Genre: Sports
Premise: A football GM finds his personal and professional life falling apart on the biggest day of the year, draft day.
About: This script finished numero uno on the 2012 Black List. Paramount bought the script last year, but didn’t want to hold onto it for some reason, so it went into turnaround. Summit/Lionsgate, looking to expand their audience outside of the 15 year old girl demographic, decided to take a chance on it. Ivan Reitman, who just yesterday dropped out of the Ghostbuster reboot, directed the film, with Kevin Costner playing the lead. Co-writer Rajiv Joseph is a playwright and was a 2010 Pulitzer finalist for his play Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo. He was working on the Showtime show, Nurse Jackie, when he wrote this. Co-writer Scott Rothman sold his first script (appropriately titled “First Timers,”) to New Line, and sold a script called Frat Boy to Warner Bros. The writers were classmates at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Writers: Rajiv Joseph & Scott Rothman
Details: 107 pages

Before I get to the script itself, which I loved, I have to say the trailer worries me a little.  What was cool about this script was the grit, the darkness, the way that Draft Day for a football organization was no different than when the team was down there in the trenches fighting for every yard.

Instead, the movie looks way more colorful and happy than the script. The message with that kind of directing is: “Everything is going to be all right.” Screenwriting is about creating doubt, about making the audience feel like they’re not going to get what they want. And the writers did that. Not so much with this brightly colorfully directed film.  I hope I’m wrong though!  Because Reitman’s got a great script to work with.

Everyone that I know who’s read Draft Day has praised it. And it supports this new theory of mine, which is that if you write a sports movie, focus on people other than the players on the field (unless it’s a true story). Because no matter what you do with the “big game” in these sports scripts, it’s going to come off as “been there, done that,” since every “2 outs in the bottom of the ninth” scenario has already been used up.

Instead, write about guys like the General Manager of a football team, guys we don’t typically know anything about (or the Coach, in Hoosiers, or the Agent, in Jerry Maguire). Find out what the biggest day is for that person, and write a movie about it. That’s what Rajiv and Scott did here.

40-something Sonny Weaver Jr. is the general manager of the biggest laughingstock in the NFL, the Buffalo Bills. Okay, maybe “laughingstock,” is an exaggeration. But the Bills aren’t very good, and haven’t been for awhile. The one thing they had going for them was a beloved coach, Weaver’s father, who Weaver fired a couple of years back. Yes, our hero fired his own father. And as we come into the story today, we find out that Sonny’s father has just died. It’s a sad day for Buffalo.

But as Weaver Sr. would probably agree, there’s no time to dwell on the past. Not today. Today is draft day, the day that makes or breaks a professional football GM. If you don’t pick the guy your entire city is counting on you to pick, you can be ostracized. You can endure months, even years of ridicule in the press. Draft day is a pressure cooker of the highest order.

Which is where we find Sonny. He’s picking 7th today, and pretty much everyone in the city and in the organization wants him to pick Ray Banks, a franchise-changing running back. But Sonny is looking really hard at a Ray Lewis-like linebacker named Vontae Mack (for those who don’t follow the NFL, Ray Lewis is one of the most charismatic passionate well-liked players in the game). Vontae doesn’t have the accolades that Banks has, so it probably won’t be the most popular pick, but he thinks it’s the right one.

Well, until he starts assessing his day, his job, his life. When you’re a GM, draft day is the day when you separate yourself. If you can pull off a miracle trade, a miracle move, you can be beloved by your city forever. And Sonny can’t stop thinking about can’t-miss-superstar Quarterback Bo Callahan. Problem is, Callahan is going #1. And Sonny is picking #7. But that doesn’t mean Sonny can’t trade up for him.

So that’s when he calls up the team picking #1 and does something unheard of. He trades his team’s first round picks for the NEXT FOUR YEARS to get the pick. That’s kind of like trading your next four children for a brand new 4k TV. True you get an awesome TV, but boy is that going to sting in the long run.

As pissed off as his organization is, AT LEAST they know they’re getting Bo Callahan now, a hall-of-famer in the making. Or are they? With just a couple of hours before the pick, Sonny announces that he wants everyone to find out as much as they can about Bo Callahan. “But wait,” they ask. “This is a no brainer. We’re picking Bo Callahan, right?” “Not necessarily,” Sonny explains. If they’re going to pay the 30 million bucks that a first round pick is guaranteed, they have to make sure they pick the right guy.

