So for those of you on my newsletter, you know I posed the question last week of, which article did you want me to write?: Why Breaking Bad is so good, or why The Fast and the Furious franchise is so successful. Now a lot of you may think this is a no-brainer. Breaking Bad is one of the best written shows in television history. The Fast and The Furious is eye-candy, fast cars and hot women. But here’s why it was a close vote. Readers pointed out that they knew why Breaking Bad was so good. It wore its great writing on its sleeve. What they couldn’t figure out was how this seemingly vapid car franchise was one of the biggest franchises in history with no hints of slowing down. That needed explaining. And what intrigued ME about it was The Fast and the Furious franchise started as a spec! That means it’s the only spec-driven franchise in decades that was able to hang with the likes of IP properties Batman, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, etc. To think that one of you guys could learn from that and start your own franchise based on a spec – I thought that was worth exploring.

So then why am I going with Breaking Bad instead of Furious? For the simple reason that I haven’t figured out what makes The Fast and The Furious so successful from a screenwriting point of view. From a concept point of view and from a casting point of view, I know. But I’m going to have to delve back into the franchise’s scripts to see why it stands out from other similar movies (like Driven and Gone in Sixty Seconds). Breaking Bad, on the other hand, oozes good writing in just about every episode, which is really hard to do (to give you some perspective, I’ve been going back over Lost and found some real dud eps – there’s an episode where Sawyer chases a boar. That’s the whole episode!). So I thought, why not show everyone how to do it right?

For those of you who don’t know anything about Breaking Bad, it’s about a high school teacher, Walter White, who finds out he’s dying of cancer. Walter has a special needs son and a pregnant wife and if he were to die today, they’d have zip to live off of. So Walter needs to make a lot of money really fast before he dies. Being a chemistry professor, he realizes that making meth offers the biggest buck for its bang. All he needs is someone to sell it. Enter his former flunky student and current small-time dope dealer, Jesse. The two are the most unlikely pair, but when Jesse realizes how much money Walter (or “Mr. White” as he knows him) can make him, he jumps on board. Of course, since the two have no idea how the upper-level drug trade works, their world gets really crazy really fast.

Breaking Bad works for a ton reasons. First, Walter is leading a double life. He must be the upstanding family man in one world, and the relentless drug producer in another. Remember that double-lives lead to one of the most powerful storytelling devices there is: dramatic irony. We know Walter is secretly a drug dealer, but his wife and family and friends do not. This means in most of the scenes, he’s hiding something, and when one character is hiding something from another, the scene is always watchable. Will he get caught? Is someone on to him? What happens if they catch him? We have to know! It’s the same reason why characters like Superman and Batman and Spider-Man have lasted for so long. The double-life thing leads to a lot of easy-to-write scenarios.

Then there are all the little things. Vince Gilligan (the creator) makes Walter’s brother-in-law a D.E.A. agent. Now we don’t just have dramatic irony, we have sky-high stakes. If his brother-in-law finds out he’s making meth? He’s in jail for life! And his brother is always around! We also have the “climbing the drug ladder” aspect of the series. We love watching characters climb up organizations, especially through the drug trade. The baddies keep getting badder and the stakes keep getting higher. It’s why we love Scarface. It’s why we love Goodfellas.

And then the show is funny! When I first heard about Breaking Bad, I mentally tuned it out. A guy dying of cancer? No thanks Depression Channel. But Gilligan makes sure this isn’t a downbeat show. Breaking Bad is packed with humor! In this episode I’m highlighting today, there’s a great scene where Walter and Jesse have a little “teacher-to-student” moment that plays up the silliness of their dynamic (Walter’s trying to teach Jesse about all those things he missed in high school via the battery they’re building. The clueless Jesse proves he hasn’t learned a thing). It’s hilarious. That balance evens out the intensity of the cancer storyline.

And then, of course, there’s the strained Walter-Jesse dynamic, which is the heart of the show. Conflict people. CONFLICT! Not only is this pairing exceptionally ironic (a goody-two-shoes chemistry teacher must go to one of his worst former students for help in the drug trade), but because this is the most unlikely pair in existence, and because they come from two totally different worlds, they’re always at odds with one another, always arguing or debating, and it’s always entertaining. They’re one of the best pairings in TV history.

Which leads us to the episode I’m highlighting today. I knew I couldn’t breaking down ALL of Breaking Bad. It’d be a 20,000 word post. So I looked for an episode that encapsulated what I loved about the show. That episode is “4 Days Out.” It’s the ninth episode of the second season, and Walter’s just learned that he isn’t anywhere near his target money number (the final amount of money he needs so his family can live comfortably after he dies – what I call: The Overall Series Goal).

He’s just received a terrible diagnosis, meaning he may die a lot sooner than he thought. So he calls Jesse and tells him they need to go make a ton of meth RIGHT NOW. The two drive their mobile meth lab (a dying Winnebago) out into the middle of the New Mexico desert, where they won’t be found, and make 1.3 million dollars worth of meth. Time to party right? Yeah. Except Jesse, who’s always doing something moronic, left the keys in the ignition. The battery is dead. The two begin to realize that no one knows where they are (and even if they did, it’s not like Walter can call his wife to pick them up). They’re too far away from anywhere to walk. And there’s no water left. If they don’t figure out a solution soon, they will die out here.

