Genre: Romantic Comedy
Premise: (from writer) A marine biologist, up to her ankles in oysters, flounders on Capitol Hill trying to save the Chesapeake Bay from a silk suited, Republican lobbyist.
About: Every Friday, I review a script from the readers of the site. If you’re interested in submitting your script for an Amateur Review, send it in PDF form, along with your title, genre, logline, and why I should read your script to Carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Keep in mind your script will be posted in the review (feel free to keep your identity and script title private by providing an alias and fake title). Also, it’s a good idea to resubmit every couple of weeks so that your submission stays near the top of the pile.
Writer: Montana Gillis
Details: 96 pages

Montana is probably one of the nicer funnier guys who e-mails me. He just seems like a real genuine person interested in bettering his craft. He also has an interesting backstory, in that he was a Marine, if I’m not mistaken. Which makes this review all the more difficult. Like every Amateur Friday screenplay I pick up, I want to love it. And while Montana can definitely write, I think he gets in his own way at times. This script is really dense, which isn’t what you want if you’re writing a romantic comedy. The number one thing I want to say to Montana going forward is: less is more. Everything needs to be pared down and the story itself needs to come to the forefront. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Dr. Turner Dixon, a 30 something “fresh-faced shapely stick of dynamite” is doing her best to try and save the Chesapeake Bay. Like a lot of bays in the US, this one is being polluted to the point where all the marine life has disappeared. So Turner is trying to pass a bill on Capitol Hill that will get all these greedy corporations out of the water.

In the meantime, we meet Jack Ward, 39, roguish, and very handsome. A lobbyist, Jack owns a breathtaking boat (the “Influence”) that he takes a lot of political bigwigs out on, presumably to wine and dine and get his way from.

Anyway, Dr. Turner is that annoying thorn in all the Senators sides, always pushing one of those liberal “save the world” agendas that will destroy the very economy allowing the town she lives in to thrive. So when Turner heads to a big Capitol Hill party and starts talking up the Senators to vote her way, she’s pawned off to Jack, who just the other day nearly killed her when his boat almost slammed into hers.

Naturally, the two get to talking, one thing leads to another, and the next thing you know they sleep together. It’s only after this, of course, that Turner realizes Jack is a lobbyist for the bad guys, and therefore her enemy. There’s also a group of shady characters behind the curtain who are aggressively trying to get rid of this annoying Turner and her stupid bill – the very people who allow our Jack to live such a wonderful life. So at some point Jack will have to decide between the cushy life he now lives or the woman he has fallen for.

Okay. I’m going to prep this critique by saying I know very little about how things work on Capitol Hill. So while this script is titled “Influence,” you might be able to title me “Ignorance.” I just don’t know how lobbying and all of that other backroom stuff works. So at least some of my confusion regarding this plot has to do with that. Having said that, I don’t think this story is nearly as clear as it needs to be.

Let’s start with one of the main characters, Jack. I originally read the logline for this eight or nine weeks ago. So when I picked Influence up the other day, I didn’t remember exactly what it was about, which is how I like it, because I want the script to speak for itself. However, I had absolutely no idea who Jack was for half the screenplay. It was only after I went back to the logline that I realized he was a lobbyist. One of the things I just pointed out yesterday was you have to make it clear who your character is as soon as possible.

So how is Jack introduced? He’s introduced on a boat barely saying or doing anything. The entire scene focuses on the other character on the boat, the senator, leaving me with no idea who Jack was. In fact, his entrance was so weak, I just figured he was the driver of the boat and therefore a character we’d probably never see again. If the reader thinks one of your two main characters is nobody important in their introductory scene, you’re in trouble.

But this continues on for the rest of the script. Jack barely ever says anything. He doesn’t have any defining characteristics. He never does anything unique. It was impossible to get any sense of him at all. I mean take the first scene with Richard Gere in Pretty Woman. You see him in a big business meeting. You see that he’s frustrated. You see that he wants to get away from this world. You see that he’s been so pampered his entire life, he doesn’t even know how to drive a car. I mean we learn so much about that character in that first sequence. And I don’t know anything about Jack after this entire screenplay.

Personally, I think the big mistake here was making him a lobbyist. It just doesn’t have any “oomph” behind it, particularly because he never seems that interested in lobbying. In fact, I don’t remember a single scene in the entire screenplay where I see him lobbying for anything. That’s awfully strange for a lobbyist, don’t you think? Why not just make Jack a Senator? It would instantly give him more clout and clarity as a character. It would force him to be more active. The stakes would be higher since he’d have more to lose. It just seems like the much more powerful choice. I guess the lobbyist angle could work, but not as it’s currently constructed, with a weak character who doesn’t seem interested in lobbying and isn’t active in any sense of the word. Still, I would strongly consider the Senator option.

