Warm Bodies flips the zombie genre upside-down. But is it enough? Or is this organ-centric horror-comedy another screenplay emperor without any clothes?

Genre: Horror Comedy
Premise: (from IMDB) After R (a highly unusual zombie) saves Julie from an attack, the two form a relationship that sets in motion a sequence of events that might transform the entire lifeless world.
About: Writer-director Jonathan Levine broke onto the scene with his 2008 film, “The Wackness,” which chronicled life in the 90s for a young New York drug dealer and won that year’s Sundance Audience Award. He followed that up by directing the Seth Rogan Joseph Gordon Levitt cancer comedy, 50/50. Itching to get back into the writing game, he adapted Warm Bodies for his third film, a novel Isaac Marion wrote. Mr. Marion self-published 3 novels before getting “officially” published with Warm Bodies. So far, Warm Bodies has grossed 60 million domestically.
Writer: Jonathan Levine (based on the novel by Isaac Marion)
Details: 120 pages (undated)

So last night we celebrated a couple dozen of the best movies of 2012. What better way to follow that up than to review the screenplay for… Warm Bodies? Okay okay. That was a cheap shot. The truth is, I wanted to review this movie this week but chose Dark Skies instead and, well, that turned out to be a mistake. Dark Skies could’ve best been summarized this way: Pointless cereal box structure found in kitchen, husband in yard with his mouth open, conspiracy theorist dude talks about alien stuff that would be considered dated during The X-Files run. Ending that makes zero sense because the writer wrote himself into a corner.

There wasn’t enough meat there for a review so I decided to read Warm Bodies instead, as I heard it was actually good. Was it? Well, it was certainly better than Dark Skies. Although that’s kind of like saying you can sing better than One Direction. Not exactly a huge accomplishment.

But what this script does right (which I tell all of you to do) is it takes an established genre and it adds a new spin to it. In this zombie flick, we’re rooting FOR the zombie. How many zombie movies have we watched where our humans are fending off numerous flesh-eaters and we’re hoping against all hope that they get away? Well here, we’re thinking, “Our zombie protagonist needs to eat or he’ll starve! I hope he catches up with one of those humans and makes a meal out of him!”

I also liked that Levine added some heart to his screenplay. Literally! This movie is about zombies turning BACK into humans when they start “feeling” which means their hearts start working again. Unfortunately, it’s not very clear how this whole process works. But I’ll get into that in a sec. First, let’s find out what Warm Bodies was about.

Warm Bodies follows 20-somethng “R.” Yes, that’s our hero’s name. “R.” “R” is “R” because he’s a zombie and zombies can’t say anything. They can only mumble out sounds. And when you ask R anything, he answers “Rrrrrrr.” So naturally, his name is “R.”

Luckily for us, R is quite articulate in voice over, which is how he communicates with us. R informs us that some years back, the plague hit, and now the world’s been overrun by his kind, zombies. The thing is, R is a little different. He can think, which the others aren’t really able to do. And he can talk! Well, not “talk” talk, but he can say a few words. And that’s pretty impressive when you’re undead.

R lives in an airport with the rest of his brethren. In fact, he even has his own 747. Not bad. But his life is going to get a lot worse if he doesn’t eat human flesh soon because the next step down from a zombie if a “Boney,” and you don’t want to turn into one of those guys. In the zombie food chain, you look a lot better if you still have your flesh on you, however gray and mangled that flesh may be.

So a bunch of zombies head into the city due to the munchies, and it’s there where R meets Julie, a human. For some odd reason, R doesn’t want to eat Julie. He wants to help her! So he pulls her away from the zombies and the boneys and takes her home, back to his 747! She’s a little confused by the fact that a zombie won’t eat her, but after some terrific conversation (that’s a wee-bit one-sided), she starts to like R.

But more importantly, she notices he’s getting better. He’s actually becoming more human as the days go by. It’s not enough to make her want to set up camp at Air Zombie for the next few years, but when she goes back home (to a stadium where all the humans are staying) she tries to convince her ditzy friend and gung-ho father that maybe the plague is turning.

In the meantime, R gets wind that a huge group of boneys are heading for the stadium to take out the remaining humans. So he grabs his best friend “M” and sets off to get there first so he can save his new long-distance girlfriend, Julie. Of course he’ll have to deal with a lot worse than that when he gets there, as Julie’s father is hell bent on killing anything that even winks like a zombie.

Warm Bodies reminded me in a lot of ways of The Wackness, even though it’s been five years since I’ve seen that film. There was a lot going on on the surface of “Wackness” but very little actual depth. It was like a celebration of the 90s with two sorta interesting characters and that was it.

