Genre: Horror
Premise: Two sisters come back to their hometown after their mentally ill mother dies, and are dragged back into the mystery of what happened to their third sister, who drowned when they were children.
About: Universal preemptively purchased this short story. Janelle Monáe will star and produce. Akela Cooper (M3GAN, Malignant) will adapt the screenplay, which is based on the short story of one of the highest-concept writers in Hollywood, Colin Bannon, who’s made the Black List a record 7 times.
Writer: Colin Bannon
Details: 27 pages

I don’t have a lot of time today so I have to speed through this one. Apologies in advance for any grammatical errors. And I encourage everyone to read the short story first because it’s a spoiler type read. And if you know the spoiler ahead of time, the story’s no fun. With that said, the only way to talk about this story is to talk about the spoiler, so you’ve been warned.

The quick and dirty plot breakdown is that a young girl named Sam lives in the South with her sisters, Riley, and Maddie. Maddie is the youngest. One day, when their mother was at the lake watching Maddie swim, she looked down at her book, looked back at the lake and Maddie was gone.

After that, both the mother and father went crazy. The dad just upped and hightailed it out of there without ever saying goodbye. And the mom was so mentally diseased that she poured bleach into her eyes, blinding herself forever. Social services came in, ripped away Sam and Riley, and the two lived the rest of their youth in foster care before heading out and trying to make it in the real world.

Sam would move to New York and become an addict and a dealer. Then, one day, she got word that her mom had died so she and Riley went back to their hometown to bury their mother. They hadn’t been in the house since they’d been taken away, and the first thing they were greeted with was a snake. Welcome home!

At the funeral, some real estate dude offers 800 grand to buy the house. Sam didn’t have to be told twice and invites the man to stop by the next day. But, on that day, as Sam and Riley clean up the house for his visit, they go downstairs and find a secret passageway, a la Barbarian.

They walk down a hallway and find an exact recreation of Maddie’s bedroom. Even freakier, they also find Maddie!!!! But Maddie is now 30 years old and wears a hood that keeps her face in shadow. She then screams, “DON’T LOOK!”

The girls run upstairs where they see the real estate agent. But it’s not just the real estate agent. It’s the real estate agent WITH A CHAINSAW!!!!!! WTF??????? He starts screaming to let him have her head or something. And then he’s attacking the girls. And then Maddie appears, lowers her hood, and we see her hair. Which is all snakes. The agent looks at her and, seconds later, he’s stone.

Yes, it appears that Maddie is Medusa. And that’s why all of this needed to happen like it did. And poor dad? Didn’t leave. Accidentally found her secret room one day, looked her in the eyes, and turned to stone. The problem now is that others are coming. Maddie can’t hide here anymore. Which means the girls will all have to leave together. And once they’re out in the real world, they’ll have to learn to live under these new supernatural circumstances. The end.

For the Win burger

All in all, this story was kinda clever.

It presents itself as a haunted house movie. The focus is on the girls coming back to their home and the home being freaky. And then, like I say you gotta do with all ideas, the author introduces a fresh unexpected angle. This isn’t your traditional haunted house movie at all. It’s a Medusa movie.

Bannon did a great job with his setup. There are about a dozen setups (the mother got into making sculptures – which actually turned out to be Maddie’s victims, there are snakes everywhere in the house, the mom bleached her eyes so she didn’t risk turning to stone herself, they find old stories about how their great grandmother decapitated one of her daughters, etc.) in this movie so that when the payoff finally comes (she’s Medusa), it makes sense immediately. Also, unlike most stories, the writer never tips his hand with any setup because we don’t even know this is a Medusa story.

So that reveal was fun.

I will say that it’s always a risk when you do the genre change-up. With this movie, you have no option other than to promote it as a haunted house movie. Which means that the type of audience that likes ghosts, maybe even monsters, are the ones who are going to show up. Unfortunately, that’s not always the same audience that likes Greek mythology. So when the Greek mythology payoff comes, you’re going to have some disappointed people.

