Genre: Drama/Thriller/Sci-fi
Premise: In the near future, the police department has developed a device that replays sound from the past, which allows them to listen in on murders after the fact.
About: Here we have another Top 10 2014 Black List script. Writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns is from Scotland and this script also placed on the Brit List earlier this year. She’s also adapting “The Good Nurse” for Darren Aronofsky, about “The Angel of Death” nurse who killed over 300 patients.
Writer: Krysty Wilson-Cairns
Details: 119 pages – February 2014 draft (this is the draft that landed on both the Brit and Black List).

Rory Kinnear as Harry?

Today I want to talk about ideas. A good idea is one of the easiest things to bring to the table as a writer. It doesn’t take a year of meticulously outlining and plotting and character work and drafting and re-drafting. An idea can come to you in a split-second and is therefore one of the least time-intensive components of the process.

It’s also one of the easiest ways to set yourself apart. For example, let’s say you want to write a murder-mystery. Okay, you’ve just joined 6000 other murder-mystery scripts. Hallelujah to that scenario. Are you sure your murder-mystery is going to be better than every one of them? The odds say no.

BUT… what if you could change something in the IDEA that made your murder mystery stand out from all the others? What if you had a concept that allowed you to explore that murder-mystery in ways that nobody else who was writing a murder-mystery could? You have just – without even writing a single word of your screenplay – separated yourself from the pack.

And that’s exactly what’s happened today. Aether is an okay screenplay. It moves a little slow for its own good and the characters aren’t as exciting as I’d like them to be, but because we have a unique concept – a specialized audio device that allows you to re-listen to the crime scene – it makes the read a lot more interesting than had this been yet another straight-forward murder mystery.

So what’s Aether about? Homicide Detective Harry Orwell was part of a prized team that recently created a device that could take sound waves in a room, collect them, and play them back long after they were made. This evolved naturally, then, to the homicide world, where it’s become a tool for detectives to figure out who the killer was.

Harry’s a troubled dude though. Like a lot of other “listeners,” he’s traumatized by the desperate last pleas and gulps and breaths of the murder victims who he must listen to over and over again. It’s become so bad that his department has actually hired a shrink to work through these issues with each audio-detective.

Well, one day Harry is listening to a murder, and he hears the exact same scream that he heard in a previous murder. He eventually deduces that the murderer has access to one of these audio devices (AMPS) and, after killing his victim, likes to sit around and re-listen to his kills (if this is a little confusing, I’m right with you. I didn’t entirely understand it either).

What makes things worse is that the latest victim is a bartender who was serving Harry drinks the night she was killed. And Harry, who was wasted, has no recollection of how he got home. Both the department and Harry start to wonder if he’s involved in the killings. When a woman from inside Harry’s department is killed next, the witch-hunt is on. So if Harry isn’t the killer, he’s going to have to find some evidence to clear his name quickly.

At the beginning of this review, I talked about finding an original idea. Now, I’m going to talk about EXPLOITING that idea. Because an unexploited original idea is no better than an unoriginal one.

What does it mean to exploit an idea? It means finding things about the idea that the average Joe never would’ve thought of and then implanting those ideas into your script in interesting ways. Think about that. You’re the screenwriter. That’s your job! You can’t be just like everyone else who comes up with an idea. You have to be exceptional. You have to find things that others can’t. Or else what makes you so special?

Take Back to the Future. A guy accidentally goes back in time and must figure out a way to get back home when the time machine breaks. That’s a fun idea. But a lousy writer’s going to come up with a bunch of surface-level hijinx (oh, gas used to be 5 cents!) and that’s it. Zemeckis and Gale dug deeper. They said, “Well wait a minute. What if, when he went back in time, he accidentally screwed up the meeting between his parents? And now he has to figure out a way to get them together before he goes back home or he’ll never be born?” THAT’S exploiting your premise. THAT’S digging deeper than the obvious.

One of the problems with Aether is that it doesn’t exploit its premise enough. Beyond listening in on these past murders, the only deeper exploration of the idea is that the killer has one of these audio devices too. There’s SOMETHING to that but it’s still just a seed of an idea. It needs to grow or else you’re going to get yet another of those murky executions of a cool concept.

