Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: (from IMDB) Set in the year 2154, where the very wealthy live on a man-made space station while the rest of the population resides on a ruined Earth, a man takes on a mission that could bring equality to the polarized worlds.
About: This is Neill Blomkamp’s second feature film. Blomkamp came to prominence when Peter Jackson surprisingly picked him for the gigantic task of directing the Halo movie, at the time the biggest project in Hollywood. That film fell through, but not to worry. Blomkamp would go on to direct the sleeper hit, District 9. He’s since been courted by just about everyone, all of them wanting him to direct their films. But Blomkamp has said he’s only interested in making his own stuff, which is why he went off and made this movie. However, Blomkamp is definitely playing with more money here (and a bigger star) so the pressure is much bigger this time around. The film finished #1 at the box office this weekend with 30 million, which is good. But it is 8 million less than District 9 opened with three years ago. Whereas with D9, Blomkamp co-wrote the film with writer Terri Tatchell, he went it alone on Elysium. Blomkamp is already hard at work on his next project, Chappie, which is said to be a sci-fi comedy.
Writer: Neill Blomkamp
Details: 109 minutes (119 pages)

I love Neill Blomkamp. I want to swap cameras with him. I want to hang out all day on set with him and share a laugh when something goes wrong. I want him to say, “Hey Carson, where are you sitting,” when it’s lunchtime, then follow me to my table.  He’ll then ask me, “What did you think about that shot, Carz?” “It was good, Neill,” I’d say, “But you probably could’ve gone a little lower with the angle.”  “Jiminy Wax, Carz, that’s exactly what I was thinking.  You should be directing these movies.  Not me.”  “Aww, stop it, Neill.  You’re just saying that.”  Yeah, I’m a little bit creepy when it comes to Neill Blomkamp, I admit it.

Which is why my Elysium experience was so confusing. It started out great. Matt Damon’s walking through a gritty, ugly futuristic Los Angeles. Robot police are roughing him up. Mood-stabilizing pills are spat out at you if you look even mildly depressed. It’s exactly what I see 2152 looking like. For a good 15 minutes, I was thinking: “This is it. This is his masterpiece. As of this moment, I’m marking this as genius.” There is nobody, right now, who creates a more honest and interesting futuristic world than Neill Blomkamp.

But then little choices here and there began to bother me. Before I get into those though, here’s a quick summary of the story: So there’s this guy, Max (played by Matt Damon) who lives in the slums of LA in the 22nd century. Everybody is poor here. Everyone is struggling. We’ve ripped our planet apart and turned it into one giant trash-bin (without the lavender-scented trash bags).

One of the only ways to make it in a world like this is crime. Which is exactly what Max did for awhile. But now he wants to leave that world. He wants to earn an honest living (likability alert – We like characters who are trying to turn their life around!). But one day at his factory job, a mishap leads to him getting severe radiation poisoning. Which means Max will be dead within five days.

There’s only one way to survive a disease of this magnitude. Get to Elysium. Elysium is a giant space station that houses only the rich people. Realizing the earth was fucked a long time ago, the richies built this utopia for themselves so they could play polo whenever they wanted and build castles for their pets. Oh, and because all these people are so damn rich and it’s the future, they have these MRI like machines that instantly cure them of any disease.

Unfortunately, getting to Elysium requires knowing a person or two, and to hitch a ride, Max will have to do one last job (a data heist). What he doesn’t know is that the heist gives him super sensitive information about an impending coup up on Elysium. Which means that just about everyone with a gun wants a piece of him. This leads to the inevitable question: Can Matt Damon save the world!?

Elysium was over-themed. The theme of this movie was brought up every two minutes, I swear. The poor are fucked. The rich are set. And it’s not fair. This is explored mainly through the fact that if poor people get sick, they die. If rich people get sick, they cure themselves.

Which is fine. It’s important to explore a theme in your script. But we’re just bombarded with this theme throughout the screenplay. A woman escapes onto Elysium, runs her daughter to a medic-machine. It cures her. Matt Damon gets sick. He’s told he’s dead in 5 days. We meet the romantic interest, a nurse, who has a daughter who’s dying of cancer. We have shots inside the hospital of hundreds of minorities dying. Then we have shots of the city, where everyone looks sick and diseased. (spoiler) Then we get the ending, with all the smiling, happy, running kids laughing as their feet splash through the water on their way to the newly distributed medical machines. It’s laid on REALLY thick.

One of the most important things about writing is to be invisible. Whatever you’re pushing, whether it be a setup to a later payoff, a plot twist, a theme, an act break – The audience (or reader) must never know that that’s what you’re doing. They should never think of the writer writing his plot twist or his theme. All of that stuff must feel invisible. Therefore, if you’re sloppy with any of these things or push them too hard, it becomes obvious to the audience what you’re doing and they check out.

What complicates this is that each person is different. Person A might need you to mention your theme four times before they get it while Person B might only need you to mention it twice. It’s why you can’t please all the people all the time. No matter what you do, someone’s always going to say there was “not enough” while someone else will say there was “too much.”  So figuring out that balance is always one of the hardest things about writing.

