Genre: Fantasy/Family
Premise: (from IMDB) A vindictive fairy is driven to curse an infant princess only to realize the child may be the only one who can restore peace.
About: Malificent is one of the more daring movies Disney has ever released. As the title implies, the film is centered around one of the most famous villains of all time, Sleeping Beauty’s “Malificent.” For Disney to center a film around a villain is one thing, but to center it around a character this evil is a surprising move. Releasing the film in the middle of the year’s biggest movie season is yet another gamble. You’re competing against X-Men, Spider men, and really muscular men, all with bigger fan bases. I have to admit I’m fascinated by this choice, and am eager to see if anyone shows up. Writer Linda Woolverton has been writing for Disney forever. She wrote 2010’s Alice in Wonderland as well as the classics, The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast. In other words, if you’re going to do something daring with a Disney property, this is the woman you want writing it.
Writer: There’s no title page here, but this draft looks to have been written by Linda Woolverton. Disney favorite John Lee Hancock helped with rewrites on later drafts.
Details: 110 pages (unknown draft)

One of the age-old questions in screenwriting has been, “How do you make an audience root for an unlikable hero?” It’s easy to make someone root for an underdog like Forrest Gump or Wall-E. It’s not as easy to make them root for Captain Jack Sparrow or Cool Hand Luke. This question resurfaced when I heard they were having a hard time coming up with a Boba Fett spin-off film for the Star Wars franchise. Boba Fett is a bad guy. How do you make him the hero?

This argument typically parlays itself into the emergence of an antihero. In those cases our protagonist is just as bad as he is good, which makes us a little more uncomfortable about rooting for him. If you do this right, you can create a classic character. Everyone loves themselves a Jack Sparrow. But the ingredients are trickier to mix with anti-heroes. An extra dash here or a tiny spill there can be the difference between a perfect protagonist and a despicable one. Let’s find out which side of the forest Maleficent ended up on.

Now, I haven’t seen Sleeping Beauty in maybe 20 years. So I had to do some Wikipedia searching to catch up. But I realized this is basically Maleficent’s side of the Sleeping Beauty story. Maleficent starts out as a young, winged fairy who’s bigger than all the other fairies for some reason. She’s infatuated with a boy named Stefan, and it looks like they’re going to fall in love and get married.

That’s until he betrays her and joins the Human Land. After becoming chummy with the humans, Stefan tries to go back and kill Maleficent (man, that romance ended quickly), but instead is only able to clip off her wings. My man, Stefan. That was a baaaaad move. A wingless Maleficent is an angry Maleficent.

Many years later, Stefan becomes king (after standing by while the real king chokes to death – classy move) and has a child. This child’s name is Aurora (Aurora is the name of Sleeping Beauty. Did you know that? I didn’t. I thought her actual name was “Sleeping Beauty”). After a confusing array of events, a fairy casts a spell on Aurora that says when she turns 16, she’ll fall into a deep sleep and won’t wake up until her true love kisses her.

Afraid of Maleficent, Stefan hides Aurora in the forest with the fairies until she’s 16. But that incredibly genius idea turns out to backfire, since Maleficent lives in a hut only a short walk away. The two eventually meet up (ON PAGE 75 – THREE-QUARTERS OF THE WAY INTO THE STORY), and Maleficent actually ends up liking Aurora.

The two become friends, however, when Aurora turns 16, she falls into that deep sleep. Maleficent realizes she’s screwed, since there’s no one in the land whose kiss can wake her up. Which means she’ll have to find another solution. Whatever will that solution be….?

Before we even get to the antihero stuff, I have to say how freaking messy the structure of this script was. It kept jumping forward in time over and over again. No story was able to start as just when we’d get close to something happening, we’d jump again. We jump from Maleficent’s teenage years, to her young adult years. And then Stefan has Aurora, and SHE has to grow up, so we have to bumble through another 16 years. Which is why it took until page 75(!) before our two key characters even met!

I think that’s insane. Whenever you write a script, one of the key decisions you have to make is where to start your story. The idea is to start as CLOSE TO THE ‘KEY STORY’ as possible. The further back you start from that moment, the more mud you have to drag the reader through to get to the good stuff.

Take Die Hard for example. We could’ve started that movie back in New York. We could’ve watched John and his wife get married, have kids, fight, her get the job in LA, leave, see him alone for awhile, AND THEN show him come to Los Angeles. But how boring would it have been to slog through all of that? Instead, we started with John showing up in LA so we could get to the good stuff as soon as possible.

To me, the story here is Maleficent and Aurora. So why are we only getting to that on page 75? I understand that the movie is called “Maleficent” and they probably want to explore how she became this evil person, but to have to sit through 5 time bumps just to get to the good stuff? That feels sloppy to me. And the truth is, they didn’t even do a good job explaining how she became evil. Stefan betrayed her, but she was already a bitch before that.