To me, the best television episodes establish a problem or a goal right away. This makes the episode feel self-contained and relevant. Whenever an episode deals with a series of threads and don’t have any form, it tends to feel unfocused and pointless. Every TV show has to do these episodes at some point, and if the threads are interesting enough (or the show is paying off some earlier season mystery), the episode can sometimes overcome this problem. But usually the episodes that stick are the ones that not only work for the show, but work on their own.

“4 Days Out” is not only a master class in how to write a good television episode, it’s a master class in how to write a good movie. Just like in any story, you want to propose a problem. That problem will then lead to a goal. That goal will drive your characters, which will, in turn, drive your episode. In this case, the problem is they’re stuck out in the desert with a dead Winnebago. The goal, then, is to find a way out of the desert to safety.

From there, you provide the stakes. The stakes in this case start off as annoyance, but quickly escalate to death. It’s clear that if they don’t figure out something soon, they’re going to be a permanent part of the horizon. Finally, you have the urgency. With water gone, they’ve got maybe 3 days before they’re dead. This is the basic structure for the episode and it’s practically full-proof. Everything is in place to write something compelling.

That leads us to our next essential ingredient – CONFLICT. If your characters are getting along during this predicament, we’re bored. You, then, need to create friction, create problems and issues between the characters, which will usually revolve around the characters having different points of views on how to solve the problem. Luckily Gilligan establishes at the beginning of the Breaking Bad series that Jesse and Walter really dislike each other. Therefore, it’s only natural that they start bickering like schoolgirls when the battery dies. Goals stakes and urgency set up the party. Conflict IS the party.

Next comes obstacles. Things have to keep getting worse over the course of the story. If the problem stays at the same level, our emotions remain at the same level. You want to play with the audience’s emotions. Obstacles help you do this. So first the generator blows up. Then Jesse puts it out with their remaining water (leaving them with no water to drink). Then the guy who’s supposed to pick them up – Jessie’s druggie friend – gets lost (it’s hard to give directions to the middle of nowhere), Then Walt’s phone goes dead. And their last ditch effort to manually rig the generator fails too. The obstacles have left them with no options left.

This puts the characters at their “lowest point.” We think these two are dead. They think they’re dead. There’s obviously no way out of this. But then our characters (NOT SOME RANDOM DEUS-EX-MACHINA LUCKY BREAK) conceive of a plan (born out of chemistry – so an established part of one of our character’s backgrounds) to build a battery from spare parts. They put away their differences for a moment to work together, and against all odds, somehow make it work! They’ve saved themselves!

Now that’s how to tell a story!

There were a couple of other things I noticed here as well. I love how when Gilligan brings us to a high (they count up all the meth they just made and realize it’s worth 1.3 million dollars) he immediately slams us back down to a low (they find out the battery’s dead). That’s what you want to do with your audience. You should always be bringing them up, then bringing them back down again. I also liked how Gilligan didn’t do the obvious. Writers are inherently lazy people. If we can take the easy way out, we will. It would’ve been really easy here to have it so neither characters’ phone worked. But Gilligan makes it so that Walter’s does, which is more realistic, and forces the writers to work a little harder to keep their characters in harm’s way. It leads to the thread where Jesse calls his stoner friend to come get them. And then of course, later, we find out his friend is lost (once again, bring them up high, then bring them down low). If you take the easy ways out as a writer, your script will read that way. Which is why I loved this choice.

It’s pretty rare that you encounter this level of writing on a consistent basis. I just reviewed the Dracula pilot the other day (the new show on NBC) and it was fine. The goal was a little muddled. The stakes were kind of there. You’re not sure you noticed any urgency. You realize how much better writing can be when you watch Breaking Bad. And revisiting this episode only reinforced that opinion. I had so much fun with, “Four Days Out,” maybe I’ll do another Breaking Bad episode some time. What about you guys? What aspect of Breaking Bad’s writing do YOU enjoy the most. Share. I want to learn too! ☺

Genre: Sneak-Into-Disney-World-And-Don’t-Tell-Anyone Genre
Premise: While on a family trip to Disney World, a man finds out that he’s lost his job. As the reality of this situation starts to hit him, he begins to see the famous park in a dark, twisted way.
About: Escape From Tomorrow debuted at Sundance where it quickly became a hot ticket for its unique backstory: the writer-director shot the film in Disney World and Disney Land without Disney’s knowledge. The buzz grew because everyone assumed that this would be the only chance to ever see the movie. How would Disney ever allow it to be released to the public? But after four months of lawyers combing through the film, they decided that even though many of Disney’s famous characters and landmarks were used, Disney wouldn’t be able to win a lawsuit (due to complicated legal terms like “fair use” that I can’t even begin to explain). As the film industry waited for Disney to roar, they never did, deciding instead to remain silent. The assumption was that any legal threat would bring more attention to the little indie film. Their position was that it would be ancient history within a few weeks if they just ignored it. They may have been right. The film made $66,000 in 30 theaters this weekend, for a $2000 average per theater. That’s low for a limited release. By comparison, Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine had a $102,000 average per theater on its opening weekend. For all the pub this film is getting, that’s surprising. Then again, it was also released on VOD (something I only learned AFTER I laid down $28 for two people), so that will probably determine if the film was a sound investment or not.
Writer: Randy Moore
Details: 90 minutes