When people talk about the best spec scripts they’ve read, they almost always say the same thing about them: they MOVE. A script that moves, that never slows down, is so advantageous in a craft packed with limitations. Readers are finicky people. They’ve read a million scripts and therefore need a high level of stimuli to stay focused. Industry folks are finicky people. They have so many things on their plate, that unless you can keep their interest with every single page, they check out.

Draft Day is PACKED with GSU. But ESPECIALLY the U. We have the clear goal – find out if Bo is worthy of the number 1 pick. We have stakes. If you screw up, your organization and the entire city will hate you (and you’ll likely be fired). And we have urgency. Sonny’s only got a couple of hours to make his decision.

That was the first genius move by the writers. See, if Sonny already had the number 1 pick going into the day, there’s no drama. They would’ve had 5 months to research Bo. By creating a trade at the beginning of the day, it gave them only a tiny amount of time to figure out who Bo was.

I also loved the mystery aspect of Draft Day – that Bo, the can’t miss QB, has a secret – that he has a weakness nobody else has picked up on yet. The writers did a really great job setting up the stakes of that mystery. They mention Ryan Leaf, another can’t-miss-quarterback picked the same year as Peyton Manning. At the time, many were trying to figure out which one would be better. Leaf’s career crashed and burned immediately and he’s now considered the biggest bust in American sports history. Sonny doesn’t want to pick the next Ryan Leaf. So he HAS to find out what other players are alluding to when they infer that Bo’s got a secret weakness. “Look at the tape” they say.

And the urgency here! What I loved about it was that we’re used to seeing this kind of cut-throat urgency in an action-thriller (you have three hours to come up with the money or we kill your daughter). The problem with that is, we’ve seen so many of those situations, that even though they’re TECHNICALLY intense, we’re bored by them. So the urgency doesn’t work as effectively as it used to. We’ve never seen this kind of urgency applied to a SPORTS MOVIE though. So it feels wholly unique. I love when writers do this – infuse techniques from one genre into another.

The urgency also dominated the story in such a way that the script practically wrote itself. You have the coach who wants to talk to Sonny RIGHT NOW, the owner who needs to talk to Sonny RIGHT NOW, the receiver who needs to talk to Sonny RIGHT NOW, all of Sonny’s potential draft picks – their AGENTS need to talk to Sonny RIGHT NOW. All the other GMs who want to make deals need to talk to Sonny RIGHT NOW. Even Sonny’s girlfriend, who works as his assistant, needs to talk to him RIGHT NOW. Because Sonny always had someone to talk to RIGHT NOW, and because each one of these conversations were imperative, there was never a dull moment.

If there’s one thing I didn’t like, it may have been some of the personal backstory. I thought the stuff with Sonny having to fire his dad was a bit over-the-top and, ultimately, unnecessary. But even though I didn’t agree with it, the writers committed themselves to it and made it work. This was a really good script!

[ ] Wait for the rewrite
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: One thing I LOVED here was that the writers looked for every single opportunity to make this job as DIFFICULT as possible for their hero. For example, when Sonny gets the number 1 pick, fans start tailgating in the parking lot, chanting their excitement about getting Bo Callahan, putting extreme pressure on Sonny to pick Bo. Or word comes in that their current quarterback, Brian Drew, had the best offseason of his career and looks like a superstar. This makes Sonny wonder, “Do I even NEED to pick Bo?” Later, people in the organization tell him, if you don’t pick Bo, we’re quitting.  Pressure pressure pressure!  Things should rarely be easy for your hero because when they’re easy, there’s no drama.

This is your chance to discuss the week’s amateur scripts, offered originally in the Scriptshadow newsletter. The primary goal for this discussion is to find out which script(s) is the best candidate for a future Amateur Friday review. The secondary goal is to keep things positive in the comments with constructive criticism.

Below are the scripts up for review, along with the download links. Want to receive the scripts early? Head over to the Contact page, e-mail us, and “Opt In” to the newsletter.

Happy reading!

