We’re back for Day 3 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) Two Jedi knights uncover a wider conflict when they are sent as emissaries to the blockaded planet of Naboo.
About: It is said that Lawrence Kasdan was approached to write the script for The Phantom Menace but that Kasdan felt Empire and Jedi were a step away from Lucas’s vision and believed that Lucas should write and direct the prequels so that they would remain in his voice. Hmmm, that personally sounds like a clever brushoff to me. Other rumors include Frank Darabont and Carrie Fisher being approached to write the script. But in the end, we got George Lucas. Hooray.
Writer: George Lucas

The Phantom Menace is such a poorly told story that as I started compiling the screenwriting mistakes to highlight in this review, I realized there were too many to choose from.

I guess we’ll start at the top. The first problem is the backstory. In the backstory for the original films, rebels were trying to defeat the Empire. It’s simple. It’s powerful. It’s focused. In this movie, we get the taxation of trade routes. In other words, it’s complicated. It’s confusing. It’s unfocused. Now complicated can be good if you have a screenwriter who knows how to navigate complications and who’s dedicated to the extra work required to write something of this magnitude. But George Lucas is neither. He’s openly stated that’s he doesn’t like writing. And since writing even a simple story can take 20-30 drafts to get right, you can only imagine how much effort and how many drafts something complicated would take. And if you’re not committed to all that extra effort, your screenplay’s going to suffer. And this is the main reason the prequels are so bad. Everything here is a first draft idea that was never developed.

Something feels wrong about The Phantom Menace right from the start. We’ve talked about storytelling engines all week and there is an engine here. But unfortunately that engine lacks horsepower. The goal is for two Jedi’s to convince the trade Federation to leave Naboo. In the opening of Star Wars, Darth Vader storms a rebel ship in search of the stolen Death Star plans. In the opening of Empire, Luke Skywalker is kidnapped by a monster and must be rescued. These are both strong and clear engines. Removing a trade blockade from a planet? Borrrrrrrr-ing.

Now to Phantom’s credit, there is one point in the film where things get kind of interesting, and that’s when Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon discover an invasion army. This creates mystery. And it gives our characters purpose. They must now get down to the planet and figure out what’s up. When they get there, they realize the Naboo people are going to be attacked and therefore have to save the Queen. Okay, we actually have a little bit of story going on here. Saving queens is exciting. Right?

Unfortunately, once they escape, they get marooned on Tantooine and things start falling apart quickly. They do actually have a goal on Tantooine, and that’s to get off the planet. But you’ll notice there’s something missing from this sequence that’s been present in every single Star Wars movie up to this point. Urgency. Star Wars added it by making sure the bad guys were always on our tail. Empire did the same, with the Empire always right behind Han. Nothing is chasing them here. We feel like they could be here for months and there would be no consequences.

The thing is, George has a ticking time bomb for the Tantooine sequence – they need to get to the Senate to tell them what’s going on on Naboo before it’s too late. But he doesn’t do a very good job of reminding us of this urgency and the goal itself is so muddled and confusing, that even if he did, we still wouldn’t feel the importance of it. I mean, hasn’t the Trade Federation already taken over Naboo? What does it matter if they get there now or two years from now?

But The Phantom Menace truly dies when our characters arrive on Coruscant (the city planet). This is where I’ll be introducing a new term on Scriptshadow: Scene Of Death.

The Scene Of Death is any scene that exists only to…

a) Convey exposition.
b) Have characters talk to each other about their feelings.
c) Have two people talk about another person.
d) Have two people talk about their views or opinions on things.

Now let me be clear. You can have all of these conversations in your movie. But you have to have them during scenes where the story is being pushed forward. If the only reason the scene exists is to show one of these four things, that scene will draw your story to a complete stop. Now if you’ve had an incredibly intense stretch of really solid storytelling, you can sometimes get away with one of these scenes. But I wouldn’t recommend it. I think there’s always a way to get this stuff in while the story is being pushed forward.

Now your screenplay is in trouble if you write just one of these scenes. But imagine if half the scenes you wrote were scenes of death. Welcome to The Phantom Menace.

This is what happens on Coruscant. The main characters convene in a room and talk about the upcoming discussion they’re going to have with the Senate. Then we go to the Jedi Council where Qui-Gon Jinn says they need to teach Anakin. Then Anakin goes to tell Amidala that he’s saying goodbye. Then we have a boring Senate meeting. Then they go to the Senate committee to ask permission for something. Then Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon Jinn talk. Then Anakin gets tested by the Jedi Council. Then Amidala talks to Jar-Jar about their planet. Then Amidala talks to the Emperor about going back to her planet. Then Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon and Anakin talk to the Jedi Council yet again. Then Qui-Gon Jinn explains what the force is to Anakin. I might nominate this as the worst stretch of scenes in a big-budget movie ever. Out of these 11 scenes, maybe half are scenes of death and the other half so barely move the story forward or are so muddled in their execution, that they destroy any bit of momentum the movie had left. There is no engine underneath this sequence driving the story forward. And there is definitely no GSU. I mean what happened to the storytelling of the first two films?? If somebody wanted something in Star Wars, they went after it themselves. They didn’t go to a Senate committee. Choices George. You have to make interesting choices. Debating anything in a Senate is not an interesting choice.