The next huge issue here is the writing itself. It’s way too dense. It seemed like every single scene was over-described. It felt like there was a line of description or action between every single dialogue utterance. There was just way too much writing going on here. We only need the essence of the scene, just enough to fill in the rest of the gaps ourselves. Let me give you an example. Here’s a paragraph from the script:

“A four story behemoth rises up behind Turner as she stands at the curb. Bright sunlight reflects off car windows and the white stone building. Turner pulls a small purse out of her large bag. She sets the bag down on the edge of the street as she digs in the purse.”

The paragraph should probably read closer to this:

“A four story behemoth rises up behind Turner. She digs her purse out of a large bag then places the bag on the ground.”

Actually, I probably wouldn’t even mention the building, as it’s not a necessary component to understanding the scene. I’m going to tell you why this is such a problem. When every single description is a bunch of details that don’t matter, that aren’t essential to understanding the story, the reader starts skipping over them. So after reading 20 paragraphs like this, I just started skimming because I just assumed all of them weren’t important. Then, when you actually do have a paragraph with some important plot information inside of it, the reader’s going to miss it. It’s the screenwriting equivalent of crying wolf.

I would try to cut down the amount of description by 50 to 60% here. That’s not an exaggeration. Everything needs to be pared down. Not just big paragraphs, but all of the needless descriptions in between the dialogue. Not only would this be a problem in a normal screenplay, but this is a romantic comedy, which should be one of the lightest flowiest screenplays out there. It should be the essence of minimalism. And yet the approach here is the opposite. So I’d definitely encourage Montana to fix that.

There were a lot of little problems here as well. For example, we have a scene where Turner gets out of a car and bumps into Jack. Okay. We create a little conflict between the characters. That’s fine. Except then we also have a scene where Jack’s boat almost runs over Turner’s boat a scene or two later. Why do we need two separate scenes showing the exact same thing?

Also, never give your female character a male name in a romantic comedy. It’s too cute, every beginning writer does it, and it drives readers nuts. I mean I’ve seen readers explode over this because it’s done so often. But even besides that, it’s confusing. It always takes me 5 to 10 pages to get used to associating a female with a male name, so even if you don’t care whether you get the reader upset, you should care that it hurts the reading experience, which is the last thing you want to do in a screenplay.

Lastly, I don’t think this script is fun enough. This is supposed to be a romantic comedy and yet the majority of the script focuses on boring backroom politicking. I’m not saying that that stuff can’t be interesting, but it’s false advertising. People don’t come to a romantic comedy to learn the specifics of what goes on behind the pushing of a bill. They come for romance and they come for laughs, and both of those things take a back seat to a lobbying plot here. To use Pretty Woman as an example again, it would be like if they erased half the scenes of Richard Gere and Julia Roberts, and replaced them with the details of Richard Gere’s business deal. So unfortunately, even though I love Montana, these issues really affected my enjoyment of the script.

Moving forward, I would focus on a few things. First, pare all the description down. You have to make this script more readable. Second, go back over yesterday’s article, specifically how to introduce characters, and make sure we like these characters right away. I never ever felt like I knew Jack and a big part of that was the way he was introduced and the lack of characterization. He just didn’t have any defining characteristics. Finally, I would cut out 75% of the bill plot. We only need the key scenes revolving around that plot. If you want to get into the details of that kind of story, I would recommend writing a drama or a thriller. But here, people are going to be more interested in the romantic comedy aspects of a romantic comedy. This was a fun exercise Montana. Hopefully you don’t hate me after this review. All I care about is making the script better. :)

Script link: Influence

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

What I learned: I want to introduce a new term: Readability. As writers, it’s our job to get carried away with every detail. We want to make sure we get this important plot point in and that this character arcs correctly and that our theme is consistently hit on. We become so consumed with all the minutia of our script, that we lose the ability to perceive it as a whole. When this happens, we’re not able to judge how readable our script is. So after you’re finished with your screenplay, you need to ask, “Is this readable?” Not, are all the plot points in the right spot and are all the characters perfectly drawn? But simply, when somebody sits down to read it, is it easy to read? I’m not sure that question was asked here. So save a couple of passes at the very end of your process just for that question. If the read is taking too long or you’re not flying through it, ask why? It might be that your description is too thick. It might be that you have too many needless lines gumming up the spaces between the dialogue. It might mean you have scenes that don’t need to be in your screenplay. But this is a question that definitely needs to be asked because it’s not just about getting everything into your screenplay, it’s about how quickly the reader’s eye moves down the page.