I secretly like the genre change-up because it’s so challenging to pull off. You want to see if you can be one of the few authors to do it. Can you start a song with rap and end it with country? So I’m curious how people will react to this.

One more thing I want to point out to anyone who’s thinking about writing a script or a short story in this same vein. You’re probably looking at this and thinking, “I just gotta go high concept and that solves all my problems!” And you’re kind of right. It makes things easier for sure. But if that’s all you do, you won’t sell the script. I guarantee that the reason this sold to Janelle Monae is because of the sisters’ relationship.

Most of the smart successful people in Hollywood need to have an emotional connection to the story for them to pull the trigger. So, draw them in with the highest concept you can think of then grab onto their hearts with the best character story you’re capable of writing.

I’m proud of Bannon here. This is his most focused story yet. And, for that reason, it’s probably his best.

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

What I learned: Genre change-ups MUST BE SET UP BETTER THAN SINGLE GENRE STORIES. Remember, you’re bringing people in who may not like what your story is going to turn into later. However, if you have a ton of setups, like Bannon does here, then when we switch over to that second genre, we’re at least not surprised by it. It makes sense to us. That, to me, is what saved this story.

Genre: Comedy Horror
Premise: When a group of new hires gets invited to their company’s corporate retreat, things
quickly take a turn as they discover the only way to land the job is to survive the
weekend. Literally.
About: I believe today’s writer, Jackson Kellard, has a couple of scripts in development. But this is the one that’s gotten him the most attention, as it ended up on the Black List with 10 votes.
Writer: Jackson Kellard
Details: 117 pages

I feel like, 1000%, this actor would be in this movie.  Playing… someone.

There are a dozen ways to tell, right off the bat, if a script is doomed. One of those ways is if you see a high page count in a low-page count genre. Contained concepts. Thrillers. Comedies. Most horror. These are all genres that should hover between 90-105 pages. When you write a 118 page version of one of these films, it’s a tell-tale sign that you haven’t been around screenwriting for very long.

Yes, it’s true, there are 120 page scripts that read like 90 page scripts and 90 page scripts that read like 120 page scripts. But the reality is, when you’re writing spec scripts, a MAJOR FACTOR in their success is making things as easy on the reader as possible.

Because you’re not getting the high-level “decision-making” dude at the studio reading these scripts. You’re getting the secretary, who’s hoping to move up in the company, and they’re told that they have to read six scripts over the weekend and tell their boss which one is best. That’s the reader you’re getting. So, your scripts are never being read under ideal circumstances.  Therefore: Make it easy for them!

Now, I’ll give it to today’s writer that he has a concept that will get people to open his script. Which is how I’m guessing Onboarding got enough votes to make the Black List. The Black List is very much a ‘quantity’ game these days. The more reads you can get, the more people you have who could potentially vote on your script. This is a concept people will check out. But as I’ll point out after the plot summary, even the concept, here, has issues.

New employees for the company, West Bridge Capital, are informed that they need to go on an orientation on a remote island. There are about 80 of these new employees and when they get there, during the opening ceremonies, they all pass out. When they wake up, they’re spread throughout the island in various scenarios where their lives are in danger.

The group we’re with consists of Charlie (the nerd), Eva (cool tattoo girl), AJ (crypto bro), Andre (gay and loving it), Jane (old chick who tries to act young), and Erik (son of the CEO of the company).

Our group wakes up on a giant platform in the sky. When the ropes of that platform are released, they’re basically standing on a giant tilting piece of wood. They realize that the only way to survive is to spread out and balance the board, or else it will tilt and they’ll slide off to their deaths. They somehow make it off of this and quickly realize that the company is trying to kill them.

Charlie, however, reminds everyone just how hard it was out there in the job market. If they can just survive this orientation, they get to work at one of the top companies in the country. They all agree and away they go. Charlie, by the way, has his sights set on Eva, who’s way too cool for him. But that doesn’t mean he won’t shoot his shot.

