Genre: Suspense
Premise: (winning logline) A recently demoted executive finds himself being harassed by a dangerous thug sitting next to him on the last bus back home to the suburbs.
About: The Short Story Showdown was one of the tightest races we’ve ever had. The top three vote-getters were separated by less than 3 votes. The story that won ended up being the only one of the writers who vetted their logline in the comments section. Could lead to similar strategies in the future.
Writer: Jason Diggy
Details: 8 pages (4800 words)

William H. Macy for Daniel?

Short stories.

They’re ELUSIVE!

What makes a good one?

I don’t know. I think it’s one of those deals where you know it when you see it.

If you’re anything like me, you want to find out if The Empty Seat is one of those ‘know it’ stories. Let’s find out!

Daniel Lowry is an aging office worker with a lousy boss and mostly lousy co-workers. He’s upset because he was told by his boss that he had to work late. This screwed up his transportation so now he has to take the late-night bus home.

A lot of this story focuses on Daniel’s wait for the bus. During that time, we learn more details about how much of an a-hole his boss is. Daniel spots a half-drunk woman from his work who he suspects is trying to get ahead through physical means with her own superior and he hates her for it.

As Daniel laments the late bus, he thinks about how he’s only got a couple more years before his kids are out of the house. Then he’ll have a lot more power at work. He won’t have to kiss the ring every single day and do whatever he’s asked. But right now, the bills are large and they’re frequent which means he has to suck it up and do whatever his stupid boss says.

Finally, the bus comes and it’s almost full. Daniel finds two seats together and semi-straddles the adjacent one to make sure nobody sits by him. We hit another stop, some more people get on, Daniel is antsy about whether his precious adjacent seat is going to be used. But luckily no one takes it.

That changes at the next stop. Some 25 year old punk with long hair gets on the bus and, this time, the seat gods do not bless him. The guy goes straight to Daniel’s seat and sits next to him. As the bus starts up again, the guy starts smoking. The smoke is going right into Daniel’s face. Daniel can also feel a potential weapon (a gun? A knife) in the guy’s pocket as it keeps bumping up against him.

Daniel starts to freak out. But he finally gets to his stop, he leaps up, and slides past this seat demon, then hurries down the block without looking back, convinced that this punk is going to chase him down. Daniel clears a corner, stops, catches his breath, and waits. Was all that just in his mind? Or is Daniel actually in danger?

In the comments section of the Short Story Showdown, ChinaSplash posted their logline which began a discussion about why I didn’t choose their story for the showdown. It came down to that the logline promised a big sci-fi concept, which was what hooked me, yet the story started with a woman who really wanted to eat a donut. My feeling was, “What’s the point of including that? It’s a short story. You don’t have time to waste. Start deeper in when the story is already moving.”

I feel the exact same way about this story.

If you read this logline, you assume you’re getting a story about a guy who deals with a scary, potentially dangerous, individual who sits next to him on a bus.

But that’s not what we get. Our malcontent bus villain doesn’t sit down next to our hero until halfway through the story.

To me, that’s unforgivable. I was even getting antsy that we weren’t in the bus conflict by the end of the first page. Yet I had to read three more pages to get there.

But let’s look at this from Jason’s point of view. I’m guessing he wanted to do some character development first. He wanted to get you in Daniel’s head so we could learn what makes him tick. Because what good is an antagonist if we don’t understand the person he’s antagonizing?

That’s a fair argument.

However, there are ways you can achieve this that are a lot more likely to keep the reader’s interest. For example, when we’re waiting at that first stop with Daniel, introduce the scary rider then. He’s standing over by the side but you can just tell there’s something off about him.

Now, when we go into Daniel’s head and learn about his day and what makes him tick, we’re doing so underneath a line of suspense. Because we see the antagonist. We know the situation with him is only going to get worse. So we’re more compelled to turn the pages, even though “nothing” is happening yet.

The Empty Seat was struggling in another area as well, which was that Daniel wasn’t a very likable guy.

When I originally heard this pitch in the comments section, I endorsed it! I said, “This sounds good.” But the way it was pitched, I was imagining a weak, potentially cowardly guy, who was being unjustly bullied. In other words, an easy person to root for.

But that’s not Daniel. Daniel is King Complainer. Give this guy a topic and he can give ten hours on things he dislikes about it. He’s complaining about his boss, his co-workers, the women there, the transportation, his bills, the other riders.