While Warm Bodies flips the script and makes the zombies the good guys, it’s still basically a celebration of the zombie genre following two sorta interesting characters and that was it. I know you can’t get too deep when one of your characters can’t even talk, but I found the relationship between R and Julie to be borderline boring. Levine added a cool little thing where Julie didn’t know that R had killed her ex-boyfriend (providing some nice dramatic irony during their conversations). But it was so sloppily written (I actually thought HE was Julie’s boyfriend for a while) that I didn’t figure it out until way too late in the script.

And really, there isn’t much of a plot at all when you think about it. Zombie takes girl. Girl goes back home. We hear boneys are going to attack. So we head to girl’s home to warn her. It’s enough to keep things moving along, but just barely. Truthfully, it felt like one of those scripts that was just thought up on the fly with no outlining. Kind of like, “Hmm, he’s let the girl go back home. But there’s still 50 pages left. What now? Uhhhhh, what if the boneys were going to attack her home and he had to warn her! Yeah!” If you’re writing your script like this, where you’re thinking up solutions and coming up with major story directions on the fly, it’s going to FEEL like you’re coming up with major story directions on the fly!

I will give Levine credit though. He knew that if he had a zombie main character with a 5 word vocabulary, we probably wouldn’t relate to him very well. So he has R dishing out voice over the whole script, telling us what he’s thinking, which I thought was a nice contrast. Remember, while voice over is hard to get right, it’s one of the easiest ways to create a connection between the audience and the character. Once we have someone speaking directly to us, no matter who it is, we feel a connection with them, and that definitely helped here.

But yeah, when it was all said and done, this was a really thin zombie story that thought its fresh take on the genre would give it enough juice to turn it into the next Zombieland. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. It has its moments. But Warm Bodies typically finds itself in cold territory.

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

What I learned: When you’re writing flashbacks, it’s important that the reader KNOW they’re in a flashback. I’ve seen too many writers not make their flashbacks clear enough, leading to a lot of confusion. In my opinion, the best way to inform the reader that a flashback has begun is to include it at the end of a slugline and BOLD it. Like so…

INT. VACANT HOSPITAL – FLASHBACK

Today’s script made some noise in the Scriptshadow Newsletter, but does it pass the Carson Screenplay SAT? Read on to find out.

Amateur Friday Submission Process: To submit your script for an Amateur Review, send in a PDF of your script, a PDF of the first ten pages of your script, your title, genre, logline, and finally, why I should read your script. Use my submission address please: Carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Your script and “first ten” 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: Horror
Premise: (from writer) A mysterious drifter with a dark past stumbles into a small town where he rents a room in the attic of a strange couple’s home, but he may not be alone up there.
About: Today’s amateur script got the best response from the amateur script entries in last week’s Scriptshadow Newsletter. To be a part of the Scriptshadow Newsletter, contact me through the site and “opt in” to the newsletter at the bottom the submission box.
Writer: Chris Rodgers
Details: 92 pages

I’ve read scripts like this before. Scripts that are so sparse, you’re almost searching for the words between the words, like they may have gotten lost in the transfer from the writer’s computer to yours. Emma is better than most scripts that come through the Amateur Friday pipeline, but I don’t know if it’s at “worth the read” status. It’s got too many quirks. The voice contains an extra dose of bizarre. People don’t speak like real people. At times I almost thought this thing could be animated, its cartoonish qualities shined through so aggressively.

And yet through it all, I had to keep reading. I said this to Miss Scriptshadow at one point: “I don’t know if I like this script. But I sure as hell want to find out what happens.” Have you ever read scripts like that before? Where finishing them basically becomes a grudge match? I don’t mean to devalue Rodgers’ script. He’s got a funky interesting style to him. But Emma is one of those scripts you finish with a startled look on your face.  Like you’ve just woken up in a room you don’t recognize.

20-something Johnny has scoot-dazzled his way into a small town in the middle of nowhere. This town’s so sparse you can walk into a restaurant and not find a single patron. Except for today that is. Because Johnny’s our single patron, and it’s here where he meets short-order cook Darrell, a local idiot with an asshole older brother and a hypochondriac mother. After some small talk, Darrell tells Johnny that if he’s looking for a place to stay, he should check out Chuck and Mary’s place. They usually rent rooms out.

So away Johnny goes where he meets 30-something Chuck, who’s plagued with burns all over his body, and 50-somethng Mary, who can’t stop yelling at Chuck about whatever the hell comes to mind. They seem like a strange couple, but not half as strange as the place they live in. That’s because the place they live in is HAUNTED!

Johnny figures this out early on when he sees the ghost of a girl named “Emma” sneaking around. A little research reveals that Emma used to be a model and was best friends with Mary. But then Emma went off to California to pursue her modeling career and disappeared. She now haunts this house for some reason. Even Chuck admits to seeing her.