Look at another fairy tale, Shrek. The timeline for that was three days! You can have time jumps in a script, of course, but you should try to contain them inside the first 15 pages if possible. Whether it be with Up or Frozen, we pass all the time we need to pass immediately, and then we can get to the story.

Now, on to the question of the day. How was Maleficent as an antihero? This is how I saw it: I never learned why Maleficent was a bitch. She hated humans from the beginning of the script, so I didn’t gain any understanding of why she was who she was. It’s not that I NEED to know that with every character. But this script is practically screaming the fact that it’s going to tell us this girl’s origins. So why aren’t we learning her origins?

Eventually Stefan steals her wings and becomes the king, setting him up as our “true” villain in the story. But I didn’t think he was any worse than Maleficent. A trick to making an audience like an antihero is to write a villain that’s way worse than him/her. We’ll want the villain to go down so much that we won’t mind rooting for a “bad” hero. But again, these two seemed about the same to me (with a VERY SLIGHT advantage going to Maleficent), so I didn’t have a rooting interest.

It seems to me that this story is banking on the fact that you know the Sleeping Beauty story like the back of your hand, and therefore will wait patiently until the Maleficent/Aurora storyline arrives. But since this will be for children, will these children have seen Sleeping Beauty? Likewise, will the parents remember it well enough (again, I forgot that Aurora was the name of Sleeping Beauty)? I don’t know. We’ll have to see.

One thing I’ll give credit to Disney for is taking a chance. This is unlike anything they’ve ever done before. And with all the money they’re making lately (no one’s making more bank than Disney these days), they should be taking chances. Unfortunately, I don’t think this chance paid off, UNLESS John Lee Hancock did an Almost Page 1 rewrite on it. We’ll have to see. But I’ll ask you guys in the meantime, especially parents with children. Are you interested in seeing this film?

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

What I learned: Dichotomy with anti-heroes – The trick with anti-heroes is to give them ONE GOOD THING they’ve got going for them (so there’s SOMETHING to root for), and then one element of darkness. That dichotomy of light and dark is what makes these characters so fascinating. A lot of the time, the “good trait” is humor (Jack Sparrow, Tony Stark, Cool Hand Luke, Randle McMurphy from Cuckoo’s Nest). And the “darkness” is self-destructive behavior (Henry Hill, Jordan Belforte). In extreme cases, the darkness is sociopathic or even psychotic behavior (Patrick Bateman from American Psycho). If you don’t have that perfect light/dark balance with your antihero, chances are, we’re not going to care about them. I’m not saying I didn’t care for Maleficent, but she definitely wasn’t interesting enough to keep me engaged the entire read.

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

Genre: Sci-Fi Action Thriller
Premise (from writers): Set in a post-apocalyptic NYC ravaged by a rapid-aging virus, THE MAYFLY follows a soldier who lives his entire life in one day, as he goes against his training to transport an uninfected woman to safety.
Why You Should Read (from writer): We’ve been pitching THE MAYFLY as, “Children of Men meets Escape From New York,” but the premise is best explained by a single question: What if you lived your entire life, from infancy to old age, in 24 hours? There is a chapter in Alan Lightman’s “Einstein’s Dreams” that explores a similar concept, except his story doesn’t include a certified bad-ass who attempts to reverse the state of the world before his time is up. In other words, Alan shit the bed, so we changed the sheets. Every screenplay is hard work. Every screenplay is a labor of love. Not every screenplay is good. Although it took us a while to get here, we believe we’ve reached the point in our journey as screenwriters where we know the difference. We humbly submit our egos to the counsel and would love some help in continuing to develop this script.
Writers: Ryan Curtin & Todd Kirby
Details: 107 pages

The prototypical actor who can play young and old.

So yesterday I got a little rant-y and overly negative. I actually don’t think screenwriting is dead or anything ridiculous like that. And while the spec system is rigged to resist more thoughtful work, that doesn’t mean you can’t trick it. It doesn’t mean you can’t slip a lobster inside the Big Mac you’re serving them. You just have to be sly about it.

One of the things I complained about yesterday was this notion of “effort.” Or “lack of it.” Because a good script is so hard to write, anything less than everything you’ve got isn’t going to be good enough. So when I see shoddy scripts with only the barest grasp of storytelling, I wilt like an aged dandelion. Whether your script is the best script in the world or the worst piece of shit in 9 counties, I want to be able to tell that you gave it your all.

I believe today’s writers gave it their all, or a pretty close approximation to it. The amount of world-building alone indicates they thought a lot about it. My question would be, did they put TOO MUCH into it? Let’s look at The Mayfly’s plot and then I’ll explain what I mean.

It’s the far-off future just outside Manhattan. To bring you up to speed, some war-hungry dimwit created a fast-aging virus that nearly wiped out all of mankind. Earth’s most recent generation still has to deal with this moron’s creation, as some people have the fast-aging virus and some don’t. Some people live till they’re 60. Some live till they’re 1 day old. It’s a crap shoot. Oh, and if you live for one day, you grow up and live your whole life in that day, baby to old man.

