URGENCY solves all your screenplay’s ills!

Genre: Zombie/Horror/Thriller/Action
Premise: (from IMDB) United Nations employee Gerry Lane traverses the world in a race against time to stop the Zombie pandemic that is toppling armies and governments, and threatening to destroy humanity itself.
About: World War Z, the movie, has had its own apocalypse leading up to its release. Its well-publicized awful third act (which forced the studio to rewrite and reshoot the whole thing) steered buzz on the film towards Death Valley. Things didn’t exactly get better when geek screenwriting whipping boy Damon Lindelof came on to “save” the movie. But just like a zombie, the film came back from the dead and started building positive word-of-mouth with strategic early screenings and that cleaned up ending. Projected by much of Hollywood to bomb, the film made $66 million this weekend, 16 million more than the studio’s best case scenario. It looks like all aspects of World War Z got an improved ending.
Writers: Matthew Michael Carnahan and Drew Goddard & Damon Lindelof (story by Matthew Michael Carnahan and J. Michael Straczynski) (based on the novel by Max Brooks)
Details: 116 minutes

I’m not sure why everyone thought this was going to flop. The trailers looked awesome. It had Brad Pitt in it. What else do you need to get butts in seats?

I actually read an early draft of this script a long time ago and there were textbook problems with it that needed changing if this movie was going to have a shot. They made those changes (nailed them, in fact) and voila, we have a MUCH BETTER script and therefore a MUCH BETTER movie.

World War Z follows United Nations agent Gerry Lane as he and his family (wife and two daughters) are beginning their day. As they’re driving through the city, chaos erupts, with crazed possessed people attacking and killing everyone in sight. Those victims then turn into attackers as well, creating an exponential path of destruction.

In a harrowing opening 20 minutes, Gerry leads his family to safety and eventually to an extraction point where the government picks them up. They head to the only safe area on the planet, military boats in the middle of the sea, and everyone starts trying to find out what’s going on.

What’s going on is a particularly lethal strain of zombie. One that’s making quick work of the planet. If they don’t do something soon, these boats may be their final destination. Just like any plague, if you find out the source (Patient 0), you have a chance of coming up with a vaccine. Because Gerry’s job is to go into dangerous places and get answers, he’s a natural fit to go searching for this patient.

Problem is, every country is being overrun by zombies. So it’s sort of like sending a tree into a field of chainsaws. The chances of making it out with all your bark in tact isn’t very good. Gerry starts his investigation in South Korea, which experienced the worst of the attacks. Clues there eventually lead him to Israel, which somehow knew to build a zombie wall before the zombie outbreak even began. These guys were onto something and Gerry wants to know what.

While there, however, our clever (and quite energetic) zombies, figure out a way to scale the walls and overrun the city, forcing Gerry to make a harrowing escape on a passenger plane. That plane eventually leads him to a World Health Organization center where Gerry uses the clues he’s gathered to (spoiler) come up with a vaccine.

Okay, are you guys ready for today’s big screenwriting lesson?

URGENCY!!!

This script proves how important urgency is to a story. Why do I say that? Because I have the old script to compare it to.

In that version, the script tried to stay true to the novel. The novel was more about the AFTERMATH of the zombie outbreak. It took a “Post-Hurricane Katrina” approach to things, with Gerry trying to find who was to blame for the outbreak rather than Patient 0.

That’s fine for a book. But shit like that don’t fly in movies. In a movie, you need urgency. I’m surprised they didn’t figure this out right away – that they paid a writer to write a draft that had no hope of pleasing audiences. But someone finally got it right. They realized that telling everything in flashbacks and having Pitt strolling around countries leisurely without a single immediate threat didn’t lend itself to an exciting flick.

The brilliance of World War Z, the movie, is that it never slows down. Outside of the opening scenes establishing the family together, once the zombies hit, they never stop hitting. And for that reason, Gerry had to do his investigation WITH THE THREAT OF BEING KILLED AT ANY MOMENT as opposed to the threat of getting a paper cut at any moment. And everywhere he went, the zombie threat was right behind him. I know some people don’t like fast zombies, but they multiplied the urgency in this case a thousand fold and really made things exciting.

The best example of this was in Israel. We saw these zombies clamoring to get inside the country and we knew it was only a matter of time before they did. So when Pitt’s investigating, he doesn’t have time to hop around the country meeting numerous people and getting detailed rundowns. He talks to one dude before the zombies scale the wall and he’s running for his life.

World War Z is actually the prototypical GSU script. You have the Goal (find Patient Zero so you can create a vaccine), the stakes (Gerry being reunited with his family AS WELL AS the fate of the human race) and the urgency (zombies always on their tail).

Speaking of, that was another great change Damon Lindelof and Drew Goddard made. They actually suggested going back and adding the family scenes at the beginning of the movie, as well as another phone call between Gerry and his wife during the second act. They wanted more stuff between the family. They know that GSU doesn’t work unless the audience CARES ABOUT THE CHARACTERS and WANTS THEM TO REUNITE.

One of the best ways to create that caring is to create a family unit, a pair (or a group) of people who we want to see reunited. You do this by showing the family together, show how much they care for each other, then rip them apart. If Gerry is ONLY trying to save the world here, this movie doesn’t work. It’s that we want to see him back together with his family that keeps us so invested.