And the scariest thing? That’s not even the worst part of the screenplay. The worst part of the screenplay is the characters. Even if Lucas had cleaned all this plot stuff up and made each sequence as tight and focused as Star Wars and Empire, it wouldn’t have mattered because we don’t like the characters. Let’s take a look at the six key characters and why they suck.

Qui-Gon Jinn – The mentor character is rarely flashy, but that doesn’t mean he can’t be interesting. I’ll admit that the Obi-Wan Kenobi from the first films wasn’t exactly the coolest character ever. He didn’t do anything outrageous or shocking. But he had this intriguing mystical quality about him and he was very warm. Qui-Gon Jinn is as cold and as boring a character as you’ll find. Part of this is the way Lucas set up the Jedi. He implied in the original films that Jedis were sophisticated and ordered and honorable. Unfortunately, those are all traits that make a character boring. I would probably want Qui-Gon Jinn mentoring me in real life. But I definitely don’t want to put him in my movie if my goal is to entertain people.

Obi-Wan Kenobi – Much like Qui-Gon Jinn, there’s very little going on with Obi-Wan Kenobi. He doesn’t seem to have any character flaws. He listens to and attentively follows everything his mentor tells him to do without argument. And that’s where this dynamic falters. Whenever you pair two people together for an entire movie, you need there to be some sort of unresolved conflict between them. Without conflict, the characters aren’t struggling to find balance. If the relationship is already balanced, then there’s nothing for the characters to fight. That’s going to equal a lot of boring scenes. So you have two characters, both of them with no internal struggles, and no conflict between them. How the hell are you going to make that interesting?

Amidala – Queen Amidala is the worst character in this movie and may be the worst character Lucas has ever created. George tries to create this whole disguise storyline where Queen Amidala disguises herself as a handmaiden. The problem is, there’s absolutely no point to it whatsoever. Had she never disguised herself, absolutely nothing would have changed. This goes back to the use of stakes. If you’re going to disguise someone, ask yourself, what are the stakes to them getting caught? If there are no stakes, then there’s no point in disguising them. If it any point Amidala is discovered when, say, they’re hanging out on Tantooine, what happens? Maybe Qui-Gon Jinn smiles slightly and says, “Wow, you got me.” And that would be it. Look at a movie like Pretty Woman. Watch the scenes where Julia Roberts goes out with Richard Gere to a high-class dinner or a polo match. In those scenes, Roberts is masquerading as one of them. If she gets caught, and somebody realizes that Richard Gere is with a hooker, there are real consequences to that. Maybe the other businessmen don’t deal with Gere. Maybe his reputation takes a shot. Julia Roberts will be humiliated. The fact that George doesn’t realize the importance of stakes in this situation shows how little he understands storytelling.

Anakin – Anakin is a tough character to dissect. Much of our thoughts regarding Anakin have to do with our knowledge of what’s going to happen to him in the future (dramatic irony). Lucas is hoping that just seeing this young happy kid who we know will later become one of the most sinister dictators in the galaxy is going to stir up enough emotions that we’ll be interested in him. And the truth is, Anakin does have some stuff going on. He’s a slave. He ends up having to leave his mother. The seeds are here for a good character. Unfortunately, Lucas really botched the casting. The kid who played Anakin wasn’t a good actor and therefore we just never believed him. I do think that a better casting choice would’ve helped this film tremendously. But it’s also a reminder of a screenwriting tip I’ve mentioned before. It’s probably best not to include a major character under 10 in your script. Finding a good actor who can play a major role at that age is the equivalent of trying to win the lottery.

Jar-Jar – This is going to shock you. Jar-Jar is actually the deepest character in the story. Or I should say, the character whom George Lucas intended to be the deepest. He’s the only character in the group who has a flaw. He doesn’t take life seriously enough. And he doesn’t believe in his worth. That’s what’s led to all of the problems with his people, and why he was ultimately kicked out of the clan. So when you’re talking about unresolved conflict, there’s actually a lot of unresolved conflict going on with this character. Unfortunately, George undercut this with such a goofy annoying character that it didn’t matter. We’re not going to care if a character is able to overcome anything if we don’t like him. So remember, just adding a character flaw isn’t enough. You still have to make that character someone we’ll root for.

Darth Maul – A huge critical mistake that George Lucas made was not including a dominant villain. Not every movie needs a villain. However, if you’re going to write a sci-fi movie, you need a villain. And Lucas actually created a really cool villain here, but ended up portraying him as a nuisance more than a genuine threat to the Republic. The guy barely spoke. He didn’t do anything unless he was told to. He was a weak villain. And if you don’t have someone to point to as the ultimate threat in this kind of movie, then you’re never really scared for the characters. Lucas really should have made Darth Maul a major character with a lot more power. It would’ve helped this movie a lot.

Like I said, I could go on forever with this movie. I didn’t even get to the ending where the bad guys were destroyed by a baffling series of lucky coincidences. I’m just shocked at how much time and effort and money was put into something that was so poorly constructed. If there’s any lesson to come out of this, it’s that this is what happens when you don’t commit to rewriting your script until it’s great. As I struggled to figure out a rating for this film, I realized I couldn’t recall a single moment in the script that worked. For that reason, I have no choice but to give it the lowest rating.