This is where it gets a little confusing. The people of Alistair Kingdom have a King who’s looking for a “breeder” to help continue the Royal bloodline. Breeders don’t have “die early” blood.  Breeders have a normal life expectancy.  Which makes them rare.  Problem is, this breeder chick they need is in Manhattan. How the King knows this, I’m not sure.  But he does.

The king nominates half-day old soldier, Morrow, to retrieve the breeder. Yes, Morrow is half a day old. But he looks like he’s 30. And he somehow has the intelligence of a 30 year-old, which I didn’t quite understand. But Morrow, being so young and therefore easy to manipulate, believes everything the King tells him, and goes off to secure the Breeder.

Once he finds her (Margo) he pulls a “Midnight Run” and handcuffs her, then starts back home, Shrek-style. You gotta remember, this guy’s got to move. It’s not like he can head home tomorrow. He’ll be dead. On their way back, Margo tells Morrow that he’s been fed lies. That the King of Alistair is purposefully letting people die for his own gain. Instead of offering her up as a sex slave, he should take her to something called “The Program” – where scientists still try to save humanity.

Morrow is torn, but eventually decides against it. His allegiance is to the King. However, after he takes her home and sees how she’s treated, he realizes how wrong he was, and that he must save poor Margo, all before he dies at the end of the day.

So in last night’s newsletter, I brought up something called “The Burden of Investment.” And what it amounts to is, how much information is the writer forcing you to take in before you can enjoy their story? How many characters, worlds, rules – essentially, how much exposition do we have to sit through before we can be entertained?

The Mayfly had a very high burden of investment. There was a Kingdom. There was a past virus. This virus acts differently/randomly for each person. There are p-counts. There are breeders. There are uninfected breeders. There are “IDs.” There are CONS. There are CONS pretending to be IDs.

My brain was so fried after 20 pages, I was pointing right while saying left. The problem when you have such a high burden of investment, is you risk losing your reader. Because there’s so much coming at the reader, it’s hard for them to pick out the essential story beats that convey the central plot.

The story’s clear to the writer because he’s gone over it 300 times. We’ve gone over it one time.  That’s what happened to me. I understood that Morrow was going after this girl in Manhattan, but I wasn’t exactly sure why (till later). That’s not to say the answer wasn’t there. It’s that it may have gotten lost inside all those other things the writer was trying to tell us.

I understand this is sci-fi and there’s going to be some world-building involved, but one of the first things I tell sci-fi writers is, “Don’t let things get too complicated. Don’t lose the reader by setting up and explaining ten thousand things right away.”

This may sound contradictory to what I wrote yesterday – when I said I wanted more depth in screenplays – but depth doesn’t mean over-complicating and over-populating and confusing your reader. That’s a different thing entirely, and the overwhelming amount of information being conveyed in the opening act of The Mayfly was too much for my little fried brain to handle.

It feels a little like Ryan and Todd came up with this idea and despite realizing it was always going to be a battle, they were going to do it anyway. Through hell or high water. And there’s a part of me that admires that stubbornness. I think it’s important to challenge yourselves as writers. But there’s another part of me that says, “Why torture yourself?”

I mean, there are still very basic things I’m miffed about that seem directly related to the concept. How do these people learn to be human in one day? How are they speaking fluent English by 9am? How do they learn how to fight or be a warrior? By noon, no less? Even in the most optimistic scenario, wouldn’t it take an adult a couple of days to learn how to walk? That was a huge problem for me, was that I never fully embraced the premise. That’s not to say it wasn’t interesting. It’s just one of those premises where you’re always aware of it, where you’re always wondering how they’re going to pull it off as opposed to just enjoying the story.

Did Ryan and Todd try to do too much? Did having a kingdom in the future along with all these complicated factions/rules take precedence over exploiting the theme at the very core of the concept – aging?  That’s something I kept asking myself.  This seemed to be more about continuing bloodlines than realizing how short life was. I mean aging’s brought up a few times (for example, Morrow’s never going to see a sunrise) but it’s through dialogue and it feels inconsequential.  The theme of aging and time passing should have been explored a lot more thoroughly here.

The writers bring up comparisons to Children of Men, and one of the reasons that movie worked so well was that it was so simple. There wasn’t any complex mythology with Kings and Princes. That’s why I tell sci-fi writers that if they can keep their futuristic societies relatively close to current society, they should do it. Because then you don’t have to spend half your script explaining shit, like a whole new political system.

I’m really torn on this. Does The Mayfly really get better if you ditch all the Kingdom stuff? It seems like the story wouldn’t be burdened with so many limitations that way. Then again, some of the better character moments happen inside the Royal Family (I liked the complex family dynamics of creating an heir).

But yeah, the more I think about it, the more I believe there were too many ideas crammed into here. And it hurt the story. Morrow and Margo rarely got a chance to talk about anything real (life, love, happiness, loneliness, fear) because they were always focusing on p-counts and breeders and bloodlines and Cons. Once exposition takes precedence over character, you’re in trouble. But it’s often the price you pay when you try and over-mythologize a script.