TITLE: The Dark Parade
GENRE: Fantasy Action
LOGLINE: On the night of Dracula’s resurrection, a past-his-prime vampire hunter and his estranged son must protect the virgin marked for sacrifice by fending off a demonic horde until sunrise.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: Like vampires and monsters? Great, come on in. Don’t like vampires and monsters? Don’t worry, this script isn’t really about them. It’s about fathers and the stupid things they do.

TITLE: Demise
GENRE: Supernatural Drama, Thriller, Mystery
LOGLINE: A depressed, yet vengeful detective investigates the recent murder of a teenage girl, and he soon realizes that his prime suspect is hiding more than just the truth.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: I just completed the fifth revision of this script and feel I am too close to the content to see the big picture – the “can’t see the forest for the trees” adage comes to mind. Any and all forms of feedback and suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

TITLE: Monty
GENRE: Action/Comedy
LOGLINE: After his dog is kidnapped by a ruthless criminal, a man suffering from depression is forced into a bizarre and dangerous underworld not only to save his dog but himself as well.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: I have always been a huge fan of the British-style Hard-R-rated action/comedy movies like In Bruges and Snatch. This is my American-ized ode to them. In all honesty, I believe I’ve written something absurd, unpredictable, and frenetic with a great mix of humor and ass-kicking while intertwining brutal violence you might expect out of a horror movie. Also, there are 116 iterations of the word ‘fuck’. I plan on submitting to Nicholl so any ideas the SS community can give me to improve the piece would be amazing.

TITLE: Of Glass and Golden Clockwork
GENRE: Contained Sci-Fi Drama
LOGLINE: On the eve of the Third World War, a young soldier abandons his post to search out a robot claiming to have information regarding his father’s unsolved murder, only to discover these two are more connected than he ever could have imagined.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: The previous draft of the script won Carson’s ‘Free Notes Giveaway’ back during Christmas of 2012. The intention was for him to use those notes as his permanent set of ‘sample notes’ from then on. But he never posted them. I’m not sure of the reason, but I have a feeling it has something to do with the fact that he called them one of the most challenging set of notes he had ever had to write. Why is that? I’ll let you find out for yourself…

After that, I put the script down for a good eight or so months and took a big step back from Scriptshadow and writing as a whole. But then, a few months ago, I picked it back up and rewrote the whole thing. The result is a script I’m personally very proud of, and it even managed to earn an [x] Impressive rating from a Scriptshadow regular. If that’s not incentive enough, I don’t know what is!

If you have ever been a fan of contained films, period dramas, complex characters, or just bold imagination, you will undoubtedly appreciate this script. It is a small, intimate fairy tale for the modern age, about love and life and loss. Hope you enjoy!

TITLE: Rapture
GENRE: Dark Comedy
LOGLINE: Two con men engineer a scheme to fleece religious zealots who are awaiting the rapture and find themselves to be the only decent people around when the apocalypse arrives.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: I’m a 24 year old film student who started writing a little over a year ago and haven’t looked back since. Rapture is loosely based on a true story about a group of men who offered insurance against the rapture to religious fanatics. I wasn’t sure anyone would ever buy the premise until one day, while researching, I stumbled upon a Christian internet forum where the members were openly discussing buying rapture insurance. As absurd as it seemed to me, it nevertheless validated the premise in my eyes. A few months and a few dozen rewrites later, Rapture was born. I hope you enjoy it.

Last year, in anticipation of the upcoming Star Wars films, I invited anyone who wanted to send in their own Star Wars script to do so. I would review the Top 5, and if one was really awesome, who knows, Disney might see it and get the writer involved in a future installment of the series. I received 20 Star Wars scripts in total. This week, I will review the best of those. Monday we got Old Weapons. Yesterday we had rising shadows.  Today we have the most badass lobster in the galaxy! 

Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: (from me) Months after the Empire has been torn down, Admiral Ackbar and a small derelict crew chase after the last Star Destroyer, which harbors an opportunistic commander who may or may not have ties to the Force.
About: This is actually the first script I’ve received from Scott F. Butler, so I don’t know much about him other than he really likes Admiral Ackbar!
Writer: Scott F. Butler
Details: 124 pages

In the name of Salacious Crumb, I don’t know if Star Wars Week is going to survive past today. I’m getting a lot of e-mails from people excited I’m doing it, but not a lot of those people seem to be participating in the discussion. In a half-stolen line from one of the commenters, the comments section for this week is starting to look like the Dune Sea.