They next end up in a cave that’s quickly filling with lava. An LED TV turns on and they’re on a zoom call with one of the managers, who informs them that she’s going to play a game of charades with them. Every answer they get right, a stairway is lowered. And if it’s lowered enough, they’ll be able to walk up it and get out of here before they’re burned alive. The answers include pop culture things such as “Scandavol” and “Caitlin Clark.”

Eventually, Charlie and Eva are split up from the main group (after they tumble down a waterfall) and Eva is able to hack her and Charlie’s tracking devices so the company can’t find them. While in the jungle, they stumble across a little mini town that previous survivors of West Bridge Capital’s initiation weekend have formed. There, they have little pun stands like, “The NY Steak Exchange,” where a woman cuts and cooks steaks for you.

The CEO of the company, Jonathan Marks, gets so pissed that Eva outsmarted him that he empowers his primary operator, Hank, to go into the game and kill her, along with everyone on her team. But Johnathan has pissed Hank off so many times, Hank does the unthinkable and teams up with the new employees instead.

Let’s start at the top. This concept is dated. I’ve come across this concept two-dozen times at least. I’ve probably read ten versions of this story. So, already, you’re in the hole.

Whenever you choose a well-tread concept, your only hope of writing a good script is taking that story in a unique direction. Either the execution is unexpected. Or the writer’s voice is unexpected. Cause the worst thing that you can do is pick a common concept and execute it commonly.

Now, while I wouldn’t say Onboarding’s execution was 100% obvious. It’d say it was about 80% obvious.

I got the sense that the writer wanted to separate himself via the humor. This is a very comedic script. But screenwriters writers don’t seem to realize that they’re competing with a level of comedy that’s beyond what even the solidly funny comedic writers are capable of.

It’s the same thing with tennis (hey, Wimbledon is going on, let me make this analogy). I competed up to a certain point, playing several low-level professional tournaments after college. And I’ll never forget the day I played this guy in the first round of the biggest tournament I’d ever played in and he hit the ball so hard and with so much spin that when my racket made contact with his shots, the ball would push my racket backwards against my wrist so severely, that it was painful to hit the ball. I’d never experienced anything like that.

I knew, after that match, I could never compete with these people.  Which is why I moved to Hollywood instead.  Yaaaayyyy!!!

Nowadays, any average person who sees me play, they say, “Wow, you’re good.”  And I am pretty good!  But I know that when I play against someone who’s an actual competitor, I’m not even in the same stratosphere.

That’s how I felt reading all the jokes in this script. They were fine. Yeah, watching Andre The Gay Guy get upset whenever he couldn’t vape made me chuckle. But to compete in the comedy space where people are giving you 40 million dollars to make a movie? You have to operate at a different freaking level. And this script never got there comedically.

Onboarding may have been able to still entertain me if the set pieces were strong. But they weren’t. We get a classic screenwriting beginner mistake where the opening set piece (the one on the tilting platform) was about 75% clear. Instead of what it needed to be. Which was 100% clear.

I had a hard time visualizing what I was looking at. To make things worse, the second half of the set piece had them opening up hatches and then bungee jumping down to the ground. Is this task about balancing or is it about bungee jumping? You gotta pick one. Cause I didn’t understand for the life of me how you keep the balancing goal while also bungee jumping. It was very confusing.

And then you straight up lost me with the lava-cave charades. That’s not even creative. It’s dumb. Again, a lot of what scripts come down to is writers either wanting to work hard, pushing their creativity to its limit, or taking the easy route. In other words, are you going to work that creative brain of yours until you come up with an exceptional set piece or are you just going to go with the first or second idea that pops into your head? Lava charades definitely felt like a first idea. And I was out after that. I knew after that scene that there was nothing this script could do to win me back.