Another thing I want to talk about is how our investment as an audience is almost always tied to the main character’s investment in the story. So look at a movie like American Sniper. For all the problems I had with the script, Chris Kyle is steadfast in his desire to keep going back to the war, to save his people, and to win the war itself. His DESIRE motivates our DESIRE to see if he succeeds.

In Aether, the big dramatic question is: Is Harry the killer, and is he going to get caught? That’s an interesting question and one that would typically keep an audience riveted. The problem is, Harry is such a sad-sack, such an introverted uninvolved character, he doesn’t really seem to care one way or the other. You get the sense that he’d be fine with getting caught because then he wouldn’t have to deal with any of this mess anymore.

In other words, because Harry wasn’t interested in his own self-preservation, I wasn’t interested in it either. And that’s what was so weird about reading Aether. You have a serial-killer mystery on your hands, and yet I never felt completely concerned or involved.

With that being said, this is not an American movie. This script screams Scottish indie flick all the way. And I know the films over there are a lot more laid back, so maybe people won’t have these same issues with Aether. But I still think this premise needs an industrial grade drill to dig much deeper into the concept itself. We’re only scratching the surface here. We must go deeper.

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

What I learned: So when you come up with a unique concept for a screenplay, I want you to do something before you write a word. Write down the first five ideas you come up with as far as the direction you want to take the movie, then consider erasing them all. I’m not going to say to definitely erase them all, because one of them might be brilliant. But chances are, the first five things you think of are exactly what everybody else would think of. And you’re a screenwriter. Which means your job is to dig deeper than everybody else.

A more complex script than you might’ve thought.

So at the beginning of this week, I reviewed a script from Academy Award winner Stephen Gaghan that was fairly complex. There were lots of characters, multiple storylines, heavy flashbacks. And while Gaghan managed to make the whole thing work, I’ve spent far too many reading experiences watching amateurs try to do the same thing and ending up at the bottom of a slugline sinkhole.

Part of the problem is that the new screenwriter comes on the scene and believes he has the answers to Hollywood’s problems. Paul Bart: Mall Cop? Garbage. Taken 7? Trash. The problem, the neophyte screenwriter concludes, is that Hollywood’s movies are all fluff. His solution is to write some big sprawling meaty “masterpiece” that’ll win 12 Oscars.

The intention is noble. But the problem is that, 99 times out of a 100, the writer has no idea how to tell a story yet. They don’t even know that their inexperience in storytelling is a problem in the first place. So the resulting script may certainly be “sprawling” and “ambitious,” but it doesn’t make a lick of sense. People who read it categorize it as “unfocused,” “all over the place,” and “confusing.”

This miscalculation boils down to the fact that the writer has no “complexity compass.” Therefore, he marches unknowingly into the Failure Desert.

So today, I want to present you with the five pillars of complexity. This way, you know where the complexity pitfalls lie, and you can figure out how to avoid them. Let’s go through these pillars one by one, then discuss how we can manage them and keep our scripts easy to read.

Description – Description’s contribution to complexity can be broken down into two categories. Writers who describe too much. And stories that require a lot of description. Let’s start with the first one. Screenplays are about saying as much as possible in as few words as possible. Readers don’t want to sit there and read a six-sentence paragraph that just as easily could’ve been one. If this is the writer’s style, the script will start to lose clarity simply due to the fact that you’re making the reader read too much unimportant information. The reader has to “dig” to find the useful bits, resulting in reader exhaustion. Exhaustion leads to the brain shutting down, which leads to the reader unable to take in more information. If you’ve ever found yourself going back to re-read a page a third of a fourth time, this is usually what’s going on. And writers, if you’ve ever had a reader come back and say, “I didn’t understand why Danny attacked Lisa,” yet you explained exactly why Danny attacked Lisa on page 47, over-description is usually the culprit. You overloaded your reader with info and their brain shut down.

The second category of over-description is a bit more challenging. Unlike the first, where you can control the amount of description you add, some stories naturally require a lot of description. Sci-fi and fantasy scripts are notorious for needing large chunks of description due to the “world-building” the writer must do. There’s no way you can write The Matrix, for example, without spending a lot of time describing their ship, describing the “real world,” describing The Matrix itself. So whenever you write one of these screenplays, you’re already going in with a bit of a handicap. There’s not much you can do about it.

