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AI be coming for our jobs.

Will it succeed?

I don’t know. I still don’t think it will ever grasp the kind of honest authentic character development that good scripts have. Then again, a lot of regular writers struggle with creating honest authentic characters as well.

Either way, it got me thinking, how do we defeat AI as screenwriters?

I think I know the answer.

You see, the reason AI is good at mimicking most of screenwriting is because a screenplay is the second most mathematical of the writing mediums (the first being poetry). And that’s what AI is good at. It’s good at recognizing patterns and structure and mimicking them.

However, what I’ve learned over time is that the scripts that stand out the most are the ones that have an X-FACTOR. They have some invisible secret sauce that CAN’T BE MEASURED, which makes them stand out in some way.

When a writer taps into an x-factor, the read stops feeling like a script and starts feeling like an experience. It’s like you’re really there, that you’re being taken on a journey that’s so unique, you know you’ll never be taken on that same journey again for as long as you live.

And if you want to take it to its logical conclusion, you can say that the x-factor is what gives your script a SOUL. Guess what? No matter how hard AI tries, it will never be able to inject a screenplay with a soul.

So, the trick, then, is to simply LEARN ALL OF THE X-FACTORS available to you and make sure you’re applying one of them to whatever script you’re currently working on. You can then sleep peacefully knowing that AI will never be able to replicate what you do.

Now, before I get into what those x-factors are, I want to highlight a recent example of an x-factor script. And by “x-factor script” I mean a script that cannot be replicated by AI. That script is “Goblin.” Goblin is a recent spec script sale that I reviewed in my newsletter about a young man who learns that his father has a goblin chained up in their basement.

Whether you liked this script or not, YOU WILL REMEMBER IT. You will remember it far more vividly than you’ll remember Monday’s script, Road Test. When you’re trying to quantify what an x-factor is, the differences between these two scripts – Goblin and Road Test – are the perfect example of the difference between what AI can replicate and what it can’t

With that in mind, let’s identify what all of the known x-factors are.

X-FACTOR #1 – IGNORANCE

Ever wonder why a lot of a screenwriter’s best work occurs early on in their career? A solid chunk of the reason is that they didn’t know what they were doing. And when you don’t know what you’re doing, you do things “the wrong way.” Ironically, when you do something the wrong way, it’s more original than doing it “the right way.”

Christopher McQuarrie famously said that he couldn’t write The Usual Suspects today because he was so new to screenwriting when he wrote it that he didn’t know the rules you were supposed to abide by. So he made “mistakes,” and some of those mistakes were heralded as what made the script so good. These days, he would follow the “proper” formula, and his screenplays are lesser for it.

Let’s not pretend that ignorance is the be-all end-all advantage, though. It mostly results in making your script worse. But it does occasionally send you down an “incorrect” path that leads to gold. Or, at the very least, originality.

There’s this old 90s romantic comedy called Say Anything (it’s the one where John Cusack holds the boom box over his head playing Peter Gabriel’s “Your Eyes”) and in that movie is this really weird subplot about the girl’s father stealing money from the old people’s home he runs. It’s odd. It’s miscalculated. Cameron Crowe never would’ve written it ten years later. But it’s also what helps make that movie unique and stand out.

Now, we cannot go back in time and become ignorant about screenwriting again. But we can retain the spirit of that approach and mimic ignorance in places. Stop holding your screenwriting “musts” so tightly. You don’t have to hit every single Blake Snyder beat at the pre-established page number. If you have an idea you want to explore in your story, but know that, in the past, it hasn’t worked, well, that may not be true for this script. You won’t know until you try. So don’t be such a stickler. You have to take risks somewhere in your scripts or else, I promise, your script will never be very good.

X-FACTOR #2 – VOICE

If you have an original voice, that is the most common x-factor that elevates your script above the competition. “Voice” is basically the unique way in which you see the world and your ability to capture that when you write.

The Daniels (Everything Everywhere All At Once), for example, run towards chaos when they write. They embrace absurdity and their scripts are often about the attempts to bring balance to that absurdity. It stands out because nobody else writes in that specific lane in that specific way.

But voice can be hard to manufacture if it doesn’t come naturally. I remember interviewing a writer once and I asked him how he came up with his writing voice. He said he didn’t know he had a voice until people told him he did. That’s voice. It’s so wrapped up in who you are that you’re not aware you sound different from others.

Voice can be found in THE WAY YOU WRITE as well as WHAT YOU CHOOSE TO WRITE ABOUT. If you write animated, conversational, rapid fire conversations, like Quentin Tarantino, that’s how you stand out through the written word. But you can also choose to write about something very specific, like having sex after car crashes, as David Cronenberg did in his 1996 film, Crash. Even if you didn’t infuse voice into the written word, that script will still have voice due to the fact that the subject matter the writer is writing about is so unique.