With all that said, there’s a base level of know-how here which, these days, is enough to get you on the Black List. If you have a concept that’s juicy enough to get read requests, you will have enough people to potentially vote on your script come Black List voting time. From there, it’s just making sure not to make any drastic mistakes. Your script has to be professional. It’s got to have a 3-Act structure, it’s gotta move, it’s got to have basic character stuff (an arc for one or two characters). This script does all of that. It just doesn’t do anything more than that.

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

What I learned: This concept is dated. If you come up with an idea like this, you should acknowledge that it’s too common, and look for a version of that idea that’s fresher, more modern. How bout “Love (And Death) Island?” A bunch of Islanders stuck in one of those Love Island villa shows.  Instead of trying to stay in the villa, they’re trying to get out. Cause if you stay in the villa for too long, you die.  That sounds more current to me.

How to make a bad pitch that will actually get you the screenwriting gig

If you are lucky, one day you will be able to pitch your take on a major motion picture sequel. And when that day comes, I want you to think back to Megan 2.0. Because this pitch destroyed a franchise. Yet here’s the irony: It’s the angle you should’ve pitched as well. I’ll explain in a moment.

I don’t like dancing on the grave of failed movies but I’m ecstatic Megan 2.0 tanked at the box office this weekend. It brought in just 10 million dollars. For comparison, the first film brought in 30 million dollars on its opening weekend.

Why am I happy? Well, it’s my job – as it is for all screenwriters – to know what works at the box office. The better the understanding you have of what makes people show up to movie theaters, the more successful you’re going to be. Because you’re going to choose to write movies that people actually like.

I never understood the success of Megan. I thought it was bargain basement horror. Sure. Just how sophisticated is a movie about a killer girl robot supposed to be? I get that it’s not trying to be Casablanca. But even the design of the doll sucked. And that stupid dance it did that wasn’t even well-choreographed. The whole time that movie was doing well, I thought I was being gaslit. I’m looking at this pile of trash and saying to anyone who will notice, “Do you not see how bad this is?”

The utter collapse of the franchise confirmed what I knew all along – which was that this Megan doll was a dud. It reaffirmed my understanding of the box office. Cause if this movie had made a bunch of money, I would’ve thrown up my hands and said, “I don’t understand Hollywood anymore.” Especially after the success of The Minecraft Movie. A double dose of dumbness doing well? I would not be able to pretend like I understood things anymore.

But here’s the relevant part of Megan 2.0 as far as screenwriting is concerned. When you are a professional screenwriter, you are constantly asked to come in and pitch your angle for writing stories. Whether you get the job or not often comes down to how good your “angle” is.

Now, as it so happens, the creative team behind Megan 2.0 is the same as Megan 1.0 (Akela Cooper, James Wan, and Gerard Johnstone). So there was no official person coming in to pitch. It was them pitching each other. But for the sake of this lesson, I want you to focus on the pitch that won here.

The pitch was: “Megan 1 was Alien. Megan 2 is Aliens.” In other words, Alien was a straight horror film. Aliens was an action film. That’s the exact same thing they did here. They went away from horror and turned this into some action movie where Megan has to take on a bigger scarier robot woman.

This highlights the problem with pitching. Is that sometimes the pitches that sound the best in the room are the worst thing you can do for your movie. I can only imagine how excited everyone in that room got when that pitch was made. Cause it sounds so right! “Alien to Aliens.” Who didn’t love the jump between those two films? Now you’re going to do the same for my movie? Hell yeah I’m in.

But Megan has completely different DNA from Alien. Alien was dark. It was almost nihilistic in its portrayal of these characters’ lives. Megan 1 was a goofy half-comedy horror film. It didn’t have the seriousness required to upgrade to an action movie. And you saw that in the turnout. People don’t want to see a goofy doll in an action movie. They want more of the same. They want horror. This franchise was never complex enough to be more than that.

But, again, here’s the irony. If you (as you in YOU reading this) were going in to pitch for this Megan sequel and you would’ve said you were going with an “Alien to Aliens” pitch, I would’ve told you to do it. Why? Cause I know it would’ve won the job. EVEN THOUGH I know that it’s ultimately going to be a terrible movie.