Exposition – Exposition is sort of the “dialogue-version” of description. These are the words your characters say to steer us through the story. Exposition can entail plot information as well as character information. “We need to be at the park by sundown or the world explodes” as well as “It turns out Diana lied to us. She isn’t from Rockford like she said she was.” The more exposition you have, the more complex your story reads. As you’re starting to realize, the more information (in the form of description or exposition) you throw at your reader, the harder it is for him/her to keep up.

Character Count – This one is self-explanatory, and yet one writers continue to ignore. The more characters you include, the more information you’re asking your reader to keep track of. More characters typically means more storylines (more subplots), which means even more for your reader to remember. I just told you screenwriting is about saying as much as you can in as few words as possible. Well, character count isn’t much different. Good writers tell their stories with the minimum amount of characters they can get away with. With that being said, every story has different character requirements (a movie about the White House is going to have more characters than a movie about two people trapped in an apartment) but you should be wary of including new characters UNLESS you believe the story needs them.

Intricate or Excessive Plotting – Are you writing a spy movie where characters are never who they seem? Are you writing a “Lost” like feature, with lots of twists and turns and reveals? Does your story go through a number of gestations, like Interstellar?  Are you weaving eight subplots in and out of your main plot?  The more plot (plot beats, plot points, twists, reveals, surprises) your script has, the harder it’s going to be for the reader to keep up. Yesterday’s script, The Munchkin, was a perfect example. Because the main character was chasing so many answers (the murder of one person, the disappearance of another, the mysterious person who hired him), the story started to suffocate under the weight of its own plot.

Sophisticated Story Presentation – Whenever you try and tell your story in a unique way, you’re adding a thick layer of complexity to it. 500 Days of Summer mashing up its timeline. Inception creating worlds inside of worlds inside of worlds. Memento telling its story backwards. Pulp Fiction telling its story out of order. To a lesser degree, even movies like The Notebook, which tells some of its story in the past and some in the present and Gone Girl, which tells its stories through different points of view, are sophisticated paradigms to tell stories in. These scripts tend to get noticed a lot and can be fun to write. But they do make your story harder to follow. Keep that in mind.

Here’s the thing with the five pillars. Using one or two is fine. It’s when you try and do three, four, even five, that you virtually ensure failure. Look at 500 Days of Summer. It has a sophisticated story presentation, but a low character count, minor description, manageable exposition, and a simple plot. The Matrix was high in exposition and description, had the right amount of characters for its genre, a straight-forward presentation, and a simple plot.

Good writers identify the degree of difficulty of their script before they write it and – if need be – game-plan for how to keep it easy to follow. I’d like to do the same for you guys. Now, if you’re writing a movie like John Wick or The Hangover, you don’t need to worry about this. But if you’re writing something more ambitious, pay attention.

Each pillar will represent a number value from 1-10. Take your script idea, and plug it into the Pillar equation. Be honest with yourself. No cheating. Assign a number value (10 for most complex, 1 for least) to each pillar as it pertains to your idea, then add all the numbers up. If you end up between 40-50, I wouldn’t write the script unless you’re extremely experienced. To be honest, I can only think of two movies that would score higher than 40 at the moment: 2001 and Cloud Atlas. So yeah, stay away from this. 30-40 is doable, but hard. Most professional screenwriters still wrestle with screenplays this complex. 20-30 is a nice place to be and where a lot of good Hollywood films operate. The Imitation Game, for example, is probably around a 30. 10-20 is where most mainstream Hollywood movies live. Being in this category does not mean a weak script by any means. Rocky is somewhere between 10-20. Nightcrawer is somewhere between 10-20. The Equalizer is between 10-20. Simple films can still be great. 0-10, however, is probably an indication that your script is too simple and actually needs  more complexity.

Here are a few sample movies to get a feel for the numbers…

The Hangover

Description: 2
Exposition: 3
Character Count: 3
Plotting: 6
Presentation: 4
Total: 18

Frozen

Description: 5
Exposition: 4
Character Count: 5
Plotting: 4
Presentation: 2
Total: 20

Memento

Description: 2
Exposition: 9
Character Count: 3
Plotting: 7
Presentation: 10
Total: 31

Guardians of the Galaxy

Description: 8
Exposition: 7
Character Count: 8
Plotting: 7
Presentation: 3
Total Score: 33

Pulp Fiction

Description: 4
Exposition: 6
Character Count: 7
Plotting: 9
Presentation: 10
Total Score: 36

Again, complexity is NOT an indication of quality. It’s an assessment of how difficult the routine is to pull off. The higher the number, the harder it’s going to be for you to convey your story to the reader. Pulling off bigger routines usually results in a more satisfying experience, but you run a higher risk of failing. So it’s a gamble.