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

What I learned: This is why you shouldn’t try and write a complicated multifaceted multi-character epic with politics and secret objectives and dozens of vastly different locations. These are the most difficult movies to write by far. And this is often the result. A bunch of muddled objectives in a muddled plot that’s desperately trying to seem important but none of that importance comes through because it’s all so sloppily executed. To me, The Phantom Menace is an argument for the power of a simple plot. Keep the character goals clear. Keep everybody’s motivations clear. Keep the story goals clear. The first two films were basically bad guys chasing good guys. Even Empire could be boiled down to that. As long as you have that simple structure in place, you can try to find the complications within it. But if you start with an overarching complex story that lacks focus, it’s likely doomed from the get-go.
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Genre: Horror/Family/Comedy
Premise: A recently downsized father moves his family into a dying town, only to find out that it’s infested with killer mutated insects.
About: This script made the lower third of the 2009 black list. It sold to Paramount earlier that year. The writer, Marc Haimes, used to be an executive at DreamWorks. He also produced The Legend of Zorro and Hotel for Dogs.
Writer: Marc Haimes
Details: 103 pages – October 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).

Get ready as I plan to fully contradict myself, only to make excuses as to why I’m fully justified in doing so. You see, one of the elements I’ve been trumpeting nonstop on the site – urgency – is a huge part of this screenplay. However, the excessive reliance on this tool brings up an important question. Is it possible to add too much urgency to your script? It’s a strange question because so rarely is it actually a problem. 99.9% of the time, when there’s a pacing issue, it’s that the script is too slow. But the answer is yes, you can push things along too quickly, and Jitters is an example of that. I’ll explain in a second but let’s find out what this is about first.

Off in Nowheresville, USA, some scientist-types have been working on breeding genetically modified bugs. At first it’s just to help some nearby plant life. But the results prove that the potential for these bugs is much bigger. In fact, it becomes clear that some of these insects could be constructed for…duh duh duhhhhhh, military purposes. So they invite some government dudes in to show them (we have moths that can camouflage themselves, tarantulas that can fly, ladybugs that can…think?) and let’s just say a few of the insects get out of their cages and bug these men to death.

A couple of weeks later Walt Hatcher and his family ride into town ready to start their new lives. Besides the wife and baby, Walt has a 13-year-old daughter Kate, who believes every passed minute is a minute you could have been spending saving the world, and a 15-year-old son Jackson, a selfish smart-alec whose number one priority is to make his sister miserable.

As soon as they roll in, they notice that this isn’t going to be like life in the burbs. You see, Walt had a nice job and a nice life but all that went to hell with the economy. Unfortunately, the only jobs left were in the middle of crappy dying towns like this one.

Well, maybe “dying” is a strong word. The insect population around here seems to be doing just fine. In fact, the bug problem is so intense that the entire bug spray shelf at the local hardware store has been cleaned out.

Almost as soon as they get to the house, everybody is off to do their own thing – mainly explore this crapola “town.” Kate runs off to spy on a couple of nerdy kids who build remote control mini-robots and Jackson goes after the hot girl who lives next door. But when Walt realizes that the insects are out for blood (courtesy of the town’s lone homeless man who has uncovered the giant insect conspiracy) he must round up his family and get them the hell out of here before they all become bug food.

I have to give it to Jitters. I was laughing a lot more than I expected to. All the characters here are really funny, especially Jackson. There’s a line he gives early on that perfectly encapsulates his character. A mosquito is caught in the car and everybody’s bickering about whether to kill it or not. Kate, of course, is begging to save it while Jackson nonchalantly offers, “We must kill it. It’s the only way it will learn.”

It’s actually a perfect early scene and one of the classic ways to introduce characters. You present a problem to a group of people and use everybody’s differing reactions to tell us what kind of characters they are. So it’s in this scene that we learn that Katie is the “all life is precious” save the world girl, and that Jackson could care less about anyone.

There’s also a funny scene right afterwards where Jackson follows a hot girl in a white tank top to the freezer section of a convenience store, trying to discreetly tape her on his camera phone while pretending to talk to someone. It’s juvenile and silly and yet it’s something I totally would’ve done when I was 14 so I loved it. In fact, all the character stuff here in the first act is top notch.

Where Jitters runs into trouble is that it moves at the speed of some of these flying insects. I’m not sure what the time frame is, but I think the whole thing takes place inside of 12 hours. Now you know me. I’m Mr. Urgency. So why didn’t this work for me? Well, it’s quite simple. If your whole movie is going to take place in a town, it’s important that we get to know that town. And we never get to know or understand or feel the character of this place because we’re off and running before we’ve even settled in.

For example, we meet the hot girl neighbor and geeky robot building twins, but since we’ve only known them for a few hours, when they find themselves in danger, we don’t care. Had we gone to school with them for a few days or had more than one scene to get to know them, I’m sure we would’ve found ourselves rooting for them because they’re actually solid characters.

I also thought the theme of trying to keep the family together could’ve been better executed. There are times when you’re reading a script and you get to that final act and all of a sudden the characters start spouting out universal themes that up until this point have never even sniffed the story (i.e. “Seize the day.” “It’s better to have loved and lost than never loved at all.”) And you’re asking yourself, “Where is this coming from?” It’s coming from the writer feeling the need to make up for the fact that he hasn’t tried to say anything with his story so far. So he has no choice but to wrap everything up in a bow before it all ends.