Genre: Comedy
Premise: A pair of pharmaceutical reps, one crazy, one conservative, travel to a drug expo to try and land the most important deal of the year.
About: This finished on the lower half of the 2009 Black List. Outside of that, little is known about the script. It appears to be Eric Lane’s breakthrough screenplay.
Writer: Eric Lane
Details: 116 pages – December 1, 2009 draft (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

Today’s script is a comedy so I’m going to take this moment to talk about another “comedy” that I saw last night. After all of this hype, I decided to watch the “Two And A Half Men” season premiere. I’d never watched Two And A Half Men before, so I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but what I got was quite possibly the worst 22 minutes of television I’ve ever witnessed. I’m not sure if it’s possible to die just by watching a TV show, but I’m pretty sure I came close a couple of times. I’ve never seen anything more juvenile, more stupid, more on the nose, and more insulting than those two and a half men. I’ll tell you when I turned it off. That would be when the kid answered a question by farting. I don’t have any other words. I’m just baffled that people watch that show and enjoy it.

Anyway, that leads us into today’s script. Yay! The good news is, this is way better than Two And A Half Men. Then again, so is soaking your eyeballs in sulfuric acid. But at least Con Men doesn’t try and insult your intelligence. Well, actually, that’s not true. Maybe I should just get to the review.

Con Men is about 25-year-old Greg Weinstock. Greg is really good at what he does, which is sell prescription drugs, and all things considering, he’s got a lot going for him, except for his material girl who lives in a material world girlfriend, Tiff. Tiff’s big beef with Greg is that he’s not really a take charge guy. He’s too comfortable with his lifestyle.

So when the boss man asks Greg to join up with the company party boy, Kevin, and try to land the biggest deal of the year at the Milwaukee drug expo, his initial reaction is, no way. The reward may be high but so is that damn risk. However, after Tiff dumps him, Greg gets it into his head that if he lands this deal, maybe he can prove to her that he is a risk taker, and she’ll end up taking him back.

Like the recently released Cedar Rapids, Greg is all business and Kevin is all party. In fact, as soon as they land, Kevin heads straight to the bar and starts having sex with as many women as possible. A scary prospect if you’ve ever been to Milwaukee before.

Anyway, they eventually run into the reason that they got this job in the first place – Sheera and Mandy. These two used to be the top pharmaceutical reps at their company until they quit and started working for the competition. Because they are hot and because they will do anything to get the sale, they are every pharmaceutical rep’s nightmare. Our guys basically have no chance against these two. And to make matters worse, Sheera is Kevin’s kryptonite – the only girl he’s ever truly loved. He basically turns into a drooling half-witted Nerf Herder whenever he’s around her, which Sheera uses to her full advantage.

I’d detail more of the plot but that’s about it. There’s a lot of double-crossing. A lot of sex. A lot of drinking. A lot of lying. Each side tries every trick in the book to land the big fish but only one will come away with the prize.

Con Men is a script from an extremely talented writer who has a huge future ahead of him. I say that mainly because his dialogue is so strong, some of the best I’ve read in a while. Here’s one of Kevin’s many meanderings in the script: “A few months ago Lindsay came over. She’s a middle reliever I keep in the bullpen for weeknights. Anyway, we’re changing the batteries in the smoke detectors. One thing leads to another. You lick a nine volt battery and put it against your chode during sex. Turns out, when you climax, fireworks. Buttermilk into thunderbolts, lead into gold. You can literally singe the minge. It’s a K Russell Orig. But yours if you need it. Point is, Lulu dug the spark. Lucha libre.”

I don’t know how to put it other than to say his dialogue has a lot of texture. It’s interesting and unique and, most importantly, memorable. Which is going to make it all the more confusing pointing out Con Men’s biggest weakness: the dialogue.

What? Carson, have you gone mad? Didn’t you just tell us the dialogue was great? The content of the dialogue is great but it seems like Eric knows this and as a result goes way too far with it. There is so much needless dialogue here that pages upon pages go by where nothing happens but people talking (about nothing). Every time someone speaks it’s a mini monologue. We’re consistently getting 10 to 12 line dialogue chunks and it just kills the momentum. There’s a reason this script is a needless 120 pages. It’s because people talk for too damn long! I don’t care how good your dialogue is. You have to show restraint. Everybody loves cake. But nobody wants to eat cake for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Unfortunately, there are a ton more beginner mistakes in the script. Character actions don’t match up with their motivations for example. When we meet Kevin, he’s the one dying to go on this sales trip. He’s the one who wants this more than anything. So it’s beyond strange that the second he lands in Milwaukee, he doesn’t spend a single moment trying to land the sale. You could even argue that he could care less about the sale. If a character really wants something then does the complete opposite, you have character problems.