Now, let’s say you don’t want to listen to me. You’re going to write a complex story no matter what. If you’re going to do this, simply look for ways to pare down the complexity of each pillar. So, for description, say in one sentence what it takes you to say in three. For exposition, focus only on the key points that need to be made. If Harry Potter’s hiding a wand in a tree, don’t have him say, “I hid Gobblestorf’s wand in the tree by the 3 Valleys – where Griffindill used to take us when we were in 2nd Year.” Say, “I hid the wand in our favorite tree.” Little changes like that can really make a script easier to follow (and read). For character count, there are usually one or two characters who are pointless in a script. Find out who those characters are in your script and get rid of them. Then combine a couple of others. For plotting, twists and double-crosses are great, but don’t depend on them. One awesome twist is better than three so-so ones. And finally, presentation. There’s nothing you can really do to change this since it’s embedded into the concept of the movie. But you can be aware that it makes your script harder to read. To that end, hold the reader’s hand more than you normally would. Reading an ambitious time-twisting narrative can be a little like walking into a fun house of mirrors. We need you to orient us from time to time.

And really, that’s the best advice I can give you. You don’t have to do all these number-adding things to know that your idea is ambitious. If that’s the case, just being aware of it puts you in front of the problem. You can guide the reader along rather than leaving them on an island with a blindfold and a Da Vinci Code codex. The writer-reader relationship is a symbiotic one. You need to work together to get to the finish line.

Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: When a distant civilization calls out to earth, humanity sends a ship to the planet to make contact. But all they find is a deserted world.
About: The original 1956 film is a classic and the first film to portray humans travelling together in a space ship. As recently as six years ago, James Cameron was intrigued with the possibility of making Forbidden Planet. Furthermore, the writer, J. Michael Straczynski, in typical Hollywood fashion, wanted to make a trilogy out of the property. While the project died not long after, we must remember that nothing in the movie business ever really dies. I’m sure the project will rise again.
Writer: J. Michael Straczynski
Details: 122 pages

Confession time. I’ve never seen Forbidden Planet. A lot of people will tell you that the 1950s film “holds up,” but come on. It’s 1950s special effects with cheesy 1950s acting. You might as well take out the sound and add dialogue cards.

Now from what I understand, in the original film, this ship the “Bellerophon” went to this mysterious planet but disappeared, and so earth sent a second ship to go figure out what happened to the Bellerophon. Well, with Straczynski turning this into a trilogy, he’s decided to follow the Bellerophon’s journey first, and that’s what this draft focuses on. I didn’t find out about the trilogy plans until after I read the screenplay, but it makes a whole lot of sense now, for reasons I’ll get to a bit. But first, a summary of the story…

The plot is pretty straight-forward. Aliens send earth a signal, along with instructions to build a ship and come visit them. There’s one small glitch though. The end of the signal cuts out, indicating that something may have happened while sending it.

Humanity builds a big giant ship, headed up by Captain Thomas Stearn. There’s like a 70 man crew, but the other two important players are Dr. Edward Morbius, a linguistics expert, and his wife (in title only), Diana Morbius. We sense a wee bit of tension between these three as Diana may or may not be secretly involved with Stearn.

So anyway, they fly to this planet, Altair-4, and the entire planet is one big city. But an abandoned city. There isn’t a single life-form around. However, when we see them leave the ship, we zoom in to notice little nano-robots entering their mouths as they breathe.

They then find an old museum where a robot named RBI (who they nickname “Robbie”) explains what he knows about the planet. Unfortunately, he’s been shut down for 800 years, so he can’t tell them why no one’s around.

Eventually, our emerging villain, Morbius, goes AWOL, and due to some connection with the nano-robots inside of him and this fully automated city, starts to actually control the planet, and quickly works to prevent the Ballerophon from leaving. Stearn will have to figure out how to stop Morbius if he’s going to save his crew, a task that’s looking less and less likely by the minute.