But I just felt Blomkamp got out of hand here. By the end, it was like, “We get it! This is like the Mexico border! Rich Americans have health care. Poor people don’t.” I wish he would’ve played around with the plot more and gone with something a little less on-the-nose.

In addition to this, the script gears had to work way too hard to keep the plot moving. There seemed to be four storylines. Max getting radiation poisoning. The Nurse and her dying daughter. Jodie Foster’s secret coup. And bad guy Agent Kruger. Getting to a point where Matt Damon ALONG with the bad guy would be going up to Elysium WITH this little girl so Max could save her felt like every plot gear on the planet was grinding to make it happen. I could see fingers typing: “Okay, we need to get Max to the nurse’s apartment so Kruger can track them there, take them, use them as bait to draw Max in, then also have Spider set up the reboot process on Elysium since the girl doesn’t have citizenship on Elysium and therefore won’t be accepted by the machines…”

It felt more like a writer trying to find his way to his destination than a smooth, natural story. That clunkiness is something you can only solve with tons of rewrites.

I also had a couple more issues. Agent Kruger, our villain, felt very… cliché. He was just this angry dude. There was no subtlety to him. There was no motivation behind his actions. He was just your garden-variety, crazy, loud, angry villain. Those kinds of characters are fun to play, I’m sure. But I couldn’t even begin to tell you why Kruger was the way he was. Why he had weird metal things in his skin. Why he randomly carried around a samurai sword in the year 2152. Why he gets mad when his face regeneration makes him more handsome. Villains need to be original and make sense. I didn’t get either of those from this character.

And finally, I was so confused by Max’s suit! I thought it was going to turn him into superman. That thing was splashed all over the posters and trailers and for good reason. It looked awesome! So imagine my disappointment when it only made him… a teensy-tiny bit stronger. In fact, there were times where I didn’t even know if it made him stronger. There was this whole unclear, complicated thing with his medication that made him weak. So he was weak from the radiation and medication. But the suit made him strong. So did those two things cancel each other out and just make him regular strength?? The rules of the universe weren’t clear. And that’s one of the first things you gotta get right in sci-fi. The rules of your universe MUST BE CLEAR (that’s one of the reasons Matrix was so good. They worked hard to make sure you understood the rules).

Now it may sound like I hated Elysium. But I didn’t! No amount of writing quibbles could undermine the awesomeness of this world Blomkamp created. It just looked so damn real. I mean, I see those fucking robots policing our streets someday for sure. I see future Los Angeles looking EXACTLY like that.

The story also had a really strong pull to it – Elysium itself! Despite the clunky plot elements, I WANTED them to get to Elysium badly. I wanted to see that awesome spinning wheel and the outrageous mansions and the outright beauty of this artificial world. Also, because the CHARACTERS wanted to get there so badly, I wanted to get there badly. I’m a sucker for a big goal with high stakes and Elysium’s got that (the main character’s dying and must get somewhere to save his life!). It kept us interested until the end. Still, this was a much better movie than script. Neill’s cinematic vision saved a screenplay that probably needed 4-5 more drafts.

Script rating:

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

Movie rating:

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

What I learned: The early drafts are where you figure out the logistics of your plot. The rewrites are where you smooth those logistics out. If you stop 4-5 rewrites short, your plot’s going to feel that way. It’s going to feel mechanical and “written.” Keep rewriting until your entire story feels effortless.

Amateur Friday Submission Process (read – slightly new!): 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
Premise: When a man involved in a fatal hit-and-run accident learns the victim is his brother’s wife, he must decide whether coming clean and appeasing his conscience is worth the risk of shattering his family.
About: Since the last time Recovery was up for AF consideration, back in November 2012, it’s undergone a page-one rewrite. The resulting draft garnered a quarterfinal placement in this year’s still active Page Awards, and I feel it’s ready for another shot at AF glory.
Writer: Harj Bains
Details: 90 pages

I don’t know why, but I see Joel Edgerton in this for some reason.

So what is a “page-one rewrite” (mentioned above in the About section) anyway? A page-one rewrite is when you scrap everything in your story and start anew. There are times where we write scripts that have inherent problems, and no matter how many times we rewrite them and rewrite them and rewrite them, it’s like adding a new shade of lipstick to a pig. It cleans’em up a little, makes them prettier. But the rewrites never seem to fix the underlying problem in the script.

Now most of the time when this happens, you eventually move on to the next script. At a certain point it just becomes so tiring trying to fix something you can’t figure out, that the best thing to do is to move on. But occasionally you have an idea that’s so good, or that you love so much, moving on isn’t an option. In these cases, where you refuse to give up, the best thing might be a page one rewrite. You see, one of the reasons it may be so hard to fix things is because you’re obsessed with some character or plotline or sequence that’s actually crippling your story. It made sense in that first draft. But as the script evolved and become something else, it doesn’t anymore. However, you’re so close to the material you can’t see what that troubling element is and therefore don’t know to eliminate it.