These two aren’t the only ones with some backstory. It turns out our buddy Johnny has escaped a mental institution, making these Emma spottings suspect. Is he really seeing her, or is he just having an episode? And what about these rumors that Chuck’s hiding a huge stash of millions in the house? Could that be Johnny’s ticket to freedom for the rest of his life? And how far will he go to get that freedom? These are the haunting questions Emma asks.

Emma’s not one of those scripts you can just synopsize. You kind of have to read it to understand it. Take the first dialogue exchange in the script for example. It sets the tone for everything you’re about to read. Johnny’s just walked into the diner where he meets Darrell.  J: “Um, can I just have a cheeseburger combo with a Coke?” D: “I’m sorry, we don’t have combos.” “Oh. Well, can I get a cheeseburger, a medium French fry, and make the drink a large.” “What kind of drink sir?” “Coke.” “Is Pepsi O.K.?” “Pepsi?” Darrell nods. “Come on. I just walked—never mind, give me a root beer.” “Good choice, sir.” “You don’t have to call me sir.” “Okay.” “Why would you say that root beer is a good choice? What makes root beer so great?” “I just like it.” “Oh.” “That will be four dollars and twelve cents.”

I don’t know about you but that dialogue feels awkward. And not purposefully awkward. Just awkward. The stuff about the root beer at the end is random. It doesn’t seem to have a point. And the early Pepsi challenge takes up a lot of time and doesn’t have a payoff. When you’re exchanging dialogue, especially early on when we don’t know your characters yet, you want to use that dialogue to teach us about your characters.

Take The Equalizer, which I review in this week’s newsletter (which you can sign up for here). In one of the early scenes, the main character is talking to a woman at the diner (so a similar location). The conversation centers around the book our hero is reading (The Old Man And The Sea). This tells us a little about our character. He reads old books. Which leads to the question: WHY does he read old books? We want to find out so we keep reading. The point is, we’re learning about the character through his exchange with someone else. I’m not sure we learn anything about these two characters in this conversation.

I think that’s something a lot of young writers don’t know. When you write dialogue, you’re either trying to reveal story or reveal character. It may seem to the audience that the conversation is casual. But what they don’t know is that you’re secretly passing along key information to them through the characters’ “casual” exchange.

Another thing that bothered me here were the flashbacks. I wasn’t sure what the point of them was. They pretty much kept telling us the same thing over and over again – that Johnny was in the nuthouse. That meant each subsequent flashback was extraneous. It was information I already knew. If there was an evolving storyline to these flashbacks, a mystery we wanted answered (aka, Johnny wakes up in a cell with a stabbed cell mate – and each scene gets us closer to why that happened), I would’ve been fine with them. But they didn’t evolve, leaving me to wonder what their purpose was.

With those things said, there were some interesting things going on in Emma. I thought some of the characters were pretty well drawn. Well-drawn characters typically evolve from well thought-through backstories. And this whole backstory where Chuck was burned during his electrician job and won a multi-million dollar lawsuit against his company – that was admirably constructed.

I also thought the mystery behind Emma was strong. How Johnny would see her with plastic wrapped around her face and body. That was creepy. And while the reveal for how she ended up that way wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t bad either.

Here’s where we run into a problem though. You have a haunted house script titled, “Emma,” and it really isn’t about Emma. It seems to be more about Johnny running away and hiding in this town. The Emma storyline is more of a subplot. If I were Chris, I’d give Emma a much bigger role. This movie has to be about her. I’d also create more of a conspiracy around her death. Possibly expand the amount of people inside the town who know what happened, and then place Johnny around more of those people. I didn’t like how we basically had two locations in the movie – Chuck and Mary’s house and the diner. It made the script feel too small. Let’s explore this town more, get to know more people, and this will start to feel like a movie.

I wouldn’t tell someone NOT to read this script but I probably wouldn’t go around recommending it either. I will say this though. I’d read Chris’ next script for sure. I feel like he’s still learning the craft and will continue to get better. I’d focus on adding more layers to his future stories. This one felt TOO simple. With a little more town exploration – bringing in a few more characters – he might’ve struck gold. I wish him luck.  His voice is unique enough to make me think he’s got a future.

Script link: Emma

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

What I learned: Treat character reveals like commercial breaks. When you’re writing mysterious protagonists, you want to give a little info about them in each scene, but also tease a mystery about them for later. If there continue to be mysteries about our hero, we’ll want to keep reading to find out what they are. So in The Equalizer, via that scene I mentioned above, we give the audience a little piece of the protagonist by revealing that he reads old books, but we don’t tell the audience WHY he reads those books yet. We “cut to commercial” and reveal that info later. If you answer all the little mysteries about your character right away, why the hell would we keep reading?

So there I am, watching “A Good Day To Die Hard” this weekend, and asking myself the question that moviegoers across the world ask a dozen times a year at their local cineplexes: “Who writes this shit?”