Concept Art for the film.

So when I started reading this, I noticed something pretty quickly. It was a cool idea. I was into it. But the story started to drag. Despite actually getting to the planet by page 30, our crew was still exploring it on page 70.

There’s a period after your characters get to the “problem spot” in your story where they start looking around and trying to figure out what’s going on. Blake Snyder of Save the Cat fame liked to call this the “Fun and Games” section, but that doesn’t really apply outside of comedies and family fare. Instead, I like to call this the “Discovery” section. This is where characters try to “discover” what’s going on in the environment they’ve been sent to.

“Discovery” should really only happen for about 15 pages (which is the same amount of time, I believe, Blake Snyder gives for his “Fun and Games” section). After that, the audience/reader starts to get restless and wants change. Imagine, for instance, in Alien, if our excavation crew went down on the Alien planet for 40 pages as opposed to 15. We’d get bored, right? We need to get to the next phase of the story, which is to bring the alien back to the ship.

But even if you’re required to stay in the location with your characters, you need to start introducing some heavier plot developments than simply finding a robot and chatting with him (as was the case here). I know there are a lot of Prometheus haters out there, but you’ll notice that the Discovery phase didn’t go on for long before a series of intense plot developments started to occur.

And that was my big problem with Forbidden Planet. It was that classic issue where you can sense that the writer is spreading his story out. He doesn’t have enough meat to cook with. At first I was confused about this. I knew Straczynski was a good writer. So why was he doing this?

Then I read about the planned trilogy and it all made sense. And hence, we have one of the biggest writing problems plaguing Hollywood today. It’s hard enough to come up with a great two hour story. But if you tell the writer, before he writes a word, that he actually has to write a SIX hour story, this is what you’re going to get. Long-drawn out plots with not enough happening.

This is the same thing that happened with the Hobbit trilogy. I remember watching the second Hobbit movie, and there came a point in the middle of the film with this big water-rafting barrel floating set-piece – and I thought to myself, “Yeah, this is a big set-piece but where are the stakes? Why is this important for the story?” It was empty because you could tell the writers were trying to cover the fact that they didn’t have a lot of story to begin with. The strategy, then, was to distract you with a big fat set-piece.

The solution to this problem is to always think of your script as a single script, even if you do plan to continue it with additional movies. Try to make it the best actual story on its own.

But there’s a bigger lesson here for screenwriters. And that’s to keep your story moving quickly. One thing I’ve found with young writers is that whatever you think is “fast-paced” is actually a lot slower on the page. It takes years and years for writers to actually understand how fast their story is coming across on the page.

So focus on moving the story along faster than you believe you have to. And that means introducing major plot points that push the story in new directions (a dangerous face-hugging alien on one of your characters) rather than small plot advancements that only have a minor effect on the story (finding a museum on your mysterious new planet).

Or, if you want me to put it simply: More shit needs to happen.

It’s kind of funny that we’re discussing this in the wake of a review about scripts that are ‘too complex.”  But that’s not really what we’re talking about here.  Complexity has little to do with writing bigger plot points that happen more frequently, which was the problem with Forbidden Planet.  This script needed more meat.  Maybe in future drafts, they’ll slaughter more cows to get it.

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

What I learned: If you feel like you’re biding time in your script, you probably are. Think about that for a moment. If you ever feel like you’re adding scenes to just keep the story alive and keep it going, those scenes will be dead on the page. Every scene should move the story forward in some purposeful way. If you ever feel like you’re biding time, go back to the point in the script where that “biding” started, and start over again.

Genre: Dark Comedy
Premise: The discarded heir to a billion dollar fortune decides to kill all his family members to inherit the money.
About: Screenwriter Ford is a new kid on the block, but that didn’t stop him from landing at number FIVE on the 2014 Black List. He’s repped at UTA and managed by Black Box Management. He also had a short film play at Sundance in 2010 called Patrol.
Writer: John Patton Ford
Details: 126 pages

I’m thinking Ryan Gosling for this one.

Wow.

This is quite the screenplay. I can’t remember the last time I finished a script so… angry.