By starting over, by accepting that nothing in the previous script is necessary and you can take the idea anywhere you want again, you open up the potential of where the script can go NOW. Since today’s script is called “Recovery,” the proper analogy might be to see your script as a drug addict. And one day he wants to change. He wants to get off drugs. The problem is, all his friends are drug addicts too. It’s impossible for him to stop because he’s surrounded by drugs ALL THE TIME. It’s only when he eliminates those friends from his life that he can actually move forward and change.

Okay, enough with analogies. I’m not even sure Recovery is a true page-one rewrite. I just saw the author mention it and felt it was a good topic to bring up since we haven’t discussed it before. Now on to the script!

Recovery follows two 30-something brothers, Tommy and Daniel. Tommy is a functioning heroin addict. He’s got a job and everything, but he lives solely for his next high. Daniel is the brother who’s got his shit together. He’s got a nice job and a nice wife, Anna, who he loves with all his heart.

Well one morning, Anna wakes Daniel up because the treadmill isn’t working. He promised to fix it yesterday and she wants to get a run in before work. She asks him to please fix it but he’s too tired. He tells her to take a jog and he’ll fix it later today. He promises. She’s pissed but heads out for a jog.

In the meantime, Tommy, who’s exhausted coming off the high of one of his many shoot-ups, is forced to drive across town dead tired to sign a stupid form for work. On the way back, he’s falling asleep at the wheel, and wouldn’t you know it, there’s Anna running, and there’s Tommy not seeing her and BAM, he gruesomely slams into her.

Tommy’s awake now. At this point, he doesn’t know it’s Anna (we don’t know Tommy and Daniel are brothers yet, either). So he shoots off, freaking out and wondering how the hell he’s going to get his car fixed without someone reporting it. It’s a small town. If he’s not careful, the wrong people are going to know that the front of his car has a person-indent in the front, and then it’s only a matter of time before he goes to jail.

Not long after, Tommy is called over by his and Daniel’s parents. They’re all mourning the loss of Anna by a hit-and-run driver. Of course, they don’t know that their own blood, Tommy, was the hitter-and-runner. And it doesn’t help that Daniel is beating himself up over it. If he just would’ve taken the time to fix that damn treadmill, none of this would’ve happened. His wife would still be alive. Not to mention the fact that exercise is supposed to extend your life. What a lie that was.

After an elongated game of Tommy feeling awful as everyone around him curses this “anonymous” hit and run driver, Tommy decides to come clean. He tells Daniel that he did it. Daniel’s outraged at first, but realizes it was an accident. The event actually becomes the impetus for Tommy getting clean. He goes to rehab, even meets a girl he falls in love with, and a few months later he’s drug-free and ready to start a new life with this woman.

Uhhh, Daniel is NOT cool with that. His brother kills his wife, then gets a wife of his own out of it!!?? No, that’s not cool at all. Daniel’s rage takes him to the darkest of dark places, and we get the feeling he’s going to take care of this problem his own way. All of this is happening while detectives get closer and closer to finding out who hit Anna. But will they find out before Daniel decides to get revenge for his wife’s death?

I can see why you guys wanted me to read Recovery. Its first ten pages are kind of awesome, culminating in a brutal and memorable hit-and-run. But the rest of the script is kind of hit-or-miss. It’s actually quite the unorthodox story. It starts off as this thriller of Tommy trying to hide this dark secret, which is the section that had the most potential.

But then he actually tells his brother he did it. And when that happened, the story lost something. I mean, it was a brave choice. It was totally unexpected. And I love when writers take stories in an unexpected direction. But every choice must be the best choice for the story dramatically. It’s good to surprise the audience, but not if that surprise results in a loss of tension or conflict, which is what this choice did (in my opinion).

Harj tries to keep that tension up by cutting back to the detectives, who are trying to find the person who hit Anna. But there was something that didn’t quite work with that. We’re constantly reminded that if Tommy gets caught, he’s only going to jail for a year. In other words, the stakes aren’t very high.

The script ramps up a little towards the end when Daniel becomes enraged after finding out that Tommy’s getting married. We know that’s going to come to an explosive head. But that still left this big chunk in the middle of the script where the tension is non-existent.

Speaking of that middle, part of the problem is that Tommy’s girlfriend never felt real. Even now, 12 hours after reading the script, I can’t remember her name. She’s barely in a few scenes, and when it became clear to me what was going to happen (Tommy was going to fall for her and Daniel was going to get mad), I was disappointed. The girlfriend was a tool, a plot point. She was there to get Daniel mad. But she was never a REAL PERSON.

I see writers do this a lot. They need to create a plot element to advance the story, but they don’t make that element real. For this to work, we have to see Tommy FALL IN LOVE with this girl. We need long scenes showing these two losing themselves to one another. We need to give her her own hopes and dreams and problems and backstory so she feels like an actual person. Not just a plot point. Because the ending is based on this idea that (spoiler) Daniel’s going to kill Tommy for the love that he has and we don’t believe in this love. This moment needs to be TRAGIC. We have to die at the idea of this love being destroyed. But since we never get to know the girl, we don’t really care.