And to prove to you just how valuable voice is in its battle against AI, can you imagine any AI coming up with Pulp Fiction or Crash? You can’t. AI would never touch either of those stories nor would it know what to do if it were forced to write them.

X-FACTOR #3 – MESSINESS

Another part of this x-factor journey, I’m realizing, is messiness. Usually, the scripts that I celebrate the most are messy in places. As much as I love a strong structure, if you wring that structure too tightly around your story, it becomes a noose. It becomes this predictable formulaic drag that we feel like we’ve seen hundreds of times already.

It’s a slippery slope, I know. Cause I read plenty of scripts where the writers are too loose with their structure, and those scripts are terrible in their own way. But, usually, that’s because the writer did it by accident. They didn’t know what they were doing. If you’re a seasoned writer and understand the value of structure, I believe you can figure out just how loose you can make some of the sections so that the script breathes like a living beautiful thing.

X-FACTOR #4 – POINT-OF-VIEW

If you present a story idea to AI—let’s say it’s a procedural setup where someone has been murdered and a detective starts looking into it, AI is going to explore that setup through the most obvious point-of-view. It’s going to tell the story from the point of view of the cop, of the killer, or both. What AI is not going to do is tell the story from the point-of-view of the killer’s dog, which is the setup for the script at the top of the 2023 Black List, “Bad Boy.”

But point-of-view isn’t just about concept. It’s everything and everywhere. When you write a scene, you have the choice to write it from any point-of-view you want. When the Justice Gang takes on a giant monster in the middle of the city in “Superman,” 9 out of 10 writers are going to tell that scene through the point-of-view of the Justice Gang. But what does James Gunn do? He shows that fight through the point-of-view of Clark and Lois, who are in her apartment high-rise, casually chatting while the fight takes place in the window behind them.

Not enough writers utilize point-of-view in interesting ways. Yet it’s sitting there for each and every one of you to take advantage of.

X-FACTOR #5 – PASSION

Scott convinced me of this one in the comments yesterday. This specific line he wrote caught my attention: “Cause you can always tell when someone is not passionate about something. The utilitarian workmanship vibe is evident.” Nothing could be truer. When you’re not passionate about the script you’re writing, you are as close to mimicking AI as a human gets. All you care about is hitting the beats. Is putting the puzzle together so you can move on.

Meanwhile, if you’re extremely passionate about something, you will explore every little crevice of it and you will include every gold nugget you find during those explorations. Your script will sing in a different key than a script without passion. This is the best area to focus on if all of these other X-factors are beyond you. By simply loving your story, you will write something that’s more powerful than anything AI could. Even when I don’t like a passionate script, I’ve never not been able to feel the passion on the page. And, at the very least, the script resonates.

X-FACTOR #6 – A STRANGE HOOK

What you’re looking for here is a strange or offbeat idea that’s still accessible. The best example ever of this is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The idea is offbeat for sure – People get portions of their minds erased so they don’t have to remember the pain of having their hearts broken. And it’s accessible. I mean, who hasn’t had their heart broken?

A lesser known example would be Colossal, about a woman who discovers that, when she gets blackout drunk, she’s mysteriously controlling a giant monster wreaking havoc in Korea. It’s obviously an offbeat idea. But, at its core, it’s a movie about alcoholism and learning to control addiction. Trust me – AI will never be able to write either of these movies. Which is why you want to learn how to excavate those strange hooks from your subconscious. Just the other day I saw a trailer for a movie about a guy who lives next to this intersection that has an unusually high number of car crashes. That’s another strange hook there is no risk of AI stealing from you.

X-FACTOR #7 – GOING OFF THE RESERVATION

Finally, the last way to tap into your inner x-factor is to go completely off the reservation with your story. Whatever the setup is, take it as far as you can take it. Then, take it further. And when you get to the end of wherever that is, keep going. We just had one of these movies hit the theater – The Substance. Look at where that script began and where it ended. Coraline wrung every ounce of story out of that setup.

Another example would be the Black List script, Roses, about a guy who takes his girlfriend to a remote house with a swimming pool. He then learns that whenever you swim in the pool, you replicate, and what comes out is a copy of you, that’s a little messier than the original. Once the copies start playing in the pool, creating copies of copies, this script goes so far off the reservation, it’s no longer on the same continent.

These probably aren’t the only x-factors available to you. In fact, if you can think of any other x-factors, include them in the comments. The more of these we know, the more we’ll be able to combat the evil that is AI Screenwriter. :)

The Scriptshadow Mega-Showdown Screenwriting Contest is Coming August 1! You have until July 31st to enter. Here are the submission details. And it’s free!

Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: A biologist is recruited to go back into “The Zone,” an inhospitable super rain forest, where her mentor disappeared 20 years ago.
About: This book was purchased by Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes, which means it will be a Paramount movie. This is your monthly reminder that Paramount is the little kid on the block, at least for now (I don’t know what they’ll be when they get purchased by Skydance). The little kid on the block has to take risks, which, in Hollywood terms, means they have to purchase original material or “original-adjacent” material, such as today’s book (a tiny sci-fi story no one knew about until it was purchased). Therefore, they’re a great studio to target if you’ve got a spec script with a genre angle. Platinum Dunes (A Quiet Place), in particular, is aces in this category.
Writer: Adrian Tchaikovsky
Details: 95 pages

This is the second novella I’ve reviewed in two weeks. The other was Collision, by Don Winslow. I think this is the much better format for adapting movies. Short stories are glorified trailers. Whereas, with a novella, you can get into the meat of your story. And they’re probably about 20% longer than screenplays, which means you’ve got room to cut, rather than having to come up with a bunch of stuff to put in.

We’re at some point in the near future. Doctor Jasmine Marks, a biologist, has become a recluse over the years, after the trauma she endured in “The Zone” two decades ago. She was part of a team sent to an ultra-tropical region on the planet to figure out if it would be possible to tame it, possibly for farming purposes.

But her boss, Dr. Elaine Fell, walked deep into the jungle one day and never came back . Which was better than what happened to the rest of the team. Some didn’t even make it out alive.

Now, 20 years later, Marks works from home. One day, she’s approached by the assistant of a very rich man named Mr. Glasshower. Glasshower flies Marks out and says that someone went into The Zone and they’re putting together a team to find them. They need Marks’ scientific expertise to help.

A couple of days later, two dozen people are flying into The Zone, which is like a super-intense version of a rain forest. You can’t even walk there without a special suit because the unique conditions will cook your body from the inside out.

We find that out immediately when, the day after they get there, the tent that houses all the military people breaks and everyone in it dies. Glasshower is not giving up, though. He insists that they move on to find this missing person. Marks is incredulous but what is she going to do? She has no ability to call anyone herself. So, deeper into The Zone they go.

A day later, they see a strange looking green man and, in a bout of shock, shoot him. He dies and they inspect his body to find that he looks to have adapted to The Zone somehow. This is when Glasshower comes clean.

They were never going in here to find a wayward individual. Glasshower has information that suggests Dr. Elaine Fell went underground and has been breeding people who can live in The Zone. What that means is that they’re going to continue traveling into this hellhole, a la Apocalypse Now, until they find her… and then kill her.

You know, it’s too bad that Rian Johnson destroyed the word “subversion.” Because it’s actually an effective writing tool. One of my favorite things writers do is set you up for a journey you’re familiar with, only to pull the rug out from under you, leaving you dazed and confused.

Saturation Point is a total “Aliens” clone in its first act. I was struggling to stay invested due to the fact that everything about the setup was exactly like Aliens, down to the female specialist who had been there before and knew how to cope, and experienced a tragedy to boot. And then the military group that comes with them.

So, when we finally get to the Zone and go to sleep, preparing for our first day of work, you could call me shocked when the first words written the next day were, “They were all dead.” All the military dudes died because they didn’t airtight-clog their tent. As soon as that happened, I was in!

But no sooner had I pledged my undying loyalty to this book, than it began a committed campaign to make me change my mind.

One of the big issues in this story – and it’s an issue I see a lot – is that the main character isn’t active enough. Instead, she’s observant. She watches everyone do things from a distance instead of doing things herself.

I understand why this happens. It can be hard to inject your hero into the mix. It forces you to disturb the carefully processed story you’re trying to tell. There’s something nice and pleasant about sitting on the sidelines and allowing your hero to log every little moment that everyone else experiences, only occasionally popping in to give a brief opinion or, in more rare occasions, advice.

Also, it’s easy to convince yourself, as the writer, that later on in the story, your hero will be plenty active. Because they have to be! The shit’s going to hit the fan and they’ll have no choice but to get involved.

But that’s the trick. When a character has no choice but to get involved, they’re still not being active. They’re being reactive, which is a step down from activity. And it paints your hero as someone who’s not really a hero. They’re just trying to survive.

So the fact that Marks is so casual throughout the majority of this story is frustrating at best and infuriating at worst.

I suppose this is more common in books, where, sometimes, you use your main character as a narrator. That maybe works if you’re writing Love in the Time of Cholera. But when you’re writing a team of people going into the shit where some enemy is going to attack you, you probably want your hero to be active.

I’ve learned this the hard way. I was one of these people who, when I wrote a story, I would play up all the other characters while my hero was over here being the least interesting person of the bunch.

I don’t know why I rationalized this as okay because I’d read all of the advice on the internet about strong active protagonists. I think I felt that just being the center of the story was enough. Which is not true. We, the audience, don’t like someone just because they’re the most featured person in the story. You have to give us reasons to like them. And probably the best way to do that is to make them active – to have them carve their own path as opposed to being hitched on the trailer of your plot and dragged along for the ride.

Back to the story itself.