As for the ending, I don’t know what they changed the script from, but you can tell where the split happened. Clearly, that plane was going somewhere else in the old film. Now the plane crashes and Gerry comically walks over to the World Health Organization, which just happens to be a pleasant 5 minute walk form the crash site.

But once Gerry’s in the building, things pick up splendidly. Lindelof and Goddard create their own little mini-movie with new GSU. The goal is for Gerry to get a special bottle the scientists need in B-Wing, the stakes are, once again, survival of mankind, and the urgency isn’t as prominent, since the situation is so fraught with tension (the zombies potentially spotting them at any time). For coming up with this ending as quickly and under as much pressure as they did, they really did a great job.

You know, I got to thinking about this movie and wondering why it was so good, despite its mechanics being so simple. There are no real surprises in this script, no x-factor. It was all straightforward. I was reminded of a movie from earlier this summer that had a similar structure, yet wasn’t nearly as good: After Earth.

In that movie, we have the family unit (Dad and son) and a clear goal with high stakes and lots of urgency (son must get to the tail section to retrieve the S.O.S. beacon). So why did it fall so short of this one? A few things stuck out to me. The first was that the stakes were so much higher in World War Z. In After Earth, only the father and son’s lives were at stake. World War Z had the lives of the family at stake AS WELL AS the entire world.

A second problem was that the obstacles were so much greater in World War Z. I always talk about the value of creating big impossible obstacles for your characters and I never saw that in After Earth. Everything the son ran into was bad, but never “Oh shit ohmygod holy shit we’re fucked” bad. Contrast that to World War Z, which has tons of these moments. I mean at one point Gerry is watching the plane he’s on be overrun by zombies and must decide whether to blow a hole in the side of the plane with a grenade, effectively crashing it, or take on the zombies in close combat. Now THAT’S what I call an obstacle.

The other problem was that After Earth’s storyline was too simple. You were always way ahead of the story. World War Z squashed that issue by creating a central mystery to the storyline: What happened? Pitt needed to put together clues to figure out what happened in order to get to each successive clue. In After Earth, the kid didn’t really have to figure out anything. His father just told him where to go and he followed orders.

And that’s ANOTHER reason why this is such a great screenplay to study. On top of all this, we have a snapshot of the proper way to write a protagonist: HE’S ACTIVE! Pitt is making his own choices, figuring things out himself, and charging forward. Isn’t that a way more interesting protagonist than one who just follows orders from his dad the whole movie?

That’s not to say World War Z was without fault. What keeps this from being impressive are some of the glaring logic oversights. Israel is being heralded as this genius country for building a wall before anybody else to keep the zombies out. Yet they’re allowing random planes to land on their runway and random people from those planes to hop into their city without enduring – oh, I don’t know – a QUARANTINE.

Ditto for the random folks they’re letting through the wall. If someone can take as long as 10 minutes to turn, why are you allowing people into your city after a Q & A session that basically amounts to “Are you a zombie?” The plane that Gerry and crew stop and board is the worst example of this. Gerry’s helping along a pale sickly woman, who’s coming with him. She never turns into a zombie, but if you’re those pilots, aren’t you thinking she might?? And yet they never blinked. Yeah, sure, come on in.

I understand why they did this. They balanced the audience’s need for logic against the audience’s need for urgency. It’s a problem screenwriters are constantly faced with. You could have had Gerry and crew placed into quarantine for 12 hours after they landed in Israel to be more realistic, but it would’ve killed the momentum. I’m not sure there’s a universal solution for this. It needs to be addressed on a case by case basis. But my gut tells me they needed it here. Because everybody looked like morons for never once considering the fact that the new guy they’re letting in the room might be infected.

The thing was, everything else was so damn well done that I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I mean there isn’t a slow moment in the movie. So congrats to the writers who worked so hard on this. It paid off!

[ ] what the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the price of an EVENING ticket
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: I always talk about giving your protagonist a difficult choice at the end of the movie, something that challenges their fatal flaw. This reminded me that you don’t want to ONLY wait for that ending to do this. You should give your characters difficult choices WHENEVER YOU CAN in the script. I loved the scene in the plane where Gerry is watching the zombie mayhem get closer and closer, and must make an impossible decision. He’s got a grenade he can throw at them, which will crash the plane and probably kill him, or he can try and fight the zombies off, which will probably kill him. Those are the great moments in scripts, where you see the character battling that impossible choice.

Unless you’re a genius like Bradley Cooper, you’ll want to outline.

Screenwriting, more so than most writing mediums, is about structure. You’re telling a story within a very specific framework (usually three acts: A beginning, a middle, and an end). If you don’t plan ahead for how you’re going to lay that story out, it’s kind of like trying to tell a joke at a party without practicing it beforehand. You’ll start to wander, repeat things, and forget stuff. You’ll see your audience getting bored, checking their phones, losing interest. When it comes to screenwriting, you don’t have that luxury. You won’t see the people getting bored, which means you’ll have no idea that the “joke” isn’t working.

So think of outlining as “practice” for your screenplay. It’s where you test and try out everything until you get it exactly where you want it to be. If you don’t outline, chances are your script will feel lost. Screenplays require a certain pacing and escalation to keep a reader’s attention. Outlining fosters that process. Now everybody has their own methods, their own outlining styles, so what I’m about to share with you is only one approach. But it should familiarize you with the process and give you a base point to start from.