The character flaws are also clumsily executed. When you have a character flaw, the best way to convey it is through action. So if you have a character who’s selfish, you want to show them encountering a situation where they can either help themselves or help someone else. You show them helping themselves and you’ve conveyed their flaw. The lazy way to do it is to have somebody come up to that person and say, “You know what. You’re selfish,” which is exactly what happens here when Tiff tells Greg exactly what’s wrong with him. This is okay if you’ve already shown the flaw in action. But here, all we’ve seen from Greg is how awesome he is at his job. It’s not like this is Seth Rogan in Knocked Up. Greg has a high-paying job with a great future ahead of him. So his girlfriend telling him that he doesn’t have his shit together doesn’t make sense.

And outside of that, this story is just all over the place. Once they actually get to Milwaukee, there’s no form. There’s no structure. It’s just a series of repetitive sequences where people get drunk and try to bang each other. Combined with an extremely inconsistent tone, the script never finds itself. I mean, Con Men starts off feeling like a sophisticated comedy. The first 10 scenes convey tasteful and occasionally sophisticated humor. Open the script to the middle however, and you’ll read a scene where a character shoots his sperm up into an exposed wire, which starts a fire and turns on the entire hotel sprinkler system. That’s Scary Movie 5 territory there and an example of a young writer just trying to make anything funny without thinking how it fits into the bigger picture.

I will say that I loved the inclusion of Sheera and Mandy though. Usually in these scenarios the competition is two men. So to make it two women was a good twist as it created a whole new dynamic between the main players. Now sex could be used as a weapon. An old relationship that still had ripple effects on the characters could be included. It just gave everything a fresh feel. I wish Eric could have brought more of that freshness to the rest of the screenplay. But I still think he has a great future. He just needs to learn how to hone the rest of his craft.

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

What I learned: Less is always more when it comes to dialogue. If you bust out screenplays for your five favorite movies, you’ll probably find that the large majority of time each person speaks, they’re doing so in 3 lines or less. Not 10 to 12 lines or more, which is the problem with Con Men. Now obviously, each story is unique with unique requirements. Some characters talk more than others. Some stories require more exposition than others. But I promise you that your dialogue will be a lot better if, on the whole, you show restraint.

Genre: Horror/Thriller
Premise: A single mother on her last financial leg meets a rich charming man with a dark secret.
About: This is a spec script that was purchased a couple of years back. Haimes is the same writer who wrote the recently reviewed Jitters and since I enjoyed that script, I decided to read this one as well, even though it’s in a genre I don’t typically enjoy.
Writer: Marc Haimes
Details: 110 pages – January 2009 draft (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

Now some of you have pointed out in the past that when I don’t like a genre, I can become biased towards a story and not give it a proper chance. Well I’m here to tell you that you be wrong sucka. Because if there’s any screenplay I’m destined not to like, it’s a vampire screenplay. I think vampires are cliché. I think they’re silly. I sometimes daydream about buying up all of the Twilight books and hurling them onto the moon like Superman did in Superman IV. So when I heard rumors that today’s script was about vampires, I was so prepared to hate it.

But!

Like I always say. It doesn’t matter what the reader’s mindset is going into your script. If you write something good, you can win them over.

28-year-old Jennifer is a struggling single mom with two daughters, a five year old and a two year old. Jennifer is barely squeaking by as a party entertainer. She dresses up as someone known as “The Purple Princess,” and performs at really rich kids’ parties. Lately, however, money has gotten so tight that she’s had to bring her own daughters to these parties, making for an awkward experience.

Things get so bad, in fact, that Jennifer has to beg her employers for any work, Purple Princess or not. One of those employers begrudgingly sets her up with a catering job at a nearby tech company . While on the job, Jennifer finds a money clip underneath a couch with thousands of dollars in it. As she’s just about to pocket it, a man spots her, claiming the money to be his. As he backs her into a corner and is presumably about to harm her, another handsome man charges in just in time to save her. His name is Ray.

Jennifer and Ray hit it off immediately, and pretty soon she’s going over to his place and hanging out with him and making love to him and just like that we have a full-fledged romance. Jennifer’s shining knight in armor has finally shown up to save her.

Buuuuuuuuuuuut… Not so fast.

Ray cuts off communication almost as suddenly as he started it, citing some mysterious but secret danger. Jennifer is a cross between skeptical and concerned so she starts stalking Ray from afar, and in the process learns that there’s a lot more going on to Ray’s company than he first let on. You see, Ray works for a company of vampires. And as we all know, vampires are hungry little buggers who like to feast on folks, particularly young women. So Ray does his best job to distance himself from Jennifer to save her. The question is, is it too late?

What we saw with Jitters was a script Haimes was working on with producers and therefore an unfinished product. With this script, we have the spec draft that sold, and you can tell the difference. Every scene has been honed. Every story choice has been thought through. Every unimportant thread has been eliminated. This reads very much like the kind of spec script that sells in the industry. It’s a high concept idea that’s been executed to perfection.