I think Recovery is an interesting script but it needs a little more meat. It’s only 90 pages long and it’s a drama. I always push for shorter scripts but dramas are typically the longest scripts out there because the genre DOES allow you to get into your characters more. And that requires more space and time. So this script should be at least 110 pages and those 20 extra pages should probably be dedicated to building the relationship between Tommy and his girlfriend into something more real. And making HER more real! I don’t think that’s going to fix everything. But it’s definitely going to give the script more weight. I wish Harj luck with it. ☺

Script link: Recovery

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

What I learned: Don’t just lay down an empty plot element. Every element in your story must feel real and authentic. If it doesn’t, we’ll see through the façade and know it’s only there for some plot reason. So with Tommy’s girlfriend, since she was never really explored as a character, we became keen to the fact that she was going to be used for something. And she was – Daniel’s motivation for revenge.

Carson here. Okay, a little background. I have this friend who recently broke into that oh-so exclusive “Hollywood Screenwriting Club.” In other words, people actually started paying him for his work. It was exciting to watch him finally get that recognition, go to meetings, officially tell people that he had representation. But as the months rolled by, I saw that he’d gotten a little down. So I asked, “Yo, Good Friend. What’s wrong?” And he assured me that while there wasn’t a day he didn’t wake up pinching himself for the opportunity to write for a living, he was a little crushed by some of the realities that go into the profession. As he started explaining them, I said, “You know what? Why don’t you write this all out and I’ll post it on the site? It’ll be like, a way for you to exorcise your demons.” He agreed that’d be a wonderful idea. So why am I posting this? To remind everyone that getting to the “spec sale” finish line is really just the start of a new race, a much longer and tougher race. Because now, instead of trying to be the king of the amateurs, you’re competing shoulder to shoulder with the heavyweights, writers who can all tell a good story (something you didn’t have to worry about in the amateur camp). You gotta work your way up. You gotta take jobs you may not necessarily like to pay the bills. It’s not easy. This is what he wrote…

Necessary dance for when you sell your first script.

When you sell your first script, you will cry.

I know that seems dramatic. It might be. But you’ve worked for this moment. Whether it’s for two years or twenty, writing is hard work—it’s impossible work. Squeezing your brain till it’s dry like brittle, staring at a glowing screen for hours until your eyes sting red, forgetting what it’s like to shower (or interact with other human beings). Writing is hard. Which is exactly what makes opening that email from your agent or manager and reading the words, ‘We got an offer’ so much sweeter.

So when you sell your first script, you will cry.

Because it feels amazing. This thing that you’ve been slaving over—outlining, emailing to trusted friends, fixing the outline, sending out again, fixing it one more time, scene-writing, banging your head against the keyboard, character work, act one is done (hurray!) oh wait it’s shit (boo!), rewriting, sending out, head-banging, writing, writing, writing, napping, read a professional script that makes yours look like a Hallmark Channel D-movie, writing, writing, almost there, final scene, DONE, sending out, rewrite rewrite rewrite, ignore these notes, apply those notes, rewrite rewrite, send to manager or agent and wait a million years until—someone actually LIKES it.

Liked it enough to, um, pay you for it.

And not just pay you. They want to make it. Into a movie. That people will watch. You IMDb the interested party immediately. Good resume, a few films under their belt, a couple you’ve heard of but have never seen. Netflix them—not too shabby, your script is better so you’re not worried because the movie’s getting made. The dream is here. In a year’s time you’ll be on a red carpet, smiling awkwardly for the cameras, right? Friends come out of the woodwork to ask about free screening passes, can you read their work, who is your manager—the uphill battle is over. You’ve made it, you’ve sold a script. Your bank account will go from $1.17 (checking AND savings combined) to some number that allows you to shop for actual groceries instead of driving thru Taco Bell for the 9th time this week. You’re gonna be sitting pretty in a dark theater with strangers laughing (or screaming, or crying, or ooh-ing and ahh-ing) at words YOU WROTE, watching actors saying things YOU MADE UP. Life. Is. Grand.

Except that doesn’t really happen.

Or maybe it does. Maybe for some people that’s really how it goes. But as far as I know, that’s like Supermoon Rare, an anomaly akin to Ahab’s white whale. That doesn’t mean selling your script isn’t awesome—it is, it’s just not the perfect, smooth sailing, seven-figure life changing event people make it out to be. But here’s what it does change:

It makes you hirable. Or, more hirable than you used to be. So you’ll get meetings. Sometimes generals, where people with a lot of power offer you a free water bottle (always take the free water bottle) and ask questions about the script you sold that they may or may not have skimmed over last week. Sometimes generals with baby producers who talk a big talk and name-drop every other sentence and try to get their talons into you early before a studio notices you. Let me just get this out now: BEWARE OF BABY PRODUCERS.