So, Carson, you’re sending us on a suicide mission? Listen. My job is to GET YOU THE JOB. It’s to get you paid. It’s to get you the movie credit. And that would’ve gotten you the credit because it’s the kind of pitch in the room that works. It’s the same reason Rian Johnson was able to get away with The Last Jedi and the depressing storyline that ruined Luke Skywalker’s legacy. Because he could say, “It’s just like going from Star Wars to Empire Strikes Back. It has to be darker!” And Kathleen Kennedy said hell yes because that pitch made sense.

It’s also the reason why this Nobody 2 movie has the storyline that it has – A family vacation. So many people came into that room and pitched a bigger badder version of “Nobody.” Think about why that doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because studio execs could’ve thought of that on their own. They don’t need creative types to say, “Go bigger and badder.” They like when you come up with that angle that they couldn’t have thought of themselves and packaged it in a container that they instantly understand. “National Lampoon’s Vacation meets John Wick.” They go gaga over that shit – to the extent that they don’t even see the finished product. They just see the sexy unexpected angle of the pitch.

Fantastic Four is about to run into this problem itself. It went with a pitch that probably sounded good in the room but is not something that people actually want to see. The pitch was: The first Marvel movie for the whole family. That’s what the story is about. It’s about a family. They even bring in a baby, like those 90s sitcoms always did in the seventh season.

But you know what happened to those sitcoms once they brought in the baby? They lost all their young hip viewers. Those viewers ran for the hills when babies showed up. And the same thing is going to happen here because anybody who’s read comic books before knows that boys used comics to escape their families. You went and bought five comics then ran up to your room and went through each and every page with your best friend.

There has never been a time in history when the whole family sat around and read a comic book together. So Fantastic Four is about to get annihilated – not by Galactus. But by the general public. Who just aren’t going to be interested in this angle.

Speaking of angles, it’s going to be really interesting to watch what goes down with this Bond stuff. Now that the hipper younger-skewing Amazon Prime has it claws in the famed franchise, it’s going to go with a fresh and new angle. They’re even considering baby-faced Tom Holland to play the most manly of all manly roles. Which makes no sense but that’s the risk of trying a new angle. You’re gambling and you’re hoping everybody follows along.

For years, the Broccolis have been steadfast in keeping with Bond tradition. Any director that came in with a fresh angle, they kicked them right back out. They rejected Christopher Freaking Nolan! Cause Nolan said he wanted to do his own thing and not have anyone looking over his shoulder. That’s how much they protected their “angle” on Bond – that they rejected the number one director in the world. And it worked! The movies all did well.

It just goes to show, there’s no “right” way to do this. Everybody always says you should go with a fresh new angle because “fresh” and “new” sounds good. But there are certain franchises where you want to stick with what got you there. Marvel and Star Wars are in trouble these days specifically because they’ve strayed so far from their traditional model. Maybe had they stayed with what got them there, both franchises would be healthy.

You know what is healthy? F1. That movie came out of the gates pedal to the metal this weekend. I feel like it was just yesterday that Brad Pitt was threatening to retire, saying he wanted to leave the industry to the young guns. After one of his best openings ever (55 mil), he should be lining up projects for the next decade.

F1 used an age-old (and very basic) Hollywood formula, which is to make a movie about the hot thing of the moment (F1) and then really do the execution justice. Had they gone the Marvel route here and magic-CGI’d this movie together, I promise you no one would’ve shown up. Instead, they put you in the car with cameras. They had Pitt really racing. They clearly cared about a genuine real world experience. How ironic is that? That the new studio players in town (Apple TV) are making movies the way studios used to make them, whereas the old guard is ignoring that in favor of AI digital bits and bops. Maybe the Disney and WB and RKO will learn something from this. We customers value stuff that looks and feels real.

Did anybody see any of these movies this weekend? If so, what’d you think?

