Genre: Cop/Procedural
Premise: (from Black List) Four hardened New York detectives race to apprehend a relentless spree-killer who’s executing victims from Queens to Southampton in the span of a single day.
About: This script finished in the middle of the 2011 Black List with 10 votes. Co-writer Alex Paraskevas has one produced credit, the 2005 Jason Patric movie, Walker Payne. Jordan Goldberg has a bit of a more interesting past.  He wrote on the animation series, Batman: Gotham Knight, and seems to be in tight with Christopher Nolan, as he co-produced and associate produced The Prestige, The Dark Knight, Inception, and The Dark Knight Rises.
Writer: Alex Paraskevas and Jordan Goldberg
Details: 116 pages

One of the problems with watching the Gangnam Style video 642 times in a weekend is that you begin to lose touch with reality.  Nothing you do or see is quite good enough when compared to a deranged Korean pop star sitting on a toilet belting his heart out.  This has particularly hurt my reading, as I find myself bored by the simplicity of black words on a white page.  I want color.  Lots and lots of color!  And grown men having dance-offs in underground parking lots.

Which is probably why Gun Eaters was the worst possible script for me to read this weekend.  I do this thing where I pick out a Black List script without knowing anything about it.  I’ve found some really awesome scripts this way – namely because it’s fun to figure out the premise as I go along.  But as soon as I realized this was a cop procedural, I deflated.

Procedurals have become such a staple in the television world that it’s nearly impossible to do anything new with them.  Therefore, if you’re going to write a movie procedural, it better have some unique-ass angle to it – something that warrants people paying 10 bucks for it instead of just staying home and watching one of the two-dozen procedural shows they can see on TV.

Sadly, Gun Eaters was not the exception to the rule.  The script follows two cops, 29 year old Detective Berendan Byrne and 48 year old vet, Detective Warren Salvo.  The two cops couldn’t be more different.  Byrne is young and idealistic, the kind of cop that makes all the other cops look bad, and Salvo is the grizzly vet who gave up that idealism a long time ago.  As he puts it, he’s learned that you’re never going to be able to win this war.  Your goal is simply to break even.

The two get put on a case where a man’s body parts have been dropped all over the city.  That’s usually…not good.  They soon find out that the man was an employee of Youngerman Health Incorporated, a company that went belly up after it was revealed that their CEO, Quentin Youngerman, was embezzling lots of money.

Blahbity blah blah, more people start dying, also employees of this company, and it’s eventually revealed that Youngerman was the main health insurance provider for all the city workers.  Once he went bye-bye, all these families started going bankrupt because they couldn’t pay their medical bills.  One would suspect, as our cops do, that their killer was probably one of these city workers.

BUT!  It turns out it goes much deeper than that.  When Salvo gets attacked one on one by the killer (who’s behind him so he doesn’t see his face), he notices that the gun he’s using is police issued.  Our killer’s a cop!  Duh-duh-duh-duhhhh!!!  Not only that, but he appears to be working with OTHER COPS.  Once Salvo and Byrne realize this, they’ve gotta find a way to get Youngerman to safety since he appears to be the ultimate target.  But how do you find safety for someone if you can’t use any of your police resources?  And the even more frightening question:  Can Byrne and Salvo trust each other??

So to be straight up here, my biggest fears were realized.  I just didn’t think this plot was worth writing about.  It’s a very average.  Very unspectacular.  A killer’s out there killing people.  And his reason is…something about health insurance???  I mean is it just me or is that uninspired?

And I’m still trying to make sense of it.  The people who were affected by the company going under were government workers, right?  Okay, so, if a company insured by the government is responsible for someone’s health benefits and they go belly-up, doesn’t the government still pay those benefits?  I mean they don’t just say, “Oops, we trusted the wrong company.  Wish we woulda done better research.  Sorry guys!”  They still pay the medical bills, right?  So is anybody really affected here?

On top of that, the cop pairing was forced conflict to the extreme.  The two cops hated each other because…because that’s how these movies work!  The partners have to hate each other!  I’m not opposed to conflict, of course.  Conflict is good!  I just pointed out how much End Of Watch sucked because the partners had no conflict with one another.  But the conflict has to feel organic.  It can’t just feel like they hate each other because the writer knows it’ll make for better scenes.