Not because the script is bad. Oh no, this is not Moonfall 2: Moon Tornadoes. Far from it. This script purposefully orchestrates your anger. To that end, it’s a success. But man, it’s not an easy success to embrace. Never has a villain seemed so casual yet ignited feelings of such rage in me.

Before you read it though (for those who have the Black List scripts, you have this), note that it’s not an easy script to get through. You’re not going to find me supporting its excessive 127 page girth. But I can promise you this. This parallel world version of Wolf of Wall Street is crafted well enough to leave you feeling rewarded when you finish. Even if that reward is a kick to the groin.

When we meet Becket Rothchild, he’s on Death Row. In fact, he only has hours to live. So he’s giving his “confession” to a priest, a confession that doubles as our narration of the story. Becket explains that 30 years ago, his mother, a teenager at the time and member of the Rothchild’s, one of the richest families in the world, got pregnant.

Her father told her that she could either abort the baby or leave the family and never come back. She decides to leave, which led to Becket’s birth, and the two hustled through life with no money at all until his mother died of cancer, a death that could have been prevented with some financial help from the family. But even then, her father turned his back on her.

This is what led to Becket’s hatred of his family, and kickstarted his desire to kill each and every one of them. Truth be told, revenge wasn’t the only reason Becket became a killer. Becket liked the idea of having all that money. As he tells us at the beginning of his narration, that old saying that money doesn’t buy happiness is bullshit.

There are nine Rothchilds to kill and they include frat douches, hipsters, reality star twins, and the big tuba himself, the man who kicked his mother out. Becket’s murder weapon of choice is a bow and arrow but the Rothchild killings come in all shapes and sizes, including poison, fire, even dynamite!

As Becket gets closer to his goal, his childhood crush and now bitter enemy, Julia, wises up to his plan. She blackmails him, telling him that if he doesn’t give her 3 million dollars, she’s turning him in. As we all know, a blackmailer never stops after they get your money. They always keep coming back for more. And Julia does come back for more right when Becket’s at his lowest point. (spoiler) It turns out she has something that can set him free. However, he’ll need to give her the entire fortune to get it. Whatever will Becket do?

Before we get into the meatier aspects of the screenplay, I want to point out a “show don’t tell” moment to remind all the screenwriters out there how important it is to look for these opportunities.

Early on, Becket’s mother becomes sick with cancer. After exhausting all their options, they make one last Hail Mary pass and return to Daddy Rothchild to ask him for money. Now, I want you to think about this scene as if you were about to write it. What would you write?

You could, of course, write a scene where Becket’s mom sits down with her father and pleads for his help. The high stakes of the situation would dictate, at the very least, a decent scene. But since the directive of the scene is so simple (she asks, he says no), it’s the perfect scene to look for a “show don’t tell” alternative.

And that’s what Ford gives us. He shows Becket wheel his mother up to the mansion in a wheelchair, Becket talks into the call box, and then the gates close on the both of them. In a matter of a few lines, you’ve given us a much more powerful version of the scene (and in 1/10 the space it would’ve taken to write a dialogue scene).

I don’t know what it is but there’s something about an ACTION that really does speak louder than words in screenwriting. A huge iron gate closing on this helpless soul packs so much more punch than a series of (likely) predictable lines between daughter and father. As writers, you should always have your “show don’t tell” goggles on when writing. Always look for those opportunities.

Now, as for the script, I’m not going to pretend this was a smooth ride from start to finish. Once I realized that Becket had to kill nine people, I was like, “I have to sit around and wait for this guy to kill NINE PEOPLE!?” It’s hard enough to make one killing interesting.  How is this guy going to keep our interest for nine?

Indeed, once we got into some of these middle-killings, I started getting restless. That 127 number staring at me from the top of the document wasn’t helping. But I’ll tell you when things changed for me. There’s a moment where Becket is about to kill the Televangelist Rothchild. He poisons his glass when he turns away. But when Rothchild turns back, he says, “So which poison did you use?” He then turns the tables on him and ties Becket up.

It was the first time I was legitimately surprised by what happened. Up until that point it was: Meet a Rothchild, spend a shit-ton of time with him, and FINALLY kill him. This one caught me off-guard. And it reminded me that one of the reasons you set up goals in screenplays, is to create expectations. You say to the reader, “Hey Reader – my character is going to go do this now.” The reader then relaxes and says, “Okay, let’s watch the character do this now.”