Now I want to highlight a couple of things here. Two weeks ago I reviewed a script, Underling, where our main character was never actually around the threat. It was his girlfriend who was around the threat and therefore *he* was removed from the central danger in the story. As a result, we never really felt that scared because we were never around the person who posed the most danger to us. Some other character who we barely knew was.

Elevator Men does this the correct way. The person we’re highlighting, Jennifer, is directly involved with the danger. Jennifer is dating Ray, who is the mysterious man who may or may not be trying to kill her. That’s how you want to do it. Whatever the danger is in your story, you want to put your character as close to it as possible. The further removed they are, the less scary your script is going to be.

I’d also like to highlight a key scene in the movie because last week we spent so much time talking about “scenes of death” and I need to point out that there are ways to write scenes of death and still make them work.

The truth is that you’re always going to have scenes where you have to convey backstory or exposition, and while it’s preferable that you hide all of that stuff within existing scenes that push the story forward, sometimes, depending on how plot heavy your script is, you’ll need entire scenes dedicated to getting that stuff out of the way.

The trick is, recognizing that scene of death, and looking for a way to keep it interesting. The scene in question has Jennifer over at Ray’s house to basically talk about their pasts. Uh-oh. Talking about your pasts is definitely a scene of death. Now it’s important to note that their pasts specifically set up plot points later in the story. So these aren’t just random backstory elements to help us know the characters. They have a dual purpose. Still, we don’t know that yet, so the scene still has the potential to be boring.

Anyway, Haimes adds two elements to make the scene more exciting. The first is dramatic irony. We know by this point that Ray is peculiar and probably dangerous. Except Jennifer doesn’t know that yet. So every moment that Jennifer is alone with Ray is a potential moment she could be harmed, making us scared for her, which creates anticipation, since we want Jennifer to get out of this alive.

The other element is gimmicky but it still works. Throughout the script, the vampires make a loud screeching noise. During this scene, we first hear that loud screeching noise from a distance. As the two continue to talk, the noise gets closer. And closer. In other words, we have sort of an aural ticking time bomb. We know the vampires are getting closer, which means danger for our hero. So again, a typical “scene of death” actually becomes an exciting scene with danger on two separate fronts.

The only real complaints I have were complaints I realized in retrospect. For example, I’m not sure the casino stuff really goes with the story. And the more I think about a mom breaking into a company in the middle of the night with her two kids, the more I question if that’s really happening. I mean, it was an exciting scene, especially when the daughters got lost. But I mean, come on – is an audience really going to buy that? It’s only one step removed from the babysitter who goes upstairs to check on a noise.

But hey, like I said, I only thought of that stuff after the script was over. While I was reading the script, it was all pretty awesome.

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

What I learned: I used to think that using money as a character motivation was a lazy choice. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that even though it’s a cliché, it’s a cliché that works. One of the most relatable situations in the world is a lack of money. Not being able to pay the bills. Not being able to pay the rent. Not being able to pay the mortgage. We’ve all been there. So creating characters that need to do questionable things because they’re desperate for money is probably going to work. I was just watching Warrior yesterday (a good movie btw) and the physics teacher’s need to fight is driven by the fact that he can’t pay the mortgage. Yes I’ve seen that a million times before. But I also know that it happens a million times a day in the real world. So it’s just one of those clichés that works.

Genre: Thriller/Drama
Premise: A young woman comes to live with her estranged sister who is married to a mysterious and dangerous man.
About: Jamaica Inn was a best selling novel back in the 1930s which was eventually made into a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The script appeared on last year’s Brit List, which is the British equivalent of the Black List. Rebecca Hall, the actress who played Ben Affleck’s girlfriend in The Town, is said to be circling the lead role. Daphne du Maurier, the author of the book in which the screenplay is based on, also wrote the novel “Rebecca,” which was turned into the movie that won an Oscar in 1940, and the short story, “The Birds,” which of course Alfred Hitchcock went on to direct as a film.
Writer: Michael Thomas (based on the novel by Daphne du Maurier)
Details: January 1, 2010 draft – 124 pages (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

Whenever you read a script where the main font is something other than Courier, a bevy of red flags pop up and usually means one of three things. You’re reading a script by the Coen Brothers. You’re reading a script by a novelist who is writing their first screenplay. You’re reading a script by someone who’s never written a screenplay before. Now if it’s option number one, you’re still in good shape. If it’s option number two, chances are you’re going to get a lot of extensive prose accompanying a story that takes way too long to get going. And if it’s option number three, you’re in for a long afternoon my friend.

My guess is that we’re dealing with door number two. Thomas definitely has a way with words. When he described a room or a setting or a person, I could feel myself being transported into the story. But the prose was such a priority that the actual storytelling suffered. Transitions between scenes were confusing, setups of scenes were muddled, and I wasn’t always sure what was going on within the scenes.