I’m always telling you guys to limit your scripts to 110 pages. And if you have a comedy or a thriller, you should probably be closer to 100. You would think then, that I’d be happy to see a movie with a 90 page script. That means the story’s going to move even faster, right!? Not exactly. You see, 90 minutes is the minimum running time a movie must be to play in theaters (I think the actual number is 88 minutes). So when I see that, I subconsciously think that the filmmakers/writers didn’t have enough story for a feature film, and just padded their script with a bunch of filler to meet that minimum requirement.

There are exceptions. If you have something really contained with a low character count (“Buried,” for example) 90 minutes/pages might be just right. But Escape From Tomorrow had a family in Disney World. That story should’ve been longer. This was a prime candidate, then, for Padding Nation. But I was still hoping the film would prove me wrong.

Escape From Tomorrow introduces us to Jim, a father of two who’s on the last day of his trip to Disney World. Jim doesn’t seem to be the happiest guy to begin with, so when he gets a call from his company to inform him that he’s fired, it only adds fuel to his depression fire.

Naturally then, you’d expect to see this depression played against the happiest place on earth. And you’d be right. After the family goes on a few rides, Jim’s focus quickly becomes these two really young French girls (we’re talking 14-15 years old) who are frolicking around with barely any clothes on. Jim’s able to split from his wife by taking one of his kids, and follows the girls around to all the rides. The girls appear to notice him, and maybe even like the attention, but Jim can only get so close before his nagging wife keeps reappearing to nag some more.

What follows is a whole lot of nothing. We’ll go on a ride. Jim will watch the girls. Then his son will throw up. Jim will meet another mom, go to her room and have sex with her, even though it isn’t clear whether it really happened or not. Jim finds himself in the center of Disney World being held hostage by a crazy German scientist who turns out to be a robot. He’s shown images of a flight simulation and a naked woman. Jim loses his daughter, who he later finds out has been sorta kidnapped (I say “sorta” because she’s given back without any trouble).

Oh, and then there’s the ending (spoiler alert)! Jim succumbs to the anemically set-up “cat flu” and dies in the bathroom of his room! Only to show up again, alive and well, with that naked woman we’d intermittently seen jump cuts of throughout the movie (for no discernable reason of course). My friends, if you thought Upstream Color was too mainstream, then boy have I found the movie for you.

Okay, before I get pissed off about the storytelling here (and I am going to get pissed off), I have to give Randy Moore a TON of credit. He did the impossible. He broke into Hollywood. If you’re a reader of this site, you’re hopefully racking your brain every night to try and find a way into this exclusive club (at least I hope you are). In order to do it, you gotta write/make something great, inspired, clever, controversial or all of the above.

If you can find a way to break the rules in an interesting way, to create an excited discussion around your film or script, then the doors to Hollywood will open right up. Moore figured out a way to do that. Illegally filming a movie on the hallowed grounds of Disney World, a movie that smashes the very image the company likes to portray, was genius. It really was. One of the easiest ways to get people to discuss your film/script is to find an ironic slant. And what’s more ironic than an evil, twisted Disney World trip? And then to shoot the film in black and white? Stripping the Mouse House of the color they so desperately use to lure everyone in? Genius!

And when I did some research on Moore, I found out other good things. He worked his BUTT off to make this movie over the last three years. The first thing he did was come up with the idea. But here’s why Moore is where he is and you’re still sucking up black mold from your 400 square foot bachelor pad in Burbank – HE ACTUALLY WENT OUT AND MADE HIS IDEA. He didn’t stop at the concept point. He went to Mandy.com and found his crew. He planned meticulously for how he was going to pull off the shoot without Disney knowing. I mean, the guy went out and did it. And as crazy as it sounds, that’s the only thing that separates the successful and the non-successful people in this business. Some just talk about it and dream about it. The others GO OUT AND DO IT. And for that reason, I shall respect Randy Moore and others like him regardless of if I like or dislike their films.

But (oh, come on, you knew it was coming) I was SHOCKED to find out what I found out about Moore. You see, I had assumed this whole time that we were dealing with a filmmaker only who had a vision for a film but no money to hire a screenwriter. So he just did the best he could and scribbled out a bunch of scenes in order to get his movie made.

Then I learned that Randy Moore was a longtime [albeit unsuccessful] screenwriter?? That he was a reader and did coverage for people? That he consulted on scripts??? That blew me away because there isn’t a shred of ANYTHING good in this script whatsoever. If you stripped away the movie and read this script on its own, without a question it’s a “what the hell did I just read?” It’s that bad.