Terribly written movies with dreadful dialogue are a huge reason why people all over the country move to LA to pursue a career in screenwriting. They’re convinced that, “I can do better than that!” And yet, thousands of these “I can do better than that,” screenwriters show up in Hollywood every year and the same dreadful terribly-written movies still get made.

Is it a conspiracy? Is Hollywood purposefully keeping good writers out of the business for some reason? Are there thousands of amazing screenplays that have been buried under a Los Angeles landfill somewhere, a conspiracy headed up by 20th Century Fox so they can keep making more “A Good Day To Die Hard” movies without having to worry about competition?

I can answer that question easily. No. The truth is, there are only a dozen great screenwriters out there, and maybe less than a hundred truly good ones. Since a few hundred movies are released each year and countless TV shows with multiple writers are produced on the networks and cable, there are more spots to fill than there are good screenwriters.

And it’s not for lack of trying that the average screenwriter isn’t very good. Screenwriting is just REALLY HARD. A lot harder than it looks.  Moviegoers assume all screenwriting is is coming up with a cool hook and some witty dialogue. But screenwriting is way more complicated than that. Outside of learning how to write within its unique bastardized format, there’s a ton of stuff under the hood that audience members never think about.

The most obvious of which is creating a seamless story. That’s something most people outside the business take for granted. They assume seamless stories are a given. However, when those same people come to Hollywood and give screenwriting a shot then send their screenplays to people like me, they learn the hard way that their stories are borderline incoherent and that it actually takes years of hard work to create a seamless story.  Not even a GOOD story.  Just one that makes sense from beginning to end.

But we’ve established that there ARE good screenwriters out there. As many as a hundred of them. That should be enough to take care of most of the movies we see. So why do movies still suck? Why are films like Transformers so badly written? Or Dark Shadows? Or John Carter? Or Battleship? Or Mirror Mirror? Why are these embarrassingly written projects given hundreds of millions of dollars? The answer to that question isn’t simple. In fact, it’s very complicated. But if you want to know, read on.

TIME – Unless you’re writing a spec, you’re usually up against the gun in a project. And since only one out of every ten produced movies is a spec script, most writers are racing to beat a deadline. The faster you’re forced to work, the lower the quality that work tends to be. That’s because creativity takes time. It takes trial and error. It takes seeing what works and what doesn’t. It takes rewriting and rewriting and then more rewriting. Without time, you’re likely to write something lousy, no matter how good of a writer you are.

DIRECTOR AND ACTOR ARE STILL SUPERIOR TO SCREENWRITER – When putting a project together, studios know that the two most important elements are the director and the lead actor. A good director is going to give you the best chance for making a good movie, and a big actor is going to give you a large enough budget to get a wide release. When looking at the director, the actor, and the screenplay, then, it makes sense that a studio would pay the least amount of attention to the script. With that said, most actors and directors won’t sign onto a project without a good script (or good source material). So the screenplay is still important. The problem is…

DIRECTORS COME ON LATE THEN SCREW SHIT UP – While there are directors who will shepherd projects over a long period of time, a lot of times a director will come onto a project as it’s greenlit and given a production date. Since directors are creative people, they’re going to want to play with the script and get it the way they want it. Which means if a writer has been perfecting that script over three years, they now have to rewrite the whole damn thing to the director’s vision – a vision they may not entirely agree with – within a matter of months. More times than not, this results in a worse screenplay.

PASSION – You want to know the truth about Hollywood? Passion may be the most important factor in getting a movie made. That’s because this business is designed to KEEP movies from getting made. It’s much easier and safer for people in all factions of the business to say no to a project than yes. Yes means their ass is on the line if the movie fails. Why put yourself in that position? For that reason, the stuff that gets through is often the result of a producer or group of producers who will stop at nothing to get their movie made. These producers, who may be experienced vets or total newbs, will gladly go to every shop, every studio, every production company, and keep racking up ‘no’s’ until they find that one yes. And guess what, it’ll have nothing to do with how good the script or project is. It will just be because these guys refused to take no for an answer. This means, ironically, a lot of badly written projects get made because of passion.

BIG IDEA WRITERS AREN’T OFTEN THE BEST WRITERS – Lots of “big idea” writers who are good at coming up with concepts and trailer-worthy set-pieces will slip past the Hollywood gates and into the system. These writers aren’t necessarily “bad,” but they didn’t make it to the top because they’re experts at character or theme or structure. They made it because they came up with some big futuristic time-travel spec that got some pub all over town. These writers then get big-movie assignments due to their spec and the best of these subpar writers become premiere summer tent-pole movie scribes – scripting such classics as Battleship and Transformers. Sure, you could bring in someone like David Mamet to write Transformers and the script would be better in areas like character and dialogue. But it would probably lack a lot of the fun and “bigness” that you want from these movies. So you’d be gaining something but you’d lose something as well. Since an executive knows that the last thing a 14 year old in Kansas cares about is theme, he’s likely to go with the big idea writer over Mr. Mamet.