With these types of stories, the thing that has to work best is: WHAT’S IN THE JUNGLE? What, ultimately, are you going to find? Because if it’s too lightweight or esoteric, the audiences who like these movies are going to be disappointed. Saturation Point reminds me a lot of Anihilation in that sense. We go into this weird place where strange things happen. But there is no clear face to the threat. It’s not like Predator, where we understand what we’re up against. The audience needs that.

You could make the argument that the real antagonist here is nature and, like, global warming or something.  But while that may fly in your college English 101 class, it’s likely to piss off the people who plunked down 20 bucks to see something cool.

I would go so far as to say the enemies they came up with for this story were the stupidest enemies they could’ve possibly come up with. They were basically little green people who shot arrows. LITTLE GREEN PEOPLE WHO SHOT ARROWS! Not exactly face-hugging aliens. Before they showed up, I would’ve given this book a “worth the read.” But the second they showed up, it was dunzoes.

We talk about creative choices on this site. And how important it is to come up with strong ones for the pillars of your story. I would go so far as to say this was the worst creative choice they could’ve possibly come up with for the enemy. It destroyed the book and it’s shocking to me that any author would believe it was a good choice.

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

What I learned: As writers, we are inherently voyeurs of life. We observe things around us so that we can write about them. Our biggest weakness is that we transfer that “observer” nature onto our main characters. We, essentially, turn them into de facto writers. Even if they don’t write for a living, they do something where they’re at a desk alone by themselves. Which is exactly the case with Marks. She’s reclusive. She works at home, at her desk. Much like… A WRITER. But, by doing this, you make your hero inactive. Which is boring. So, as much as it pains you due to the fact that making someone active makes them different from you, it’s better to have an active protagonist. Period.

Genre: Superhero
Premise: When Lex Luthor tries to take over a country in Eastern Europe, it will be up to Superman to stop him.
About: It’s finally here, James Gunn’s Superman, the movie that will launch an entire reboot of DC. Estimates for the opening weekend box office were all over the place. In the end, Superman settled for 120 million dollars. It is currently at an 82% RT score and a 95% Audience score.
Writer: James Gunn (Superman created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster)
Details: 2 hours 9 minutes

It’s been a while since I’ve sat and stared at the blank page this long before a review.

I’m not really sure what to say about this movie.

I guess if you pushed me to give you a definitive verdict, I would say it’s good.

But the more I delve into the specifics, the more hesitant I am to endorse it.

With that said, there are some fun screenwriting discussions to emerge from this movie. So let’s get into it.

Superman has been here on earth for many years and he’s recently gotten into some controversy. He showed up on the border of Boravia and destroyed a lot of stuff to prevent a war. A lot of people around the world are wondering if he’s allowed to do that.

Including Lois Lane! Oh yeah, Clark and Lois are already together. Actually, they’re in a situationship. And she already knows he’s Superman.

A remote-controlled dude who recently beat Superman up was controlled by Lex Luthor and a bunch of his minions. They’ve developed an AI app that’s logged all of Superman’s moves from his past fights and can, therefore, predict what he’s going to do ahead of time, giving them a huge advantage over Supes in any fight.

Meanwhile, Lex is trying to gain control of half of Boravia. Once he gets Superman out of the way, it should be a cakewalk. Especially because Lex has created a “pocket universe” for his secret hideout. Lex eventually snags Superman and places him in a prison in his pocket universe, leaving it up to Lois and the Justice Gang to save him. But once they save him, will it be too late?

The first big screenwriting risk Gunn took here was starting deep into the story. This is not new to screenwriting. It’s known as “in media res.” You throw the reader into a story that’s already going on.

When you do this well, it’s fun because the reader has to play catch-up, which gets their minds spinning right away. However, it’s easy to do poorly. If you’re too far ahead of the reader and you don’t give them enough information about what’s happening, they can get left behind and never catch up. Be ready for the scorn of the reader if that happens.

I know exactly what James Gunn was thinking here. He thought: the audience knows who Superman is. They know who Lex Luthor is. They know this whole mythology like the back of their hand.  So he realized he COULD start the move in media res, and it would be easy for the reader to catch up.

But a bigger question emerges here. Did we start too deep into the story in general? James Gunn loves the original Superman, as do a lot of us. One of the best things about that movie was the interplay between Lois Lane and Clark Kent due to the fact that she didn’t know he was Superman and we did. There are very few opportunities as a screenwriter to play with a dynamic that powerful. And Gunn just threw that all away by having Lois already know Clark was Superman AND to already have them dating.

I think this was a really poor choice as it turned Clark and Lois’s relationship into one of the worst things about the movie. It wasn’t bad. But it was BORING. Which is way worse in my opinion. I did not care about these two AT ALL.  And it clearly goes back to that choice.  Think about their kiss in the movie.  WHO CARES!  They’ve been kissing for months.  Bad decision here by Gunn.