But the action he took that killed it for me was when he sat down on the bus and took over two seats to make sure nobody sat next to him. How am I rooting for that guy?

I honestly thought, at that point in the story, that Jason was flipping the script on us. He was making us think Daniel was our hero when, in actuality, he would be our villain. And the guy who sat next to him would end up being the “character who was intimidated by another passenger” – Daniel himself.

But no, Daniel was just a really upset guy who hated his life and wanted to get it all out of his system. It compromised the character to such a degree that it was impossible to root for him.

I actually see this issue occur frequently once writers enter the short story (or long-form storytelling) format. Unlike screenplays, you can now take us directly into the character’s mind. And often, since our characters represent us, we use that character to get out all of our own frustrations.

I’m not saying that there isn’t value in observation and frustration. But you have to be careful with this stuff because when the reader is introduced to your main character, one of the first things that goes on in their head is, “Do I want to go on a journey with this person?” If the answer is no, you’re screwed.

I don’t think Daniel is someone you want to go on a journey with.

One of the most successful character types you can write is not the guy who gets kicked to the ground and complains. It’s the guy who gets kicked to the ground, but gets back up and keeps trying. Audiences LOVE those characters.

The Empty Seat’s potential to redemption was the antagonist. If that interaction was strong, I think we could’ve turned things around. But there’s not much to it. I understand what Jason was doing. He was exploring how we can get lost in our heads and build things up that aren’t there. I do think that’s an interesting topic to explore.

But, in this case, the logline kind of promises conflict and we don’t get much of it. It was too much of a tease.

Story link: The Empty Seat

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

What I learned: One of the hardest characters to make likable is a complainer. It’s not impossible! But the only times I see it work are in comedies. In one of my favorite movies ever, Office Space, Peter is a serial complainer. But he’s also funny. So be wary of going the complainer route. If you do, make it a bug, not a virus.

Of the many discussion points that have come out of this movie, the one I care most about is that Tom Burke (Praetorian Jack) now needs to be in every single movie going forward for the next 50 years

Genre: Action/Sci-fi/Epic
Premise: A young girl is taken from her people, grows up in a desolate desert city, and learns to become a great road warrior, an essential job in a post-apocalyptic world where everything of value that is transferred between towns will be attacked by outsiders.
About: Director George Miller loved the character of Furiosa so much that he immediately went about creating another movie for her after Fury Road. Ten years later, a new Mad Max movie is born. The plan was to do a Mad Max prequel for Tom Hardy’s character as well. But with Furiosa coming in at just 35 million over the 4-day holiday weekend, it looks like that movie, sadly, will never happen. Miller wrote Furiosa with longtime collaborator, and mainly actor, Nick Lathouris.
Writers: George Miller and Nick Lathouris
Details: 150 minutes!

Furiosa is going to go down in history as a symbol of change in the public’s consumption of theatrical movies. On Hollywood’s biggest movie weekend, it scored the lowest opening of that weekend in 30 years.

I find that unfortunate because Furiosa shouldn’t be the movie that represents theatrical box office’s fall. It should’ve been a movie like Transformers 9 or Fast & Furious 11. Cause those are the movies that have gotten us into this muck.

Furiosa is the kind of movie Hollywood SHOULD be making, which is bigger budget movies that actually have ideas and take risks. It’s not a perfect movie but it’s a very good one. And it could’ve been iconic if not for a couple of factors working against it.

The main factor is expectation. You can’t put this movie after Fury Road. Fury Road was pure adrenaline. To follow that with a years-long character-driven epic is confusing. Whereas, if they put this movie FIRST and Fury Road SECOND, it would’ve been one of the best one-two combos ever. EVER.

For those who haven’t seen it, and apparently there are a lot of you, Furiosa is a complex movie that follows a little girl, Furiosa, who’s taken from a hidden “Eden” if you will, to become the de facto daughter of a rising menace in a post-apocalyptic desert world, Dementus (Chris Hemsworth).

Dementus wants to conquer the big swinging d**k in the region, Immortan Joe, so he can have his cool rock water town. When his initial efforts are thwarted, he goes about a years long plan of taking over Gas Town, where all the region’s gas is kept, and Bullet Town, where all the weaponry is made.