STEP 1 – FIGURE OUT YOUR ACT BREAKS

Assuming you’ve already got an idea, the first thing you’ll want to do is set your act breaks. On a 100 page script (which is what I’ll be using as the page count basis for this article), your act breaks are going to occur around page 25 and 75 (or at 25% through and 75% through, if your script is longer). The first act break (act 1 into 2) will be when your hero leaves on his journey and the second act break (act 2 into 3) will be when it appears he’s failed at his journey. For this to work, you’re going to want a protagonist with a goal (find the Ark, save the wife from terrorists, snag the girl, survive the Purge, find and get Doug back to his wedding on time). It becomes a lot harder to structure a screenplay if you don’t have a protagonist with a goal.

All you have to do, then, is figure out how these moments play out in your specific story. So let’s say I’m writing a movie about a plague that’s threatening to destroy the human race and our main character is looking for an exotic monkey he believes has the cure (I think this is an actual script I reviewed – it sounds familiar). Hence, our main character, Jason (a primatologist), must find this monkey. Page 25, then, might be outlined as: “Jason takes a plane to Kansas City where the plague began and where he believes this monkey escaped from the zoo.” Boom, you just outlined your first story beat!

Page 75, the break into the third act, will require a little more thought, because you have to think through your entire story to figure out how your protagonist will get to his lowest point. In the case of future blockbuster “Monkey Plague,” it might be that Jason is rushing to the labs with the monkey, only for our villain to race him off the road and steal the monkey away.  It looks like poor Jason has failed at his mission.  :(

STEP 2 – HOT SPOTS

Now that you have the two most important places in your screenplay mapped out, you have a solid sense of where your story needs to go. This should make tackling your story easier. But remember that the average screenplay has 50-60 scenes. We’ve only written two of those. I’ve found that the more advanced the writer, the more specific they want their outline to be. So if you want to take this a step further, here are the next set of scenes you’ll want to outline before you start. I call these major beats “Hot Spots.”

The inciting incident (Page 10) – The inciting incident happens in the first act, somewhere between pages 5-15, and is the thing that throws your hero’s world upside down. It could be the death of someone they’re close to, getting fired, wife divorcing them, someone tries to kill them, aliens showing up. Everything’s cool for your hero until this moment happens, so it’s a good (and usually obvious) moment to map out on your outline. In Monkey Plague, this might be the announcement on television of the plague. Or, if you already started with the plague, maybe the government announces an official quarantine on the city Jason lives in. You’ll notice how this conflicts with the First Act Turn I outlined above. How can he take a plane somewhere if his city is quarantined? I’ll go back and change the First Act Turn to him paying a black market bus to take him out of the city. These kinds of changes happen all the time while outlining and are part of the process.

First major obstacle/jolt (Pages 35-40) – I’m a strong believer that something exciting should happen every 10-15 pages in your script, something that jolts the reader a little, whether it’s a major obstacle, a reversal, a mystery posed, a surprise, a character intro, a mystery answered, a twist, or just something that ups the stakes. Use these moments to reignite the flame of your story, which may have grown dimmer as your reader has settled in. Keep in mind that most of these moments should be based in resistance. They should make your protagonist’s journey more difficult. In Monkey Plague, Jason may get to Kansas City only to find that the city infrastructure is crumbling as everyone flees to the safety of their homes. Electricity is starting to go out, public transportation is shut down, looting has begun.

The Midpoint Shift (second major obstacle/jolt, page 50) – The Midpoint Shift is one of the most important pieces of the outline because the second act (between pages 25-75) is where most stories fall apart. It’s such a big gap that writers don’t know what to do with all that space. Enter the Midpoint Shift, which is basically the most extreme obstacle/twist you’re going to write into your movie. The idea is to shake things up and turn the story on its head a bit so that the second half feels different from the first. I can’t stress this enough. Without a solid midpoint shift, your second half will feel like a repeat of the first and we’ll get bored. So in Monkey Plague, I’m thinking of two things happening. First, everybody in the city is mysteriously disappearing. Something’s up, and Jason doesn’t know what it is. On top of this, Jason finds out he’s infected (either by random exposure or someone infecting him on purpose). Notice how this changes up the story (the danger becomes more personal) and ups the stakes (our own character’s life is at stake, and he doesn’t have long to save himself).

Third Major Obstacle/jolt (page 65) – This is probably the least known hot spot, but an important one as the late second act is often the most boring part of a movie. Therefore we need one more jolt before we get to the end of the second act. What that jolt is (a twist, raising the stakes, a giant obstacle) is up to you, but a lot of times it has something to do with death (the death of Obi-Wan for example). But it can also be a good guy who’s secretly revealed to be a bad guy. It could be a false victory (the guys in The Hangover find Doug only to realize… it’s not the real Doug). Or it could just be something strange and unexpected, such as the discovery of the Guinea Pig Island in Life of Pi. In Monkey Plague, maybe Jason comes upon a slaughter house. They’re killing all the monkeys to get rid of the plague. But as he gets closer he realizes they’re not slaughtering monkeys. They’re slaughtering HUMANS! Ahhhhh!!!