If you look at Lethal Weapon, you saw two guys with completely different lives.  One lived in a trailer and grieved every day over his dead wife, a loss that’s made him suicidal.  The other had a huge family with a loving wife and great children.  You could tell why these two wouldn’t get along.  And the cool thing about that Lethal Weapon pairing was that it wasn’t one-note.  The two had issues with each other in the field but actually got along quite well off it.  Their relationship was dynamic as opposed to one-note, as was the pairing here in Gun Eaters.

I guess I was just waiting for something unique to happen and it never did.  People have noted that I’ve been giving tons of “wasn’t for mes” lately and the reason is…well…I haven’t been reading any good scripts!  It seems like everything I read is either sloppy or really predictable.  And the scary thing is, these are both elements that can be addressed with EFFORT.

Sadly, this is yet another subpar script.  Hopefully the Wachowskis bring some game tomorrow.  I’m STARVING for a good screenplay.

What I Learned: In regards to the two issues I mentioned above.  Sloppiness (which wasn’t a problem in Gun Eaters, but in other screenplay I’ve reviewed recently) is mainly about lots of rewriting and making sure your reader always understands what your characters are going after at all times.  And predictability comes down to challenging yourself – constantly asking yourself, “Have I seen this choice before?”  “Have I seen this idea before?”  “Have I seen this scene before?” “Have I seen this character before?”  If you’re answering “yes” to a lot of those questions, chances are you’re writing another “been there, done that” script.

A good blogger never lies.  So I’m not going to lie to you today.  Last night I watched the video for Gangnam Style 213 times.  I just…I just couldn’t stop.  I memorized the lyrics.  Practiced the dance moves.  Wikipedia’d “Psy.”  And you know what?  I feel like I’ve learned something.  So much so that I almost ditched today’s script review to review the Gangnam Style video instead.  However, I realized that the video was so amazing that no amount of analysis could do it justice.  It would get a [xx] genius rating without question.  I mean the video not only makes a profound statement about horse dancing (one that puts the Chik-Fil-A debate to shame), but also the power of “sexay lady.”  It teaches us that when you have a “sexay laday” dancing next to you, you can act like a total lunatic and it doesn’t matter.  These are life lessons we’re learning here, kids.  Life lessons.

Where does that leave us today?  With a script that has a really tough act to follow, that’s where.  The last 12 hours have brought me so much joy, that La Mujer would have to take me through a life’s worth of emotions and back again if it was going to have a shot at “worth the read” status.

I will now channel the elevator shot from Gangnam Style to review La Mujer.

La Mujer is about…well…La Mujer!  A beautiful “sexay laday” who walks around South America whispering profound statements into people’s ears that change their lives for the better.  We don’t hear any of these profound statements – not yet anyway – we just see people’s eyes light up and their world’s rocked.

In the meantime, we meet Thomas Kemp, a journalist for the New York Times who seems to be going through some mid-life crisis.  Despite having tons of work to do, he’s obsessed with finding his birth records, to the point where he assigns an intern to take care of his work while he heads down to South America to find them.

Unfortunately for Thom, his boss, Clara, doesn’t have…what are those called again?  Oh yeah, FEELINGS!  She could give a shit about Thom’s soul-searching.  It just so happens that a prominent Ecuadorian ambassador, one who was best friends with the U.S. president in college, has been slaughtered, along with his family.  Clara wants Thom in Ecuador now to get the story.

Thom begrudgingly goes, and along the way hears about this La Mujer woman.  She’s becoming a sort of traveling celebrity, instantly changing the lives of everyone she comes in contact with.  Thom thinks that sounds like a much better story than the slaughtering of a prominent family for some reason, and unofficially decides to focus on her.  Maybe she can clear up this whole birth certificate thing he’s been obsessing over while he’s at it.

Problem is, there are some people who don’t like the fact that La Mujer’s alive.  I’m a little unclear on the specifics, but I think she was supposed to be killed some time ago, along with her daughter.  The bad guys who did this, then, are shocked to learn she’s not only alive, but going around whispering in people’s ears!!  So they regroup to find La Mujer and kill her off for good.  Which means if Thom’s going to get the birth certificate thing figured out, he’ll have to move fast!