With that in mind, I had to make a hard decision on which Star Wars script would be the last. I couldn’t make it through another 150+ page script, so that eliminated Children of the Jedi. I liked that someone would tackle an Emperor origin story. But Holy schnikees, the first five pages are all description! Not even action description. Just description.

That left me with The Admiral’s Vendetta versus Secrets of the Ancients. Admiral’s Vendetta got a little more love in the Group Posting on Saturday, so I decided to go with that.

Strangely, our author has decided to title this episode “Episode 6.5.” I found that odd, since it relegates the script to “never having a chance” status (who’s going to spend 200 million dollars on a half-sequel?). Then again, since Disney has already mapped out an outline for the next three films, none of this week’s scripts had a shot at a direct translation anyway. It was more about finding a writer who could nail a Star Wars story and getting them noticed.

So “Vendetta” takes place six months after Return of the Jedi. The Rebels are trying to clean up the galaxy, and Admiral Ackbar (that iconic lobster looking dude with the awesome voice) has spotted the last of the Star Destroyers trying to get away. He wants to bring in the ship’s commander and, not unlike they did with all those Nazis, make him pay for his war crimes.

The commander in question is a dude named Ti Treedum, who seems to have a little of the Force in him. Treedum is actually a pretty interesting guy. He never saw eye-to-eye with the Emperor, but he doesn’t like the Rebels either. He sort of wants to start his own government, and to do that, he needs to learn how to become a Jedi, something he can accomplish with the help of one the Emperor’s Imperial Guards.

So he and this guard head out to meet up with another bad guy who, I believe, is going to help Treedum get his Jedi schwerve on. Admiral Ackbar is so set on making sure this doesn’t happen, however, he eschews the red tape that would prevent him from following them and goes rogue, teaming up with an upstart pilot named Lanza, and a pirate named Kara Kara.

They take the WA-77 pirate ship (piloted by a humanoid lizard named Slay who speaks in slithers) and are finally able to catch up to Treedum and his Imperial Guard pal. It’s there where Ackbar demands that Treedum turn himself in, but as you might imagine, Treedum has other plans. A battle ensues, which will end with the future of the galaxy in doubt!

The Admiral’s Vendetta felt like one of those scripts with good intentions that hadn’t figured itself out yet. And a Star Wars movie is not the kind of movie that works un-figured-out. There are so many aliens and so many planets and so much exposition and so many storylines, that if you’re not on top of your game and telling a confident story every step of the way, the story can quickly get away from you.

This happens with any complicated story really. For complicated stories to work, you need to workshop them. You need to give them to people after every draft and see if what you’re trying to do is making sense, if it’s all followable. One wonky or confusing plotline can doom a script. Which is why, I’m realizing, writing these Star Wars scripts is so hard.

For example, I didn’t understand what Ti Treedum was really. Was he a Jedi? Or just someone who wanted to be a Jedi? In one scene he’s able to use his force-powers to choke Lanza. In the next, he’s baffled about lightsabers. That’s fine if he’s an apprentice, someone with Jedi powers who’s trying to learn to become a Jedi (or a Sith) but that needs to be made clear somewhere.

See, with every unclear plot point, there are repercussions, “cracks” if you will, that spread out throughout the rest of the script. Because I wasn’t sure if Treedum was a Jedi, I wasn’t sure what he was trying to do. And because I didn’t know what he was trying to do, I didn’t know why it was so important for Ackbar to get him. This entire script is based on Ackbar’s need to capture Treedum at all costs. But if Treedum’s just some bumbling wannabe-Jedi, who cares? How much damage can he really do?

And that was “Vendetta’s” biggest mistake. The stakes weren’t very high (or clear for that matter). What happens if we stop Treedum? Nothing, really. We stop some unclear future problem. In Star Wars, we’re trying to stop the most technologically advanced weapon in the universe. Those are stakes. Had, for instance, we been told that Treedum was a super badass with the ability to raise armies and take over the galaxy, I would’ve been more invested in stopping him.

On top of that, there were too many meandering sequences in the story. Remember, sequences in action movies are about setting a goal, stakes, and adding urgency. They’re little mini-movies that need to be clear. In the original film, our characters get stuck in a Death Star. It’s clear their goal is to get out. That the stakes are they’ll die (along with many others). And the urgency is that someone’s always on their tail.