I feel a lot of that going on here. When Walt starts talking about how family is the most important thing in the world and that’s why he needs to save the day, I’m sitting there going, when exactly did this become important? I never got the impression that Walt didn’t care about his family at all. And I think the reason for that is, we never spend any time settling into the town. Had we settled into the town, we could’ve showed Walt being more obsessed with work than he was with his family. But since things move so fast, we never get that opportunity.

On the plus side, you don’t really have time to think about all that stuff. The urgency masks a lot of the deficiencies and you find yourself simply trying to keep up with the pace. On top of that, this script is just packed with fun moments. One of my favorites was when the hot girl neighbor tricked Jackson into believing he was being attacked by a giant spider. After she leaves, a real giant spider arrives, and Jackson “isn’t buying it this time” and begins messing with the “fake” giant spider, going into this whole routine of petting it and taunting it. Needless to say, it doesn’t end well.

That’s the true strength of this script. It has this fun lighthearted vibe to it that reminds you of movies like Tremors and Gremlins. It never quite reaches the heights of those films but I can still see this being a really fun silly time at the movies.

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

What I learned: I’m going to take a few steps back here. While I’ve been touting the importance of urgency a lot lately, this script reminded me that you first need to build up to that urgency. For thrillers like Buried and Source Code, yeah, you want to sprint right out of the gate. But certain stories, such as this one, require that set up time to pull the audience in. Only then do you want to start upping the urgency with ticking time bombs and chases. Jitters never took the time to settle its characters in and I think that’s why the script feels too fast for its own good.

And you thought yesterday was the apocalypse…

For those fans of Jersey Shore, you know the term “GTL” well. Of course, I don’t watch Jersey Shore so I had to get my “GTL” definition from someone else. But from what I understand, it means “Gym, tan, laundry.” These are the things your average Guido (their word, not mine) needs to survive on a day-to-day basis. Food? Not important. Tanning though? That’s a life or death situation. Now of course, not knowing anything about Jersey Shore, I haven’t heard that The Situation is claiming to have knocked boots with Snooki, who is steadfastly denying the claim, but if I did watch the show – and I don’t – I would probably side with Team Situation on this one. I don’t know why he put Snooki on blast, but everybody knows The Situation don’t lie.

Now, what the hell does this have to do with today’s article? Well, there’s another acronym you should always be pumping your fist to as a screenwriter, and that acronym is “GSU”. GSU stands for “goal, stakes, urgency.” Every single one of your screenplays should have goals, stakes, and urgency. So before you go online to see if the rumors are true that Jwow had some work done to her face, let’s take a look at GSU in action.

Goal – The character goal is the heart of your story. A character must be going after something or else that character is doing nothing. And a character who does nothing is inactive and inactive people are borrrrrrrrrrrr-ing. You think Pauly D sits at home every night reading War And Peace? No! He has a goal – to get as many female numbers at the club as possible! Characters in movies should have the same devoted drive as Pauly D. So in The King’s Speech, the goal is to conquer his stutter. In Black Swan, it’s to conquer the dark half of her performance before the show. Now every once in a while, things get tricky and writers try to incorporate negative or benign goals. In Good Will Hunting, the goal is pretty much to endure the court mandated punishment. That doesn’t allow our character to be very active, so it’s a dangerous road to take. As that movie shows, it can be done, but you need advanced screenwriting skills to pull it off. And very few writers out there have those skills.

Stakes – Once you have a character goal, you can establish your stakes. You do this by asking two very simple questions: “What does my character gain if he achieves his goal?” And “What does my character lose if he fails to achieve his goal?” The bigger the gains and losses, the higher the stakes. Now don’t throw in your hair extensions just yet. Before you lose yourself to the beat, remember this. The stakes only need to be high relative to the character’s situation. So in Star Wars the stakes are the safety of the entire galaxy. That’s pretty high. In Black Swan, the stakes are the lead role in a ballet performance. Which in comparison, seems really low. But because that role is so important to our heroine, the stakes actually feel just as high.

Urgency – I don’t think I need to tell you how important urgency is. It could be the difference between getting to the Smush Room first or getting to the Smush Room second. And as everyone knows, you don’t want to use the Smush Room second. One of the biggest problems I see in amateur screenplays is glacial pacing. The writers don’t understand how to infuse urgency into their story. The most common way to do this is via a ticking time bomb, that point of no return by when your character needs to achieve his goal. You can throw ticking time bombs all over your screenplay so that the pace is always quick. For example, if Sammy and Ronnie meet for coffee and they talk and talk and talk and talk, it’s going to be boring. But if Sammy tells Ronnie at the beginning of the scene that she has to leave in 5 minutes, the scene’s going to have more pep. Also, like stakes, urgency is relative. If I told you I needed to get my wallet back from Snooki’s place, who’s leaving for Vegas at 6 AM, the ticking time bomb is going to be somewhere in the eight hour range. But, if I told you that you needed to trick Snooki into falling in love with you so we could start hanging out with the Jersey Shore crowd, the ticking time bomb would be longer – maybe two or three weeks. The idea is to make the time frame as short as you possibly can relative to the situation.

Now, let’s look at five movies and see how they GSU. Get ready to pump those fists!

BACK TO THE FUTURE

G – The great thing about Back To The Future is that the story is so basic. Therefore it’s a great template for learning screenwriting. The goal here is simple. Marty needs to get back to the future.