Once you lure them into that sense of security, you turn the expectation against them. That’s exactly what happened here. We figure, hey, he’s going to kill the televangelist just like he’s killed everyone else. But now the televangelist flips it around and the hunter becomes the hunted. Building expectation is a powerful tool. But it only works if you fuck with the expectation.

And yes, I get that to fuck with the expectation, you first have to lure the audience into a sense of security, which is why Ford would argue the previous Rothchild killings needed to go according to plan. But there were a few too many of them and each of them lasted a few scenes too long. We needed to get through that section quicker. I’d even argue that we don’t need 9 people. We could get away with 7.

Anyway, after that, the script was less predictable, and the increasing frequency of our serpentine villain, Julia, added another x-factor to the story. We were no longer on that predictable “get to know a Rothchild, then kill him” train. We were on busses, planes, sidewalks, bikes.  Shit, we were in an Uber at one point.  All of this made me less sure of where the story was going.  I was kind of surprised, being so apathetic at the midpoint, how into the ending I was. And when that big bombshell hits, it’s something else. As in, it kind of makes you want to kill yourself.

“Rothchild” left me with mixed feelings but they were feelings nonetheless. I’m still thinking about it. And that’s usually a good thing.

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

What I learned: We’ve discussed the page number thing to death. But if I can, I’d like to recap. It’s true that page length doesn’t “really” matter. A well-written 120 page script can read like it’s 90 pages and a terribly written 90 page script can read like it’s 140 pages. Here’s why keeping the page length down helps though. It forces you to make tough choices – to cut out stuff unless it’s absolutely necessary. A lot of writers are the equivalent of motor-mouths. They like to hear themselves type. Well, as you know, it doesn’t take long for somebody to eventually tell those people to shut up. Don’t be a screenwriting motor-mouth. Choose your words carefully.

What I learned 2: A serial killer main character gives your script a 20% better chance of getting on the Black List. I’m not kidding.

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Genre: Animation
Premise: Woody, Buzz, and the gang are stuck at Andy’s spooky grandma’s house for the night, where the toys start disappearing one by one.
About: After Toy Story 2, back when Pixar and Disney were going to break up, Disney still would’ve owned the rights to the Toy Story franchise. They went back and forth between whether to make another Toy Story feature or to send the franchise into direct-to-video purgatory. As such, they wrote several versions of Toy Story 3. I thought I’d be reading the recently talked about version of Toy Story 3, which had Buzz Lightyear being recalled to Taiwan, but this draft of the story appears to precede even that. Interestingly enough, you can see the seeds of what would eventually become some of the major sequences in the official Toy Story 3.
Writers: Cheri and Bill Steinkellner (Revisions by David Guion and Michael Handelman)
Details: 104 pages – June 8, 2005 draft

I love reading early drafts of famous movies because you can really see the writing process in action. When you’re writing your own script, searching for that perfect plot point or memorable character, it can be hard to see the forest through the trees. Only by looking at a great movie and then going back to the early drafts where it wasn’t so great, can you see the key decisions the writer’s made to make it work.

In this case, we went from Grandma’s haunted house to a pre-school prison. On the surface, this doesn’t seem to be that big of a deal. Both locations offer plenty of hijinx and opportunity for adventure. But later I’m going to tell you why the pre-school was a waaaaay better option, saving the Toy Story franchise from going into the toilet.

Toy Story 3, the 2005 version, starts the same way Toy Story 3 the 2010 version starts, with the toys playing in Andy’s imagination. The scene is a toned down version of the huge opening from the official film. Afterwards, the toys learn that Andy’s room is going to be redecorated, and they’ll be packed into a box and sent to Grandma’s with Andy for the night.

Once at Grandma’s, a big scary Victorian mansion, the team meet two new toys, a sniffling badly cobbled together excuse for a sock monkey named Gladiola, and Jack Challenger (otherwise known as Hee-Hee), a sock monkey who’s been on more adventures than Indiana Jones.

Hee-Hee is perfect in every way and quickly wins the toys over. But Woody has some reservations about him. He can’t put his finger on it, but he’s seen this toy before. He just can’t remember where.