What’s a baby producer? That rando with one short film IMDb credit who blows up your inbox with questions about the script you sold, where’d it find a home, what are you working on now—that’s a baby producer. And they’re slick because the high of selling your script is just that—a very cool, ego-inflating high, and people will not hesitate to exploit it. You’ll think, Great! People want to hire me and read more of my stuff and having two produced scripts is CLEARLY better than selling one so why not?! I’m gone ride this wave of attention to the Academy and never eat Taco Bell again!! It’s easy to think this. It’s easy to assume that these people just want to make a good film and they read your work and loved it and trust your voice. It’s so, so easy.

It’s also incredibly stupid.

Baby producers are the worst. They’re dangerous. Because they’re inexperienced and because they’re inexperienced they’ve had to learn how to talk to get into rooms they have no business being in. So they’ll talk to you. But you’ll be naïve (well, you won’t because you read this article but anyways). So you’ll work. On insane timetables, too, because you’re riding that momentum from your script sale and don’t plan on losing steam anytime soon. You’ll work on their terms, with their ideas, and always with the understanding that you should be grateful for this opportunity to be writing for pay. You will write the first draft in less than a week. And the pay will be shit.

Meanwhile, you’re in rewriting hell from your own spec. There’s that saying, “Writing is rewriting.” That’s never truer than when you sell your script—because the studio or producer or independent prodco owns you. And they want a quality product. Oh, they liked your script, your ideas. But they like theirs better. So you’ll rewrite your precious baby into Kingdom Come to get their stamp of approval. After all, they are the gatekeepers here—they don’t like what you do, you get paid out and a shared credit with whomever they bring in. Which, as a new writer with an original spec, is not good news.

And you’ll learn that the feature world is harsh. That the writer is not the revered king but the lowly fool. That staying afloat in this pool requires some serious stamina—this is a marathon, not a sprint (and how many metaphors was that? yeesh!). You’ll learn that the producers are really the writers and most of the time they really aren’t writers but just think they are and they’ll tell you what darlings to kill. You’ll kill your darlings. You’ll do it reluctantly but you’ll do it.

You will question your own sanity. Notes will start to look circular—isn’t that how I had it in the original draft? why are we circling back??—and this script that you’ve lived with for months, years, will begin to haunt you. And you will despise it. It’s important, though, to realize exactly why this happens, why you might hate your own work so much at this point in the process: This is your baby. It’s been your baby since its conception. You know it inside and out, forwards and backwards and upside down. You saw it take its first steps, lose its first tooth. Then you sell it and someone else joins the family. Except they haven’t been living with the script for months or years—it’s new to them. This is both a blessing and a curse. Their perspective is fresher than your own, but it’s also not your own. Some ideas these new eyes have will be great, like Why didn’t I think of that?! ideas. Others will be awful, like, There’s a reason I didn’t think of that. Whatever the case, you’ll spend hours slogging through producer notes and draft after draft after draft until your eyes bleed from reading notes that tear your precious script apart piece by piece, slugline by slugline. And maybe, if you’re lucky, if you’re working with a producer who maybe kinda sorta knows that they’re doing, it won’t be so bad.

Maybe it’ll be good. Great, even. Awesome.

Because you sold your first script—the key word being “first.” I cannot stress this enough: This is a snapshot, not the whole picture. The trailer, not the movie. Somewhere along the way, this becomes clearer. You might complain about how hard the work is, how harsh and pointless the notes seem, how ridiculous and unprofessional the baby producers are, but you’ll realize that many people have this dream, and for you it’s now a reality. So you will shut up with the negativity and start to tell people when all that gratitude and excitement finally sinks in. And their reactions will be priceless. You’ll spend a lot of time answering questions from friends and family about when your movie is coming out (this will never stop until, I’m guessing, your movie actually comes out). And then you’ll smile—because that’s actually a very likely outcome to all of this. Your movie will come out.

Unless it doesn’t. In which case, it’s time to sell your second script.

Genre: Sci-fi e-book
Premise: Set during an unknown time, Wool follows a select group of workers inside an expansive 100-story underground bunker who begin to suspect that the world they live in is a giant lie.
About: Writer Hugh Howey initially wrote Wool as a stand-alone short story. He published the work through Amazon’s Direct Publishing system. After the story began to do well, he started writing more entries for it (the entries are now combined into a single book). 20th Century Fox bought film rights for the book last year, and Howey just signed a print-only deal with Simon and Schuster for half a million dollars.
Writer: Hugh Howey
Details: 530 pages

One of the things I’ve been keeping an eye on of late is Hollywood’s interest in self-published material. It used to be that, on the book end, there was only one chance of getting your work adapted. You had to get a book published! And to publish something, you had to crack into an industry that was just as hard to break into as this one.

Times have changed. The burgeoning E-book industry has allowed that “nobody” writer to finally bypass a system previously designed to keep you invisible. Having published an e-book myself (yeah, yeah, the physical copy is coming), one of the things that baffled me was how easy it was. I mean you literally go to Amazon, upload your document, and it’s on the site 6 hours later.

Now, of course, you still have to get noticed. You still have to find ways to get people to know about your book. But the tools are in place, especially with the pricing flexibility you have. You don’t need to compete with those huge books because you can price your book at 1/10 their price (99 cents), making it an easy gamble for hungry readers looking for something new to try.