Ending (page 95) – Michael Ardnt (Toy Story 3 and Star Wars VII) says he doesn’t write scripts until he knows the ending.  That’s because the ending dictates everything that comes before it.  The more specifically you know your climax, the more direction your story will have.  Period.  But endings are also really hard to figure out.  Coming up with an original one that will surprise an audience is rare.  So you’re not always going to get it on the first try. Still, try to put something down, even if you think it might change later.  It’ll give your writing direction and purpose. I’m having a hard time with the ending for Monkey Plague, so for now, I’ll just say that Jason gets the monkey back and creates the antidote, with mere minutes to spare…only to find that it was the wrong monkey!

SETP 3 – FILL IN THE REST

Okay, now you have the basic story beats laid out. These will be the pillars of your plot. From here, you have a choice. You can either charge forward and start writing your script or you can start filling in the gaps. My advice is to fill in the gaps. The more scenes and beats you know, the easier it will be to write the script and the less of a chance you’ll encounter writer’s block. Depending on the length of your script, you’ll have anywhere between 10-15 scenes in the first act, 25-30 scenes in the second, and 10-15 in the third (the number of scenes will also vary based on what type of script you’re writing as well as your writing style). Since you have the Inciting Incident, the First Act Turn, the First Major Obstacle, the Midpoint Shift, the Third Major Obstacle, the Turn into The Third Act, and the ending, that means you already have seven of these scenes set. You just have to come up with the final 50. As you keep working on your outline, both before and during the writing of the script, you’ll become more specific with each beat and scene (even adding notes to yourself in sub-headers as to what you’re trying to accomplish with the scene). If you can get your outline to the point where every scene is noted (should be easy after the first draft), you’ll be able to see what needs to stay, what needs to go, where things need to speed up, etc.  Wordpress won’t let me add sub-headers without learning Fortran, but the outline will look something like this (I’ve added a few scenes to fill out the outline).

ACT 1 (numbers denote scene numbers)

1 – Jason working in the lab on a monkey that’s showing exceptional abilities.
2 – Jason goes home. Girlfriend pissed cause he spends too much time at work.
3 – Jason gets a surprise phone call – told not to come into work tomorrow. Government has called in to suspend all primate studying for the time being.
4 – Inciting Incident – The government announces an official quarantine of the city.

12 – (break into act 2) Jason heads to Kansas City on a sketchy bus.

ACT 2

18 – (Obstacle 1) City infrastructure is crumbling. Violence is erupting in the city. Phones go down so no one can call him back.

25 (Midpoint Shift/Obstacle 2) – Jason betrayed by Sara after getting injured. While asleep she injected him with the plague and is now gone. Plague kills within 72 hours. (where is everyone disappearing to??)

32 – (Obstacle 3) Jason finds out that government has taken over all slaughterhouses and is using them to slaughter humans with the plague.

38 – (Lowest Point/Break into Act 3) Is chased after getting the monkey, rammed off the road. The monkey is taken from him. He’s at his lowest point. Has nowhere left to go.

ACT 3

50 – (climax) Jason infiltrates the government base where the monkey testing that created the plague was happening. Takes down the bad guys, completes the antidote… but finds out it’s the wrong monkey!

CONCLUSION
Besides Monkey Plague starting to sound more and more like a midnight Sy-Fy channel flick (hey, what did you expect? It was called Monkey Plague!), I think this gives you a pretty good idea of how to outline. What’s important to remember is that this is a very general approach. It’s tricky to put a one-size-fits-all approach on outlining. When Harry Met Sally, for example, doesn’t have a character goal driving the story. This meant finding another way to structure the script, and therefore another way to outline. They did this with time jumps, which divided (structured) the story into five parts.

Multi-protagonist movies (Crash) and multiple storyline movies (The Dark Knight) don’t follow the traditional “Character goes after a goal” structure either. These are trickier to outline because there just aren’t as many successful movies in those formats to draw from. With that said, it’s even more important to outline these scripts since they’re more likely to lose focus.

Outlining should also work closely with rewriting. The more complicated your story is, the harder it will be to figure out all the beats right away. The Dark Knight, with its many storylines and characters, is going to require some playing around to discover the storyline. So feel free to get the basics down in your initial outline, then write a draft that helps you discover where everything else is going to go. As you write, you’ll feel yourself coming up with ideas, which you can fill in on the outline on the fly. Your second draft, then, will be the powerhouse draft.

Now there’s no law that states you must outline. You can drop into your script guns a’blazin and see where it takes you. But the more you know about your story, the more it frees you up to just write (as backwards as that sounds). If you’ve never outlined a script before, give it a try and see if it helps. And if you already do outline, maybe I gave you a few extra tricks to use. Next Thursday is a Character Outline article so try to have your plot outlined by then!

I predict today’s writer will be writing movies we see one day. So how come I’m not onboard with this skill-rich script?

Genre: Drama/Coming-of-Age/Comedy
Premise: (from writer) Fatherless Copywriter, Nick Adams, uncovers a stash of immaculate love letters dated the year he was born and post marked from Key West and Havana, Cuba. Convinced he is Hemingway’s bastard love child, he travels to Key West with teenage son in tow to usurp his birthright.
About: This is an amateur script that came referred to me by one of my consultants.
Writer: Eric Brown
Details: 113 pages

Paul Rudd for Nick?

Now that we’ve proven there’s undiscovered talent out there just waiting to be found (Patisserie baby!) I’m back on the amateur bandwagon, hoping to bring more scripts to Hollywood’s attention. Hemingway Boy, I’ve been told, has a shot at being one of those scripts. The script was given to one of my consultants for notes and later recommended to me (which doesn’t happen very often).