In the immortal words of Psy, the genius behind the greatest song ever conceived: “Beautiful, lovable, yes you, hey, yes you, hey, beautiful, lovable, yes you, hey, yes you, hey. Now let’s go until the end.  Oppa is Gangnam Style.”

That actually has nothing to do with this review.  I just wanted to quote Gangnam Style.  Anyway, while La Mujer gets some points for its mystery elements, such as who this La Mujer lady is and why is it that everyone freaks out when she whispers in their ear, the script as a whole suffers from two tried and true beginner mistakes which I harp on all the time here at Scriptshadow…

Clarity and Focus.

The story is unclear. The plot is unfocused.  Add those two mistakes together and it’s hard for a script to recover.  Let’s start with the clarity thing.  I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what Thom was looking for.  Something about his birth certificate?  But his birth certificate was being kept from him for some reason?  Maybe because he was adopted?  Did he just find out he was adopted?  Does he only suspect he was adopted?  Or has he always known and just now decided to look into it?  I have no idea.  Because the script is unclear about it.

And because it’s unclear, there are no stakes attached to his success or failure.  If he doesn’t find out who his parents are, what happens to him?  As far as I can tell, nothing.

La Mujer’s storyline is also unclear.  She seems to be roaming the countryside, telling people secrets about themselves that are impossible for her to know, which was a little intriguing.  But where is she going?  What’s her goal?  In the end, she ends up at the home of one of her attackers, but I can’t tell if that’s where she was always going or if she was just wandering around aimlessly and eventually ended up there.

This leads us to the issue of focus – if we don’t know what your characters are doing – what their goals are – then the story is going to seem random to us.  I never knew what La Mujer was doing.  I never knew what Thom was doing.

The only time the script took on any type of focus was when Thom’s boss ordered him to investigate the massacre (which happens around the midway point).  FINALLY, the story seemed to have a clear objective.  Unfortunately, that storyline was dealt with in the same unclear manner as everything else.  There was some confusion as to whether 8 people or 6 people were murdered, but I couldn’t ever figure out what that had to do with anything.  In addition to that, Thom didn’t even care about the investigation, so we had an unclear set of circumstances and an unmotivated protagonist.  Not exactly the stuff great stories are made of.

If I were Steve, this is what I’d do.  Have the massacre happen RIGHT AWAY.  Maybe it’s the first scene of the movie.  Then, have Clara assign the story to Thom, who goes down there to investigate it.  Drop the weird birth certificate stuff.  It was confusing and not very interesting anyway.  What this will do is tell the audience from the get-go that THIS is the story’s focus – the investigation of the massacre.

From there, you can weave in the mysterious La Mujer.  Maybe, on the day of the massacre, a lot of people claim to have seen her around town.  So Thom wants to talk to this girl for his investigation.  Now we’re not playing “Guess the motivation.”  Every plot point is clear from the get-go.  You can still keep La Mujer’s goal a mystery to the audience.  The reason it was a problem before was because both her AND Thom’s objectives were mysteries and it just led to a whole lot of confusion.  Since you’ve established Thom’s goal right away, the audience will be more tolerant of a secondary character being a mystery.

However, make sure that YOU know where La Mujer is going and what she’s doing.  Her ending has to make us go “Ohhhh, of course!” instead of, “Uhhhhh, what??” which is unfortunately how I responded to her climax in this draft.

Script link: La Mujer

What I Learned: When someone complains that your script is “unfocused,” it usually boils down to one of two things – the goal for the main character is unclear, OR, there’s no goal in the first place.  Think about it.  If your main character has a clear objective (or “goal”) then the story automatically stays on track, since the character is focused on achieving that goal.  In La Mujer, Thom does have a goal – to figure out who his parents are I think?  But it’s unclear as hell, so we’re not really invested in it.  This makes the story seem unfocused and we eventually check out.

