Ran is great with character stuff and dialogue. I think she’s weak in horror and mythology. However, this script doesn’t sell without the horror and mythology. That’s how powerful marketable genres are. Even if you’re not great with them, they give you a much better chance at selling your script, even if you didn’t perfectly execute the genre part. And that’s because producers read the script and see the poster and the trailer. Posters and trailers always look better when there’s a marketable genre popping off them.

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

What I learned:“Running Commentary Description” – Running Commentary Description is when you occasionally use your action lines to commentate on what’s happening. It helps create a more casual read. So, for example, we get this line early on: “Finally, a waiter comes by with two glasses of red wine. A lifeline.” That last part – “A lifeline,” gives the reader a little more information on what that red wine means in the moment. Or later on, when Jo is speaking to a couple of Irene’s work friends and they’re going their separate ways, one of the friends says, “We should all catch up some time.” And the action line that follows is, “They never will.” I kinda like running commentary description but just like anything, if you do it too much, it can get annoying. So be careful out there.