Moving forward, I’d try to streamline the opening act. Strip out as much information as you can and make the world of Mayfly as easy to understand as possible. You do that – this script is going to be so much better.

Script link: The Mayfly

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

What I learned: Reader Reminders – When you’re writing one of these scripts with SO much information, you might want to repeat the protagonist goal for the audience a second time. I didn’t know why they were going after Margo here. The answer was in there somewhere, but it got lost inside all the information dumps. So it was nice when, later, Morrow reminds us that they’re getting Margo in order to continue the Royal bloodline. If your plot is simple, you won’t have to do this. It’s only required when your setup is packed with information and exposition.

The disappointing showing of Transcendence really bummed me out this weekend. Not because I had anything invested in the film. It was just one of the few non-IP properties that made it to the big screen. And for screenwriters who still believe in original ideas, it’s very important that these movies do well. Because if they don’t, we’re bound to turn into an all IP industry.

The thing is, right now, the studios would have a good case against the spec world for doing so. Nobody’s writing anything good, so why should they buy any specs or make any specs into movies?

I’ve thought about this a lot lately, and I’ve noticed some real problems in the system. One of the reasons I tell everyone to simplify their stories and make sure their GSU (goals, stakes, urgency) is strong, is because these are the only scripts that get past script readers. They’re the thrillers and the comedies that have clean easy-to-understand stories, and therefore they can pass up to their bosses without fearing the dreaded, “What the fuck is this?? Give me something I can sell!”

So what does that say to us? It says we can’t explore anything too complex. We have to stay in that little box. In many ways, specs are like the Big Mac trying to compete with the studios’ lobster. We’re not allowed to create something challenging or unique or with substance, so how the hell are we supposed to compete with projects like “The Wolf of Wall Street” or “Benjamin Button?” If neither of those projects were based on IP, they wouldn’t have sold. And that’s really hard to accept. That the playing field is so uneven.

Despite that, I don’t think writers are giving it their best. Even with that reasonable excuse, I’m not reading enough good material. And I’ve tried to figure out why. Part of me believes that screenwriting is SO much harder than everyone thinks it is. There’s so much you have to know how to do.

You have to create intriguing likable protagonists that don’t feel like every other intriguing likable protagonist we’ve seen. You have to know how to pace a script with act breaks and story beats. You have to know what conflict is so you can write entertaining scenes (I can’t tell you how often I see all 55 scenes in a script, and not a single one has conflict).

You have to know how to explore a character in a way that adds depth, and to create relationships with problems that need to be resolved. You need to know how to write dialogue that does more than simply allow two characters to speak. It must push them to speak in a way that ENTERTAINS US. You need to know how to apply suspense, obstacles, setups, payoffs, urgency, stakes. And after you figure all that stuff out, you actually have to apply it in a NATURAL way that doesn’t look like there’s any craft to it. You have to build a house that looks like it’s always been there.

And that’s hard to do.

Part of the problem is too many writers are trying for the quick fixes. They read a couple of things from this site, a couple of things from another site, and they think they’re ready to go.  You can spot these scripts a mile away. There’s just no sense whatsoever that the writer’s put anything into the craft.  A couple of months back I read an amateur writer’s script, and he wanted to know if his hero should secretly be the killer. I was like, “I’m not even clear what’s going on in YOUR FIRST SCENE.” Whether the killer is the bad guy or not is irrelevant. You need to figure out how to write a scene first (a scene is a story.  Start with some problem your characters have to deal with, and you should come up with something reasonably good).

And that’s something I just don’t think people do anymore. Actually WORK. I came across this short last week (The Long Game) which talks about all the geniuses throughout history. Da Vinci, John Coltrane, Stephen King, people of that stature. And what the director found was that there was this period in each of these artists’ lives that he called the “Difficult Years,” where they went through this self-appointed apprenticeship. This apprenticeship would last somewhere between 7-15 years, and would consist of them practicing and experimenting and writing and reading and playing and studying, and looking for any little thing that could make them better, that would give them an edge on, or help them catch up to, their competition.

Nobody talks about those years cause they’re not decorated with No. 1 hits or groundbreaking sculptures or Pulitzer prizes. But those are the MOST IMPORTANT YEARS of the artist’s life. Coltrane spent 15 years practicing relentlessly EVERY DAY on his saxophone until he got his first real gig. And this is the best saxophonist ever! It took him 15 years of practice!

In the documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” about the best sushi chef in the world, this guy spent something like 10 years studying RICE! What region the best rice came from, the textures that worked best, how to store it, how to cook it. We’re not even talking about the fish. We’re talking about the RICE. That’s why he’s the best in the world. Because he dedicated himself to finding the perfect EVERYTHING for his food. What are you doing as a screenwriter that’s setting you apart from everyone else?