Let me try and break down some of the problems here. NOTHING LOGICAL HAPPENS. There is no cause and effect. In other words, one thing does not lead to the next. Random things just happen and you’re expected to go with it. Oh, our main character has sex with some woman he meets while his son waits in the next room. Oh, there’s a naked woman who keeps appearing on the screen and then in the end, the re-birthed Jim goes to Disney World with her. Oh, there’s a break-out of “cat flu” on the grounds (what the hell is cat flu????). Oh, a robot scientist locks Jim up (???????). Oh, Jim gets into a spat with a large, wigged man in a wheelchair.  This film was built on set-ups that NEVER got a payoff (how can you screw that up?  Setups and payoffs are some of the easiest things to do in screenwriting!).

The only narrative focus used here are these 14 year-old French chicks. That’s the only thing pulling the story forward – Jim’s pursuit of them. But their inclusion is so thin (we don’t know anything about them – they might as well have been carrots and Jim a mule) that we don’t care if he gets them or not. So they only seem to be there so we can see more places in the park and pad the story with more scenes (remember what I said about those 90 pages?).

There was a scene, when Jim’s daughter is “kidnapped” by a witch, where I thought, “Okay, this kind of makes sense.” We’re in Disney World. There are witches in this world. He’s going insane so maybe this is or isn’t happening. I can make some sort of connection there. If there was more of that, maybe the story might have actually been interesting. But instead we have cat flus and huge men with bad wigs on wheelchairs and the Epcot Center ball blowing up because it’s a fun special effects shot, things that don’t seem to have anything to do with Disney World.

I mean, coming up with a more cohesive story that still allowed Moore to play around with Jim’s insanity wouldn’t have been that difficult. Have him lose his family early. They go off one way, him the other, and the narrative engine is him trying to find them again. If you want to get trippy, maybe he starts to question if he ever had a family – if they weren’t a part of his imagination.  Or his wife’s back at the room and he loses his kid and is so terrified of his wife’s reaction, that he decides to look for him himself. Or, if you really want to get wild, start by having Jim wake up in a strange room with a dead girl (the French girl?). No idea how he got there. He goes back to his family, sneaks in before they wake up, and must pretend like nothing’s wrong on their last day at Disney World, all while Disney guards become more and more suspicious of him and seem to be following his family everywhere. Things get really bizarre when he sees the impossible – the French girl, out and about, still alive.

Yeah, I’m not asking for awards for these ideas, but give us SOME sort of narrative thrust so we’re not randomly stumbling through a world with no rhyme or reason. That kind of thing is interesting for about 7 minutes before the audience gets impatient and wants a reason to stick around.

I suppose this kind of thing might work for David Lynch fans who are into trippy unconventional plots, but from what I’m hearing, even Lynch fans are calling this movie random and pointless. And that’s not a good sign because that’s the only audience that’s going to go for this. Again, I commend Moore for coming up with this idea and generating so much buzz. But the screenplay for this was so disappointing, I can’t possibly endorse it. I just can’t. It was so very bad. ☹

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

What I learned: You are not as good as you think you are. I don’t care if you’re a script reader, a script consultant, or if you’ve sold a script – ALWAYS GET FEEDBACK! Always! Because the world doesn’t see your story the same way you see it in your head (ESPECIALLY stories like this, where you’re playing with reality). You need that outside perspective so you can identify the faults in your script and fix them. “Escape” could’ve become a classic if it was actually good. But it appears Moore never got any feedback on the script.

What I learned 2: Even “trippy” scripts need structure. You can’t use the excuse, “Well, it’s supposed to be weird” to explain away a wandering plot and wall-to-wall strangeness. Create the boundaries of your world first, then you can play within them.

Get your script reviewed!: To submit your script for an Amateur Review, send in a PDF of your script, along with the title, genre, logline, and finally, something interesting about yourself and/or your script that you’d like us to post along with the script if it gets reviewed. Use my submission address please: Carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Remember that your script will be posted. If you’re nervous about the effects of a bad review, feel free to use an alias name and/or title. It’s a good idea to resubmit every couple of weeks so your submission stays near the top.

Genre: Drama/Action/Period/Western
Premise: (from writer) When a woman is kidnapped in Texas during the Dust Bowl, her husband embarks on a harrowing odyssey where he’s forced to confront danger in the forms of Mother Nature and man and also the mysterious past he buried years ago.
Why you should read: (from writer) Who am I? I’m 28 years old, live in Boston and have a day job in PR. For the last several years I’ve been moonlighting , weekending and every-free-fucking-second-I-have-ing as a writer. I’m hell bent on breaking in, by any means necessary. Anyway, back to the script. Sunny Side of Hell is set during a time where most us who frequent SS wouldn’t have lasted a week — the Dust Bowl. My grandparents actually lived through it and their stories set the backdrop for SHOH. The script, although a first draft, has a page-turning plot, interesting characters, compelling themes and a couple twists and turns to keep everyone locked in.
Writer: John Eidson
Details: 118 pages

Scriptshadow pick for Sam: SCOTT EASTWOOD!