A former Black List topping author whose great script only failed to get developed because it, ironically, got blacklisted by Madonna is back with a new take on Macbeth

Genre: Drama/Comedy
Premise: (from Black List) After beloved movie star Tom Adair is found dead, the outpouring of grief and sympathy quickly elevates his best friend Alec Donavan to movie star status. Now Alec must contend with his newfound fame and success–and the fact that he and his agent/girlfriend Karynn Pieper secretly murdered Tom and are haunted by his vengeful ghost.
About: Today’s writer has topped the Black List before with a Madonna biopic that was awesome. She’s back, and this latest script of hers is an adaptation of one of the most popular stories of all time – MacBeth.
Writer: Elyse Hollander
Details: 100 pages

Perfect casting?

For a long time, it has been thought that scripts about the industry don’t work. The failure of HBO’s The Franchise seemed to confirm that pulling off the subject matter was impossible. But then The Studio came along and proved that it could be done!

Has “Turnaround” also cracked the code on stories based on the industry? Let’s find out!

Set in the early 2000s (why? who knows??), 30-something Alec Donovan, an actor, is struggling to make ends meet. He’s resorted to writing his own script. But all the big producers in town tell him that the only way this script will get made is if he has a movie star in the lead role.

It just so happens that Alec has a movie star best friend! Tom Adair. But he and Tom haven’t spoken in forever. Ironically, the two have the same agent, Karynn Piper. And Alec is sleeping with Karynn. But even she tells him it ain’t happening with Tom, who’s on the set of his latest movie, about Caesar.

As it so happens, one of the actors on the movie ODs on some bad coke, and Tom figures he’ll throw his buddy a bone, hiring him onto the movie. Later on, Alec decides to see if Tom will be in his movie so he goes over to his house. That’s when he sees that there’s a young attractive naked dead guy in Tom’s bed. Another OD!

Soon, Karynn is over and the three are deciding what to do with the body. But when Tom starts commanding them around, Alec loses it and pushes his friend down the stairs, killing him. Alec and Karynn decide to stage the house like it was just these two here and jet out.

Cut to a year later and Alec has used the publicity of his friend’s death to become a hot commodity in Tinseltown. He even stars in the sequel to that Caesar movie. Alec has to deal with all the responsibilities of his newfound position, which include being a sellout, something he vehemently detests.

But that’s not nearly as big of a problem as his dead friend deciding to haunt him. “Haunt” is a strong word. I’d say it’s more like trolling. He doesn’t threaten Alec. He just says a lot of things that make him feel bad. Of course, Alec thinks he’s going insane, which interferes with his movie star life. He eventually has a mental breakdown before realizing he must take care of this problem once and for all.

Oof.

Oof oof.

Double oof.

This was not good.

You can always tell, too.

You know immediately if a script isn’t going to work, even if it’s a good writer, like today.

The second I saw that we were randomly setting the movie in the early 2000s I said, “Uh oh.” If stories are set in random near-past time periods for no reason, that’s a good sign that a crappy script is coming.

And then the structure was… nonexistent. Things just happen like they’re being made up on the spot.

This supporting actor dies of an overdose on the set of Tom’s movie and then Alec replaces him. Then that production ends and we cut to another death, when Tom’s boy toy ends up overdosing at his house. Then, not long after that, we get the THIRD death of the first 30 pages, with Tom himself getting murdered.

That’s what we call “all over the place storytelling.”

We cut to one year later because of course we do. Remember yesterday how I told you that extremely tight time frames were screenplay catnip. This shows you what happens when you go the opposite direction. After that one-year jump cut, all the air left the balloon. The story basically starts over with Alec now being a movie star in Tom’s stead.

Then we just… hang out for a bunch of scenes. At a certain point, I checked the page number. It was page 65 and NO PLOT HAD BEGUN YET! There was no engine underneath the pages. The script existed solely to wait for every instance that Tom could haunt Alec. And he didn’t even haunt him that much!  Want to know what a script that actually has structure and an engine looks like so you can compare good to bad?  Check out any version of A Christmas Carol.