What’s weird about screenwriting is that a bad choice can, ironically, give you good writing opportunities. We all know how challenging exposition can be. Well, by having Clark and Lois already be together, it allowed for this scene where Lois interviews Clark as Superman. It’s one of the better exposition scenes I’ve read all year because it cleverly uses Superman’s dual-identity to add details we wouldn’t have otherwise gotten.  During the interview, if a question was tough, Superman would stop the recorder, transition to Clark, and talk to Lois as her boyfriend (for instance, he might say, “Hey, we talked about this with each other – you agree with me!”  And she’d say, “Yeah, but I’m not talking to Clark.  I’m talking to Superman.”).

I advocate for scenes like this in my dialogue book. Interview-type scenarios (or therapy scenarios) are perfect for covertly disseminating exposition.

Regardless of any reservations I had early in the script, I liked the opening act. I thought it was the best act in the script.

From there, things got sloppy. I know a lot of people have said that this story was overstuffed. I disagree. I didn’t think that was the case at all. I never once couldn’t follow what was going on. Contrast that with the last three Mission Impossible movies where I lost track of what was going on within half an hour.

The problem with this movie was not that it was overstuffed.  It was that the storyline was lightweight. Maybe this is because I’m too “inside” to see this objectively. I know that this movie isn’t just a Superman movie. It’s a movie that needs to launch a 20-film franchise. And, for that reason, I was expecting way higher stakes.

Lex Luthor wants half of some tiny third rate Eastern European country? Who cares? Even if the argument is that that was a decoy move to take out Superman, it still feels small.

James Gunn must navigate a very tricky reality here. He’s trying to go back to basics and tell a great simple superhero story about the greatest superhero ever. But, unfortunately, that’s not the movie world we live in. We’ve seen every superhero imaginable over the last 15 years, many of which raised the stakes from previous films. The audience doesn’t understand going backwards on that.

Another screenwriting paradigm Gunn went up against was how strong to make your hero. This is something we’ve discussed many times on the site. Do you make your hero Robert McCall, in The Equalizer, where he’s so powerful nobody can so much as scratch him? Or do you make your hero Indiana Jones, who constantly fails and gets beaten up and has to work for every inch of what he gets?

Traditional screenwriting thinking says the latter is the better way to go. The more uncertain the reader is that the hero can survive in any moment, the more drama there’s going to be. Think about it. How much drama is there when you know your hero is going to easily win every single time?

So, technically, by making Superman so easy to beat up in this movie (heck, we meet him having been beaten up), you’re making the “right” screenwriting choice.

The problem is that Superman is different. He’s supposed to be THE MOST POWERFUL SUPERHERO OF ALL TIME! And yet he’s getting his ass whipped by predictive AI. It just feels… wrong.

And the thing is, Superman stories have always had this ace up their sleeve to counteract Superman being too powerful.  Kryptonite!  Kryptonite makes it so he’s got to be more clever in how he wins. But, in this movie, he’s already getting his ass kicked multiple times by the time kryptonite enters the equation.

Here’s why it’s a big deal for DC Films. One of the coolest moments in Superman sequels is when Superman finally meets somebody who’s stronger than he is. We didn’t think that was possible. So when the situation arrives, we’re shocked and scared.

But with this Superman not even being able to defeat a glorified robot, you can’t make this moment happen.  No matter who you bring in, it’s now embraced with a shoulder shrug (another super villain who’s going to beat Superman’s ass).  It’s a controversial choice Gunn has made because, again, in a vacuum, it’s the right choice. But for a Superman movie, it’s probably the wrong choice.

I mean, there are two superheroes in this movie, Mr. Terrific and Green Lantern, who are way more powerful than Superman! Is that the smartest creative choice to make?

If you want to make it as a big-budget screenwriter, one of the things that will be required of you is great imagination. Your imagination cannot be on par with everyone else. You need to prove that you are MORE IMAGINATIVE than the average scribe.

Gunn’s big imagination play here was the pocket universe. From a writing perspective, I thought it was clever. But from a movie perspective, it was a fail. It’s a fail because superhero movies have become terrible at creating totally made-up locations. They’re all CGI vomit at this point. But the bigger problem it creates is that we (the audience) have no bearing for what we’re looking at.

It’s like the microscopic universe in Ant-Man 3. We don’t have a single constant to latch onto so it all seems like muck. And when you layer on top of that bad CGI effects, it just feels like we’re in a computer. Superman completely lost me when he was floating down a horrifically fake-looking rainbow river, holding a badly modeled CGI baby. It was the kind of CGI scene you’d expect in a film from 2003. It was just bad. And when something is that poorly constructed, it takes the audience out of the movie.

Contrast this with the fight against the dragon earlier in the film. We have actual bearings in that scene. We see buildings. We see parks. We understand the mechanics of a city. We’re familiar with enough elements in the set piece that we can play along. I wish Gunn had stayed more “real world” with this story. Because it’s Superman. It’s supposed to be pure and simple. It’s not supposed to be pocket universes.