Oh boy. Not a period piece. When I see 1 am and “period piece” on the same computer screen, a part of my script-reading mojo dies. It’s not that I don’t like period pieces. Two of my top 5 favorite unproduced scripts are period pieces. It’s just that when you’re stuck reading a bad period piece, it’s a lot worse than being stuck reading a bad present piece. They’re slower. They’re over-described. They’re mired in that drab “history lesson” snore-y fashion.

BUT! But when they’re good, they’re good. And you know what I’ve found? I’ve found that the writers of period pieces, on average, are usually better writers than their contemporary cohorts. I know that sort of contradicts what I just said, but hear me out. When someone wants to write a period piece, they’re usually a pretty smart guy. Most history buffs are knowledgeable folks. So there tends to be more depth to their work than the average script. Whereas a lot of contemporary writers who have more marketable concepts tend to write more from a “I like movies, so I can do it too” perspective. They don’t have that same appreciation for how difficult it is to create an imaginary world. So there isn’t as much attention paid to depth and detail.

So if we could somehow MARRY these two types of writers into a high concept detail-specific super cyborg writer… why, we could print money. Hmm, a cyborg writer. Now that’s an idea. I’m gonna look into that. But in the meantime, let’s take a look at John Eidson’s script. We’ll see if he’s one of those rare writers that can make a period piece fly.

Everything’s bigger in Texas. Like dust storms in the 1930s. Yup, try to plant an orange tree back then and it’ll be more like Tropican’ta than Tropicana, if you know what I mean. You see, before there were sharknados? There were dustnados. And maybe they didn’t have Great Whites doing 360s inches from your face, but if you ever got some dust in your eye? Well, shoot. You weren’t going to be opening that eye until AT LEAST tomorrow morning.

35 year-old husband Sam is trying to make the best of a situation that’s looking increasingly dire. You can’t grow crops in dust. So he and his wife Hannah are looking at all options in the survival game. One of those options is to take a big hunk of money from the town judge, Reginal Barron (who also happens to be Hannah’s father), and move west, where they haven’t figured out how to screw up crop fields yet.

Sam would rather starve than take handouts from Asshole Von Barron, whom he figures is enacting some scheme to separate him from his wife. So he tells him to dust off. That whole skirmish becomes secondary, however, when a day later Hannah is kidnapped! Turns out someone wants their brother out of jail, and they figure they’ll use the judge’s daughter for a trade.

Sam works with Barron to do the trade, but when he gets to the drop-point, the only wife waiting for him is a couple of smith and wessons! This is the kind of three-way I don’t want any part in! Bang bang. Bang some more, and somehow everybody’s dead except for Sam. So Sam keeps following Hannah’s trail, willing to go through hell or swirling dust to make sure the “death til you part” part of his vows doesn’t happen yet.

Along the way, Sam runs into a stampede of jackrabbits (not kidding), a sickly leatherface like family (sorta kidding), and some lesbian cannibals (definitely not kidding). In the end, he’ll learn the truth about his wife, and (spoiler) have to team up with his mortal enemy to take down the big bad shocking puppeteer of this farce of a kidnapping.

Okay, I’ve watched Miley Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop” video, so I can safely say that I’ve seen everything. But Sunny Side of Hell is like Miley Cyrus’s long lost screenplay cousin. I mean, this is one weird little script. Case in point. I’ve never seen a jack-rabbit stampede crashing a 1930s motorcycle and turning our protagonist into road goo before. So Eidson gets a point for that.

But man, I mean, as for the rest, I don’t know where to stop. Because I can’t stop. And we won’t stop. I mean, know where to start. START. No, I’m not twerking right now.

So here’s the thing with this script. It’s very well-written. When you’re writing a period piece, you have to establish mood. And you do that by crafting words in a pleasingly descriptive way. A.K.A. Unlike that sentence I just wrote. Eidson is really good with description. There are a lot of paragraphs like these: “Golden stalks of wheat swaying gently from side to side, set against a great pale blue sky. The scorching sun roasts the fragile stalks.” – It’s really the perfect balance. It’s not over-described. It’s accurately described, and doesn’t give us any extra words or sentences we don’t need. That’s what I like. I don’t want the writing to be too flashy. I like it to be invisible, with just enough depth and imagery to place me in the world.

Ditto with the dialogue, which was consistently authentic. I mean, I could pick a hundred lines out of this script that sounded just like this one: “Lots a that goin’ on these days. Dust storms scaring folks outa’ here faster than a bee-stung stallion. Good for you fellers though I suppose?” That sounds to me like a real Texan from 1930s middle-of-nowhere, right?

But just like everything in this script, where there was a positive, it was coupled with a negative. There were sooooo many errors in here, and that’s WITH the “newer version” Eidon sent me. I’m not sure there’s a single correct usage of “your” in here. “Sees” is written as “see’s” for some reason. And there were just a lot of mistakes like that. So this beautiful writing was constantly being pulled down by silly mistakes.

As for the story, I have to admit I wasn’t sure what Eidon was doing for awhile. We start off with a clear goal – Sam’s wife’s been kidnapped. He must go after her. However, it’s as if the immediacy and importance of that goal are constantly thrown out the window in favor of these strange stops along the way. I have no idea why a 15 page chunk was dedicated to this strange sickly band of folks holed up in their mansion. It just felt like a completely random diversion. Ditto the lesbian cannibals.