I think I know why this is such a problem for our industry. It’s because screenwriting DOESN’T LOOK THAT HARD. Why would anyone work hard at something that seems so easy? Everybody thinks they can write a screenplay. They look at what’s out in the theaters and say, “I can do better than that guy.” No, you can’t. That’s exactly WHY screenwriting is so hard, is because even the best screenwriters can’t come up with something “better than that.”

As a writer, you should be obsessively doing three things. You should be writing, you should be reading (scripts/books), and you should be studying. If you really want to have a shot at this, you have to outwork everyone else. So I challenge you. All those things I noted above (obstacles, conflict, etc.), I want you to MASTER ALL OF THEM. Work on them until your fingers bleed. That’s the only chance you have of writing something great, is if you master all the aspects of storytelling.

Now I realize that’s a tall order, so maybe I can help you focus a little. If there’s one thing I see botched over and over again – the biggest problem I see in screenplays by far – it’s boring characters. And derivative characters.  Or the worst – the combos: Derivabores.  So start there.  Learn how to write good characters. Look back through my archives. Google the word. Re-watch all your favorite characters and take notes about why you love them.

Because the more I read, the more I realize that it’s ALL ABOUT THE CHARACTERS. If you write a bad story, you can make up for it with good characters. A great place to start is by doing the PLOT STRIP TEST. Mentally strip your plot OUT of your script and just look at your characters all by their naked selves.

Now tell me, are these characters interesting without the plot behind them? Without the explosions or the twists or the killer concept? In a script I read awhile back, I did the PLOT STRIP TEST, and here’s all that was left: A hero that was afraid of heights and a love interest who was upset that her dad died. Do those sound like interesting people to you?

Where is the flaw (she’s unable to love), the vice (she’s a sex addict), the relationship problems (these two were together once until she made a mistake and cheated on him).  What’s their personality like (wise-ass)?  What do they fear (sleeping alone)?  What do they keep from the world (they once watched a friend rape someone and didn’t do anything about it)?  I don’t want to use the dirty words “soap opera,” but you almost have to think of it that way. Are my characters interesting on their own, without the story? Because if not, you need to build a lot more into them.

But characters are still just one piece of the puzzle. Sometimes I’ll pick up a script and I don’t know what’s wrong with it. I just know that it’s lifeless, that it’s missing something.

So maybe I’ll turn to you guys for help. What do you think’s missing from today’s scripts? A lot of you called Transcendence a “bad screenplay.” What’s missing from it and other scripts like it? What is that one thing that all these writers (amateur and professional) continue to ignore?

And hey, if you think you’ve done everything I’ve said above and that you’re ready, well dog gonnit, send your script in for Amateur Friday (details at top of page). Maybe you’ll get reviewed and blow us all away. I hope so. Because baby, I want to believe again.

Oh, and finally, I’m sending out a new newsletter late tonight, and it’s going to be a good one. I’ll be reviewing a script from one of my FAVORITE writers, as well as posting some short films for you to check out. Make sure to check your SPAM boxes if you don’t receive it, and add me as a contact so it doesn’t go to SPAM in the future. If you’re new to Scriptshadow and want to sign up, go here!

Genre: Dark Comedy
Premise: When her step-brother, whom she’s never met before, gets back from rehab, a 16 year-old girl with all sorts of issues engages in a bizarre, sexually dysfunctional friendship with him.
About: Alexander McAulay has found a small level of success selling novels, but this appears to be his first real screenplay (or at least the first one he broke in with). It finished fairly high on last year’s Black List, though it is so messed up I don’t know if anyone’s going to have the balls to buy it.
Writer: Alexander McAulay
Details: 99 pages

AnnaSophia Robb as Erica?

Sometimes you read something and you go, “Did I just read that?” Because you can’t believe that you actually did. Like Fatties. I still have nightmares about the amputation fisting scene. But Flower, with its appropriately coy title, may go beyond even that script. I mean, this thing is so messed up I don’t even know where to begin.

I guess you should imagine Flower as “Fatties meets Heathers.” That would give you a small inkling of how delirious it is. The question is, would anyone actually purchase it? Getting on the Black List is great. But it doesn’t always mean a sale. It just gives you the kind of exposure that may lead to a sale.

Personally, I think this was a brilliant move by McAulay. He knew the chances of Flower getting made were slim, but he also knew that if he pushed the envelope and made the reader uncomfortable, that you’d remember his script. And call him in for a meeting. And that’s all you’re really trying to accomplish as a screenwriter. Get as many people as familiar with your work as possible. Because the more people who know you, the more rooms you get into, the more jobs you get.

Oh, so what do I mean when I say this script is crazy? Well it starts with this girl, 16 year-old Erica Vandros, blowing a really creepy old dude in a van. After he finishes, Erica’s best friends, Claudine and Kala, come out of the bushes, informing the man they’ve been taping the whole thing. If he doesn’t give them every cent he’s got, he’s going to jail for a long time. Oh yeah, and this isn’t an isolated incident. They do this ALL THE TIME.