Truth?

The new DC universe is in trouble.

I thought this movie was going to open like gangbusters at 170-180. 120 is not embarrassing but it’s definitely not the number you needed to be at to launch a 20-film franchise. When Iron Man came out, it massively overperformed, which gave Marvel the confidence to go all in with their plan. 120 is the same number as Man of Steel. May I remind you that Man of Steel never even got a sequel.

Maybe that number is just the ceiling for Superman. This is as big as it gets no matter what you do.

I still think this is a good movie. I just wish it had been better.

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

What I learned: Playing with the sexual tension of a potential relationship is one of the more powerful scene engines out there. So, assuming all else is equal, if you have the choice between that or already placing your characters together, go with the sexual tension.

Sometimes, you have to get dirty to convey a great sceenwriting lesson.

Before I get into what I mean, let me share with you the impetus behind today’s article.

I’ve been reading a lot of scripts lately and many of them have this “tame” feel. They’re pleasantly executed stories that never push the hero beyond mild irritability.

The truth is, most scripts are tame. This is because most writers treat their main characters like friends. Cause if they do that, writing the script is like going on a journey with your best friend. And that sounds a lot more fun than going on a journey with your enemy.

Yet, that’s how you should be seeing your hero – as the enemy. Your job, as the writer, is to try and destroy them.

Now, I’ve written several articles about this. And yet I continue to receive these pleasant casual stories where the main character is never pushed far enough.  So I’m obviously not doing my job.

I think I finally found a video that can effectively get my point across.

Now, if you’re afraid of flying, I STRONGLY recommend avoiding this video and the remainder of this article. Cause things get dark. There is no happy ending here.

But, if you can stomach it, it’s one of the most valuable lessons you will ever learn in regards to how to write a great screenplay. So, with that in mind, go ahead and watch it.

If you don’t have half an hour, the video covers a UPS flight out of Dubai where, about 30 minutes into the flight, a fire alarm goes off. What the pilots don’t know yet is that, in their cargo hold, several enormous packs of lithium-ion batteries have caught fire. The video details how they try and get the plane back to the airport while fighting the growing fire, which is so bad, that thick black smoke starts making its way into the cockpit.

Now, before I get into today’s lesson, let’s take note of how perfectly this situation mimics a screenplay. It has the ultimate GSU. A problem arises (a fire), which creates the story’s goal: Get the plane back on the ground. The stakes are enormous (they will definitely die if they fail). And then you’ve got extreme urgency (Estimates are that a plane has roughly 17 minutes to get on the ground once a fire starts before the plane becomes unflyable).

But, there’s a key difference in this story compared to the stories you write. In this story, which is based on a real life event, the heroes do not win. This is not Apollo 13. The two pilots flying the plane die. But not before enduring a harrowing and heroic attempt at survival.

One of the things that struck me while I was watching this story was the number of times the narrator would say something akin to, “But a new problem emerged.” Or, “But things were about to take a horrific turn for the worse.” These phrases kept coming again and again.

It started with the fire alarm. That was the first moment when the pilots realized they were in trouble.

“But things were about to take a horrific turn for the worse.”

Three minutes later is when smoke first enters the cabin, making it difficult for them to see and forcing them to put their oxygen masks on.

“But a new problem emerged.”

The captain realizes that his control column no longer controls the pitch. Which means he can’t steer the plane up or down.

“But things were about to take a horrific turn for the worse.”

The smoke in the cockpit starts getting thicker and thicker, making even small tasks overwhelmingly difficult. Because now they can barely see the control panel in front of them.

“But a new problem emerged.”

The fire has become so bad that it has eaten through the captain’s oxygen tank line, cutting off his oxygen supply. The captain has no choice but to head to the back of the cockpit to get the supplementary oxygen tank. But the toxic black smoke has gotten so thick that he can’t find it and, within seconds, he dies of smoke inhalation.

“But things were about to take a horrific turn for the worse.”

The communications go down. So, the first officer can’t talk to the Dubai control tower to find out where he is. This forces him to call another nearby plane, to relay his messages to a second control tower, which then manually calls the Dubai control tower to ask the question the first officer needs to ask. And then this whole process is reversed to get the information back to the first officer. This, for a situation where every second is precious.

“But a new problem emerged.”

The first officer can’t see out the window or see the instrumentation due to the black smoke and learns, too late, that he’s way too high up to land at Dubai. So he begins a desperate process of getting the plane lower.

“But things were about to take a horrific turn for the worse.”

When he gets the latest info from his wacky communication process, he learns that he is directly over the airport, still at 4000 feet. And he doesn’t have time to loop around and try again. Which means he’ll have to try and land at a nearby secondary airport 10 miles away. The controller gives him the coordinates to put into his plane to get to that airport.