In the time it’s taken me to finally read and review it on the site, it was picked as one of the coveted “referrals” on The Tracking Board’s site. One person recommending a script can always be a fluke. Two? Means we probably have something good here. And since my taste matches up well with Christian’s (my consultant), I figured Hemingway Boy might be able to bring me to my screenwriting happy place.

40 year old Nick Adams feels trapped. As writer Eric Brown points out, he’s like “all of us” in that respect. You know when you’re a kid and you plot out where you’ll be in 30 years? Yeah, well, Nick’s at the opposite of wherever that is. How opposite? Well, he writes advertising slogans for baby food. And while he gets paid a lot of money for it (he’s even in line for a promotion!), how excited can you get when you’ve won over a target audience who’s not only illiterate, but hasn’t learned their ABCs yet?

In addition to the career stuff, Nick has to take care of a chirpy mother with early onset dementia. He must contain an increasingly rebellious teenage son (Sam). And he must learn to be civil with his irritating ex-wife.

Well at least one of those problems gets solved when Nick’s mom kicks the bucket. But just when he thinks that’ll calm things down, Nick stumbles upon an old box of love letters written to his mom from a mysterious man. After doing a little research, Nick becomes convinced that that man is Ernest Hemingway, and that his Mama Mia’esque mother made him the bastard child of the famous author.

Feeling some purpose for the first time in his life, Nick grabs his son and heads to the town in Florida where Hemingway spent most of his life. He hopes to ask around, find out if anyone saw Hemingway and his mom together, and go from there. When he gets there, he’s greeted by his tour guide Joe Jack, a step-father of sorts who dated Nick’s mother for awhile. Back then he was a pretty selfish prick, and now he wants to make up for that phase in his life by helping Nick however he can.

Once set, Nick meets a bus driver named Charlie (noooo – not the female love interest with the male name!) who he starts to fall for, while Sam ends up meeting a too-cool-for-school hottie named Stacee who he falls madly in love with. We jump back and forth between these relationships as they equal parts sputter and sparkle. With time running out before Nick has to be back in Detroit for work, it’s looking like he’ll never find the truth. That is until he locates an old friend of his mom’s who lives in Cuba. Going there is a risk, but Nick HAS to know. So grabs a boat and endures the final leg of his journey.

Here’s the thing about Hemingway Boy. It’s written by a real writer. It’s not one of those amateur scripts you read and say, “This guy isn’t even ready to be judged because he doesn’t know how to write yet.” Brown knows how to write. He’s very comfortable in this medium. For that reason, I see this more as a professional script than an amateur one. And for that reason, you’re going to judge it like a real movie, not on its mistakes, but rather its choices.

While I can understand why people responded to this, it wasn’t quite my cup of tea. Let me try and explain why. I don’t react well to scripts that are high on quirk. Scripts that feature the kooky grandmother, scripts where billboards are talking to our characters, scripts where every other character is flamboyant or over-the-top. I’m a big believer that the story always comes first. So if I feel that the writer is more interested in coming up with a wacky character than they are pushing the story forward in an interesting way, I start to turn on the script.

I do this because I’m now focused on the writing instead of the reality the writer’s created. In other words, I’m out of the story. And you don’t want your reader to be outside the story thinking about YOU, the writer, writing this. The spell is broken once that happens. And I found myself increasingly reacting to things other than the story.

The first moment this happened was Grandma Janice (I say “grandma” if we’re looking at her through Sam’s p.o.v.). As soon as she came in and started acting kooky and quirky, I said, “Uh-oh,” under my breath. I’m not going to lie. I hate the unpredictable “says whatever’s on her mind” grandma character. I see it so much. I think it’s so cliché. It’s kind of like screenwriting kryptonite to me (ahh, I can’t seem to forget Man of Steel!). And I’m not saying you should never write the character. Obviously people respond to it (who doesn’t like Betty White in The Proposal?). But that character kills me so much that when she showed up, I instantly turned on the script.

And if that was all, I might have rebounded. But it felt to me like every character was over the top. For example, Joe Jack, the grandfather character, almost seemed like a male version of Alice. He was big, loud, over-the-top, and always said embarrassing things. So again, we’re favoring quirkiness over reality. And I get that that’s a choice. I’m not saying it doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work for me.

On top of this, I couldn’t pinpoint why exactly Nick wanted to know if Hemingway was his father other than it would’ve been kinda cool. He mentions a couple of times that he just wants to know where he came from, but we seem to be missing out on a potential bigger story here. I wanted to know exactly why Nick needed this answer because it was the question driving the entire story. And if I’m not even sure on why he’s going after it, it’s hard for me to 100% engage in that quest with him.

With all that said, there’s definitely something here. While I didn’t like how extreme the characters were, there was a lot of depth to them. And all of them stood out, which can’t be said about the majority of amateur screenplays out there – which struggle to come up with a single memorable character. That’s a big-time writer skill. I thought the stuff with Sam and Stacee was interesting (although I was hoping he would end up with Stuckey, her younger sister). There’s definitely a goal here (trying to find proof if he’s Hemingway son). There’s some urgency (he’s only got two weeks). There’s plenty of conflict in the scenes, with characters meeting obstacles in whatever goal they’re pursuing. The 3-Act structure is in place.