Erica’s saving up money to bail her deadbeat dad out of jail. But her blowjob streak is interrupted when Luke moves in. Luke is her stepdad’s son, the result of a new enough relationship with her mom that she and Luke have never met. Luke is really fat.  Like Southwest Airlines “buy two seats” fat. I think Erica describes him as if “Jabba The Hut sat around all day eating lard.”

So how does this relationship begin?  Well, what better way to introduce yourself to your new step-brother than asking him if he wants a blowjob! Yes, Erica’s so into blowing guys (preferably guys she doesn’t know) that she actually has a sketch book where she’s drawn all the penises she’s encountered. What a classy lady. Luke is so freaked out by girls in general that he declines, and a baffled Erica eventually learns that the reason for this (and his craziness in general) has something to do with a guy who lives in the house across the street molesting him as a boy.

This angers Erica, who puts Operation Stepbrother Blowjob on hold so she can take Paul (the neighbor in question) down. She and her friends will drug him, take a bunch of sleazy pictures with him, then use those pictures to blackmail him out of everything he owns.

Things don’t go exactly according to plan though. (Spoiler) Molester Dude sort of… dies accidentally during the drugging, which means Erica’s a murderer. So she goes on the run with Luke, deciding to kill two birds with one stone and bail her father out of jail along the way. But what happens instead are a lot of confessions that amount to these two being big fat liars their whole lives. Including that little molestation accusation that led to Paul’s death.  Oops.

Like I said, this is a great script to get you noticed. It’s risky. It’s daring. It makes you feel weird reading it. I wrote an article awhile back about not writing “soft” scripts. This is anything but soft. It’s got pointy, stabby edges that are continually jabbing at your insides. I mean, I’m not going to pretend like it’s God’s gift to screenwriting or anything. But I’ve been pretty bored with my reading the last few weeks and this was the first time a script really made me sit up and pay attention. So it had SOMETHING going for it.

And it wasn’t just a string of shocks either. McAulay knows how to construct a story with goals and obstacles and conflict all the way through.  I liked that Erica wasn’t just sitting around on her ass being a boring independent movie character all the time.  She’s out there actively making money so she can bail out her father.  And when Luke enters the equation, Erica’s goal slides over to taking down the molester.  That’s what you need in a script – you need to feel like the characters are moving towards something at all times, even if it’s something odd or nontraditional that would only make sense in their particular universe.

Also, if you’re going to get on the Black List like Flower, you need interesting characters – characters readers haven’t seen before.  Both Luke and Erica definitely fit this bill. Luke is half-crazy, suicidal, an oxycontin addict and a food addict. And Erica’s an enigma. She’s a blowjob addict. She’s funny. She’s over-the-top. But I think, most importantly, you DON’T FORGET HER. I read so many forgettable female characters in screenplays. I PROMISE you, with this girl’s attitude and the shit that comes out of her mouth, you will NOT forget her.

The only thing that hurt the script was that every now and then, it felt “written.”  In other words, when you read something, you could actually see the writer typing it down.  It’s typically a bad thing as it means you’re not immersed in the story.   I mean, when Erica’s mom kisses her and she yells back, “more tongue, ma! Or I feel gypped!” or when she spots Luke, “Look! Shamu’s found dry land!” or later to Luke, “Don’t you want revenge? Or did he rape all the manhood out of you?” you can smell McAulay grinning deliciously at his little insults.

And then you have things like Luke getting back from rehab, then a scene later, his molester from ten years ago moving into the house across the street – I mean, come on, what are the chances?  A plot should be invisible.  It must not draw attention to itself.  When you cram big plot points together like that, they expose the gears of your story.  The reader shouldn’t see the gears of the story.  It’s like seeing behind the curtain in Oz.

The funny thing is, it almost worked. I mean, the story and characters were so out there, so weird, and people were always doing and saying things that were so bizarre, why not make it a giant translucent chicken drumstick of crazy?  If you’re laughing, you might not care that you can tell the writer’s there in the room with you, typing away.

I don’t know if the masses are ready for Flower though. This thing is offensive at every turn. Who’s going to pony up five million bucks to have a high school girl parade around town offering blow jobs to old men? I guess it could happen. You have to find that really fucked up filmmaker, like a young version of whoever that guy was who directed “KIDS” back in the day. But I’m not holding my breath.

Still, despite its weirdness, I wanted to see what happened. I wanted to get to the end. And the writing was infinitely readable. Enviably sparse and to the point. It was one of the faster 99 pages I’ve ever read recently. I’m going to recommend this only to the weirdos though (like me!). If you’re not the kind of person who waits til you and your friend are alone so you can start cracking the most inappropriate, insensitive jokes in history, you’re probably not going to like this.

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

What I learned: Beware the perfectly-timed coincidence. Coincidences are your enemy in screenplays. If things that you need for your story to work just show up out of nowhere at just the right time, the audience will groan and roll their eyes and call you on it. The perfect example is Luke coming back from rehab and, what do you know, the guy who molested him at some faraway camp a decade ago has just moved in directly across the street.  It may be EASIER to write that plot point, since you don’t have to put any effort into it, but it’s always better to go the extra mile and make your major plot points coincidence-free.