S – Back To The Future also does one of the better jobs setting up its stakes, as they’re entirely specific to the situation. What’s at stake is Marty’s existence. If he doesn’t succeed, he will cease to exist. Notice how organic that is to the story. Marty doesn’t just die because they needed high-stakes. He dies because he himself screwed up his mother and father meeting, and now must get them back together so that he can be born. There’s a beautiful irony to that. The more you can tie your stakes into the fabric of the story, the better off you’ll be.

U – I don’t remember the exact time frame here. But I think it’s one week. This is the perfect amount of urgency since it gives Marty and Doc a believable amount of time to take care of the problem but not so much time that it feels easy. This is a problem a lot of beginner writers make. They set the time frame so far ahead that it feels like the main character has forever to solve the problem.

THE GOONIES

G –The Goonies is a great reminder that when you’re writing a high concept idea meant for a mass audience, you want to keep the goal simple. The goal here is to find the secret hidden treasure. That’s it. We’re now on our way.

S – The Goonies also reminds us to push ourselves a little harder when it comes to key story decisions, such as creating the stakes for your story. I think if I were developing this back in the day, I would’ve been fine limiting the stakes to Sean Astin losing his house. But The Goonies did something really clever. They came up with a scenario – a golf course – that made it so everybody was losing their houses. That meant that every single kid on this journey had something at stake. So when you think you’ve figured your stakes out, always go that extra mile and come up with something even bigger.

U – Goonies shows us the power of the super urgent ticking time bomb. We’re not talking a week here. We’re not talking a few days. We’re talking less than a day until the house is signed away. This is why I always recommend condensing your time frame to something as short as possible. Having a week to save the house is still pretty compelling. But it’s not as compelling as only having a day to save your house.

INCEPTION

G – The goal in Inception is to plant an idea into rival Robert Fisher’s mind so that he’s no longer a threat to Saito.

S – The stakes here are Cobb seeing his children again. If he succeeds, he gets to be with them. If not, he’ll probably never see them again (or at least that’s what we’re led to believe). Inception spends a lot of time showing us visions of the kids as a reminder of the stakes but I’d argue that Inception was pretty weak in this category. It’s still not clear why he can’t have his father fly them over to him. And I’m not sure we really believe that if he doesn’t do this now, he’ll never see them again. But if you’re looking at it from a technical standpoint, Inception does have stakes in place.

U – There wasn’t a lot of urgency throughout the first half of the movie, which is why it played out so damn slowly. But once we get into the dreams, Nolan makes sure that the urgency is high. He achieves this mainly with a visual ticking time bomb – the van falling. We know that when that van hits the water, everybody is going to wake up. So if they haven’t achieved their goal by that time, that’s it. Now I still think that Inception fudges the rules in that three levels down they’re supposed to have months to pull off their plan. But since they’re always being pursued, and because Nolan introduces so many visual cues that the dream states in all three levels are becoming unstable, there’s a sense that if they don’t get this done now, they’re going to run out of time. It’s a little bit shaky but it still works. Having said that, if you’re one of the many people who felt like Inception was sloppy, there’s a good chance that the vague stakes and the vague urgency contributed to that.

UP

G – The goal is for Carl to get to Paradise Falls.

S – This is the first of the movies where you can technically argue that the stakes aren’t high. If Carl doesn’t get to Paradise Falls, what happens? Technically nothing. It’s not like he dies. It’s not like anybody loses anything. However, if you look closer, you’ll notice that Up decides to sacrifice physical stakes for emotional stakes. We’ve established that the one thing Carl and his wife were never able to do was to go to Paradise Falls. The point of this journey then is to take his wife to the place she always wanted to go. That’s why the stakes are still high. The trick to making that work is similar to what they had to do in Inception. Whenever you create emotional stakes, you have to do the legwork ahead of time and establish that bond so that we care. How well you pull  that off will determine how invested your audience will be. You’ll notice that, emotionally, we’re much more invested in Carl achieving his goal than Cobb , and that’s because that opening sequence did such an amazing job establishing the love between these two. We never really feel that in Inception, which is why the stakes seem so low. Who cares if Cobb is able to see his two kids if we don’t even know them? We never even see their damn faces!

U – The urgency here comes from two different areas, one of which is quite clever. Instead of having a stock timer counting down, Up uses the rapidly depleting hydrogen supply in the balloons as the ticking time bomb. If he doesn’t get to the cliff within a couple of days, he will not be able to get his wife (represented by the house) to the place she always wanted to go. The other is the bad guys (Charles and his dogs) chasing them. Remember that incorporating a chase is a cheap but solid way to up the urgency in any story.

AMERICAN BEAUTY

G – I purposely chose this one as the last example because it doesn’t easily fit the GSU mold. It’s kind of like Sammy Sweetheart in that sense. She’s on the show but she never gyms, tans or laundrys. So I’ll just repeat this warning. If an idea doesn’t fit easily into the GSU mold, be aware that you are now writing in unchartered waters. Good luck. Now let’s see how GSU applies to American Beauty. The goal in American beauty is open ended. It isn’t a tangible objective. Lester’s goal is to get his life back on track (however misguided his belief of what that means is). The reason it still works as a goal though is that it keeps our main character active. Lester goes out and gets a job at the local drive-through. Lester starts working out more. Lester makes friends with people he would never make friends with. Lester buys the car he always wanted to buy. Even though it’s unclear when the goal will be achieved, because it keeps our character doing things, it works.