After awhile, I began to wonder if what Eidon was trying to do was use this forum as a sort of cinematic postcard for the Dust Bowl. Because showing the scorched fields and the sickly families, at a certain point, became more important than our main character’s pursuit of his kidnapped wife. And while I sometimes found these people interesting, in the back of my head I’m going, “Why the hell is he hanging out with these people when his wife is in danger of being murdered at any minute?”

In addition to that, Eidon telegraphed his twist way too clearly. Going to be some southern spoilers here. By having the rift between Sam and Barron so out in the open and obvious, in combination with Sam showing up at the drop point only to find out it was a set-up, I mean it was pretty obvious to me at that point that Barron was the one setting him up. Yet another 60 pages go by until we’re told this. In the next draft, I’d advise Eidon to make Barron much more subtle, or maybe make him the opposite of how he is now – overly nice, so we don’t suspect him. Because that twist is supposed to be a big moment, and we were way ahead of it.

Despite all that, there’s definitely something here, if not with this particular script, then with the writer. There are two questions I ask myself after I finish a script in order to determine how I REALLY feel about the screenplay 1) Do I want to push this up the ladder (pass it on to people)? And if not, then 2) Do I want to read what this writer writes next? In this case, I definitely want to read what Eidson writes next. But right now, he’s not there yet. He needs to work on focusing his narrative and not losing sight of the plot. This drifted too far off the main road too many times, and in the process, got stuck in the dust. But the great thing about writing is you learn something with every script you write. Hopefully this only makes Eidson stronger.

Script link: Sunny Side of Hell

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

WRITER
[ ] still figuring out basic English
[ ] needs to write a lot more scripts
[x] someone to keep an eye on
[ ] this guy should already be a pro
[ ] the next coming of Aaron Sorkin

What I learned: Guys guys guys. I can’t stress this enough. Please send your best stuff the first time out. When you e-mail a day later and say, “Here’s the new one. Don’t use the last one,” I die a little inside. Because I don’t understand why you didn’t make it perfect the first time. You’re basically admitting that you didn’t meticulously make sure everything was perfect the first time out, which is what you need to do! If you’ve done a major rewrite, that’s different. But whenever you’re submitting a draft of a script, make sure it’s “the one.” And remember that I’m SUPER LENIANT about this compared to the rest of the industry, who probably will delete you forever if you try and pull that stunt.

What I learned 2: There’s this new thing being done in scripts that I don’t know if I’m on board with. When a line or two of description interrupts a person speaking, and that same person speaks again, the writer doesn’t include the name above that second chunk of dialogue. So it’ll look like this (my apologies for not being able to format it correctly).

JOE
I was racing for years, Mac. YEARS I say. But it wasn’t until I got the cancer that I realized how much I loved cycling. It’s funny how that is, right? How you don’t know what you got until it’s gone? But that’s when they hit me with the whopper. It was ass cancer. Ass cancer. I would never be able to sit on a motorcycle again.

Mac looks at Joe before finally reaching over and giving him a hug. It’s emotional for both of them.

Maybe if I had got more of these from Mom, I never would’ve got the ass cancer. Never would’ve got it…

So the name “JOE” should be above the line that starts with “Maybe…” but in this new format people are using, they don’t do it. Does this make it easier to read? That’s debatable. One less name to ingest means possibly. The thing is, whenever I see that, I THINK about it. And that’s the problem. I mentally stop for a second and THINK about how the writer’s using this unorthodox device, which takes me out of the story for a second. And as a writer, your job is to NEVER let your reader out of your spell.

Last week we discussed box office surprises and how those movies’ screenplays factored into their success. The idea is that when something unexpected happens in this industry, we, as writers, should know why it happened, so we can then use that knowledge in our own writing. Well today, we’re going to do the opposite. We’re going to look at some box office duds and see if we can’t figure out why they dudded. Again, the more knowledge we have, the better equipped we are to find success.

As I noted last week, directing, marketing and star power are all going to play a big role in a movie’s success. But everything stems from the screenplay. When you’re talking about the reasons for a box office failure (from a screenwriting perspective), you’re talking about two things. You’re talking about the concept, that 3-5 second pitch you can convey on a poster or billboard, and you’re talking about the story, since most trailers are going to convey the gist of your story within their two-minute running time. All else being equal, if nobody shows up to your movie, you can probably blame one of those two things.

The Lone Ranger
Projected Box Office: 250-300 million
Actual Box Office: 90 million
There are tons of theories on why this movie bombed. Even Johnny Depp has one (the American press conspired to destroy it). Many of these theories are probably right, but I’ll tell you something I noticed that not a lot of people talked about. When you watched The Lone Ranger trailer, you saw absolutely nothing new. Train chases, seen’em. Cowboys, seen’em. Indians, seen’em. Shootouts, seen’em. There wasn’t a single thing in that trailer that I hadn’t seen before. And if you’re writing a summer blockbuster script, and you aren’t giving us something we haven’t seen before, you may as well throw in the white flag, because audiences aren’t going to show up. The summer season is the “Thrill Season” for the movie business, and you gotta knock us out if you expect to compete. I mean look at the movie that came out last weekend, Gravity. That’s the perfect example of something new and different and fresh we HAVEN’T seen before, which is why so many people showed up for it.