When we finally get to Treedum’s ship, there’s this overlong sequence where we’re just sitting around with the two ships (good guys and bad guys) talking to each other. “You surrender.” “No, I don’t want to.” It felt like a petty fight between five year olds. This is Star Wars. There should be no ships talking to each other through video-links. People need to board ships, to go after people, to get into some conflict!

And when conflict did finally arrive, it dipped up and down in waves. A sequence has to build up to a climax (again, our characters in the Death Star – they’re building towards getting out – the climax occurs when they make their run for it). There was no build here. It was, again, a lot of back and forth, as if Scott wasn’t quite sure if, or when, he should pull the trigger.

That might be the best way to describe “Vendetta.” The script always felt like it was holding back. It never had its “stuck in a trash compactor” moment. The conflict was only half-realized. I wanted these characters to engage, but it seemed like they were more interested in talking about engaging.

That’s not to say the script didn’t have its moments. It was probably the most creative of the bunch. The half-underwater city of Dac was really cool. And the port city with all the pirates where they had to find a ship, although an obvious reference to Tatooine, felt like its own unique world, which is what I’ve been looking for with these scripts.

I liked the Skull ship, the triple light speed jump, and Kara Kara and Slay. Making her the female Han Solo was a nice touch, since it’s impossible to create another Han Solo in the Star Wars universe without it looking like you’re directly ripping off Han Solo. Kara Kara felt like her own person. And that was good.  But man, I wish this story had more bite!

You know I worried, at first, that there would be no true screenwriting lessons to come out of this week. That the only things we’d be able to learn were Star Wars specific (a sexualized teenaged lesbian relationship at the core of a Star Wars film probably isn’t the best way to go). But now that I think about it, I realize that every writer is dealing with the exact same issues these Star Wars writers are dealing with.

Whatever genre you like to write in, that genre is your “Star Wars.” Just like that iconic film, your genre has done everything already. Just like these Star Wars writers can either write clones of their favorite Star Wars films or push the franchise into new territory, you can either write clones of your favorite genre films or push into new territory.

It isn’t easy to do, to “try.” It’s so much easier to fall back on what’s been done before because it doesn’t take any thinking on your part. But if you do go that extra mile and seek out those new ideas, and you do that consistently throughout your script, I guarantee you, you’re going to write something that readers and audiences remember.

Script link: Star Wars: The Admiral’s Vendetta

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

What I learned: I leave this debate to all of you. Should you include adverbs in your writing? Some writers HATE them. Indeed, they can read clunky. But sometimes they feel like the only option. For example, here’s a line from “Vendetta:”

The Gunship laserfire sprays impotently into blackness.

Should the word “impotently” be here? Or does the sentence pack more punch without it? Or does the adverb add enough of a descriptive element to justify its existence? Weigh in in the comments section. I’m eager to get a consensus on this.

To keep Star Wars Week going, post: “Team Jedi” in the comments.
If you want me to move on, post: “Team Sith,” even though you probably don’t know what that means.

Should you be aspiring to write the next Cloud Atlas?

Today I want to pose a question to you that’s had me stumped for awhile.

What is the difference between BAD non-traditional writing and GOOD non-traditional writing?

I’m asking this question because I meet so many writers who insist on defying convention. I read their scripts and I say, “I don’t see a focused story here. I don’t see you setting up your characters correctly. I don’t see your story starting soon enough. I don’t see you adding conflict or suspense or any of the things that traditionally keep a reader interested.” And their response to me is always, “Well I don’t want to do it like that. That’s how Hollywood does it and I don’t like Hollywood movies. I want to do it differently.”

My gut reaction is to groan, but then I realize that they have a point. There isn’t just “one way” to do something. There are lots of ways. And if I tell these writers, “No, don’t do it that way,” aren’t I stifling their creativity? Aren’t I potentially preventing a new voice from emerging? If I was Captain of Hollywood, True Detective would’ve never been made. Yet there are a lot of people who love True Detective, and that’s definitely a show that “does it differently.”

Here’s the problem though. 99% of the time I let these writers roam free, they come back with a hodge-podge of ideas, sequences, and characters in search of a script. It’s like walking into a Category 5 Screenplay Storm. Anyone who’s been tasked with reading amateur scripts where the writers ignore all storytelling convention knows what I’m talking about.