“But a new problem emerged.”

After putting the new heading in, the co-pilot watches, horrifically, as his plane turns in the opposite direction of the second airport. In all the chaos, and because he could barely see the control panel, he accidentally put in the wrong heading, sending the plane in the wrong direction.

And then the final problem emerges. The plane gave out on him, plunging into the desert sand.

Okay, so why am I going into the gory details of this event here? Because here’s the truth of the matter. There were eight “things got worse” moments here, all of which placed our pilots in a more precarious position than they were in before.

In fictional screenplays, the average screenwriter may include ONE “things got worse” moment. The more experienced screenwriter might have TWO. But EIGHT??? Nobody includes eight. Why? Let me explain.

In this recreation, the writer/narrator knows the pilots are going to die. Because of this, he doesn’t have to worry about saving them. All he has to worry about is telling the audience what happened. This allows him to write in as many “things get worse” moments as showed up that day.

If, however, our narrator was creating a *fictional* version of this story, where the pilots had to survive at the end, he probably never would’ve went past the third “things got worse” moment because, the more dire the predicament you place your characters in, the more you have to work, as the screenwriter, to figure out how to get them out of it.

In other words, most screenwriters are terrified of painting their characters into a corner. And, therefore, they make sure to leave a big unpainted trail that allows them to walk to the exit.

What’s the lesson here?

WRITE YOUR MOMENTS LIKE YOUR CHARACTERS ARE GOING TO FAIL AS OPPOSED TO WRITING THEM LIKE THEY’RE GOING TO SUCCEED.

If you have a “characters must succeed” mindset while writing, you subconsciously place protective armor around them to make sure that they can get out of any bad situation they’re in. You mainly do this by limiting the number of bad things that happen to them, or, if there are bad things, you make sure they’re only kind of bad.

But if you write sequences like your characters are going to fail, or, in this case, die, then you’ll keep adding more and more “things get worse” moments. Which digs your characters into deeper and deeper holes. The deeper those holes get, the more captivated the reader gets. Readers are never captivated by a 10 foot hole. They figure the character is going to figure out *some way* to scale those 10 feet. But if you put them in a 100 foot hole?? Now they have NO IDEA how that character is going to succeed.

This will create more work for you on the back end to get them out of that hole. But I promise you, it’ll be more dramatically captivating for the audience.

From now on, when you write your characters into tough situations, which you should be doing many times throughout your screenplay, I want you to remember this video. And ask yourself, “How can I make things even worse for my hero here?” Smoke in the cabin? Let’s make that smoke so thick he can’t see three inches in front of his face. Need to get the plane down? Let’s take his controls away from him. Needs oxygen? Let’s have the fire burn through his oxygen mask.

The more peril you put your hero through, the more captivated we’ll be. :)

Carson gives notes on just about everything related to screenwriting – feature scripts, pilot scripts, first acts, first ten pages, first scenes, loglines, outlines, and e-mail queries.  If you’re interested in getting some help with your writing, shoot him an e-mail at carsonreeves1@gmail.com

One of the more fascinating scripts I’ve read all year!

Genre: Thriller
Premise: A CIA agent must impersonate himself in order to fend off the most daring Russian double-agent plan in espionage history.
About: This was a big 7 figure spec sale that went to Ryan Coogler’s team and Skydance. Writer Aneesh Chaganty is one half of the “Searching” team and a graduate of the Scriptshadow approach to screenwriting (he and his writing partner used to read the site all the time and, to my knowledge, still pop by) so it should be no surprise that I was very into this one.
Writers: Aneesh Chaganty & Dan Frey
Details: 113 pages

Hey, Superman might as well parlay all his buzz into as many sexy projects as possible

Note: This is definitely one of those scripts that you’ll want to read FIRST before reading the review as it has a lot of twists and turns. Someone in the comments may be able to help you find it.

I’ve been reading a ton of scripts lately.

And what I become very sensitive to when I’m reading a lot of scripts is originality.

Is the writer giving you exactly what’s expected? Or are they going above and beyond to outthink you?

Cause that’s part of the job description of being a good writer. You have to outthink the reader.

As one of you just pointed out in the comments yesterday, Jon Watts got lazy writing Spider-Man: No Way Home. He had to come up with a way to bring in the other two Spider-Mans (Toby and Andrew) and he thought it would be a cool idea right after Aunt May’s death to do it right on the top of a building in the middle of New York.

But then he was reading Spider-Man subreddits and saw that someone already came up with that exact assumption of how they would be introduced. The poster even generated an image of it. Jon Watts said, “Well I can’t do that anymore.” And he changed it to what we eventually saw in the movie.

None of us are fortunate enough to be guiding franchises that have subreddits where commenters can keep us honest. But we can keep ourselves honest if we’re honest with ourselves.