R.I.P.D.
Projected Box Office: 130-150 million
Actual Box Office: 33 million
I actually thought this script was pretty good. Not great. But fun. However, the exact issue I spotted during that first read was exactly what doomed it. R.I.P.D. felt too similar to another film franchise – Men In Black. This is one of the trickiest games you play as a writer because you’re told to write something similar enough to other films that studios can envision it, but fresh enough that audiences won’t see it as old hat. R.I.P.D., in its trailer, felt too similar to a huge franchise and the reason that’s a killer is because even if you do a really good job of copying that franchise (or film), you’ll still be seen as the “lower quality” version of it. Now you can sometimes circumvent this issue if there’s been enough time between the film you’re copying and the one you’re releasing, but Men In Black 3 had just come out a year earlier, so people were bound to see this as Copycat Nation. Always have something different about your screenplay. If it’s too similar to something else we’ve seen, we’re on to the next script.

After Earth
Projected Box Office: 140-160 million
Actual Box Office: 60 million
I think the main reason this movie didn’t do well was the casting. There’s something about Will Smith doing a movie with his teenage son that gets people  riled up. A father who can hand you the starring role in a giant effects-driven action movie reeks of the worst form of entitlement, right? In this country, we like to see people earn it. And while I know Jayden Smith did well with Karate Kid, I think America’s still waiting for him to prove himself before he’s ready for major action parts. With that said, this script didn’t open THAT terribly. It made 27 million dollars on its opening weekend. So if it really impressed its audiences, it could’ve made 75, maybe even 90 million dollars from word-of-mouth. So why didn’t it? Well, I noticed something about this film in retrospect that I now believe is killing all of M. Night’s  films. They’re all so MONOTONE. Every character is one-note. They’re either sad, angry, or a combination of the two. The obsession with this downbeat tone results in audiences leaving the theater… down. And if moviegoers are leaving a movie down, do you think they’re running off to their friends to tell them to see the movie? Of course not. This when you had two of the more charismatic actors in the world!

Man On A Ledge
Projected Box Office: 65-75 million
Actual Box Office: 18.6 million
It’s too bad this movie bombed because I heard the original writer is a really nice guy and his script got shredded into something that barely resembled his original idea. Having said that, Man On A Ledge’s failure can be attributed to a mistake I see often in the amateur community – a confusing premise. A good premise is clear and strong and obvious to the audience as soon as they see it. A bad premise takes a lot of extra explaining, and often still leaves unanswered questions. I read Man On A Ledge AND watched the trailer and I’m still not a hundred percent on what’s going on. A guy is pretending that he’s going to jump off a building so that his friends can secretly rob the bank across the street? I mean that sorta makes sense, but with all the ways you can rob a bank, is a fake ledge-jumping decoy really the most logical option? If I don’t understand the concept, I’m not going to see the movie. So that’s one of those things where there’s no wiggle room on. This is why you wanna run your concepts by your no-bullshit crew (people who are honest with you and tell you when your stuff sucks). If they’re confused or not impressed, move on to the next idea.

Runner Runner
Projected Box Office: 60-70 million
Actual Box Office (as of October 9, 2013): 9 million
Runner Runner is what I refer to as a middle-of-the-road script. It’s a decent read, it keeps things interesting enough that you turn the pages, but it doesn’t do an inch more. In other words, it’s generic. And to me, generic is the worst crime you can commit as a writer, because it’s the opposite of everything a writer should be: committed, hard-working, always challenging himself, never satisfied. These qualities ensure you’ll keep writing until you’ve got that fresh new concept, that fresh new scene, or that unique character that nobody’s seen before. A driven writer knows when a section of his script is average or derivative and keeps working on it until it pops. Runner Runner is the opposite of that and audiences don’t need an entire movie to see that. They can pick that up by watching the trailer. So when Runner Runner’s trailer displayed 2 minutes of generic characters, lines, and imagery, of course we’re not going to show up and pay ten bucks for it.

Cloud Atlas
Projected Box Office: 80-100 million
Actual Box Office: 27 million
When agents or producers tell you that your 180 page epic sci-fi script doesn’t have a market, and therefore, there’s no point in sending it out, this is what they mean. There may be 2 or 3 directors who could’ve done a better job than the Wachowski Siblings with Cloud Atlas, and it wouldn’t have mattered. It still would’ve made 25-40 million. That’s because serious takes on esoteric science-fiction fare don’t make money. We’ve seen it with movies like The Fountain. We’ve seen it with movies like Solaris (2002). Even Blade Runner didn’t do that well. If you want to survive in sci-fi, you have to go more mainstream. Robots trying to assassinate people. Guys waking up every 8 minutes in a train after it keeps blowing up. Giant Robots battling monsters. And the thing is, you can still explore some dark themes in those scripts. You’re just not being pretentious about it or over-complicating the narrative. It should be noted, though, that you can make your pretentious esoteric sci-fi flicks if they cost very little (like Primer). There IS an audience out there for these films. It’s just not very big.