Yet these writers continue to drum up compelling arguments to defend their approach. They say, “Well I don’t want to write Transformers, or Grown-Ups, or Identity Thief, or Olympus Has Fallen. Those scripts follow all the rules and they suck.” Hmm, I think. Can’t argue with that. And yet I can’t seem to convey to them that even Hollywood’s vanilla is better than their chocolate without getting a funny look or a black eye.

Maybe we can solve this by moving away from the amateur world and into the professional one. Because in this venue, writers are having the same battle. They all want to write something challenging and unique, a convention-defying opus that will win them an Oscar. All else being equal, no one wants to write Battleship. And they seem to have hard-core cinemagoers on their side. You need look no further than the Scriptshadow comment thread to see Grendl preaching this every day – break away from convention, ignore the rules, create something original!

But let me offer you the flip side of this argument. It’s only two words long.

Cloud Atlas

Here’s a book that was adapted by and then directed by the Wachowskis (and Tom Tykwer), three of the more visionary directors in Hollywood. The result was one of the most beautiful movies of the last decade. And one of the most unfocused unsatisfying stories of the year. I’m not going to say the film didn’t have fans. But by and large, it was a failure, making only 30 million domestic. A documentary about chimpanzees made more money that year.

I bring the film up because this is the kind of thing you’re advocating when you say, “Fuck convention and write whatever you want.” You have three of the stronger talents in the business writing six narratives spanning six different time periods, with no clear connection. Set one of those time periods a thousand years in the future. Have the main character followed around by a homeless looking Leprechaun creature who spouts out indecipherable ramblings. I mean come on! There isn’t a single audience member who’s going to respond to that. It’s too weird!

And I can hear you from here. You’re saying, “Well I’d rather Hollywood produce ten failures like Cloud Atlases than one “hit” Iron Man 3.” No you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t. I dare you to sit down and try and watch Cloud Atlas’s three hour running time and not start checking your e-mail by the halfway point. I thought Iron Man 3 was pretty bad. But at least it was trying to entertain me.

My lack of enjoyment not-withstanding, the point is, two popular writers were given free rein to go crazy with a huge budget and created a piece of doo-doo. Which begs the question, is this what we want all the time? Julie Delpy written movies? Shane Carruth written movies? Another “Somewhere” from Sophia Coppola? Steve Soderbergh busting out films like “Bubble” every year?

It sounds fun in theory. Yeah! Give those guys gobs of money and let them do whatever they want. But what are the actual consequences? The consequences are film geeks getting to masturbate online about 10 minute tracking shots. But that’s where the benefits end. There would be no movie business because attendance would be down 90%. And the thing is, what you’re asking for is already here! These movies have already happened. You’ve just never heard of them because they were so bad.

Does a movie that promises to aggressively subvert the romantic comedy genre sound intriguing? Sure. But watch “I Give It A Year” and tell me you don’t want to kill yourself by the end of the first act. Diablo Cody won an Oscar. Let’s let her go wild on the page and see what happens. It happened, with a movie called “Paradise,” which I’m pretty sure is still waiting for its first customer. Francis Ford Coppola was given free rein on his last film. What did he come up with? Twixt. I’m guessing you didn’t rush over to Fandango to find the opening day showtimes for that one.

Now you may be saying, “Yeah, but I don’t like the sound of any of those movies, Carson. So of course I’m not going to see them.” That’s the problem. Millions of other people feel the same way. And if no one’s going to see these “fuck convention – I’ll write what I want” movies, then there won’t be a movie industry anymore.

On the flip side, there are definitely screenplays that have defied convention and turned out great. Pulp Fiction, Slumdog Millionaire, American Beauty. More recently, some might say American Hustle and Her. Which is why answering this question is so difficult. What makes one unconventional script good and another terrible?

I’ll give you an example from both sides. What makes the intense dramatic unconventional Short Term 12 good while the equally intense dramatic unconventional Labor Day is terrible? I suppose we can break down each script point by point, but I’m looking at the bigger picture. How do writers not bound by rules keep away from the bad and write something good? Do they just follow their heart? Should writing contain no form whatsoever other than the stream-of-consciousness rolling off the writer’s fingertips? I mean we can’t really be advocating this, right? There’s got to be a plan.