So it’s clear Eric knows what he’s doing. My preference was just that the script be a little more grounded in reality and less proud of itself. I wanted more people who acted like people as opposed to caricatures of people. That would’ve pulled me in and made me believe in everything more, instead of concentrating so hard on the person writing the script. Then again, the same thing can be said for writers like Tarantino or Shane Black, and they’re doing all right. So maybe I’m just being Grumpy McGrumperbottoms. What did you guys think?

Script link: Hemingway Boy

[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me (but this writer shows a lot of promise)
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: I’m a firm believer in the hero going after the goal hard. If he’s not going after the goal hard, that tells me he doesn’t want it that much, and if he doesn’t want it that much, then why should I want it for him? Nick’s actions never matched up with his words. He always felt a bit too casual in his pursuit. I wanted him to be dedicating more time to this endeavor. I wanted to feel more urgency and desperation.

There’s a reason I’m busting out The Dark Knight for this week’s Ten Tips. This weekend I experienced a super-human catastrophe in Man of Steel. And I want to look at an actual well-made superhero film to see how to do it right. What’s interesting here is that two of the major players are the same in both projects (Christopher Nolan and David Goyer). The big flashy addition is Zack Snyder, which tells me that his paws may have been the ones that dirtied up the Man of Steel waters. With that said, I’m not going to pretend like The Dark Knight is some tour de force in screenwriting. I’ve battled many a time with this screenplay and feel that it has just as many weaknesses as it does strengths. With that said, it’s a far superior screenplay to Man of Steel, particularly in the area of character. So let’s see what we can find when we compare the two behemoths.  I suspect some some nifty tips!

1) Give us a main character who’s active – It’s one of the simplest and often-stated screenwriting rules there is, and yet us screenwriters constantly forget it, finding ourselves 60 pages into our screenplays and wondering why they’re so boring. One only needs to watch Man of Steel to see how an inactive main character can destroy a movie. It makes them (the main character) bland, which forces the story/plot to work overtime to overcome this issue. That’s likely why we had so much overplotting in Man of Steel. The writers sensed something was wrong but couldn’t figure out what, so they just kept ADDING MORE PLOT. The simplicity of having an active main character is that they forge forward, carving out the story on their terms. Look at Bruce Wayne. The guy wants to make a difference so he creates Batman to do so. He WANTS to fight crime and clean up the streets, so he’s always out there actively pursuing that.  Superman in Man of Steel is the opposite.

2) Beware the reluctant protagonist – Building on that, Man of Steel made me take a hard look at the reluctant protagonist. By “reluctant,” I mean a character who’s reluctant to engage in the central conflict of the film. That’s Clark Kent. He’s reluctant to get involved in the world’s problems. A big reason this doesn’t work is because by being “reluctant,” you’re basing the entirety of your hero on a negative trait – avoidance – which pretty much goes against everything that’s fun about movies (our hero ENGAGING in the adventure). There are movies where it works (Michael Corleone in The Godfather) but it usually doesn’t, especially in action movies. The word “reluctant protagonist” now scares me. It should probably scare you too.

3) Just tell us what’s happening dammit – I’ve read a few amateur screenplays recently where the writer tries to do way too much with their action description. They write stuff like, “Sweat glistens off Joe’s knuckles as he wrestles the gun out of his pocket.” There are times where you want to add a little flair to your writing, but for the most part, just tell us what’s happening. Here’s how Jonathan and Christopher Nolan write an early scene before the bank robbery in The Dark Knight: “A man on the corner, back to us, holding a CLOWN MASK. An SUV pulls up. The man gets in, puts on his mask. Inside the car – two other men wearing CLOWN MASKS.” These are two of the top writers in the business and every word in that description is something a third grader would understand.

4) “A&P” (An Active main character with Personality) – The character type who’s typically the most fun to watch is ACTIVE (making his own decisions and pushing the story forward himself) with PERSONALITY (is charming or funny or clever or smart or a combination of all these things). Look no further than one of the most beloved characters of all time, Indiana Jones, to see how that combination works. Or Iron Man. Or Sherlock Holmes. While I wouldn’t say Bruce Wayne is going to open at The Laugh Factory anytime soon, he does have a personality, likes to have fun with his money, and has a sense of humor. Combined with his desire to fight crime (being active), he’s got the coveted A&P. Superman in Man of Steel has neither the A or the P, which is why he’s so forgettable. As a rule, try to have the A and the P for your protag. If you can’t, give him the A or the P. If you can’t give him either, I guarantee you you have a boring protag.

5) Backstory is the enemy – Remember that superhero origin stories are by definition required to show us the backstory that led to our hero becoming who he is. In the real world of spec screenwriting, backstory is the enemy. Unless there’s some really unique or traumatic or shocking thing that happened in our character’s past, don’t show us. And if you do, show us only the bare minimum of it. It can even be boiled down to a quick expositional sentence if you do it right. Batman Begins handled its backstory a lot better than Man of Steel, but in both cases, the main plot (taking down the Scarecrow and Zod respectively) had to be pushed to the second half of the script, something that will never be accepted in the spec arena.

6) Invisible Backstory is your friend – You may not tell us a single thing about your main character’s past, yet you – the WRITER – should know everything that happened to your hero since the day he was born.  This knowledge leads to SPECIFICITY OF CHARACTER, a character who is unique because of the extensive “real” life he’s lived in your imagination.  The less you know about your hero, the less specificity you’ll be able to infuse him with, which leads to genericness.  This is one of the quickest ways I can differentiate the boys from the men in screenwriting.