Genre: Cop/Found Footage
Premise: Two cops (and best friends) begin taping their daily exploits, which include numerous busts and adventures.  But when they’re marked for death by a local gang, they’ll need to count on their friendship like never before to survive.
About: David Ayers (Training Day, The Fast And The Furious, S.W.A.T.) wrote and directed this.  It stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena.
Writer: David Ayers
Details: 97 pages

Training Day is one of my favorite cop movies of all time.  I loved the simplicity of it.  I loved the characters in it.  I loved the twists.  I liked it so much, in fact, that it’s one of the screenplays I feature in my upcoming book.  In addition to that, I liked Ayers’ other breakthrough script, The Fast And The Furious.  Not as much as Training Day, but as a fun summer flick with fast cars and faster characters, it was perfect mindless entertainment.  So I guess you could say I’m a David Ayers fan.  Which means I’ve been looking forward to this one.  But you know what they say about expectations.  Bastards can ruin your afternoon.

First thing we’re told in End Of Watch is that this is recorded footage.  Yup, Ayers is jumping on the found footage train.  And “train” is an appropriate metaphor for this script.  In a world where most screenplays fly, End Of Watch takes forever to get where it wants to go.  And to be honest, I’m still not sure where that is.

24 year old Mike Zavala and 23 year old Brian Taylor (or Dan Taylor as an old script fragment labels him) are partners.  Not life partners but cop partners.  However, they could be life partners because these two looooove each other.  I mean they really really REALLY love each other.  They hang together, drink together, and repeatedly tell one another they’d take a bullet for the other.  This is a polmance if there ever was one.

Taylor is trying to get his law degree and one of his electives is a film class so he’s decided to drag along a camera wherever they go to tape their adventures.  Seeing as they patrol South Central LA, there’s usually an adventure around every corner.

What there isn’t, however, is a plot.  Ayers takes the found footage thing literally and doesn’t seem interested in creating a cohesive storyline.  It’s like one of those weekend warrior dads editing together the family vacation footage.  There’s no form to it, no direction.  Just long drawn out clips of the experience.  Taylor and Zavala question a notorious gang leader, talk about wives and girlfriends, and save a girl from a burning building.  Our movie instincts keep telling us to be patient, that this will all come together at some point, but it doesn’t.  The script is devoid of arcs, form, focus, setups or payoffs.

I guess if there’s a plot focus for the story, it’s the aftermath of the heroic fire rescue (which doesn’t happen until the midpoint).  Afterwards, the two are heralded as heroes and even make the paper.  But neither seems comfortable with it.  They don’t do this for the glory.  They do it because they love their job.  But again, this doesn’t really go anywhere.  I label the section “focused” because it’s the only development in the screenplay that lasts more than three scenes.

Eventually, some gang members get irritated with them because (I think) they’re abusing their power.  Word on the street it that there’s a green light on them, which is gang code for “they’re going to get capped.”  They don’t pay it much mind, though, I guess because they’re having too much fun on the job.  But it’s something they’ll have to deal with when it’s all said and done.  Gangs tend not to go away until bizness is taken care of.

I think I know what Ayers was going for here.  He was going for the most realistic cop movie ever.  He didn’t want things to be bogged down by plot points and story conventions.  He wanted it to feel like we were dropping in on these guys and seeing what it was REALLY LIKE to be them.

I admire that approach.  It’s bold.  But there’s a reason writers rarely try it.  Real or not real, we go to the movies to watch a story.  For whatever reason, randomness just doesn’t go over well with an audience.  Maybe it’s because we’re conditioned to expect the opposite, maybe it’s because if we want randomness, we can get it in our everyday lives, but if a story doesn’t seem to be going in a particular direction, we get impatient, and that was happening to me as early as page 20.  “Okay, what’s the story here?” I kept asking.  But one never showed up.

This can sometimes work if the characters are amazing, but that was another problem with End Of Watch.  The characters weren’t amazing.  They were barely even average.  I guess Zavala’s character was fun, but the big problem here is that these two LOVE EACH OTHER.  They stroke each other the whole movie.  They laugh, they celebrate, tell each other how great the other is.

In other words, there’s NO CONFLICT in the central relationship of the movie!  Therefore, all of their conversations are boring.  I don’t care how good of a writer you are.  If you don’t have some element of conflict in your scenes, it’s almost impossible to write good dialogue. And that’s where End Of Watch suffered.