During this time, Young Furiosa gets transferred over to the care of Immortan Joe (in one of the few sloppy plot beats) and is able to escape the high society slavery there to live secretly amongst the townspeople, where she gets a reputation as a fearless go-getter.

This gets her a position as a truck-protector for whenever Immortan Joe needs to get gas or weapons from the two other towns. Through this process, she becomes close with Joe’s star driver, Praetorian Jack, and soon the two are riding together (and kissing together! – well, offscreen at least). Everything’s going fine until Furiosa’s nemesis, Dementus, makes an aggressive bid to take over everything, forcing Furiosa to square off against him in one final battle.

Furiosa is a script you could never write as a spec.

Which is both a strength and a weakness.

It’s a strength because the script is unlike anything you’ve seen from a studio in two decades. It’s basically a period piece masquerading as a sci-fi action movie. Years upon years pass in several different places within the script. It’s not just one time jump and we’re done. We move through time gradually, and Hollywood movies just don’t do that. Hollywood movies, and spec scripts for that matter, like urgency. They like their time to be contained because it makes everything feel like it needs to happen right now. Which adds a ton of energy to the story.

So that choice alone makes this script feel unique.

It’s a weakness because we’re never quite sure where we are in the story. A couple of times in this movie I kind of sat up and asked myself, “Where are we going here?” It wasn’t clear.

The reason it wasn’t clear was because George Miller would focus on one particular time period within this multi-time-period epic and not give us any goals, stakes, or urgency to work with. One section was just about building Furiosa’s relationship with Praetorian Jack. There wasn’t really a goal within the sequence, which was frustrating.

But once you figured out that this was an epic, you sat back and let it happen, instead of trying to control it. Which is when the movie really started showing its mettle. Cause I can’t remember an epic sci-fi movie that has done it better than this one. I remember certain writers trying. Christopher Nolan tried with Interstellar. But that movie comes nowhere close to this one in both quality and vision.

One of the more interesting choices Miller made was to stay away from dialogue in regards to his main character. This is something I get into in my amazing dialogue book – this concept of showing as opposed to telling. And Furiosa is definitely a show-don’t-tell character. She rarely speaks.

There are two reasons to take this approach. Number one is that you don’t feel confident in your dialogue-writing ability. Which is fair. If you don’t feel great about your dialogue-writing, then write stories where your characters don’t talk much. It’s a legitimate strategy.

The other point is that delivering believable dialogue is notably challenging. I’ll give you a quick assignment to see what I mean. Go to Youtube and search for short movies. Not the best ones. Ones with 50,000 views or less. What you’ll find is that a lot of these short films actually look quite professional. However, the second one of the characters starts speaking, the suspension of disbelief is lifted and we’re aware of how fake everything feels.  It’s because the dialogue is lousy.  Which you can hide if characters don’t speak much. Even at the professional level.

Cause let’s be real: No writer has ever lived in a post-apocalyptic world before where guys ride around on giant stages in full hair-band makeup playing guitar. Any dialogue you try to create for that world risks sounding ridiculous.

This is why almost all of the dialogue in Furiosa is centered around big speeches (Dementus screaming up to Immortan Joe how he plans to take over his town). Big speeches are theatrical in nature, which hides the potential ridiculousness of what’s being said.   Big speeches also often contain logic, which is less susceptible to sounding stupid.  “You will adhere to our demands or we will attack you!”  That’s a much less tricky line to pull off than something that contains emotion, such as, “You complete me.”

Which is why when we’re outside of these speeches, the characters rarely say much. And I think that’s by design due to what I just said.

But the thing that really surprised me about Furiosa was the character work. Ironically, not with Furoisa herself. Furiosa was solid. But the stand-out characters were Dementus and Praetorian Jack.

The thing you always have to worry about when you’re doing prequels is finding villains that are worthy of the villain precedent you set in the original movie. Literally nobody has figured that out yet. Which makes sense. If the villains in these prequels were so awesome, *they* would’ve been the big villain in the next movie.

As a result, a lot of these prequel villains are middle-management types. Orson Krennic in Rogue One, for example. Who was scared of that guy? Nobody.

Miller was actually in a tricky spot because, while he had a cool villain already in Immortan Joe, there was no way to make him the villain of the movie. Why? Because Immortan Joe had to live. He has to survive to make it to Fury Road. That means Furiosa can’t defeat him. She would have to lose to him. Which would’ve led to a weak ending.