Ah-haaaaa. I believe that may be the clue we’ve been looking for.

If we’re going to do something as radical as defy convention, it only makes sense that we have a plan.  Now that I think about it, the successful “unconventional” screenwriters I’ve spoken with always knew why they did what they did.  They understood their unorthodox choices and made them for a reason. The people whose unconventional scripts aren’t so good are those who can’t answer any questions about their choices. They seem tripped up when you ask them even the simplest question, like “why did you choose this plot point here?” or “why did Character A do that?”  They never had a plan, which is why their scripts tend to feel so aimless and frustrating.

So what I’d say to everyone planning on writing that next great unconventional screenplay, learn everything you can about this craft and then have a plan when you write. It doesn’t have to be everybody else’s plan. It just has to be yours. And know why you’re doing shit.  The more control you have over your choices, the more logical your script is going to be, and the easier it’s going to be for your reader to digest.  If you think that advice is for wimps and you want to fly by the seat of your pants, that’s fine. But don’t be surprised if you leave a lot of confused readers in your wake.

What about you guys?  What do you think the key is to writing an unconventional screenplay?

Genre: TV Pilot – Sci-fi/Thriller/Drama
Premise: In the near future, a robot is accused of murder for the first time ever. A young defense attorney must find out how to defend him, despite there being no precedent for the case.
About: Tin Man was written by Ehren Kruger, one of the biggest screenwriting names in town, as he’s written almost all of the Transformers movies. He also penned horror favorite, The Ring, and busted onto the scene with the awesome thriller, Arlington Road. While the draft I read of Tin Man is listed as a traditional pilot, I’m seeing on IMDB that Tin Man will be more of a TV movie. Not sure what that means, but this seems to be part of a new protective network trend designed to take risks without admitting failure. If the show doesn’t do well, they just say it was a one-off. If it does do well, they turn it into a series. Tin Man will air on NBC this year.
Writer: Ehren Kruger
Details: 54 pages – undated

Up-and-coming actor Patrick Heusinger will play the Tin Man!

Man, I had to work a long time and weed through a TON of pilots to find one that wasn’t a procedural. I saw everything from a detective who’s going blind and uses his other senses to solve crimes, to a lawyer who’s secretly an alien. Procedurals are the reason I’ve been uninterested in TV for so long. I never understood why you’d watch a show whose story didn’t evolve in subsequent episodes.

It wasn’t until serialized shows started making a big push after Lost that TV became interesting. But Hollywood loves its procedural television and doesn’t want to move away from it anytime soon. There seems to be two reasons for that. One, procedural television is a lot easier to write for on a long-term basis. Just give a lawyer a case to argue, a doctor a patient to save, or a detective a murder to solve, and you can write episode after episode after episode. The engine (goal) that drives each episode is built right into the format!

Two, it’s much easier for procedural shows to pick up new viewers. Understanding the show doesn’t require you to know what happened five episodes ago, whereas in a serialized show, like Breaking Bad, that’s not the case. We need to know that Walter killed that crazy ass drug dealer to understand why these two drug kingpins are after him this week.

This is, of course, changing. If you start hearing about a good serialized show, you can always “binge watch” it on Netflix and catch up to the series in the process. And you have to remember, we didn’t used to have huge DVD sets of an entire series, or the entire show a click away on Amazon or Itunes. So even when a show is over, it can still make a lot of money from old viewers as well as new ones. In other words, these days, TV is more receptive to the serialized format than ever.

Which is a good thing. Because the sooner we can get away from networks putting procedurals about cops in wheelchairs on television (Remember Ironside???) the better.

With that said, this still doesn’t solve that other issue: how to WRITE these serialized shows. When you write a serialized show, you have to come up with a new story engine EVERY SINGLE EPISODE. Think about how hard that is. With Grey’s Anatomy, all they had to do was say, “We just got a man in the East Wing who’s showing signs of pregnancy,” and that episode is taken care of. Coming up with original plot lines time and time again for shows like Lost and Breaking Bad is a lot more challenging than it looks.

Anyway, that’s a rather long rant that doesn’t have a whole lot to do with today’s pilot, so why don’t we switch gears and get to that.