There’s a version of today’s concept that 99 out of 100 writers would’ve gone with. Today’s writers would be the 1 out of 100 that pushed the idea a step further. Which is why the script sold. I’ll talk about that in a second. First, let me summarize the plot for you.

Veer Miller is a CIA agent who has a wife and two kids. Although we don’t get to see him a whole lot with his family, we get the sense that he might not be the best husband or father. He also may not be very good at recognizing that.

One day Veer is shocked to be brought into the CIA Director’s office, who tells him that he’s been picked for a very unique mission. The Russians have located a man in Brazil, Pedro Barbosa, who looks identical to him. Their plan is to get Pedro and teach him to be Veer. They will then kill Veer and replace him with doppelgänger Pedro so that they have a mole inside the CIA.

The CIA’s counter-plan is to send Veer to Brazil to secure doppelgänger Pedro, then take his place, pretending to be Pedro. This way, the Russians will recruit him instead, and replace Veer with… Veer. This will mean that Veer will be in constant contact with the Russians, who think he’s Pedro, and the U.S. will be able to manipulate Russia by having Veer tell them false information.

So, Veer is sent to Brazil. Pedro is secured and sent back to America, where he’ll be forced to play Veer while Veer is gone. Veer then meets up with the Russians, who pose the first big snag to Veer’s mission. There are three other doppelgängers!!! That was not part of the intel. The Russians want to make sure that they send the perfect double-agent. So this is a six-month competition to become the most convincing Veer. Whoever wins, goes to America.

Naturally, you would think that Veer has a leg up on everyone. But as the training begins, he constantly fails all of the tests, many of which amount to seeing what he would do in a specific situation. Veer gradually realizes that he has always viewed himself as an idealized version rather than his true self.

In order to win, he must see who he really is and become that person. And who Veer really is, is the person Veer least wants to be.

This is one of the more clever setups to a movie I’ve read in a while. Going back to what I was talking about earlier, I receive spy ideas a lot. But the version of this story that I receive (99 out of 100 times) has the US using our protagonist CIA agent, who they realize looks similar to a Russian KGB agent, to replace that agent in order to accumulate intelligence. In other words, it’s the straight-forward version of a doppelgänger idea.

Chagantry and Frey ask themselves, “What’s the next iteration up from this idea?” And that’s how they come with this really clever version of a spy concept.

I can already hear some of you chirping about the believability of the doppelgänger conceit. But these guys actually do a perfect job of setting that up. They play footage of a real Russian theorist who had this obsession with how many people in the world look exactly like each other, and that’s the basis for how the Russians came up with this idea.

One of the things that all good writers do is they take risks. These writers could’ve written “Salt,” here. “Salt” was a gangbusters spec script from Kurt Wimmer that was just a good old fashioned fun spy thriller. And we could’ve gone that same route with Doppelgänger.

But Changantry and Frey took this giant risk and decided to make this a character piece. This story is more about who Veer is and how we, as human beings, see ourselves, versus how the world sees us.

And there’s some good stuff in here. There’s an actress playing Veer’s wife in the training and he has to have deep conversations with her about their relationship and the specific circumstances help him realize that he’s the world’s worst husband and has been terrible to her.

There’s a lot of that.

I’m not going to lie – I wasn’t 100% onboard with this decision. I understood why they did it. But I assumed, at some point, we were going to go back to the US and see some cool spy shit. We never did, though, and I had some FOMO about that. Or, since we didn’t go, maybe it’s the opposite of FOMO. Cause FOMO is when you’re missing out on something. Or maybe that is the appropriate way to say it—

—ANYWAY!

It doesn’t upset me that much because I SO respect the risk the writers took because it made this script different from any script that’s been written in the past three years. It’s unique. And how often do we get unique scripts? We don’t. If we would’ve gone back to the US and had some US-Russian spy set pieces, then it’s just like John Wick. It’s just like Mission Impossible. We think we want those things until we get to the theater and we watch the film and we say, “That was just like every other action movie I’ve seen.”

Also, if you have a movie idea that allows a director to cast the same actor in multiple roles, SEND IT TO RYAN COOGLER. This is clearly his thing now. And this has even more roles than Sinners. The actor gets to play 4 roles!

This is an imperfect script. It becomes a character-driven story and I’m not convinced they nailed the character-driven parts. But it’s such a fresh premise with a fresh execution – two things you RARELY SEE TOGETHER in scripts these days (I see fresh concepts with standard executions and standard concepts with fresh executions, but I never see fresh concepts with fresh executions) and, for that reason, I have to recommend this script.

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

What I learned: Double up interesting plot beats and exposition delivery devices. Doppelgänger has an early scene where they need to test Veer so they can make sure that, when he returns, he’s the real Veer. So they ask him all these questions (i.e. what was your happiest memory, what was your saddest memory). This allows us a quick and easy way to deliver exposition (Veer’s backstory) via an entertaining, and necessary, scene. That’s good writing!