So Miller created this other character named Dementus, giving Furiosa somebody she could defeat, making her victorious at the end. And because of the “period piece” format, Miller was really able to explore this character on a deep level.

He wasn’t your average villain. He’s kind of dumb. He’s a terrible organizer. Everything falls to sh*t that he tries to manage. But he’s aggressive and he’s determined. So he’s always moving forward. He’s always trying to get to the next level, which is what you want out of your villain AND your hero. Because that means, inevitably, the two are going to run into each other, which is exactly what happens.

The other standout here was Praetorian Jack and it’s SOOOOO depressing that this movie bombed because, if it didn’t, this guy would’ve had his own movie. He’s so cool! He’s basically the original Mad Max (Mel Gibson) but more in control. He’s like the guy who walks into the bar and every single guy inside wants to be friends with him. He’s just cool! There’s no other way to put it.

It’s hard to write one really good character. This movie had three of them: Furiosa, Dementus, Praetorian Jack.

And those characters were bolstered by that unique George Miller flair. Like George Lucas, he never just puts characters in front of the frame. He’s always got all this other stuff going on in the background. Like Dementus’s “mimicer.” There’s this guy who hangs around Dementus and mimics everything he says and does. It’s hilarious! It’s just like Rock Star Guy. You wonder how he comes up with these things.

This movie proved to me what I thought was impossible. That a prequel can be good and not just backstory.

I’m fine if you didn’t go out to the theater to see this. But for all that is good and holy, watch this when it comes out on digital. For people who love sci-fi? It’s one of the best movies in the genre ever made.

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

What I learned: It’s amazing how easily you can make a character likable by showing how kind they are to your hero. The main reason we like Praetorian Jack is because he’s so kind to Furiosa. It’s simple but so very effective.

Genre: Horror
Premise: A young couple who perform rituals to raise people from the dead get more than they bargained for when they attempt to re-animate a young girl who doesn’t remember how she died.
About: This script finished with 8 votes on last year’s Black List. The writer is brand new!
Writer: Mike George
Details: 98 pages

Rising star Dominic Sessa for Ryan?

As I’ve pointed out before, you can really up your chances of breaking into the business if you come up with either a HIGH or MARKETABLE concept that can be shot in a single location.

Here’s the difference between the two. A high concept is something that has that all-important ‘strange attractor.’ The upcoming The Watchers is an example of this. A group of people get stuck in a looped forest that’s impossible to get out of, forcing them to live together in an isolated cabin in the woods.

Absent a high concept, you can still break through with a MARKETABLE concept. That just means you’re writing an idea in a genre that’s marketable and the idea itself lives in the same marketable space as other movies studios have released.

And yes, you can achieve both of these with the same idea. I’m just saying that if you don’t achieve the high concept, you can still write a script that people want to buy as long as it’s marketable.

Today’s script lands in that high concept space, albeit right at entry level: A couple attempts to raise the dead at an isolated AirBnB to disastrous consequences.

27 year old Shay and 25 year old Ryan are trucking it out to a remote house. We’re not sure why yet. We just know that Ryan is a little more smitten with Shay than Shay is with him. In fact, early on, Ryan attempts to propose to Shay, who steadfastly refuses. She’s not where he is yet.

The two get to a remote AirBnB farmhouse and start unloading their stuff. And that’s when we see a body bag. With a body in it! The couple lugs the dead body into the home. From there, we start to get hints about what’s going to happen. They’re going to perform a seance to bring this dead girl back to life.

The reason we’re bringing her back to life is explained soon after. They’re working for a client. This is his daughter. What they do is bring people back to life for clients so that they can have one last conversation with their loved ones before they move on.

However, the process for bringing people back to life is complicated. It requires writing out detailed pentagrams on the ground, writing in ancient languages on the walls in blood. Oh, and there’s a lot of sacrificing. One of them always has to sit within the pentagram and give a lot of blood in order to bring the dead person back to life.

Once they prep everything, the client, 40-something Mark, shows up. But the second he walks through the door (spoiler) Shay looks at him in shock. Shay knows this man. And he knows her. If this is the client, she knows, then chances are their dead girl is not his daughter. And that begs the question: Who the hell is she?

The first half of this script was awesome.

I was on the edge of my seat.

Two things I absolutely love in a screenplay are 1) Show me something I haven’t seen before. And 2) Give me a deep compelling mythology that I know you know intimately.