For example, I didn’t know until I went over to Wikipedia that one of the main characters, Joss, was a ship marauder who, along with his band of hoodlums, would kill everyone on a ship and steal the loot. When I was reading the actual script, we’d just all of a sudden inexplicably be on a ship with a bunch of people throwing a bunch of other people off, and I honestly had no idea where any of it was coming from. I eventually chalked it up to one of the characters having some recurring nightmare, as that’s the only logical conclusion I could come up with at the time. Again, this was due to the way that scenes just sort of bled into each other without any defining purpose or structure.

Now I suppose it’s fair to ask if this is my fault or the screenwriter’s fault. Here’s what I’d say to that. When you write in a non-industry-standard font, the reader doesn’t trust you, because they assume you don’t know what you’re doing. So when those weird moments happen, the reader is less likely to chalk it up as their fault and more likely to chalk it up as yours. If the formatting is correct – had the presentation been consistent with industry standards – then the reader is more likely to go back and reread something to figure out what they missed. Because of the presentation, I wasn’t willing to do that. And that’s usually the case with most readers. They just don’t have time to dick around.

Having said that, it’s important to note a couple of things. This script appears to be developed in-house, which means it’s being written for only the producers. Also, I admit I’ve seen quite a few screenplays off The Brit List using a font other than Courier. So I’m wondering if they don’t use Courier as a standard font over in the UK? Maybe somebody from across the pond can clear that up for me.

Anyway, it’s time to tell you the plot. I’m guessing the story begins back in the 1930s, though I couldn’t tell you for sure because no date is given in the script. I’m just going off when the novel was written. As those of you who read the site know, not giving the date of your story is a huge pet peeve of mine, but I’ve ranted about it before so I’m not going to do it again. A young down on her luck woman, Mary, has come to the city to live with her sister, Patience, at the Inn that her husband owns. When she gets there, she learns that said husband, Joss, is an alcoholic evil brood of a man.

Her sister is also a shell of her former self. Once beautiful, she is now shriveled and thin and haggard, the result of years of constant abuse. As Mary tries to reconnect with her sister, she encourages her to see what she’s become and to think about leaving her husband. But what Mary will soon find out is that Joss is not an easy person to run away from.

He begins treating Mary much like he treats his wife, but Mary is not as easily scared, and does her best to stand up to Joss. However, her bravery starts to dissipate when she sees Joss kill a man. On top of that, Mary realizes that nobody ever actually checks in to the Jamaica Inn. Which brings up the question, how the heck does Joss make any money?

Of course, through the help of Wikipedia, we learn that Joss and his band of buddies rob incoming cargo ships and that’s how he makes his dough. If all of this wasn’t enough to handle, Mary finds herself sexually attracted to Joss, a temptation she must constantly battle but one in which she has little control over. I guess that’s one way to go about proving to your sister that her husband isn’t right for her. The Jerry Springer approach.

So again, my big problem with Jamaica Inn was that I was never quite sure what was going on. The emphasis seemed to be on the prose and not on the storytelling. I can’t emphasize this enough for young writers. Readers don’t care how well you can describe what a tree looks like in the morning mist. They care about how you craft your story. They care about how you create drama. They care about how you create conflict. They care that you can tell your story in a clear and concise way. I’m not going to say that the way you choose your words isn’t important. If I were writing the beach scene in Saving Private Ryan, I would use descriptive visually arresting words and phrases. But as far as everything else, just tell the story. Don’t describe to me the sound Private Vin’s pants make when they rub against each other. Save that stuff for your novel.

I think there’s some good things about the script. Rebecca Hall is a hot actress at the moment and has her pick of the litter. So her interest in this is telling. Both of these female lead roles are juicy and the kind of stuff upper echelon actresses don’t get a chance to play very often. I also thought the relationship between Mary and Joss was interesting. On the one hand she was terrified of him and on the other she was attracted to him. I’m not sure it totally made sense but there was definitely an intriguing chemistry between the two whenever they had a scene together.

The thing that will either make or break this movie is clarity. On the page, I wasn’t exactly clear what was going on with all of the ship stuff. But I think onscreen, when we see the faces and the people involved it’s going to be much easier to follow. Still, I’m hoping that they addressed the confusion surrounding that whole storyline and that they don’t make it feel like a dream sequence, which is how I interpreted it in this draft.

The truth is, I was really hoping this was going to be a ghost story. When you have an Inn that nobody comes to, I think you’re hoping for a bigger payoff than that the owner goes off and loots ships. Or at least that’s how I felt. So with the payoff being disappointing and the writing being too confusing, I can’t say I would recommend this. But I will say that the idea has potential.