MO MONEY MO PROBLEMS – The other day a producer told me that this one well-known indie writer-director who’s had a hard time breaking into Hollywood called him and basically said, “I want 20 million dollars to make my movie and I don’t want you or anyone at your company to bother me.” Unfortunately, that’s not the way it works. Money comes from a bunch of different places these days (foreign financing, private investing, production houses, studios, etc.) and the bigger the pot, the more people want to be involved in the decision-making. If you’re making a movie like Transformers, with a budget of 250 million, you will have TONS of people sticking their finger in the pie. And chances are, a lot of these people won’t know jack-shit about writing. In these cases, the screenwriters aren’t even really writing a script. They’re MANAGING a dearth of strange and sometimes terrible ideas and trying to turn them into a story that makes sense. This is one of the main reasons why these giant movies are so terribly written. Too many cooks in the kitchen.

There are, of course, other reasons for badly-written films. Endless development. Foreign financing that puts little emphasis on the screenplay. Producers who hire their friends instead of good writers. And the bar for sequels, like “A Good Day To Die Hard,” just isn’t that high.

So what’s the solution here? Is there a way out of this mess? The thing that studios don’t realize is that it’s in their best interest to write a good screenplay. Not only does a well-written movie encourage positive word of mouth, which means more audiences members and repeat business, but the film has a better life in the post-theatrical market. It also increases the likelihood of building that all-important franchise everyone’s chasing.

In order to get scripts in better shape, Hollywood needs to make some sacrifices, stuff that they probably don’t want to do because it goes against everything they’ve done up to this point. First, they should look closer at the Pixar approach. Pixar screens multiple storyboard previews of their movies in order to get a feel for how the story is playing. The writer, who’s usually on the project for years, is then able to see what isn’t working and fix it. This perk is available because it takes so long to make an animated movie, time live-action films don’t have. Live action films are usually backed into tighter schedules, giving the writer less freedom to figure things out. But you do find the occasional live-action project that takes its time, like the Batman films and anything directed by James Cameron.  And we see the results when those films finally come to screen. I realize studios have corporate commitments and need to meet certain financial forecasts, but with a little more planning, they should be able to take that extra time and get the script right.

Producers and studios also need to keep the same writer on the project if possible. I realize this means less work for writers (since only one writer will be on the job), but if you want to make good movies, you need to keep writers around who understand the project. A huge reason movies feel so unfocused and disjointed is because Writer F had no idea what Writer A was trying to do when he wrote the original screenplay and therefore changed everything that made everyone fall in love with the script in the first place!

If agents and writers hate this idea because it means less jobs, what about doing what the studios did back in the old days where they kept 20-some writers under contract every year? Those writers would then be available to come in to give notes on the studios’ key projects. This is essentially what Pixar does and it’s proven to be an effective model. In addition to this, hire smart producers who actually understand storytelling and screenwriting. A reason a lot of writers get replaced is because the producer who hired them doesn’t know how to get the most out of them. Therefore when the script stops improving, they just hire someone else. A good producer will guide a writer into overcoming any problems a script may encounter.

Production companies and studios also need to take more chances on scripts that are ready to go, even if they’re afraid of them because they don’t fit into their proven paradigm. When The Streetlights Go On, After Hailey, Desperate Hours. Everyone loves these scripts but they’re still not being made. If you already have a script that people love, don’t fuck with it. Just make the damn thing. I’m not saying you have to put a hundred million dollars into these projects. You have to make them for the right price. But moviegoers out there want better writing. You have it. All you have to do is greenlight the film and make it.

Let the scripts be critiqued online. It always makes me laugh when studios spend 50 million bucks to fix movies they’ve already shot, usually because of story problems. Why not put your scripts online and let the fans critique them? Let them spot what’s wrong ahead of time so you don’t have to pay the price later. Your everyday moviegoing audience won’t pay attention to this, so you won’t spoil the film for the masses. And your core cinephile fan who participates is going to see the next Spiderman or Guardians Of The Galaxy film anyway. In all likelihood, being a part of the development process, even indirectly, is going to get them even more excited to see the film. This has gone on on a smaller scale on Scriptshadow for years. I’ve been told from numerous producers that they made changes to their scripts based on the comments from people who read them here. So I know it works. The question is, will studios put their egos aside to do that for their bigger projects? That remains to be seen.

As you can see, there are no easy answers here. There are a lot of things working against good writing. In many ways, you can consider it a minor miracle when a well-told story DOES reach the screen. But I think with a few changes, we could make sure good screenplays happen more often. And besides, by treating America (and the world) to better movies, our industry wouldn’t be the butt of so many jokes across the country about how they “could’ve written something better.” And with that, I’m out of here. What do you guys think?