What I learned 2: While it certainly isn’t a prerequisite, if you can write two really quirky weird characters into your script, your chances of getting on the Black List go up 100 fold.  The Black List loves the unique weird offbeat strange characters.

Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: A love story set in a time where a dying scientist is able to upload his consciousness into the internet and, facing its global implications, must fight against the forces who are actively working against the existence of a singularity.
About: Transcendence is one of the few spec scripts that made it to the big screen this year, and a popular one with script readers, including myself. It was Wally Pfister’s directorial debut. Pfister, Christopher Nolan’s long-time cinematographer, was blessed with a strong cast that included Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Morgan Freeman, Cillian Murphy, Kate Mara and Paul Bettany. Despite what looked to be a surefire hit, the film was botched in just about every manner. Critics blasted it (it got a 20% on Rotten Tomatoes) and audiences didn’t come to see it (it made 11 million bucks over the weekend). So today, the question is, why? What happened? Where did things go wrong? I’d like to find out.
Writer: Jack Paglen
Details: 120 minutes/131 pages

Transcendence just made every single one of your jobs as writers a thousand times harder.

You may not know this, but every time a spec-script-turned-film bombs at the box office, it hurts you. Because the studios log that away and say “Yet another reason not to make spec scripts.”  Which makes it harder for you, my dear writer friend, to sell a screenplay.  I mean, first Draft Day bombs and now this??  We’re not exactly making a strong counter-case here.

The thing is, this should’ve worked.  If ever there was a spec that felt right being turned into a movie, it was this one.  It had an interesting role for a lead to play, a marketable premise, some intriguing new themes our interconnected planet is dealing with and some inventive set pieces.  Black List voters jumped on board.  And pretty much everyone I talked to liked the script.  So then what went wrong?

For those who don’t know much about the film, here’s an abbreviated plot breakdown:

40-something Will Caster is one of a handful of scientists across the world who is making strides in artificial intelligence. His goal is to reach the “Singularity,” a nerdy term for when computers become as smart as humans. From there, it’s assumed, computers will become exponentially smarter than humans, to the point where they may want to get rid of us.

Which is exactly why a renegade group out there known as the “RIFT” is trying to assassinate Will and others like him. To “save the world.” They do end up shooting Will but not killing him. However, just when he thinks he’s in the clear, Will learns that the bullet was laced with uranium. Will will be dead in weeks from radiation poisoning.

Will’s wife Evelyn, who loves him more than anything, comes up with this wacky idea to use Will’s own research to save him, uploading his brain into a computer. With the help of Will’s reluctant best friend, Max, they’re able to pull this off just before the RIFT find them.

With the entire internet at his hands, Will becomes really powerful, and starts building a super town out in the middle of the desert. While at first Evelyn was excited to have her man back, now she’s kinda freaked out. Will monitors her 24/7, and she’s starting to feel like a kept woman. RIFT joins up with a small department in the FBI to try and take Will and his new city down, but it looks like it’s going to be too little, too late.

“So let me get this straight Mr. Pfister. You want me to look bored the entire movie?”

The first thing I realized about the screen translation of Transcendence was that two of my favorite things about the script were gone. First, Pfister decided to nix the love-triangle between Max, Will, and Evelyn, which was a strange choice. Max’s inner struggle about whether to help Evelyn save her husband even though he secretly loved her, was one of the only aspects of the script that added any layers to the scenes. Without that, everything pretty much played out on the surface.

Then there was the compete lack of any set pieces. In the script, we get this super battle with Will’s self-made super-soldiers (which he creates via nano technology) throwing tanks and doing all these impossible things. In the movie, these “super nano humans” never engaged in any physical attacks. It was beyond bizarre. We built up to three major battle scenes, but nothing actually happened! Right as the nano-soldiers were about to unleash their awesomeness, they’d just… stop.

Now, obviously this could have been due to budgetary reasons. But I suspect it might have actually been a choice. In the script (major spoiler) we find out at the end that, despite RIFT’s insistence otherwise, Will wasn’t trying to rule the world. He was trying to help Evelyn “change the world.”  In other words, Will was never bad.  He was good! In order for this “shocking” twist to work, I’m guessing our director thought, “Well then Will can’t actually kill anybody! He’s a good guy.” “Aha,” he continued. “That means we can’t have those casualty-heavy set pieces anymore.”

This was a terrible choice, and a trap many writers fall into. In order to make one small aspect of their script work, they sacrifice other bigger parts of the script. In this case, we lost out on these cool set pieces for a lame twist that didn’t make all that much sense anyway.

But the truth is, I don’t think either of these were the reason Transcendence sucked. If you inserted those changes into the movie right now, it would’ve been only marginally better (maybe 35% Rotten Tomatoes instead of 20%). The reason this movie sucked was mainly due to something writers have zero control over: bad directing.