This script nailed both.

I’ve read ideas sort of like this before. But nothing quite like this. A couple who work as spiritual necromancers rent a home to perform a resurrection.

And then you have the mythology… this writer went all in on this mythology! I got the sense that he must’ve dabbled in witchcraft at some point in his life. He knows way too many details about the practice not to have been a part of it somehow.

Those two things powered the first act of the screenplay.

I’ll tell you something else that powered it. The word “No.” In my dialogue book, one of my big dialogue tips is utilizing the power of “no” in conversation. “Yes” rarely leads you anywhere interesting in a conversation. But the word “no” almost always leads you there.

Early in the script, Ryan, who clearly likes Shay more than she likes him, proposes to her. And what does she say? She says, “No.” The reason that answer is so important is because it lays a thick claptrap of conflict over the rest of the story. Every conversation they now have is affected by this new jilted dynamic.

Think about what their conversations would be like if she had said yes. I’ll give you a hint. They rhyme with ‘boring.’ With Ryan now wondering what he’s done wrong, why she doesn’t like him as much as he likes her, there’s subtext in every conversation that’s had.

So we’ve got an [x] impressive here, right?

Well, let me say this. I admire whenever a writer takes a big creative swing. Whenever they make a daring choice, there’s value in that. Unfortunately, I think George made the wrong choice and it kind of destroyed the rest of the screenplay. Spoilers ahead.

This Mark guy comes in and he’s supposed to be the dead girl’s father. He wants to reunite with her one last time. But then we see him and Shay giving each other eyes. We’re wondering what’s going on. What we find out is that he and Shay used to work together as “con men” bilking people out of money, pretending to raise the dead.

Mark then heard that Shay was doing her business with someone new. And she still owed him money or something. So he pretended to be a client in order to find her and get that money back.

The reason the choice doesn’t work is because it took a small intimate story with a really fun idea and made it both too silly and too complex. Once you introduce con men into other genres, it never feels right. It’s the kind of thing that only works when you establish it at the outset: This is going to be a con man movie.

But the bigger issue is that if George would’ve stuck with what got him here, he was on the verge of writing a great script. Because you’ve got this really cool mystery. When they’re slowly bringing this girl back to life, they’re realizing that she’s different. There’s some sort of mystery to her. That had me turning the pages.

But, also, you destroy your most emotionally impactful storyline before it ever had a chance to breathe, no pun intended. A father getting an opportunity to say goodbye to his daughter one last time… I wanted to see that. Especially after all the effort Ryan and Shay put into bringing her back alive. I felt that George really robbed the story of a great moment there.

Also, we should’ve left Mark in the ‘former or current lover’ category. We’ve already established that Shay doesn’t want to marry Ryan. You’ve built a compelling conflict between them via that storyline. Her sleeping with Mark would’ve been a natural extension of that storyline and now you’ve got this other layer of b.s. the three of them have to deal with as they bring this daughter back to life.

This happens sometimes. We get overzealous as writers. We get bored with our stories. We feel like we have to do more than we actually do. So we come up with big wild plotlines when a smarter smaller more emotional plotline would’ve been better.

I’m going to give this script a [x] worth the read because its first half is so good. But it’s one of those ‘hanging on for dear life’ worth the reads. Cause the second half was way too messy.

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

What I learned: Build your relationship backstories from elements organic to your concept. In other words, sure, you could’ve had Ryan and Shay begin their relationship at a coffee shop. But a coffee shop is generic. Instead, use the organic elements of your story to explain how they met. Which is what George does. Ryan and Shay met because Shay was originally working alone, Ryan hired her after his mom died, and they started dating after that. Not only does it make more sense but it feels genuine because it’s original. It stems from the core of your idea as opposed to some generic place that anybody in any movie could’ve met.

Does this red-hot project deliver? Load up those arrows and let’s find out!

Genre: Drama/Period
Premise: Robin Hood, who in this iteration was a robber and serial killer, is seriously wounded after a battle, forcing him to get his injuries treated on an island led by a nun.
About: This script/package just came together a couple of weeks ago. It will star Hugh Jackman and Jodie Cormer. It’s written and directed by Michael Sarnoski, who made that Nicholas Cage movie, “Pig,” and just finished “A Quiet Place: Year One.”
Writer: Michael Sarnoski
Details: 98 pages

When a new Robin Hood movie is announced, there’s a symbolic meaning to it that digs deep into one of the many issues within Hollywood. Which is that the town cannot ignore free IP. They would rather make a bad movie and lose a ton of money off publicly available IP than leave the IP alone and keep their money.