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

What I learned: Remember, whenever you have a slow build to your story – and what I mean by “slow build” is that no real goal emerges in the story for a long time – you have to use other storytelling methods to hook the reader in the meantime. Slow builds are really dangerous because readers are impatient people. So you want to think long and hard about how else you plan to keep them interested. Here, there are two things. There’s the mystery of what’s going on at the Jamaica Inn, and there’s the unique conflict between Joss and Mary (Do they hate each other? Do they like each other?). Now whether those are enough to keep one’s interest is up to the individual reader. But the point is, you need something there to keep the reader interested until the real story kicks in.

We’re back for Day 4 of Star Wars Week. To find out more, head back to Monday’s review of The Empire Strikes Back.

Genre: Sci-fi/Fantasy
Premise: (from IMDB) Anakin Skywalker shares a forbidden romance with Padmé Amidala while his teacher, Obi-Wan Kenobi, makes an investigation of a separatist assassination attempt on Padmé which leads to the discovery of a secret Republican clone army.
About: Lucas was a little shaken by the response to his screenplay for The Phantom Menace, so was reluctant to write Attack Of The Clones. He ended up writing a couple of drafts and then gave off the final draft to Jonathan Hales, a writer on Young Indiana Jones, who had little experience writing theatrical films. Hales finished his draft a week before production began.
Writers: George Lucas and Jonathan Hales (story by George Lucas)

Of the three prequels, Attack Of The Clones probably had the best chance of becoming a real movie. There’s definitely a lot more going on here than in Menace. You have an assassination attempt. You have a much more interesting dynamic in your Jedi pairing. The set pieces are more interesting. But much like The Phantom Menace, there’s too much junk you have to sift through to find the gems. By far, the biggest fault of the screenplay is its treatment of its love story. If you ever plan to write a love story, watch this movie to see how not to do it. Lucas has referenced numerous times how this storyline was his “Titanic.” And that’s a great place to start because I want to show you just how inferior this love story is to Titanic.

Probably more important than what happens during the love story, is how you set up that love story. Your job as a screenwriter is to set up a situation that mines the most drama out of the relationship. In Titanic, we have a poor drifter falling for one of the richest women on the ship, who also happens to be engaged – and oh, they’re on a ship that will eventually sink and kill most of the people on it. I can safely say that’s a situation that will bring out a lot of drama. Now let’s look at Attack Of The Clones. Anakin and Amidala are told to go hide out on her planet.

I want you to think about that for a second. Hiding out on a planet. There is no goal here. There’s no engine driving the story thread. There’s nobody after these two. There is no urgency. There are no stakes. You’re simply putting two characters in an isolated location and asking them to sit and wait. Is there any drama to mine from that situation? No. This means that before our characters have a single conversation, their love story is doomed. There is no way for it to be interesting. Contrast this with The Empire Strikes Back, where the entire love story takes place on the run with our characters constantly in danger. That’s how you want your love story unraveling.

Next up is the dialogue. This is a huge mistake that a lot of amateur screenwriters make. They believe that if the characters are telling each other that they love each other, that the audience will by association feel that love. Wrong. Actually, the opposite is true. We feel love through actions. We feel love through subtext. The time when we least feel love is when two characters are professing it to each other (unless we’re at the end of the movie and you’ve earned that moment).

One of the best ways to convey love is through subtext. Characters are saying one thing but they really mean something else. The best example of this is in The Empire Strikes Back. During that movie, Han and Leia are arguing with each other nonstop. Yet we can feel the desire each has for the other in every argument. Even when Han is directly trying to make a move on Leia, he does it by challenging her. He’s constantly telling her that she likes him, which is far more interesting than if he would’ve sat her down and professed his love for her, which is exactly how all of the love scenes happen in Clones.

Another thing you need with any good love story is conflict. You need things constantly trying to tear your leads apart. Whether it be something between them, an outside force, a battle from within the individual. The more things you can use to tear your lovers away from each other, the more those characters have to fight to be with each other, and those actions will translate over to the audience as love. So look at all the things keeping Jack and Rose apart on Titanic. First they’re from different classes. A poor kid like Jack just can’t be with a rich woman like Rose. It doesn’t happen today and it definitely never happened back then. Also, Rose is engaged. Even if the class thing weren’t an issue, she’s getting married. Also important to note is how much is at stake with that marriage. Rose’s mom needs her to marry to save their financially crumbling family. The two are also constantly being chased by her fiancé’s Henchman. And on top of all that, they’re on a doomed ship, a ship that will sink and likely kill one of the people in the relationship. I mean if you want to talk about things that are trying to rip a couple apart, all you have to do is watch this movie.

Let’s compare that to all the things keeping Anakin and Amidala apart in Attack Of The Clones.