I mean look at Training Day.  Because of the heavy amount of conflict between lead characters Alonzo and Jake, the dialogue was a blast!  Alonzo was always pushing Jake.  Jake could never impress Alonzo.  Jake was always nervous around Alonzo.  Alonzo would tell Jake to do things he didn’t want to do.  Go watch that movie again.  Every single scene is steeped in some kind of imbalance, in some kind of conflict between the main characters.  Which is what made it so fun.

End Of Watch doesn’t have that.  And if you don’t have a plot and you don’t have any conflict between your leads…that’s a big hole to pull yourself out of.  I hope Ayers’ directing vision is able to override some of these weaknesses, but in script form, “Watch” is a disappointment. :(

What I Learned: One of the easiest ways to juice up dialogue is through conflict.  Create an imbalance between two characters (one wants one thing, the other wants another) and you’ll find the dialogue writes itself.  If you have two characters without that imbalance, you’re forced to try and write clever fun “chummy chummy” dialogue between them, which can work for a scene or two, but rarely has the weight to last an entire screenplay.

Genre: Crime/Period
Premise: A gang lord in 1949 Los Angeles becomes so big that the only way the cops can handle him is to go off-book and wage a war against his empire.
About: I think Gangster Squad is based on a bunch of real articles from 1940s Los Angeles newspapers.  But it may also be a book, as the script says it’s based on “Tales Of The Gangster Squad” by Paul Lieberman.  Either way, the story is adapted by author Will Beall, who burst onto the screenwriting scene with his script L.A. Rex (another LA war script – this one set in the present), which one of my other reviewers, Roger Balfour, loved, and which made the 2009 Black List.
Writer: Will Beall (based on the book by Paul Lieberman).
Details: 3/11/2011 draft.  (It should be noted that this draft is newer than the main one that’s floating around out there.  So this script might be slightly different from the one you’ve read).

I’ve been hearing about this one forrrrrrever.  And the word on it?  GREAT.  But I haven’t read any scripts by Will Beall yet because peripherally (hearing about him through others) his writing sounds like a bit of a loose cannon.  He makes up rules as he goes along, bolds, underlines, italicizes way too liberally, delves into the dreaded dual-line dialogue more than a fat man hangs out at Mickie D’s, and generally favors style over substance.

BUT…I admit that’s my take from afar.  And forming opinions on people before you meet them?  That’s so high school.  So it was time to see what Beall was about on my own  And time to see if this script was as good as everyone said it was.

Mickey Cohen is a naughty naughty guy.  When he doesn’t like someone, he ties them up to the back of two Cadillacs and has each drive in the opposite direction.  Why?  Because Mickey wants it all.  And he wants to instill fear in every single entity in LA so he can have it all.  He’s got the cops.  He’s got the judges.  No one fucks with Mickey Cohen.

And if you do manage to catch him in the act?  Well, he’s got the best lawyers money can buy too.  Guys like Mickey NEVER go down.

Which is what the LA police realize.  They see that this man is slowly turning Los Angeles into a steaming pile of trash.  And if they wait around any longer, they’ll be driving the dump trucks.   The guy who knows this more than anybody is Sergeant John O’Mara, one of the only clean cops left in the city.  He and his superiors come up with an idea.  If they can’t stop Cohen legally, why not attack him at his own game?  Why not put together a vigilante police unit, one that doesn’t have to abide by the rules and regulations cops are bound to, to, pardon my french, fuck them up Old Testament style?

O’Mara is in.  Now it’s a matter of finding his team.  He grabs: A tech expert, the first black lieutenant in the department, the “deadliest cop in LA,” a young Mexican cop eager to prove himself, and a wild card dude who isn’t sure which side he wants to play for.  The team goes in hard, hitting up Micky’s deliveries and anything else he has his dirty paws in.

Mickey, along with everybody else, is just confused.  I mean, who the hell attacks Mickey Cohen??  The most feared man on the West Coast!!  But after he gets over his shock, he realizes these mystery dudes are a real threat, and he gets all his little horses and all his little men riled up for one specific purpose – to take them down.

Who’s going to win this one?  Mickey?  Or the Gangster squad?