I’d go so far as to say, I don’t think this script did a single thing right. Even the humor wasn’t funny. “Some would say, thirty-five is too old to die young, you know?” Is that a funny line? I know it “presents” as funny. But does it make you laugh?

“Hanging around funny” is not the same as funny. A lot of writers forget that. They think that if they can place some jokes near funny, that will be enough. But funny needs to actually be funny.

The thing is, we’ve got a comp for this on how to do it right. “The Studio.” The Studio is covering the same ground but it’s doing it in a way fresher and funnier way. Note that The Studio does what I was teaching everybody yesterday – using The Big U for all of its episodes.

It also had much clearer characters with clear characteristics, which is imperative to the humor hitting. You have the new studio head who loves artsy movies yet is forced to make brainless big-budget shlock. You have the “That Guy” producer, a talentless douchebag who knows it’s only a matter of time before people figure out he doesn’t know what he’s doing. You have the overly ambitious assistant. And you have the over-the-top marketing girl.

Here in Turnaround, Alec’s character is pretty clear. He’s living in his friend’s shadow. Karynn is clear – she’s the cold-blooded agent. But she’s so cliche that everything she does is boring and obvious. But the real difference in these two character groups is that we don’t like either of the characters in this script. Whereas we like all of The Studio characters.

Here’s one certainty I have learned over 20 years of reading – If you have unlikable leads and no plot engine, there is NO WAY your script will work. It is literally impossible to pull off.

And I think that the pushback to my criticism would be that this is an adaptation of one of the most successful stories of all time in MacBeth. But there’s a slight difference in the time periods that the two versions of the story are released in. And I’m pretty sure that in 1606, Shakespeare didn’t have to compete with an infinite-scrolling app of endless entertainment.

You gotta change with the times, baby. A stronger structure. More urgency. And characters we can actually get behind. This was very close to a “What the hell did I just read.”

The sad thing is that those improvements would probably only make this script average. The DNA here is full of too many cobwebs to turn this into a winner.

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

What I learned: It is VERY DIFFICULT to make a big time jump after the first act and have the script work. I’m not saying it’s impossible. But in all the scripts I’ve read that have done it, I’d say 99.9% of them sucked. So, don’t do it unless you absolutely know what you’re doing and you have a good reason to do so as well as a strong game plan for executing it.

Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: The United States is in a race with China to become the first country to time travel. When an older pilot cheats his way onto the program, he positions himself to be the first ever time traveler.
About: Being pitched as “Interstellar meets Top Gun,” short story “The Barrier” became a hot package when rising star Austin Butler became attached. Winner of the package? 20th Century Fox, who knows themselves some sci-fi. Writer MacMillan Hedges has been reviewed on the site before with another time-travel script. This man loves himself some time-jumping!
Writer: MacMillan Hedges
Details: About 4000 words

There was some reluctance to check this one out because I’d read the writer’s previous time travel story, a screenplay, and let’s just say I thought there was too much going on.

But Carson, don’t you ALWAYS think there’s too much going on in screenplays? You know what? That very well may be the case. But it’s a valid argument because most of the time, THERE IS TOO MUCH GOING ON.

Screenplays, and short stories, need to have focused stories to truly take advantage of their mediums. And writers just jam too much shit into them. Or, even if they don’t have a lot of shit, they twist and turn the simple stuff they do have in ways that are unnecessarily confusing.

When you combine that issue with the nuclear shitshow that a lazily written time travel story can create, you’re asking for trouble, brother. Time travel movies are HARD TO WRITE.

I’m not saying don’t write them. Deep down in my heart I love time travel as a story device. But it’s hard to get right. So if you’re going to write a time travel story, you have to give 100%. Not 95%. Not 97%. Not even 99%. Cause that extra 1% is the difference between time travel plot holes and no time travel plot holes.

As for today’s story… I’ll say this. For 75% of the story, I had no idea where it was going. Then, out of nowhere, the main character’s purpose arrives and I said, “Oh, okay, that’s actually a story. Why didn’t we make that clear earlier?”