S – Remember that whenever the goal is murky, both your stakes and your urgency will also suffer, since those variables are direct offshoots of the goal. In this case, the stakes are our hero’s happiness. If Lester is to continue down this path of letting the world push him around, he’s going to be miserable for the rest of his life. For that reason, failure to push forward means accepting defeat. Lester must succeed at obtaining this new life or else he’ll be miserable forever. I’d say avoiding being miserable forever would classify as high-stakes.

U – The truth is, there isn’t a lot of urgency in American Beauty. The official ticking time bomb is one year. We find that out at the beginning, when Lester tells us, via voiceover, that he’ll be dead in a year. This does create urgency later on when we feel his impending death approaching (and the mystery kicks in of who’s going to kill him). But the pace throughout the first half of this script is relatively slow. The question is, why does it still work? The simple answer is that the character work in American beauty is the best of any script written during the entire decade when this movie came out. Most of the relationships here are so volatile or so destructive (Ricky and his dad, Lester and his wife, Lester and Angela) that there is an invisible ticking time bomb ticking away above each of them. We know that sooner or later each of these relationships is going to go boom, and that alone creates the illusion of urgency, even though the physical countdown is relatively slow. I guess the lesson here is that not every movie needs urgency, but you better have the toolset and a damn good plan if you don’t plan to incorporate urgency.

My suggestion to you, after you GTL, is to open up your current screenplay and ask if it has strong GSU. If it’s lacking in any of the three areas, see if you can come up with a solution. Oh, and make sure to check out Jersey Shore tonight to see who’s lying, Snooki or The Situation. Then e-mail me and tell me what happened because I don’t watch the show.

 

Genre: Drama
Premise: A war photographer is the only witness to a huge massacre in Pakistan. An ex special ops soldier with ties to the massacred party hires him to travel to Afghanistan and enact revenge on the men responsible.
About: This script came together as an idea by Zack Snyder (300, Watchmen, upcoming Superman movie) who hired the writer, Kurt Johnston, to write it for him. The script has been in development for a while and this is one of the early drafts. Christian Bale and Sean Penn recently signed on to play the lead roles and the director of the Swedish version of “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” is set to direct.
Writers: Kurt Johnstad (story by Zack Snyder)
Details: 112 pages – 1.5 draft – October 10, 2008 (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).

So I wasn’t going to review this one because it’s an early draft and the movie Sean Penn and Christian Bale signed on to was a more recent draft. But I’ve gotten enough people to recommend it to me that I decided it was worth taking a look at.

Joe Wallace is an American war photographer in Pakistan who’s been relegated to snapping photos of diplomats’ birthday parties. I guess America isn’t the only place where the economy sucks. But what Joe is about to realize is that the war is a lot closer than he thinks. A group of men storm the party and massacre everyone there, except for Joe, who escapes by the skin of his teeth. But the event scars him deeply and when we meet him again a few weeks later, he’s a full-blown heroin addict.

Ethan Black, an older ex-special ops soldier, had family killed in that massacre, and when he finds out Joe was the only witness, he seeks him out and hires him to help him find the warlord responsible.

So away they go, heading to Afghanistan at a time when you definitely do not want to be traveling through Afghanistan, meeting old friends and trying to piece together where this warlord might be hiding. Eventually they find out that his brother’s wife was building schools to educate females, and we all know how the Taliban feels about educating females. So a statement had to be made.

The movie is a down and dirty look at what it would really be like traveling through Afghanistan at this time. They have to con their way through roadblocks, they have to maneuver their way through unfriendly towns, they have to figure out who to trust and who not to trust. There’s no glamour here. It was almost like Zack and Kurt decided they wanted to make the most un-Hollywood movie possible. It’s dark and it’s depressing and it’s probably exactly how it would really be if you tried this yourself.

One of the big changes made to the newer drafts is that it’s now a kidnapping movie as opposed to a revenge movie. This is a really important distinction I’ve talked about before because it changes the tone of the story and it changes the pace of the story. When you’re talking about a revenge film, the person is already dead. For that reason the pace is more leisurely. You’re not in a hurry to take somebody down because they’ve already done their damage. That slower pace usually ends up hurting the screenplay because the urgency factor (UF) goes way down. And when you lose urgency, you lose a lot of what makes a story work.

If it’s a kidnapping scenario, urgency is at the forefront. Every second lost is a potential second that the kidnapped party could be lost forever. Look no further than Taken to see how that plays out. In addition, the entire tone of the piece changes. Whereas with revenge, the tone is sad and fatalistic and hopeless, with kidnapping, it’s hopeful and optimistic and exciting. There’s always a chance that you could still find that person alive.

Now I’m not going to tell you that revenge is always the lesser of the two choices. The Brigands of Rattleborge is one of my favorite scripts and that movie is pure revenge. But it becomes a lot harder to make the movie work because you need to supplement your story with things to make up for the lack of urgency and hope. Rattleborge had amazing characters for example. It also did a top-notch job making you hate the villains so that you couldn’t wait to see them go down. Unfortunately, I don’t see either of those things in this early draft of “The Last Photograph.” Not only did I never meet the bad guys, but I never knew the people who were killed either. I mean, if I don’t know the bad guy and I never cared about the people killed, why would I be invested in this story?