This film was botched on the directing end pretty much from the very first frame, when we get an absolutely unnecessary flash-forward (which was added to the script for God knows what reason) showing a future without internet or something. It did NOTHING for the story except make an already dangerously slow first act five minutes slower.

But here’s the real issue. Pfister has spent the majority of his career being a technician. His job is to capture an image. Directing, on the other hand, is a creative role, requiring thought and inventive choices and imagination and inspiration.  Pfister never figured that out, and therefore approached directing like a technician would.

Look at Transcendence: Everything was “technically” okay here. The effects shots were fine. The cinematography was pretty good. The lighting was fine. Actors stood where they were supposed to stand and delivered their lines when they were supposed to deliver them.

But that’s not what a director is supposed to do. A director must elevate the material on the page. And Pfister was only interested in transferring the material from the page. For example, one of the most important things a director must do is get performances out of his actors. There were zero performances in Transcendence. Not a single one. Every single actor in this movie played THE EXACT SAME EMOTION. Which was downtrodden/sad/reserved. I have never seen a movie where every character acted so similarly.

Also, the dangerous thing about a character who is downtrodden/sad/reserved is that if you play that emotion wrong, it comes off as “bored.” And for that reason, every single actor in this movie looked bored. They looked unengaged. It was almost like there was a meeting beforehand to drive home the point that nobody was to emit any emotion during this movie. Ever. Just look sad and deliver your lines in a monotonous voice.

“Hi, I’m Agent Bored.” “And I’m Agent Sad.”

The question was: Was this problem there in the script or just in the movie? It’s been awhile since I read the script, but I remember a more vivid and varied cast. I remember more personality in the characters. And again, I remember all the subtext that played out in that love triangle. With that gone, and everyone pretty much speaking on-the-nose, surface-level sentences to one another, it was hard to find any drama anywhere. This means you had flat performances delivering flat lines inside flat relationships. That right there is Transcendence in a nutshell.

Now, there was one big script mistake that I didn’t notice the first time around that I’m kicking myself for. And it’s a biggie. In fact, it’s one of the most destructive things you can do to your screenplay – a succubus that can destroy your script from the inside-out. Evelyn, our main character, was passive/reactive (aka the old passive protagonist problem – PPP). It’s almost impossible for a script to overcome a passive protagonist, and Transcendence shows why.

EVELYN NEVER DOES ANYTHING! She never instigates anything. She never activates anything. She never goes after anything. When your main character doesn’t do anything other than wait around for other people to make choices or do things, we will get bored with her.  We will get annoyed by her.  We will build up anger towards her, quietly thinking with each passing minute, “Why aren’t you DOING anything???”  And that is exactly what happened here.

In fact, Evelyn is so unengaged that we begin to wonder if she really is the main character. Max, Will’s friend, is the one trying to stop all of this, but even HE’S passive in the way he goes about it, allowing RIFT to come to him and suggest they rescue her. So that’s two out of our three main characters who aren’t doing anything but waiting for others to tell them what to do.

That leaves Will. Will is active, but it’s never clear WHAT he’s actively trying to do. He’s building something… but why? We’re not sure. In the script, where we have action scenes of RIFT attacking Will, we’re distracted enough that we don’t really care that much. But now, with there being virtually no action at all, we’re a lot more aware that Will’s creation doesn’t seem to have a point.

Finally I was reminded, after reading and then watching the film, that seemingly trivial logic issues on the page become INTENSELY MAGNIFIED on the screen. When you read, your brain is more active, as it needs to construct the images of the story you’re reading. When you watch a movie, however, it’s more of a passive experience and because of that, your brain has more time to ask questions, to wonder. Indeed, I couldn’t stop wondering WHY THE HELL the U.S. Army wasn’t trying to get rid of Will’s mini-fortress??? If it was really as dangerous as they were saying, why only send a second-tier local FBI agent to fix the problem??

So what does this all mean? Well, I think the badness that is Transcendence can be blamed equally on the director and the final shooting script. Wally Pfister did not infuse a single scene with life. NOT ONE! And that’s not hyperbole. Go watch this and point out one scene that was inspired. You can’t.

But you can’t discount that script issues played a part in the problem. Like the choice to eliminate the love story, the lack of any real set pieces (which was a strength in the original script), instituting a passive main character, and allowing heavy logic issues to slip through the development phase.

If there’s anything I learned here, it’s that if it feels like a minor problem on the page, it’s going to be a HUGE PROBLEM on the screen. Get it fixed or be embarrassed once you see all those glossy eyes at the premiere.

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

What I learned: Something else I learned here was the importance of CHARACTER VARIATION. Every character here emitted the same downbeat serious demeanor and it absolutely killed the movie. Without variation in character, characters can’t contrast. Without contrast, everyone feels like a clone, a walking copy of one another. Have someone get angry. Have someone be funny. Have someone be crazy. Have someone be awkward. But whatever you do, don’t have everybody be exactly alike.