Not to mention you’re not beholden to any page count. A lot of e-writers are selling serialized novellas, allowing them to write a quick 150 page book, charge 99 cents, gain some fans, then write three more 150 page novellas (each a dollar) to finish the series (which is similar to what Wool did). This is a great way for screenwriters to dip their toes into the medium and see if they like it.

I bring this all up because Hollywood is obsessed with adaptations. They want to see things proven before they take a chance on them. And this is a way for you to exploit that business model without having to convince a publishing industry to print half a million copies of your debut book. You can create a small tremor in the book world and turn it into a big splashy sale that way as opposed to the spec route. Which brings us to today’s book, Wool.

Note: Wool is the kind of story that plays best when you don’t know all its little surprises. I recommend you read it if you don’t want to know what happens. There will be spoilers below.

Wool is about an immense underground “silo” (almost 150 levels deep) that houses a community of people doing various jobs all focused on one thing – keeping the silo running smoothly. Although it’s never explicitly stated, it’s implied we’re in the far off future and that something terrible happened that destroyed the atmosphere and made earth inhospitable. In fact, if you’re lucky enough to be on the top floor of the silo, you can see giant monitors displaying the outside’s rolling lifeless hills, as well as the decrepit remains of a city in the distance.

The story centers around a young machine welder named Juliette who becomes an unwitting sheriff of the silo. She received the job after the previous sheriff was picked for the “lottery.” While winning the lottery may sound wonderful to you, the lottery of this world means you’ve been designated to clean the cameras outside the silo. Because the atmosphere is so harsh, this ensures your death, even with the most technologically advanced suits available. This is actually considered an honor in the silo. Wining the lottery allows you to do your duty for your people.

Anyway, while running across some of the old sheriff’s e-mails, Juliette finds out that he had begun questioning the purpose of the silo (a huge no-no in the community). Even worse, he found that some silo truths didn’t add up. Maybe the lottery wasn’t a “privilege” after all. Maybe it was a backdoor way for the silo leaders to get rid of those who were onto their secret? But what was it the silo leaders were covering up exactly? And why did all trails seem to lead back to IT, the secluded computer hub of the silo?

Juliette does some more digging and learns of something called “the uprising,” something that happened many years ago in the silence, and finds evidence that there wasn’t just one, but maybe many uprisings. Dozens! Her curiosity finally causes her downfall though, as IT catches her snooping, and announces she is the next “lottery” winner.

Before she goes down, Juliette learns that there is a much bigger world out there with many secrets, and that IT is entrusted with keeping those secrets. If she’s going to find out what those secrets are, and she’s going to survive “cleaning,” a procedure that not a single Silo member has ever survived, she’ll need to call on her friends, her unique skills, and her intelligence to identify exactly what this Silo is.

I mean, is it any surprise at all that I liked this? It’s right up my alley in just about every category. And I don’t know if Fox only bought it for a feature adaptation, but this would be an even better TV show. That’s all I kept thinking while I was reading it. “This is the next fucking Lost.” It’s got such a vast mythology (mythology I’m still learning about in the sequel, Shift) and such a great environment for characters, you could just see this thing taking over the geek community.

But this could just as easily be a film. And that’s one thing I admired about Hugh’s writing. Taking a page out of screenwriting books, he always kept the mystery high and the story moving. We always had a clear goal – much of which was based on Juliette’s desire to figure out what was really going on in the Silo – investigating mysterious murders, looking into mysterious e-mails, following up mysterious rumors.

That’s a great tip for all you young writers out there. Put your character in some sort of investigative position. That way, they’ll always have a goal. They’ll always have something to solve, something to look up, something they must find out. This keeps your character active and active characters are almost always the most interesting to watch. Wool doesn’t play nearly as well if, say, Juliette is a stay-at-home mom. She has no reason to investigate any of the cool stuff she had to investigate as a Sheriff. And if you DO send a stay-at-home mom off to investigate a bunch of things, you have a very confused reader on your hands wondering, “Uhhhh, why is she doing this?”

In addition to its TV and feature qualities, I also enjoyed Wool doing certain things you can only do in a book. For example, we originally start off following the sheriff (whose death Juliette looks into later). So he’s our main character. But then he walks outside for the lottery, experiences something mind-boggling, and dies. So our main character’s dead! Then in the next section, we meet the mayor, who we follow for awhile. She too starts to dig into some silo inconsistencies. She’s then picked for a cleaning and dies too. So our SECOND main character is dead. This finally leads us to Juliette, who becomes our hero throughout the rest of the book.

Now in retrospect, of course, this makes sense. Howey originally wrote this as a standalone short story. So the need for a new hero to replace the dead hero from that original novella was obvious. And he probably didn’t know yet if he was going to write an entire book, so again he followed that storyline to its logical conclusion, ending up in the dead Mayor. Once he realized he was going to turn this into an entire book, he knew the next hero would have to be the protagonist for good.

But I love reading stuff like this because it’s easy, after immersing yourself in screenplay land for years, to think the Hollywood beats are the only beats available. Try killing your main character off twice in a script. We wouldn’t meet the third real main character until at least page 40 and by then it’s too late to start your story.