From the opening page, every action is coated with despair. I’ve read scripts that are more depressing than The Last Photograph, but I’m not sure I’ve read a script that became so lost in its own hopelessness. Every line sounds like a line you’d hear from somebody right before they committed suicide. One of our heroes is a heroin addict who has no hope of ever being happy again. And the other is an introverted Bounty Hunter who’s never allowed himself to feel anything.

That was another issue I had. Whenever you pair two people together, they need to be different in some way. These characters were almost exactly the same. The only difference I could see between them was that one had a drug problem and the other didn’t. Since their interactions are the centerpiece of the story, you can imagine why it didn’t work. They never really clash about anything. There are no real differences here. It’s just a couple of guys who realize that life sucks and then you die. I think that some people gravitate towards that fatalistic mentality but I’m not one of them.

Having said that, I cannot think of two better actors to play these parts. Sean Penn loves these miserable 50 something types. And giving Christian Bale a heroin addict to play is probably more addictive to him then heroin itself.

But I’m trying to figure out what it is people liked about this so much. I imagine we’re just into different films. I see them liking Biutiful and The House Of Sand And Fog and 21 Grams. Those films are too depressing for me. The only movie that’s really depressing that I love is The Sweet Hereafter and the reason for that is that it’s not just an exercise in hopelessness. There’s actually a clever story being told. And while the narrative in The Last Photograph is clean and easy to follow, it seems like that story is secondary to showing how miserable two people can be.

But there are some things that worked. I thought the writer did a good job with imagery. One of the challenges of writing a screenplay is trying to get the reader to see what you see, using only words. That’s not easy to do. There were many times where I felt like I was there in Afghanistan with these guys. Joey Ramon covering What A Wonderful World while Hindu porn is pumping away on the TV and our character is injecting Brown heroine into his veins is a powerful sensory filled image. And while I know some readers hate music cues, I like them, because they help me understand the tone the writer is going for. There were a lot of music cues that put me right in the heart of the moment here.

Unfortunately, the characters were too cliché (to be honest I don’t know how you write a heroin addict that doesn’t feel cliché these days) and the story too depressing for my taste. I also wouldn’t have minded a few more surprises along the way. As we’ve talked about before, it’s easy for a road trip movie to become monotonous. It’s up to the writer to infuse it with surprises and twists, anything to place us on the less traveled path. I felt like we were too often on the traveled path, which is kind of ironic considering the subject matter. But hey, that’s just me. If you love serious fare – if Babel is in your top five – you might want to check this out.

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

What I learned: This screenplay was a good example of a term Stacy Menear (writer of Mixtape) taught me. Monodrama. The entire screenplay hits only one emotion. And if you stick with one emotion for too long, that emotion loses its magical effect. People are more likely to respond when you take them through a range of emotions. Unfortunately, we don’t get that here. I’m really hoping they addressed this in future drafts.

It’s going to be a great week here at Scriptshadow. We have an Impressive script and a new Top 25 script. In fact, I might even make it a Top 10 script. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since I read it. So, is today that script? Read on to find out…

Genre: Comedy
Premise: An FBI agent whose family life is falling apart is tasked with escorting an eccentric bank robber to jail.
About: Moving Elliott sold to Universal Pictures back in 2001 for mid six figures and started the careers of Glenn German and Adam Rodgers, who went on to sell a few more scripts. Unfortunately, those careers never extended into produced credit territory, which is a shame since this script is so good. In fact, even though this script was sold back in 2001, its greatest attribute is that it’s timeless (note to writers: the more timeless your story is, the longer its shelf life). You could still shoot this movie today as written. I really hope somebody takes that chance because this script does not deserve to be lost in development hell. Here is an interview that the writers did back in 2005.
Writers: Glenn German and Adam Rodgers
Details: 118 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).

Elliott Jenkins, an African-American armored truck driver, is picking up some moolah from the bank with his menacing partner Donald Griggs. Elliott is a unique guy. He can be laid back, he can be intense, he can play the dumbest guy in the room, he can play the smartest guy in the room. He’s eccentric. A little off center. And all in all, a happy go lucky honest kind of dude. So it’s a little strange then, as he and Griggs load the money onto the truck, that a second armored truck pulls up.

Oops. Maybe Elliott and Griggs aren’t so honest after all. After a few distracting words with the second crew, our thieves hightail it out of there.

Halfway across town we meet Jack Traylor. Jack is an FBI agent whose family life is going to shit. His wife has left him and wants full custody of his two children, his young son and teenage daughter. These are the only two things Jack has left in his life, so he’s going to do everything he can to hold on to them. Unfortunately, with the bills piling up and the neverending demands of being an FBI agent, the two worlds keep crashing into each other, and lately Jack has found himself in too many situations where his kids have been put in danger, not the kind of facts you want showing up at a custody hearing.

Anyway, while driving his kids home for the day, Jack runs into that armored truck that Griggs and Elliott are driving and becomes suspicious. He follows them into a Long John Silvers, and the next thing you know Griggs is opening fire on him and his daughter. Jack is able to nab Elliott but Griggs escapes.