It’s weird that they keep making this mistake over and over again. Cause let’s be real. The Robin Hood IP is deader than Blockbuster Video.

Luckily, there are still three ways to revive dead IP. The first is to come up with an angle so fresh, it reinvents the material. The second is to execute the script so well that we’re captivated by the story. And the third is to hire a director with a really unique vision who presents the story in a fresh new way.

I can tell you whether the first two criteria are met as I just read the script.

1246

A young girl walking through the countryside dressed as a boy to avoid attacks, stumbles upon a 50-something hermit who gives her food & shelter and tells her to be careful on her journey. That night, the girl attempts to slit his throat while he’s sleeping. But he was still awake, knowing she would do so, and mercilessly kills her.

The next day, an old friend of his, the burly Edward, comes by and says that a family stole his farm and kicked him out. He wants it back but he needs help. Robin and Edward head to the farm, where they kill everyone, unfortunately losing Edward’s wife in the battle.

When word gets to the local warlord that Robin Hood is around, he and his men head to the farm and engage in battle with them. Both Robin and Edward barely defeat them. But Robin is on death’s doorstep.

Edward puts him on a boat and takes him to an island run by Sister Brigid, a sort of hybrid healer/doctor/nun. She takes in whoever comes and nurses them back to health. So, for the next 80 minutes, Robin does just that. The end. No, I’m not kidding. That’s the whole movie.

To this script’s credit, it nails Revival Option #2.

It completely reinvents Robin Hood. That cannot be disputed. So kudos for doing that because it’s clear that that was why this movie got greenlit.

Another thing the screenplay did was help me discover a new type of screenplay opening.

Actually, the opening has always been around but I’m just now realizing that it can be categorized.

I call it the “We mean business” opening.

Basically, what you do is you write something so shocking that the reader has no choice but to sit up and pay attention. Now, I want to be clear here. You can’t fake a “We mean business” opening. Remember the opening of The Sixth Sense? A former patient breaks into Bruce Willis’s home and stabs him.

I read that type of opening all the time. It’s not a bad opening but it’s not a “We mean business” opening.

A “We mean business” opening is what they did here. They had Robin Hood, one of the most beloved heroes ever, violently kill a 14 year old girl. That’s a freaking “We mean business” opening. It’s the kind of opening that makes the reader go, “Whoa.” It stuns them.

And it worked! You can tell by my review intro that I was skeptical of this script. But that opening scene made me think, “Okay, maybe this is going to be better than I thought.”

By the way, note the skill involved in executing the “We mean business,” opening. It wasn’t just following an old Robin Hood through the streets, seeing some girl, then killing her. Sure, that would’ve met the criteria for We mean business, but it also would’ve felt forced and artificial.

Instead, we get this little story of this lost girl and she meets this hermit and asks for his help. Then, when they’re asleep, she sneaks up on him to kill him as it turns out she came here to assassinate him all along. But he was ready for her and able to turn the tables. It gave us the We mean business moment yet we don’t despise our hero afterwards. He’s still worth rooting for.

This “We mean business” vibe continues for another 15 pages. And, at that point, I was sharpening my pen, getting ready to anoint another [x] impressive.

But then this script falls off a freaking cliff.

And oh how spectacularly it falls.

It fell so far so quickly, I had whiplash.

How could this have happened, I asked myself.
And that’s when I saw it:

Writer-director.

As I’ve chronicled before, very few directors can also write. I mean… we’re talking a narrative engine so inert here that the script stands in place for the last 80 pages. It’s stunning how boring the story that follows is.

What sucks is that this is Michael Sarnoski, who directed one of my most anticipated movies of the year: Quiet Place Year One. Now I’m worried that movie’s going to disappoint too!

So why, specifically does this script fall apart? Well, for one, it becomes a “waiting around” script. These are scripts where your characters just wait around the whole time. These narratives are incredibly difficult to make entertaining. Because movies are great at celebrating active-ness. They like when characters charge forward and take the story with them.

A hero can’t do that if he’s lying around for 80 minutes.