7) Conflict is your weapon against exposition – One of the earlier scenes in The Dark Knight has Bruce talking to Alfred about needing improvements to the Bat Suit as well as getting info on the new District Attorney (who’s dating Rachel). It’s a straight forward exposition scene and, for that reason, one of the more forgettable of the film. Contrast this with when Bruce meets Harvey Dent (the District Attorney) out for dinner. Harvey’s with the love of Bruce’s life, Rachel, and Bruce has brought along a hot ballerina. There’s a lot of exposition in this scene, mostly in regards to Harvey trying to save the city, but the scene is fun because of the conflict: Wayne sizing up Harvey and the jealousy between Bruce and Rachel. Conflcit is your weapon against exposition. Use it whenever the evil EXPO rears its head (Nolan forgot this simple rule in Inception, which is why so many of his early scenes are boring. They’re pure exposition with zero conflict).

8) Brains over brawn – I think one of the reasons Batman is more popular than Superman is because he can’t just fly away. He can’t just use his heat vision to burn a hole through a guy. He’s gotta use his brains. Granted, he’s got a lot of money and that money has created a lot of gadgets, but Batman’s way more dependent on his wits than his powers. I bring this up because I read so many scripts where the writer gets his hero out of a battle with a gun or a roundhouse kick or a superpower. The thing is, it’s always more rewarding when the hero uses his wits (his INTELLIGENCE) to get out of that situation. So always look to your hero’s mind to solve his problems, first.  Only use physical force as a last resort.

9) Have your bad guy earn his keep – Whenever I re-read The Dark Knight, I’m always studying the villain, since the Joker is one of the most famous villains of all time. He’s lasted decades, whereas most villains last the two hours that make up the film (Die Hard With a Vengeance anyone?). Upon reading The Dark Knight, I realized that for truly timeless villains, you gotta like them a little bit. And I think one of the reasons we like watching The Joker is because the guy earned his keep. He wasn’t handed anything. He had to rob a bank and infliterate and intimidate the biggest baddest nastiest dudes in town. As crazy as it sounds, we kind of respect him for that, and it makes us sorta like him. So make your bad guy earn his keep. We’ll respect him (and actually like him) more.

10) Rational vs. Irrational Villains – Something I noticed while comparing The Dark Knight to Man of Steel, is that they have two polar opposite villains. General Zod is rational and calculated and has strong reasoning for doing what he’s doing. The Joker, on the other hand, is irrational and unpredictable and confusing. No doubt The Joker is the much scarier of the two. Through this, I learned the value of bad guys who are a bit unpredictable, a bit out of control. When you think about it, those are the scariest people in life because they don’t have that “rational” button you can push. I was never scared of General Zod cause the guy was just so darn rational.

These are 10 tips from the movies “The Dark Knight” and “Man of Steel.” To get 500 more tips from movies as varied as “Aliens,” “Pulp Fiction,” and “The Hangover,” check out my book, Scriptshadow Secrets, on Amazon!

It doesn’t get much better than Goodfellas, a script based on the non-fiction book “Wiseguy” by Nicholas Pileggi (who shares writing credit with Martin Scorsese on the film). The film came out in 1990 and got nominated for six Academy Awards. Joe Pesci, in a role he’s still getting mileage out of, won for best supporting actor. While the story structure was put in place by the writers, much of the great dialogue was discovered through rehearsals, where Scorsese let his actors roam free, then wrote into the script many of the lines they came up with. While Pileggi wanted to follow a traditional narrative, Scorcese didn’t think it was necessary, believing the film was more a combination of episodes, and those episodes could be told out of order. It’s this and a few other non-traditional choices that make Goodfellas so interesting to study as a screenplay. As the story goes, after reading the book, which Scorsese thought was the best book on the mob ever written, he called Pileggi and said, “I’ve been waiting to direct this book my whole life,” to which Pileggi responded, “I’ve been waiting for this phone call my whole life.”

1) The tragedy script – The tragedy script does not follow the traditional three-act structure (setup, conflict, resolution). It works more in two halves. You build up the hero’s success in the first half, then have them fall apart in the second. That second half fall should be dictated by the hero’s flaw, which can be anything, but is most often greed.

2) The cool thing about tragedies is that you can have your main character do some pretty horrible things – The audience understands this isn’t a romantic comedy. They don’t need their main character to be a saint. They get that bad things are going to happen and that our protagonist is going to be unsavory. Embrace that. I mean, despite all of us falling in love with Henry’s (Ray Liotta) first love, Karen, he starts having an affair with another woman on the side. You can’t do that in a traditional film without the audience turning on the protag. The one caveat to all of this, is that we must START OUT loving our main character. We’ll only go down the dark path with him if we liked him before he got there. So it’s no coincidence that Scorsese and Pileggi used one of the most common tools available to make us fall in love with Henry – they made him an underdog – the little nobody kid from the streets who worked his way up the system.

3) Give ’em something to talk about – What I learned about voice over during Goodfellas (which is used practically non-stop) is that if you have a fascinating subject matter and you’ve researched the hell out of it, the device is a great way to give us all of that information. What sets movies like Goodfellas and, say, Casino apart is those “behind the curtain” details we learn about the subject matter. You walk away knowing exactly what it was like to be a wiseguy (or what it was like working in a Casino) after watching these films. But extensive voice over like this ONLY WORKS if the subject matter is fascinating, if you’ve researched the shit out of it, and if you’re telling us stuff we don’t already know. Break one of those three rules, and the voice over will probably get tiresome.