But I still love seeing this because it REMINDS me that there are other ways to do it. You don’t HAVE to do it the way it’s always been done. I don’t know how you’d do two fake-out main character introductions in a major Hollywood movie but MAYBE it could be done with the right approach and the right writer. And knowing that’s an option, no matter how far-fetched, keeps you on your creative toes. You can do anything you want to with a screenplay. Wool reminded me of that.

Getting back on track, I just think it’s cool that these other options are popping up for screenwriters. You no longer have to have a best-seller to get your script adapted. Just put a great story up on Amazon. Heck, start with a simple short story and charge 99 cents.  You could be the next High Howey!

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

What I learned: People do judge a book by its cover. If you’re going to self-publish, pay the extra dough and get a professional cover done. I saw the old (before a publishing company came in) cover for “Wool” and I would’ve never read it off that cover. It just looked so cheap. The much more professional one I placed at the top of this review is actually how I first spotted the book. It got me to click on it, learn about it, and actually buy it.

Sing it with me now.  “Mish Mash Monday…. Mish Maasssh Muuunnnnday!”

There were no major releases this weekend that contained see-ocity and therefore no big movies to write about. Unless you’re Team Smurf (hey, Hank Azaria was genius as Gargamel in Smurfs 1 – not that I’ve, um, seen it). As for the other major release, 2 Guns, I thought it was pretty original when I read it, but once I saw the trailer, it dropped on the priority list to somewhere between a kitten funeral and sign flipping. It was like all the originality was sucked out of whatever I read. It looked Generic City, like Safe House in the desert.

I was discussing this the other day. Everyone starts off making a movie with these great intentions of creating something unique, but as the development process (and the production process) goes on, everybody starts freaking out that people aren’t going to “get it” and therefore tip toe closer and closer to the most generic version of whatever they’re doing. I understand this phenomenon because it’s scary to go off and be different. But I wish more production teams (and studios) would trust themselves with what they originally bought and stick to that vision.

My movie-going experience was not totally deprived of optimism, however. Miss SS and I went to see The Spectacular Now and both really liked it. Let me just offer some words of wisdom though for those in the LA area. Do NOT go see any movies at the West LA landmark unless you a) wear adult diapers, b) sport life alert or c) smell like a hospital. The median age of the showing we were at (about a high school couple, ironically) was 87 at least. The 106 year old woman next to me wore one of those audio assist headphones and it was BLASTING static louder than a freaking Kanye West concert. It didn’t help that her husband had to go to the bathroom 9 times during the first 45 minutes. And you know the annoying person at a theater who always asks their date/friend, “What did they just say?” Imagine if there were FIFTY of them in a single theater. There was more talking going on OUTSIDE the movie than inside it. I don’t know if we accidentally stumbled in on a special hospice showing or Landmark was allowing Civil War vets to use their facilities, but you won’t see me at the Landmark again for another 60 years at least.

Anyway, from what I was able to hear, the performances of the two leads (Miles “No, I’m not going to be in Fantastic Four” Teller and Shailene “I got cut out of Spiderman 2 because Andrew Garfield wants a male love interest” Woodley) lived up to the hype. They have wonderful chemistry that elevated a script which was already good to begin with. And I loved that director James Ponsoldt used long takes with his leads, which made the dialogue even more natural than it already was. That decision is what’s making this film play so well in my opinion. We don’t get any of those hard artificial dialogue cuts where you can tell the editor is fishing for the best line reading. The actors were allowed to just let go, and the film feels like real life as a result.

The only thing I didn’t like about The Spectacular Now was the last twenty minutes as it reminded me of a problem a lot of screenplays (especially character-driven screenplays) face: RRSS (“Relationship Resolution Stacking Syndrome”). Whenever you write a character piece that has your main character embedded in multiple relationships that need resolving, the last 20 pages of the script becomes a chore of stacking all those resolution scenes on top of each other.

That happened big time in Spectacular Now. Obviously, our main character was going to need to resolve stuff with his absent dad. That was fine. But then we have the scene where he wraps up his issues with his sister. Then the scene where he wraps up issues with his boss. Then the scene where he wraps up issues with his mom. Finally the scene where he wraps up things with Aimee. It just went on and on and on. I feel like there’s a more delicate way to handle this, where you don’t feel the scenes climbing up on top of each other.

Then again, if you try and create space between them, the third act can go on forever, which is a whole other problem to deal with. I think the key may be to resolve some of these relationships earlier. Maybe at the end of the second act. And also ask yourself if you really need to resolve every relationship. Like did we really care about his three-scene boss enough to resolve that? I know the writers might say, “Well yeah, but the boss is the one who makes it clear that he’s not fooling anyone with his drinking. So that scene was needed.” True, but remember, this is writing. There are a million ways to solve a problem. Why not give one of the other characters he’s resolving issues with that observation?