Your one respite in that situation is conflict. If we’re waiting around in a situation ripe with conflict, it can still be entertaining. Heck, we just saw this YESTERDAY! In my review of The Last Stop in Yuma County. Characters were all waiting around for a fuel truck to show up. But the difference was, there was an insane amount of conflict due to the hostage-situation.

Here we just… wait for Robin Hood to get better. And he doesn’t even have a goal he’s trying to achieve after he gets better. He’s just… trying to get better.

But this script violates a much bigger issue: It pretends to be a reimagining of Robin Hood but I have the sneaking suspicion that the original drafts of this script had nothing to do with Robin Hood and that, in the last couple of drafts, Sarnoski changed his main character’s name to Robin Hood to capitalize on the IP and have a better chance at getting it made. Which, to his credit, is exactly what happened. Talk about a “What I Learned.”

But yeah, I kept waiting for Robin Hood mythology to work its way into the story in clever ways but that never happened. There are a few moments where minor Robin Hood lore is brought up, but it’s presented in a manner by which it’s conceivable it could’ve been thrown in there at the last second.

I have to say, this is one of the most spectacular nosedives I’ve seen in a screenplay. It starts off SO STRONG and then it’s as if someone who’s never written a story before mumbled out 80 pages of jibberish.

And it’s not like it couldn’t have been saved! That’s the frustrating part. Late in the script, we learn that Sister Brigid’s family was killed by Robin Hood. Why not learn that earlier and then play up the suspense of whether she’s going to kill him? At least then we’re building towards a showdown.

But Sarnoski, oddly, runs away from conflict whenever the possibility presents itself. Brigid tells Robin she knows he killed her parents but, you know what, she’s okay with it. She still wants to heal him.

Wow.

Just wow.

It sticks a dagger into the center of my body when I see writers making these giant movies who possess so little storytelling ability. It sucks! Because what it means is we’re going to get this beautiful-looking movie with this cool trailer that’s going to focus on those first three violent scenes and then people are going to show up to the movie and say, “What the f**k was that???” Cause nothing happened for the last 80 minutes. Literally nothing.

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

What I learned: Take a well known beloved hero and make them bad (Robin Hood). Or take a well known beloved villain and make them good (Wicked). Tried and true method for reinventing classic stories.

When a movie nobody knows about is actually one of the best movies of the year

Genre: Contained Thriller
Premise: A knife salesman is holed up in a diner in the middle of nowhere when two bank robbers show up, loose canons who are a beat away from killing anyone who could ruin their score.
About: First time writer-director Francis Galluppi has talked about the challenges of getting his movie made. At first, he was going to direct a 5 million dollar version of the film but he quickly learned that when you go that high, the financiers demand that you use certain actors in the main roles, as they are proven in foreign sales. Those actors, unfortunately, carry the sheen of a “straight-to-digital” vibe (aka John Cusack) so Galluppi decided he was going to shoot the movie for 1 million instead. That way, he’d be able to choose all the actors he wanted. The difference is a buzzy movie that will be a calling card that should send Gulluppi up the Hollywood ladder quickly, compared to sending him into the doldrums of straight-to-digital purgatory.
Writer: Francis Galluppi
Details: 90 minutes

The best way to experience this movie is the way I experienced it, which is to not know anything going in. Because I really didn’t know where this thing was going. And that was exciting because that rarely happens to me with movies anymore.

However, in order for me to convey just how strong the writing was in this script, I need to unleash a ton of spoilers. So, again, go watch this first THEN COME BACK. Otherwise, you’re going to be robbed of a really cool experience.

We’re in the middle of Nowhere Arizona. A well-dressed knife salesman pulls up to the last gas station for the next 100 miles, only to learn from Vernon, the attendant, that they’re out of gas. But the gas truck is on its way. So just sit tight in the diner and you’ll be on your way soon.

One of the first clever things about this script is that the opening title sequence is a bunch of close ups of that fuel track flipped upside-down off the highway, post-accident. In other words, it’s the first of many uses of dramatic irony in the script. We know that truck is never coming but the characters do not know that.

The pretty waitress at the diner, Charlotte, is married to the town sheriff, who dropped her off. We keep hearing through the radio something about a local bank robbery. And then, what do you know, two nasty looking dudes, Beau and Travis, show up for gas only to find out the same thing – there is no gas yet. So they head to the diner as well.