It took Tarantino ten years to finish Inglourious Basterds, mainly because he couldn’t figure out the ending or how to spell his title. The story grew in scope so much during that time that at one point he considered scrapping the movie and turning it into a TV show. After many “almosts,” he finally shot the film in 2008. The casting of Tarantino’s films is always a fun topic of conversation and Basterds was no different. Quentin originally wanted Leonardo DiCaprio to play the career-making part of Hans Landa, which eventually went to Christoph Waltz. Of course, Tarantino would later come back to DiCaprio to play his big baddie in Django Unchained. Landa was a huge problem for Tarantino during writing. He feared that the part was “unplayable.” He often mentions Waltz saving his film due to his unique interpretation of the part, a performance that would later win him an Academy Award. Tarantino was always careful with Basterds because he considered it to be his masterpiece. He wanted it to be perfect. I don’t know if I’d call it perfect, but it certainly is a great screenplay/movie worth studying.

1) Defy character type if possible (Make your villain polite) – You shouldn’t ALWAYS do this, but a common amateur mistake is to make your villain a really mean asshole of a guy. What a boring on-the-nose interpretation that is! Tarantino goes the opposite direction and makes his villain, Hans Landa, the most polite person in the story. Since we’re not used to this, it unnerves us, makes us feel uncomfortable, and therefore makes his presence way more interesting.

2) For the love of all that is holy, cut out scenes you don’t need! – If you read Tarantino’s widely circulated almost-shooting draft, you see a lot of scenes that were cut. For example, there’s a scene where Hans Landa explains to an officer why he let Shosanna go. It was unnecessary and therefore cut. There’s a scene where Shosanna is taken in by the owner of the cinema she ends up running. Tarantino realized he could move the story along quicker if they start with Shosanna already owning the cinema. You should always be looking for ways to move your story along and cutting out unnecessary scenes is one of the easiest ways to do this!

3) The more doom you imply, the longer your scene can be (or “The Impending Doom Tool”) – One of the reasons Tarantino gets away with writing such long scenes is because of the impending doom he sets up at the beginning of them. Because we know something terrible is going to happen, we’ll stick around to see it. Look at the opening scene of Basterds. From the very first moment Hans walks in that house, we know this is going to end badly. We see this in Pulp Fiction as well, when Jules and Vincent (after discussing the sexual nature of foot rubs) go to Brett’s apartment to retrieve the briefcase. To demonstrate how powerful this tool is, note what happens when Tarantino doesn’t use it. One of the most boring scenes in the film is when Lt. Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender) is briefed by General Ed Fenech (Michael Meyers) about connecting with one of the Allies’ contacts. The scene is incredibly boring, and a big reason for that is that it’s one of the few scenes in the film where doom isn’t implied. It’s just two guys discussing exposition.

4) DRAMATIC IRONY ALERT – Tarantino LOVES dramatic irony. In fact, the bulk of his storytelling power comes from the impending doom tool and his use of dramatic irony. We see it in the first scene, when Tarantino reveals that there are, indeed, Jews under the floor. We know this but Hans Landa does not. Then later when Shosanna is called to lunch with the Germans, Hans shows up to talk with her. We know she’s the one who escaped the house that day. But Hans does not. We see it in the pub scene, where the Allies are posing as German soldiers. A German lieutenant starts asking probing questions. We know they’re not really Germans, but this German soldier does not. You’ll see some form of dramatic irony in almost all of Tarantino’s scenes.

5) Look for unique ways to stage your characters during dialogue – One of the most interesting scenes in the script occurs after the shootout at the pub. One of the Germans has survived and must negotiate with Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) the life of Bridget von Hammersmark. The entirety of the scene occurs with us never seeing Aldo Raine. He’s upstairs, yelling down to the soldier the whole time. There’s something about Aldo’s disembodied voice that brings the scene to life.

6) The Red Herring – Another really cool thing Tarantino does is introduce red herrings into his scenes – people or things we assume will be relevant, but turn out not to be. You see this in the opening scene with the dairy farmer’s three beautiful daughters. As Hans approaches them, we’re terrified of what’s going to happen to them. Is he going to rape them? Is he going to let his men rape them? Will he use their lives to get the truth of the farmer? In the end, they weren’t relevant, but we feared they were. Tarantino is always looking for ways to build tension into his scenes and this tool is a sly way of doing so.

7) Reverse Save The Cat – Remember that just as a hero should have a “Save The Cat” moment, your bad guy should have a reverse-save-the-cat moment. Who doesn’t hate Hans after that opening scene where he orders half a dozen helpless Jews to be murdered underneath the floor?