4) We’re more likely to go along with a character’s suspect choices if we’re inside his head (listening to his voice over) – There’s something about hearing a character’s play-by-play of his life that makes us more tolerant of the terrible things he does. If Henry is robbing people and cheating on people and killing people without him ever telling us why, there’s a good chance we’ll turn on the character. But because he’s explaining it to us as he goes along via voice over, we understand his choices. It’s kind of like hearing that some random person you don’t know is cheating on their spouse. You immediately conclude that they’re a terrible person. But when your best friend cheats on their spouse, and they explain to you why they’re doing it and what went into the choice, you’re more okay with it. Voice-over can be very powerful that way.

5) Research research research – I’ve read a LOT of amateur scripts about the mob over the years and none of them ever come close to Scorsese’s films. Why? Research. Nothing feels original or unique. These writers fail to understand that Scorcese is using material that has been meticulously researched. I mean, authors like Pileggi have spent hundreds of hours talking to the REAL PEOPLE involved in these crime magnets. He’s getting the stories that REALLY happened. Whereas with amateurs, they’re making up stories based on their favorite movies. Therefore they read like badly made copies. So if you’re going to jump into this space, you better have at least a hundred hours of research to base your story on. Or else forget about it.

6) Start your script with a bang – Goodfellas starts with a bang and never lets go. And that got me thinking. In the comments section of the Amateur Offerings post this weekend, a commenter said he stopped reading one of the entries after page one because it was boring. A debate then began on whether the first page of a script should always be exciting. Some believed it should, and others said the writer should be afforded more time. The actual answer to this question is complicated. In the spec world, yes, the first page should immediately grab the reader. However, your first scene should also be dictated by the genre and story. If you’re telling a slow-burn story, for example, then a slower opening makes sense. But the definitive answer probably lies within what happens BEFORE you write the first page. You should choose the type of story that would have an exciting opening page in the first place, since it IS so important to grab that reader from page one. Once you’re established and people will read your scripts no matter what, THEN you can afford to take your time getting into your story.

7) Always look to complicate your scenes – Driving a dead guy into the woods to bury him isn’t a very interesting scene. Driving a “dead guy” who all of a sudden starts banging on the inside of the trunk (Oh no, he’s still alive), is. And it leads to one of the most memorable moments in Goodfellas, when Tommy starts bashing the still-moving bloody mattress cover over and over again. Try not to allow your scenes to move along too smoothly. Always complicate them somehow. It usually results in something more interesting.

8) Beware the mob/gangster screenplay naming conundrum – One of the biggest assumptions young writers make is that readers will remember however many characters they introduce, be it 5 or 500. I can’t stress enough that too many characters leads to character mix-up which leads to story confusion. Mob movies are particularly susceptible to this problem for two reasons. One, they naturally have a lot of characters. And two, most of the character names sound the same, ending in “-y” or “-ie” (Jonny, Billy, Tommy, Frankie) making it particularly easy to mix characters up. For this reason, whenever you write one of these scripts, it is essential that you make everybody memorable and distinctive. Here are a few tips to achieve this (note that these will work for any script with a lot of characters):
a. Only create characters if they’re absolutely essential to the story (less characters equals less of a chance the reader will forget who’s who).
b. Differentiate names as much as possible (don’t use “-y” and “-ie” names if you can avoid it). If you have to do this, consider using a nickname or their last name to identify them by.
c. Describe each character succinctly. No bare-bones “fat and awkward” descriptions.
d. Give each character their own unique quirks. Anything to make them stand out from the other characters.
e. Open up with a memorable character-specific scene for each of your big characters. So if you have a character who has a temper, open up with a unique compelling introductory scene that shows him losing his temper (like how we introduce Tommy in Goodfellas, who gets so mad at Billy for insulting him that he kills him).

9) Bounce around a large location easily by using mini-slugs – A mini-slug is basically a quick identifier of where we are inside a larger location. Since a full slug line indicates a more severe location change, it can ruin the flow of a scene if used often. For example, say two characters are bouncing around multiple rooms in a house. You don’t have to write, “INT. KITCHEN – SECOND FLOOR – DAY” every time you come back to the kitchen. Just say, in capital letters, and on their own line: “THE KITCHEN” or “THE BASEMENT” or “THE LIVING ROOM” or wherever the sub-location might be. These are mini-slugs.

10) The “powder keg” character – To me, these characters always work. If you write a slightly crazy character who could blow up at any second, then any scene you put them is instantly tension-filled. It’s like the character brings with him a floor full of pins and needles wherever he goes. It’s why Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) is such a classic character. We’re terrified of what he’s capable of. We’re worried that anyone at any moment could say the wrong thing and BOOM! – our powder keg blows up. If you can find a way to weave a powder keg character into your script (and it fits the story), do it. These characters always bring the goods.

These are 10 tips from the movie “Goodfellas.” To get 500 more of the most helpful screenwriting tips you’ll ever find, mined from movies as varied as “Aliens,” “Pulp Fiction,” and “The Hangover,” check out my book, Scriptshadow Secrets, on Amazon!