Not long after Beau (the older bank robber) susses out that Charlotte may be onto him, he pulls out a gun and tells everyone not to do anything stupid, like call the cops. Just do as he says and once the fuel arrives, it’ll be like they were never here.

After this happens, more people start showing up – a young wanna-be Bonnie & Clyde couple, an older couple, and a Native American man. None of these newer people know what’s going on here. But the knife salesman and waitress do.

As the tension builds and people start putting two and two together, Beau decides to pre-empt any uprising and pulls out his gun. Beau seems to forget, however, that this is America. And, in America, everybody has guns. This begins a wild Mexican standoff, the result of which will blow your mind.

I LOVED the directing here. It was so simple yet still stylish.

However, it’s the WRITING I was the most impressed by. I see so many upcoming directors debut with these films that everybody says show “PROMISE.” The reason they say “promise” and not “this film was great” is because the script is always bad. And that’s because young directors don’t put any stock into the script. It’s an afterthought compared to the directing.

This is the first time in a LONG TIME that a new director genuinely put just as much effort into the script as the production.

There are two places in particular where this script excelled.

1 – Dramatic Irony

2 – Setups and Payoffs

This is a dramatic irony masterclass here. Dramatic Irony is so important that I dedicated an entire section of my dialogue book to it.

Most writers who understand dramatic irony only do so on a basic level. This writer understands that it has multiple facets and if you can learn those facets, you can make a simple premise like this one play out with more power than your average Marvel film.

I mentioned the crashed fuel truck. Normally, with dramatic irony, the character and the audience know a secret together. But you’ll notice here, we’re given the crashed truck information on our own. We’re the only ones who know it. Not a single person in the diner knows it. This ostensibly adds a layer of drama before anything has even happened, which was such a rad creative choice.

But you’ll also note that Galluppi doles out the information about the bank robbers being in the diner to only two other characters, the knife salesman and the waitress. This introduces what I call in my dialogue book “superior” and “inferior” points of view, which is what really brings dramatic irony to the next level.

Because when Beau is talking to the Old Man and his wife, there are different ways in which his dialogue is affecting people. To the Old Man, his words are harmless. But the knife salesman is sitting right next to the Old Man, and he (as well as we) interpret his words much differently, since we know he’s a bank robber and that he has the capacity to kill.

Another thing Galluppi nailed was the setups and payoffs. Setups and payoffs are one of the easiest ways to tell if a writer put a lot of work into a screenplay. Because good writers connect the early parts of their scripts with the later parts.

(Big spoiler so don’t read this until you’ve seen the movie) My favorite setup and payoff was when the Knife Salesman is getting away in his car but then he runs out of gas (due to a separate clever setup and payoff) and he’s stranded in the middle of nowhere. And we know the cop is coming after him (another example of dramatic irony).

So he’s screwed. Sooner or later, someone is going to find him out here with the bag of money. And he sort of stumbles to the other side of the road, over to this dip down from the highway. And there he sees… the crashed fuel truck! This fuel truck had been talked about the entire movie. What better way to end the movie than to pay it off? Ironically, he ran out of fuel at the very place where he could get more fuel.

And yet, as this screenplay did over and over, it didn’t go in the direction you thought it would.

I only had two minor issues here. One, Galluppi cheats with the whole cell phone angle. He puts us in an unidentifiable year, almost in a different dimension, where it’s both the present and the past. This was clearly to take cell phones out of the equation.

And two, the knife salesman is introduced as someone who clearly has a secret. So when that secret never emerged, I was disappointed. The only explanation I can come up with is that the actor misplayed the role. He was supposed to play a coward but his eyes and his actions tell us the entire time he’s hiding something. But it turns out he isn’t hiding anything.

Still, this was such a fun movie. If you’re a screenwriter or a director, go watch this now. You will learn something, be inspired, or both!

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

What I learned: If your story takes place in one location, which almost always requires you to have a lot of dialogue, dramatic irony is practically a must. Because without location changes, you need changes in the conversations themselves. Which you can achieve by building superior and inferior points-of-view regarding key information. Character A and G know that Character X is a bank robber. But characters B, C, and D don’t know that. And character E suspects he might be the bank robber but isn’t sure. So you can even play with the middle-ground there. But the point is, if all of your dialogue is on the surface and none of it requires the reader to think at all, your one-location story’s going to get boring fast.