As the toys come up with a plan where Hee-Hee will stay with them so that Andy accidentally takes him home with them the next day, members of the group start disappearing, starting with Woody’s horse, Bullseye. This, of course, makes Woody even more suspicious of Hee-Hee.

Rumors start flying that Andy’s room redecoration will be accompanied by a more sophisticated lifestyle, and that only two of the toys will be returning. This results in everyone pointing the finger at the notoriously jealous Woody, who they believe is offing the toys one by one so that he can be one of the two toys.

As the group heads deeper into the spooky house to find the missing toys, Woody must find a way to prove his suspicions true, that Hee-Hee is somehow behind this. But the more he digs, the more it’s starting to look like someone else is involved.

One of the first things you notice about the 2005 version of Toy Story 3 is the opening. It’s very similar to the eventual movie. The toys are on a train, heading towards a giant canyon, and it’s all happening in Andy’s imagination. The big difference is scope. This version seems neutered, not as imaginative. For example, there’s no giant spaceship that comes in at the end. It’s like the writers began the idea and then got bored with it.

Strangely enough, the ending is the same as the official Toy Story 3 ending as well. Our toys get stuck in a garbage truck and are heading to the landfill. But again, it’s a neutered version. They never get to the landfill.

I can’t stress how important of a lesson this is. Big set-pieces require imagination. They’re, in essence, their own stories, and the first versions of these stories are going to be pale imitations of the final product. Every time you come up with a set-piece, put it down, and the next time you come back to the script, look for ways to make it more imaginative. Afterwards, put it down, come back weeks later, and look for ways to make it more imaginative. If you don’t do this, you’re going to end up with the garbage truck version of the Toy Story 3 climax as opposed to the huge multi-location landfill version that was in the final film.

Now, let’s talk about why this script was scrapped in favor of the eventual pre-school storyline, cause this is a super important lesson for screenwriters as well. Put simply, the Grandma storyline doesn’t take advantage of the specific concept of Toy Story. Toy Story is about toys that come to life. Throwing those toys into a “haunted” house doesn’t take advantage of that in any specific way. In other words, you could put any characters in a haunted house and it wouldn’t be much different.

When you have an idea, you want to find a story that takes advantage of that concept in as specific of a way as possible. Putting toys in the hands of young kids is a storyline that much more specifically takes advantage of the toys-coming-to-life concept.

And this lesson isn’t relegated to the concept only. It’s something you should be thinking about with every aspect of your story. For example, a few weeks ago, I read a superhero script where the main character’s power was his ability to use fire. The big climax of the script? A shootout on the top of a building. I explained to the writer that if the main character’s big power is his use of fire, then you need to build a climax around that specific idea. Maybe he’s in an oxygen-deprived environment where he can’t use his fire. Or maybe there’s water preventing the use of fire somehow. But whatever it is, it has to be more specific to the story being told. It can’t just be a random shootout scene, no matter how cool the location is.

The 2005 version of Toy Story also violates one of the big tenants of Pixar storytelling. There’s no theme! It’s just a goofy little story about toys going to Grandma’s haunted house. There’s no bigger message – no deeper feeling when you finish reading it. The real Toy Story 3, however, is about moving on into that next phase of life, something that directly came about because the story focused on a more concept-specific idea in the pre-school.

Another thing you notice by reading this version is how forced all the motivations are. You’ll see this a lot in early drafts (or Amateur scripts, where writers don’t write enough drafts). The writers are clearly trying to come up with reasons to put their characters where they want them to be, but aren’t doing a good enough job of it.

Andy’s room is getting redecorated? That’s a pretty lame motivation to send the toys out of the house. I mean, why not just put the toys in another room? Consider the motivation for the toys leaving in the real Toy Story 3 – Andy’s leaving for college. That’s a much bigger and more realistic motivation.

Motivations are one of those annoying things that take multiple drafts to get right. If you ignore them, they’ll look like this: clearly forced writer plot points to get the characters where they want them to be. Don’t stop rewriting until all the motivations feel natural.

As much as I wanted to read the Toy Story 3 Taiwan version, this was a great reminder about the power of rewriting.

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

What I learned: How big does your rewrite need to be? If your execution is not taking specific advantage of your unique concept, as was the case here, you’re looking at a page 1 rewrite. If you were smart enough to make the story concept-specific, however, your rewrite should be much more manageable.