Tim Man takes place in the near future and follows a robot named Adam Sentry (who looks 30 years old in human years). Adam is the creation of trillionaire (yes, with a “t”) Charles Vale, who owns a huge robotics company. Adam is Vale’s de facto robot Butler, and takes care of every aspect of his life, which is relevant, because Vale is sick and going to die soon.

Turns out it isn’t the cancer that gets him though. Vale is murdered in his home one evening. And who’s the only one in the house with him at the time? That’s right. Adam. So Adam is taken to the police station and read his Miranda Rights. Which sounded like a good idea at the time until the police realize that they can’t read Miranda Rights to a bunch of bolts and wires. That would imply he’s human.

And thus the United States Court System must figure out how to proceed with the first ever robot accused of murder. Do they try him? Do they turn him into scrap metal? There’s all sorts of implications here, since if you try a robot, that implies robots are equal to humans, and then you start giving them rights, and pretty soon they’re running the world and then you have Terminators and then you have the Matrix.

Adam surprisingly asks for a dying breed to defend him, a HUMAN defense lawyer. Katie Piper sees this as an opportunity to bust out of being a glorified secretary and takes the job. But she learns the hard way that the Vale corporation doesn’t want Adam anywhere near a trial. They want him terminated. So when (spoiler) they try to kill him, Adam has no other choice but to resist everything that was programmed into him, and go on the run. He knows that his one shot at not being shut down, is finding out who killed Charles Vale, and why.

All you can really ask for from a show/script/movie is that the writer execute the idea in a way that isn’t obvious. I mean, you still want them to fulfill the promise of the premise. People who bought tickets for The Terminator because they heard it was about a killer cyborg want to see scenes where a cyborg kills people. But on the whole, if an idea is executed exactly as expected, it’s boring.

I don’t know about you, but I want to be surprised. I want the writer to be ahead of me. And Tin Man unravels slightly differently than I expected, which was refreshing. I think I was expecting a straight-forward boring delivery about the increasingly frequent debate (in sci-fi screenwriting) of whether robots should be given equal status to humans.

We get a little of that, but we also get this plucky human defense lawyer, a “dying breed,” who’s using this opportunity less as a noble cause and more as a way to advance her career. When that happened and I realized I wasn’t going to be preached to, I was on board.

And I liked the implication that Adam was holding a bunch of proprietary information, since he was Charles Vale’s personal robot, and what that could mean for the company if he went to trial and was forced to divulge those secrets. And therefore them wanting to kill him before he made it to trial. All of a sudden, there were a few more layers to the story than I expected. The stakes were higher than just “should we try robots?”

And the pilot didn’t end how I expected it to either. I assumed this was the beginning of a drawn out court case that would last half the first season. But at the end (spoiler), Adam escapes and we’re essentially introduced to a future version of The Fugitive. I was surprised at how closely this mimicked that premise, but it’s a recipe that definitely works, and thank god it keeps us away from procedural territory.

I don’t know if I had any problems with the script other than, maybe, it doesn’t feel ground-breaking enough? It feels a little too familiar? Robots seem to be the new craze in TV. We have Almost Human. Extant, coming up on CBS, and I’m sure at least a couple of series on SyFy.

This idea of people mimicking robots… I don’t know how else to put it but it feels like an easy way to squeeze a high concept into a small budget. Which is fine. Budget-wise, it’s a smart move. But I feel that audiences are becoming hip to this approach, which is why shows like Almost Human reek of cheapness. Occasionally showing the metal skeleton other underneath the skin after the robot gets cut—we’re kind of tired of that, seeing as we saw it all the way back in The Terminator.

I suppose it’s all in how its shot, the vision and what the production value is, but I need more than just “robots in human skin” these days to get excited about a series.

With that said, I think Kruger is a good writer. You may not agree when you see those Transformers credits, but the impression I get there is that he’s writing with 50 heads over his shoulder. In this case, with Tin Man, I see something solid. It’s not spectacular, but it’s a good pilot.

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

What I learned: You don’t HAVE to write a strict “serialized” show or a strict “procedural” show. You can heavily serialize something (like Lost) or you can write a procedural with serialized elements, like The X-Files. The X-Files had plenty of standalone procedural shows, but then would have shows that solely dealt with the mythology. So don’t feel like you have to go only one way or only the other when making the procedural/serial choice.