(insert long silence here).

I mean I guess if you were to push me on it, I could argue that there’s something about how Jedi’s are not allowed to love. That, to me, is the only element of conflict keeping these two apart. But the thing is, there are no explained consequences to this conflict. It’s never explored in anything other than words. And Lucas never commits to it. As we’ll see in the next film, their “secret romance” has Anakin sleeping over at her apartment every night. Yeah, they’re trying really hard to keep this a secret. This leaves us with absolutely zero conflict in any of their scenes, putting all the heavy lifting on the dialogue, and since the dialogue is mostly Anakin professing his love for Amidala, this storyline turns out to be one of the worst love stories ever put to film.

This also highlights something I brought up yesterday – the scene of death. Every single scene on Naboo between these two characters is a scene of death. The characters are either talking about their feelings or talking about politics. You will never be able to make those scenes interesting because, again, there’s nothing else going on in the scene and none of these scenes are pushing the story forward.

These scenes of death are everywhere if you look for them. Remember, when you’re writing a story and trying to convey any sort of character development, you want to show and not tell. Now George does a pretty poor job of this in an early scene with Obi-Wan and Anakin, but he does do it. After Obi-Wan and Anakin chase an alien into a bar, the two get into a series of disagreements on how to handle the matter. It’s sloppy and it’s on the nose, but at least we’re showing their problems and not telling the audience their problems.

However, a few scenes later, we’re up with Amidala in her apartment and the entire scene is dedicated to Anakin telling Amidala how he feels about Obi-Wan. This scene of death (two people talking about another person) is violating three screenwriting rules at the same time. First of all, it’s not pushing the story forward at all and therefore is unnecessary. Second, it’s telling us and not showing us. And third, it’s repeating information we already know. Lucas has given us a few scenes now that have shown us that Anakin has a problem with Obi-Wan’s authority. This is the kind of mistake a screenwriter who is writing their first screenplay would make. It’s that bad.

As for the structure of the screenplay, all you need to do is compare it to Empire to see why it fails so spectacularly. Remember how in that movie, we were cutting back and forth between Han being chased and Luke training to become a Jedi? In this movie, the two threads we’re cutting back and forth between are a love story on a planet where there’s no urgency whatsoever, and a procedural where Obi-Wan plays detective, a sequence that also has little urgency. That means instead of two threads with high horsepower story engines, we have one thread with just a tiny bit of horsepower. No wonder the movie feels so slow.

The funny thing is, there’s only a single interesting scene from a screenwriting perspective in the entire movie. And the reason for this is probably that Lucas ran into it by accident. Good screenwriters deliberately structure their screenplays to create these scenes. Bad screenwriters stumble upon them luckily every once in a while, wondering why they’re the only scenes that feel right in their script. The scene in question is when Obi-Wan meets Jango Fett in his apartment. This scene is a good one because there’s so much subtext at play – one of the few times in the prequels that we actually have subtext. Obi-Wan suspects that Jango Fett is the one who tried to assassinate Amidala. Jango Fett knows that Obi-Wan is on to him but must act aloof. This is what creates the subtext. The two are having a somewhat normal conversation, but both are hiding some critical pieces of information that they know about the other.

The only things that actually work in the film are things that were born out of the original films. We’re excited to see Yoda fight for the first time. We’re excited to see a bunch of Jedi’s take on another Army. We’re excited to see Obi-Wan battle Jango Fett. But none of those things are generated through the dramatic components of this particular story. We enjoy them based on nostalgia. Attack Of The Clones is a little better than The Phantom Menace but not enough to garner a better rating.

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

What I learned: What I’m realizing with these prequels, especially after yesterday, is that there’s no urgency to them whatsoever. I mean look at this stretch of four scenes early in the movie. We have a scene of the Jedi Council telling our characters what to do. We have a scene where Sam Jackson and Obi-Wan and Yoda discuss how Jedi’s have become arrogant (scene of death). We have that scene where Anakin and Amidala talk about how Obi-Wan is mean (scene of death). And we have a goodbye scene at the ship station with Obi-Wan and Amidala (scene of death). That’s four scenes in a row where the only thing that happens is the Jedis order Anakin to protect Amidala. There are no story engines driving these scenes whatsoever. Everything just sits there. Go watch the first act of Empire. After the 15 minute “Luke kidnapped by Wampa” sequence, we get a fun little scene where the crew jokes around about what happened, and then the very next scene they find out the Empire has spotted them, beginning the next sequence where they have to escape the planet. If Lucas would’ve wrote that sequence? He probably would have added three or four scenes with Han and Leia talking to each other, with Han and Luke talking to each other, and God knows who else talking to each other. When people say to keep your story moving, this is what they mean. They mean don’t write all these unnecessary scenes that you don’t need.