I know this is going to upset people, but this script was kinda designed for me to hate it.  Period crime dramas aren’t really my thing, but a good story is a good story, no matter where it’s set or who it centers around.  Case in point.  I’ve been reading Ken Follet’s novel, “Pillars Of The Earth,” set in the year 1100, about a mason looking for work in a world that doesn’t have any for him.  If there’s ever a subject matter I was designed to dislike, it would be this one.  And yet, it had me from the first page.

The novel starts with the hanging of an innocent man.  It’s a heartbreaking and heart-pounding scene.  This is followed by the mason and his family losing their only lifeline, a pig they saved up for all year, stolen by an outlaw, who belts their daughter with a hammer to complete the crime.  Subsequently, the family follows him to town and comes up with a plan to attack the man to get their money back.  After another heartbreaking failure, the now homeless family is forced to live in the woods as outlaws.  The pregnant wife soon gives birth to a child and dies in the process.  The mason decides to leave the newly born baby in the woods to die, since there’s no way to feed him.  Every once of these sequences just grabs you and yanks you in.

The point being, Follet uses basic character-focused storytelling to transcend subject matter, to make you connect with and care for the characters.  After someone belts a little girl with a hammer, who doesn’t want to see the family get the villain back?  Take them down?  I never saw any of that with the characters in Gangster Squad.  I mean, they’re much better written than yesterday’s entry, “Oz The Great And Powerful.”  But even the big dog, O’Mara – I only knew the basics about the guy. He was a clean cop and was in the war and…well, that’s it.  He was a clean cop who was in the war.  Not exactly a five star motivation.

But the real problem here is the endless number of characters.  I stopped counting but I’m guessing there’s somewhere around 40.  How am I supposed to keep track of 40 characters??  All the obvious problems popped up as a result.  I’d constantly forget who was who and have to go back and check, leading to dozens of read interruptions, a cardinal sin in writing (A reader should never feel like he’s working to figure out what’s going on).  After awhile I got sick of having to stop every two pages so I just kept reading, even though I wasn’t 100% sure who I was reading about (writers should know this happens all the time.  At a certain point, a reader just gets sick of having to check back on stuff, and barrels forward without exactly knowing who’s who – At this point, your script is usually screwed.  So always make sure every character is distinct and memorable!)

The real problem with this though is that the more characters you add, the less time you have to develop the key characters in your story.  A character is going to come off a lot more interesting if you have 40 pages to develop him as opposed to, say, 15, which is what I’m guessing the 6-7 key characters in Gangster Squad got.

This can be done (and needs to be done with Gangster movies, which are usually character heavy), but it basically amounts to figuring out ways to make characters relatable and interesting and deep in 1/4 the amount of time you usually have.  And only the most skilled writers can pull that off.

The thing is, the idea for GS is cool.  I love the notion of a team of cops putting down their badges to wage a war against a kingpin because that’s the only way they can defeat him. That’s a movie I want to see.  If we only would’ve focused MORE on that group, and not the thousands of other little subplots and characters instead.  Get to know each of those guys intimately, care about them, and then send them off against Cohen.  I mean that’s how they did it in The Godfather and that worked out okay.

BUT! As we all know, this is a preference I get attacked for all the time.  It’s the reason I didn’t like Dark Knight Rises.  I like clean narratives where I’m not confused 30% of time about what’s going on.  Some writers like to take the more ambitious “epic” route and some readers/audience members enjoy the larger canvas as they like having to work for their meal.  I dig that kind of story if the writing’s clear enough to handle the larger tapestry.  But I didn’t personally see that here.

On the flip side, the dialogue in GS is top-notch, and I’m guessing that’s why a lot of people love it so much.  It is SO HARD to create authentic fun crackling dialogue for period crime pieces.  Believe me, I’ve read plenty of scripts where the writer couldn’t come up with a single convincing sentence of dialogue from that era, so I know.  Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough for me to join the Gangster Squad.  I think I’m going to go see what Mickey Cohen’s doing.

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

What I learned: I will say this until the day I die.  The more characters you add, the less time you’ll have to develop your protagonist (and other key characters). So think long and hard before adding that new character.  Do you really need him?  Can you use one of the characters you already have instead?  We’d much rather learn more about your hero than endure two scenes of Random Dude #5.