8) Always look for different ways to say things – This is one of the easiest ways to spice up your dialogue. Just take a few moments and come up with a more unique way for your characters to say what they’re going to say. When Aldo Raine orders The Bear Jew to kill a German soldier, he doesn’t use the amateurish line: “Kill this asshole.” He says, “German wants to die for his country. Obliiiiige him.”

9) The “Tell Me About Myself” tool – You never want a character to start talking about his own backstory. It never sounds right. (i.e. “I’m a killer. I like to kill Jews.”) So Tarantino’s developed this clever trick where he has the character whose backstory he wants to unveil say to another character, “Tell me what you know about me,” as Hans does in the opening scene to the dairy farmer. This way, the character isn’t talking about himself. Someone is telling him about himself. For whatever reason, this always feels more realistic.

10) Place your scene in an original (but organic) location – The other day I talked about putting your scenes in unique locations to add more pop. However, it’s important to note that those locations must still make sense, must still be organic to the story. There’s a great example of this in Basterds. It’s the scene where Fredrick Zoller hits on Shosanna for the first time. Shosanna works in a movie theater, so an amateur writer may have put her behind the candy display and had Zoller walk in and make his move. To make things more interesting, Tarantino puts Shosanna up on a ladder changing the marquee with Zoller on the ground, semi-shouting up to her. The distance between them adds a charge and uniqueness to the scene that you never would’ve gotten had they had a conventional conversation in the lobby.

BONUS TIP – Find humor in the non-humorous – This is one of the tools that has made Tarantino famous. He always mines humor from situations that aren’t typically humorous. We saw it in Django when all the men put on Klan masks but start freaking out because they can’t see out of them. And we see it here too, with scenes like Hitler going bonkers when he hears about the Basterds. The reason it works is because it’s unexpected. We’re not USED to laughing at the Klan or at Hitler.

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

Disclaimer: I did NOT see all of A Good Day To Die Hard. I found it to be so terrible that I walked out 45 minutes through. I have no idea (but will gladly assume) what the final 50 minutes were like.

Genre: Action
Premise: Errr… a former NYPD cop goes looking for his estranged son in Moscow and stumbles onto a complex plot involving weapons grade uranium…or something.
About: Skip Woods has written a lot of mediocre action flicks that are, surprisingly (or I guess not surprisingly) almost exactly alike. Which movies, you ask? How about I offer you Swordfish, Hitman, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and The A-Team. If you’re looking for subtlety, depth, cohesive plot, a narrative, words that make sense, then you’re probably not looking for these flicks. Which I guess makes sense. Woods’ background leads one to believe he’s more interested in ‘splosions than any sort of plot or story. He’s a partner at Wetwork Tactical, a weapons handling and tactics consulting firm. Woods is also writing Ten, which is a movie about a group of DEA agents getting hunted down by a gang they busted. That flick will star James Cameron vets Sam Worthington and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Writer: Skip Woods
Details: 95 minutes of pure torture (45 minutes of which I saw)

Shame on you Bruce Willis.

Shame on you Skip Woods.

Shame on you John Moore.

While A Good Day To Die Hard wasn’t as bad as, say, getting tortured by the Viet Cong, it was still pretty damn bad. And I’ll tell you when the moment occurred that I knew it would be bad. It was the scene where John McClane was in the cab after arriving in Russia. The scene has McClane and the cabbie engaging in a goofy (awkwardly directed) conversation. Because the writer is so lousy, he doesn’t understand why you’d have a scene like this in the first place and likely included it because he remembered the scene in the original Die Hard where McClane engaged in that fun conversation with the limo driver.

Here’s the thing though. That original fun conversation with the limo driver actually had a purpose! First, it introduced us to the charming McClane (he sits in the front seat with the limo driver, showing us he’s just a normal guy). But more importantly, it sets up the relationship between him and his wife, which will dictate us CARING when she’s held hostage and WANT John to save her.

This Moscow cabbie scene is a classic Screenwriting 101 mistake. It doesn’t tell us ANYTHING we don’t already know. It tells us John is here looking for his son (already knew that), that John has a daughter (already knew that), and that John is from New York (kinda learned that ohhhh, 25 years ago). So what’s the point of this scene? It’s the definition of pointless.

That doesn’t even begin to infringe on some of the other screenwriting 101 errors though. We follow a scene talking in a car (with his daughter) with a scene talking in a car (with the Russian cabbie). Two boring car talky scenes in a row (that reveal nothing or next to nothing). Are you asleep yet?

Oh, and then there’s the classic screenwriting neophyte tell of characters who repeat their line for emphasis. “Dammit John. You shouldn’t have come here.” Dramatic pause. “You shouldn’t have come here.” This “repeat-line-for-emphasis” move was used at least a half dozen times throughout the first 45 minutes.