Another idea is to create devices where you can resolve a relationship quickly, as opposed to with endless melodramatic conversations. Good Will Hunting did this famously. Damon and Affleck set up the whole Chuckie, “I’m hoping that one day I show up for work and you aren’t there” moment early on. That way, at the end, they could quickly show Chuckie going to Will’s door and Will isn’t there, and that’s it. Relationship resolved. And now that I think about it, they resolved the relationship with Robin Williams quickly too. Will leaves him a note that says, “I’m going to see about a girl.” (another payoff of a setup). So maybe the lesson here is to set something up earlier so you don’t have RRSS problems in your final act.

Moving on to a completely different genre, I finally saw Evil Dead (the remake) this weekend on iTunes. I have to say that I was really disappointed. When I read the script, I thought it was kind of clever that they created this whole “heroin-addicted woman takes her friends out to the middle of nowhere to help her beat her addiction” storyline. I’d never seen that as a way to start one of these middle-of-nowhere horror movies before.

But when I watched how this played out onscreen, something felt off and I couldn’t figure out what it was. Everybody seemed so… bummed out. I’m talking right from the beginning. Nobody really liked each other. They all seemed to be in a pissy mood. And that’s when it hit me. The detox storyline was all wrong. It meant that the characters were already starting in a dark place. So there was no shift when the horror hit. Everybody was pissed off and upset beforehand and everyone was pissed off and upset after.

There’s a reason the classic formula of a bunch of happy college kids going out to a secluded cabin works. Because we start from a high place. We start with a positive charge, with hope. That way, it’s more jarring when bad shit starts happening to them. There’s an arc in the emotion. And we never experienced any arc in Evil Dead. I mean, it was a well-made movie, but it was such a fucking downer. As silly as it sounds, we like to ENJOY being scared. This film made being scared sad.

Moving on, I couldn’t help but notice this story about George Clooney and Daniel Loeb. The short of it is that this guy, Daniel Loeb, is one of the biggest investors in Sony, and he got really pissed when two of Sony’s big blockbusters bombed this summer (After Earth and White House Down). So he publicly bitches and moans that Amy Pascal and the Sony folk have no idea what they’re doing and that Sony, to protect people like him, needs to sell off the entertainment division to another company (or something like that – I don’t understand all this financial terminology). In other words, he’s trying to strike fear in Hollywood so that they become even MORE risk-averse than they already are. And we all know what risk-averse gets us.

Well George Clooney to the fucking rescue. Clooney basically told Loeb to go fuck himself. That Loeb doesn’t know jack shit about how the entertainment industry works and that he was part of the financial culture that almost bankrupted the U.S., so why the fuck should he have anything to say about how to run the movie business. I mean he really handed it to him. And when you think about it, that was a dangerous thing to do. Clooney is a movie star, but money crushes everything, and this Loeb guy is loaded. You just don’t hear guys of this stature taking each other on in the public like this. Props to Clooney for speaking his mind and defending this business we’re all dying to get into.

Look, I didn’t think After Earth was very good. And the trailers for White House Down made it look like they cared more about Channing Tatum’s muscle definition than, you know, a story. But that doesn’t mean Sony won’t make good movies in the future. There will always be duds. I can only imagine how difficult it is to be a studio head and come up with a slate of films for the entire year. There are so many variables at play and you don’t always get the movie you thought you signed up for. But this business is predicated on taking risks and if you, as an investor, don’t know that’s what you signed up for, take your money elsewhere. This business is mega-profitable and we’ll find the money somewhere else.

Finally, I wanted to congratulate writer Mickey Fisher. He did well in a small pilot contest, which got him repped by Brooklyn Weaver, and now he finds the pilot he entered in that contest (Extant – about an android boy) as the hottest TV pilot in town. Every network wants it. This guy is about to become very rich, very fast, and probably get a guarantee that his show will be on the air. That never happens. And it definitely never happens for a nobody.

I read the pilot (the 2013 version that went out to the networks) and while it starts slow, it really gets good at the end. In addition to the android boy storyline, his mother has just gotten back from an 18 month solo-trip on the space station where she’s inexplicably pregnant. We have hints that aliens could be involved. There are mysterious Japanese men coming out of hyper-jello sleep. And probably, most interestingly, the pilot poses questions about a future society WITHOUT the famed “3 robot rules.” In other words, the robots can do whatever they want. They’re not bound by directives like “never hurt humans.” And the more I think about that, the more I’m starting to see the reason why everyone wants this show. I mean it has the possibility of going on for 30 seasons if approached right. We could watch as these robots integrate deeper and deeper into society and explore the issues and philosophical questions that come with that integration.  What the humans want.  What the robots want.  If robots should have the same rights as humans. What happens if a robot kills someone?  They’re still the same person after an 80 year jail sentence.  Do they just get out again?  The show would be able to explore issues extensively that movies like Bi-Centenial Man and A.I. and 2001 and I-Robot were only briefly able to touch on because of their 2 hour format.  That sounds like it could be pretty awesome to me.

That’s all for Mish-Mash Monday. I had this epiphany about clichés that I wanted to get into but I’ll save that for another time. See you tomorrow when I give you 10 screenwriting mistakes to avoid via Southland Tales.