There’s an old saying in Hollywood that no one sets out to make a bad movie. And, for the most part, I believe that. It’s in everyone’s best interest to make a good movie because it ensures they’ll keep getting work. BUT, I still think there are a lot of lazy people in Hollywood who aren’t trying as hard as they think they are. Being honest with yourselves when something isn’t working and figuring out a solution (particularly at the script stage) can be the difference between a good and a bad movie, or in some cases, stopping a movie that’s going to lose everyone money.

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: Noir of the Dead
GENRE: action horror/comedy
LOGLINE: A former gangster must once again take up the gun and unite rival Prohibition enemies in order to fight off marauding, mutant zombies.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: “I wrote this script with the intention of having fun with some familiar tropes…Prohibition gangsters, zombies, a mad scientist, the lethal femme fatal. The script ended up in a digital sock drawer…until I dusted it off and entered it into the ScreenCraft Horror contest, where it made the finals. My prize was development notes from someone named Pat at LD Entertainment…and I’m actually embarrassed to repeat some of his complements, where the writing was compared to Billy Wilder and I.A.L Diamond…and now my girlfriend thinks I write like Willy Wonka and I’m sure Scriptshadow readers will think I write more like Lester Diamond. But some judges and a studio guy liked it, maybe a few others will too. You never know.

Can we have a word on zombie scripts? The other day I saw my 6 yr old niece playing some zombie game on her kid’s i-pad, and apparently it’s the most popular game. I had an apocalyptic vision of millions of kids growing up already hooked on zombies. Zombies ain’t going anywhere. Disco may be dead, but the undead…well, the undead never die.”

TITLE: Submerged
GENRE: Contained thriller
LOGLINE: Trapped in a shrinking air pocket deep beneath the ocean’s surface, the survivors of a plane crash battle to stay alive long enough for the rescue teams to locate them.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: “This is my eighth screenplay, all in the action thriller genre. Submerged adheres rigidly to all of the spec script rules laid out on Scriptshadow – it is a low-budget, contained thriller with a marketable concept, set in a unique location, featuring a proactive protagonist who must conquer a potentially fatal flaw to succeed. And it all happens in a reader-friendly 94 pages!”

TITLE: Coin
GENRE: Thriller/Heist
LOGLINE: A brilliant young thief is forced to rob an auction in the heart of Manhattan, but, when the rules change, his mission becomes a life and death struggle to find his tormentor before he kills his mother.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: “The script was inspired by your French Week review of the Untitled Hlavin project. To its credit, it’s an interesting departure from the normal heist story. Exhibit A. The object being sought is a coin and, although it is valuable, the protagonist stands to make zero dollars for his efforts. Not your standard 80/20 split. Already, things are different. Exhibit B. The protagonist is, for all intents and purposes, retired. Sure, he’s young. But he’s seen the flaw of his ways and changed. Exhibit C. The story is more about the journey than the goal as it explores his life and relationships as he figures out what his next moves will be. He has a good heart and it shows. Together with all of the twists and turns and backstabbing double-crosses, he’s never able to tell who’s with him and who’s not. It all adds up to thrilling adventure that pushes him to the limits of his abilities and wits, climaxing in a thrilling showdown you won’t see coming.”

TITLE: The After-Afterlife
GENRE: Comedy
LOGLINE: Terrified that there may not be life after the afterlife, a group of ghosts must convince the world that ghosts exist by revealing themselves to the crew of a cable ghost show on the night before their haunting place is bulldozed to the ground. It’s something that’s way easier said than done. It is a basic cable show, after all.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: “In a word: story. This is a story first and foremost. It’s a funny story, but story always, always, always takes precedent over funny. Then, in many words: I wrote with a partner for many years, and we even scored well in a multitude of contests including Nicholl (Semifinals twice) and the Austin Film Festival (Finals). But now I’m trying a few solo scripts, and need to know if I’m good on my own, or if I should beg my partner to take me back.”

TITLE: Shifting.pdf)
GENRE: Supernatural Horror/Drama
LOGLINE: A teenage girl balances high school life with keeping her lycanthropy at bay.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: “I’ve worked for the city as a 911 call taker for the last, going on seven years. You hear stuff. One minute it’s a guy who robbed the local Best Buy (make that tried) of a PS3 console, tripped and fell in the parking lot, busting his head open in the process — now he’s got a brief hospital visit to look forward to, followed by a slightly longer stint in jail — the next it’s a man playing with his pet puppy, which ended up biting clean through his penis (do. not. ask.), and EMS has to walk him through how to contain the bleeding while his girlfriend laughs uncontrollably in the background.

Not to mention, of course, random conflicts among senior citizens involving tasers.

It can put your mind in a place. Which brings me to “Shifting”. I think I wrote this as a way of staying sane in my most unsanest of professions, but also out of genuine affection for werewolf cinema. Even ‘Bad Moon.'”