Oh, and don’t forget the quirky villain character who’s quirky only because we need him to be, NOT because it’s a logical extension of who he actually is. Our villain here EATS CARROTS. No, I’m not kidding. He just munches on them. Every one must’ve been patting each other on the back after that one. “It will be so ironic! A bad guy who eats carrots!” Except it looks STUPID unless it actually makes sense. Darth Vader doesn’t have that raspy breathing thing because it’s cool. He has it because he can’t breath on his own. It’s embedded into his character’s history. Oh, and they didn’t even stop there! The Die Hard villain also tap-dances! Yes, our villain tap-dances!!!

Oh, you say, but what about plot? Was that any good?

That depends on if you like movies. Particularly good ones. I’ll try to explain.

Die Hard starts with John McClane deciding he wants to look for his son, Jack, who’s recently fallen off the map. He gets word that Jack is in Moscow, so he books a flight to Russia to catch up. Meanwhile, there’s something going on in Russia where a high ranking official has incriminating information about Russia’s president or something. Jack, who’s an undercover CIA agent, is aligned with this official for some reason, who’s on trial for something else (are ya following all this?). When the trial’s about to begin, a third party of bad guys blows the courtroom up and goes after the official. Jack shuttles the official away to a safe house but before he can get there, John POPS UP in front of his car and demands to come along.

The three agree that they have to get the official to America or something, but he refuses to leave without his daughter. So they go and meet her at a meticulously scouted warehouse. John thinks something is off and is proven correct when it turns out to be a trap. The daughter is in cahoots with the baddies! The baddies want this secret file as well, but before they can get it, John and Jack join forces and kill a bunch of people and escape. That’s the point where I walked out of the movie. But I hear that John and Jack then head to Chernobyl of all places where they discover there wasn’t any file to begin with. It was all a cover for some weapons grade uranium that was going to be used to blow up the world…or something.

Here’s what I don’t get. Don’t writers realize that if the plot is muddled and/or stupid, that we’re not going to care?? The whole reason we care what’s happening in a movie is because we understand that if our heroes DON’T succeed, something bad will happen. In other words, there’s something at stake! If we don’t understand what our heroes are doing, there’s nothing at stake. After the embarrassingly clumsy plotting that connected our two main characters (John McClane literally BUMPS INTO his son, Jack, in the middle of Moscow. How convenient!), we don’t have any idea what our characters are doing or why they’re doing it. We’re told of some sort of disk or file that’s needed, but it’s never clear what it is, what it holds, or why it’s important. So we’re supposed to be involved in a pursuit that we don’t even understand! I mean compare this to Die Hard. What’s the plot? SAVE HIS FREAKING WIFE! That’s the plot! How freaking simple is that? How clear are the stakes?? That’s why we’re invested. Cause we understand what the heck is going on!

But, none of this compares to what they turn John McClane into. They rewrite this cinema icon into a PASSIVE HERO! Like, that’s the first thing you learn in A screenwriting class. MAKE YOUR HERO ACTIVE! ESPECIALLY in an action movie! The only way you could do worse is if you MADE the most active awesomest hero of all time passive! The original John McClane was great because HE MADE THINGS HAPPEN. He did things. He ACTED. Here, he’s just following his son around like an annoying little child who keeps asking, “Are we there yet?”

I don’t know if this is because they’re trying to do a “pass the torch” thing with the son, but even if that’s the case, it’s a mortal sin. We didn’t come to this movie to see boring buzz cut no-name actor kick ass. We came to see Bruce Willis kick ass!

In the end, all I ask with the writing is that you try. SHOW. ME. THAT. YOU. ARE. TRYING. There isn’t a single moment in this script that indicates anyone was putting any effort into the choices. I’d be surprised if this script made it past a second draft. That’s how sloppy it feels. I mean it didn’t even get the tone right. Die Hard films are supposed to be fun! Whoever directed this thought he was directing The Bourne Identity or a new Bond flick. Where was the fun???

And don’t buy into the company line that “IT’S AN ACTION FLICK. LOOSEN UP AND ENJOY IT!” Just cause you’re making an action flick doesn’t mean that things like plot, story, and characters don’t matter. I know this because I’ve seen action movies that have done it right. Where the people actually cared about writing a good screenplay. They were called Die Hard.

And it’s not insignificant. If you make a good movie, you make more money! People will keep buying your movie 20 years from now. Just like they still buy Die Hard, the original. So there is incentive to get it right. I’m just shocked that hacks were allowed write this piece of garbage.

Try. Next time, just try. That’s all I ask.

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

What I learned: Don’t write scenes that tell us things we already know! You will bore us. Who isn’t bored by the random weird Moscow cab scene in A Good Day To Die Hard? And the reason we’re bored is because it doesn’t advance the plot in any way, it doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know, and it doesn’t reveal anything we need for later. It. Is. Pointless!