Back at headquarters, Jack gets reamed out for yet again mixing family with work, and as punishment, his boss wants him to escort Elliott across town to jail tomorrow. Jack pleads with his boss to use somebody else because his custody hearing is tomorrow but his boss doesn’t give a shit. In fact, he’s ready to take Jack’s badge right now. Not screwing this up may be the last chance for Jack to keep his job.

So Jack agrees to do it, but there’s no way he’s losing his kids, so he decides – against all reason – to do it all. After picking up Elliott, the first place he goes is to the bank to refinance his mortgage so he can keep his house (and therefore keep his kids). What he quickly finds out though, is that Elliott is not the easiest guy to shut up, and that wherever he goes, Elliott always has an opinion. Sometimes he helps him and sometimes he doesn’t, but he’s always got advice for Jack.

Complicating things is that Griggs is still out there and has a huge hard-on for finding Elliott. As the day goes on, Jack starts putting together the pieces, and realizes that something is off. Why would two guys who just stole hundreds of thousands of dollars stop at a Long John Silver’s anyway? Why did Griggs fight for his life while Elliott practically begged to get caught? And why does Griggs keep chasing Elliott? Jack suspects that he may be part of a bigger plan. The problem is that he’s so consumed with keeping his family together that he doesn’t have time to figure that plan out.

This script had so many things going for it. It had a tight urgent easy-to-understand goal. It had tons of obstacles that got in the way of that goal. It had two compelling main characters. It had conflict at the center of that pairing. It had a character with a ton to lose (high-stakes). It had a solid villain in Griggs, who was always on their tail. It had enough setups and payoffs to make Back to the Future jealous. It had a great sense of humor. And what put it over-the-top was that it had an intriguing mystery.

If this were just some movie about a guy escorting another guy across town, it would have been average at best. But where this script elevates itself is when Jack realizes that there might be more going on here. When we realize that Elliott could have a bigger goal in play, and that getting escorted was all part of a bigger plan, that’s when I knew I was reading something special.

And you know, I actually loved all the family stuff too, which I normally don’t. These guys have somehow managed to write a family movie without falling into that safe PG territory. The Disney promotional team would have a heart attack combing through this, but I think that’s what makes it work. It’s been a long time since we’ve infused a traditionally R-rated genre with a family theme. But these guys have done it, and done it well.

But these scripts don’t work unless the central relationship works. And the key to making that central relationship work is to put the two characters as far apart as you can on the spectrum, and then over the course of the movie, get them to a place where they understand each other. Seeing two people who weren’t meant to like each other eventually like each other is one of the more satisfying threads you’ll find in a film – if it’s done well. And like everything else in the script, it’s done well.

I also want to highlight Moving Elliott for doing something that another recently reviewed screenplay did not do. My big problem with that script (amateur entry “Inhuman Resources“) was that it was too thin. There were no subplots. It just barreled through to the end, never stopping to develop anything other than the main plot and the pursuit of the main goal.

Moving Elliott is an example of how to populate your screenplay with subplots. Instead of just barreling towards the jail, we have the custody hearing, we have the house foreclosure, we have a project he has to get to his son at school, we have his daughter secretly dating a guy behind his back, we have the mystery behind Elliott getting caught so easily. We have the pursuit by Griggs. That’s what’s so awesome about this screenplay. It’s populated with so many little subplots and extra things that a simple movie about transferring a convict becomes a complicated story about an FBI agent trying to make it through the day with his family intact. I can’t stress this enough. If you have ever wondered about how to integrate subplots into your script, check out this screenplay. It’s a master class.

However, this is not the Top 25 script. Why? A few minor reasons. The dialogue wasn’t punchy enough for this kind of movie. It’s almost there. But this is the kind of film that needs those memorable one-liners that people will be quoting for weeks after leaving the theater. And right now it doesn’t have them.

I also thought the opening scene was more confusing than clever. This may sound like nitpicking but the introduction of one of your main characters is one of the most important scenes in the entire movie. The idea here is that Elliott is supposed to be clever and intelligent – that plays out through the rest of the story. But the way he handles the second armored truck interrupting their pickup, is akin to something a 12-year-old would come up with. He babbles some stock nonsense about calling the guy’s supervisor if he mentions this to anyone, and for no other reason than that this is a movie, the guy goes along with it. If they could’ve improved this scene so that Elliott comes off as the clever “smartest guy in the room” he’s supposed to come off as, that would have sold him as the person he needs to be.

Other than that, I loved this. I don’t know if Universal still has the property. But if they do, they need to dig it up right now and take another look at it. Cause this script does not deserve to be collecting dust. It could be a great film.

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

What I learned: When you sell that first script, you haven’t made it. I think that’s terrifying to hear because we’re sold on this whole idea that selling a script is the endpoint. It’s the moment when we’ve officially “made it.” But if you look at the career of these guys, they wrote a great script here – and yet they still don’t have a theatrical credit to their names. That’s baffling to me but it’s far from unique. There are a lot of really good writers who still struggle in Hollywood purgatory. It’s a great reminder that once you sell that first script, you need to fight and claw and write and work and put everything you’ve got into keeping it going. Because one of the sad realities is that if you don’t keep moving up that ladder in those first 2 to 3 years, people will start to look at you as one of those average second rate writers who will never go beyond that intermediate level. It’s not fair and, in this case, it’s a crime. But that’s the reality of the business.