Confused? Let me break down the plot for you.

The Chinese have accidentally discovered time travel during a drone test. This freaks the U.S. military out. If China can develop a reliable Time Machine and send people back in time, they could erase the U.S.

So the U.S. puts all of its resources into making it to the time travel finish line first. The rules are this: Since it requires so much energy, they’re only going to be able to send one person. Pilot Karl Herseht is determined to be that guy. So he goes up against all these other dudes.

A key stage in the hiring process is the psychological evaluation. They put you through a lie detector test specifically to see if you have any past traumatic experiences. We don’t really understand why yet, but they really want to know if someone in your past died.

Here’s where things get a little complicated so stay with me. Karl is pretending to be someone else. How he’s able to trick the U.S. military into thinking he’s another person isn’t convincingly explained. But we realize later on why it needs to happen for the plot.

Karl does the old trick of jamming a nail in your foot to defeat the lie detector. He pretends he’s someone else so they don’t know about his secret past trauma – that Karl’s son drowned in their pool. When it happened, his wife was so devastated, she simply ran away.

When Karl wins the job, he goes through the training and then preps to be placed in some supersonic jet thing that will be dropped from the edge of space and then speed towards the earth fast enough that it will eventually create a time portal. And then he’ll eject and parachute to the ocean.

(Spoilers) Right before launch, the military discovers who Karl is and tries to stop him but he goes anyway. Once back in time, he runs over to his home from 20 years ago and rigs up his son to have a secret breathable mask underwater because Past Karl has to believe that his son dies so that Future Karl will come back to this time and save his son. After he and Past Wife “save” the son, they run away together.

I mean… there’s a lot to get into here if we want to.

We could start with the fact that the U.S. spent every single resource they had to create a Time Machine yet was unable to properly ID a member of their own military. There are some plot holes audiences will overlook. I’d be surprised if they’d look the other way on that one.

But let’s say we can get past that. Does the story work?

The problem I have with The Barrier is that it doesn’t show its hand until too late in the game. This means we’re stuck trying to figure out what’s going on the whole story. This can be a purposeful storytelling device, where you, the writer, are dangling the carrot for the reader way off in the distance. But you have to be careful. If the carrot is too far away, to the point where we can’t make out what it is, we can become disinterested or frustrated.

I began to get frustrated. The short story had these fun little moments where we’d see transcripts from news shows and podcasts, with famous people talking about the event. But while all of that was fun, I kept saying, “What is this about??” I kept waiting for a story to emerge.

Sure, I knew we were trying to win the time travel race, but I wasn’t sure why. There was this vague threat that if China beat us to the punch, they could erase us. But not long after that threat was mentioned, it evaporated, and then, out of nowhere, we were in a time travel race with India??

Why the messiness? You want your story to be cohesive. You want all the parts to come together harmoniously. It felt like new parts of the story were being added all the time without thought.

Such as: where we were even going when we traveled in time? It was determined by the U.S. military that they wanted to go back and stop the Iraq War. So they were sending Karl back to the year 2002.

Why was this even in the story?? It’s a setup that’s never paid off. Clearly, it was just put there because that was the approximate time the author needed to send the main character to to save his son. If you’re the U.S. military creating time travel, your first goal wouldn’t be to stop a war. It would be to – you know – TIME TRAVEL! Let’s figure that out first and we’ll move on to the war stuff later. It’d be like trying to win the race to the moon and, hey, while we’re up there, let’s build a lunar skyscraper.

It was weird choices like that that gave the story an unsophisticated polish. And time travel needs to be as polished as it gets. There can’t be any rough edges as those edges always feel 10x as sloppy as they do in normal stories.

Much like the last sci-fi short story that sold, I sense that this sold because of the concept/pitch. That one was about the first human alien hostage exchange. This one was about the time-travel race, an update to the space race. That’s a good pitch. Good pitches/concepts put blinders on producers which is why I constantly drill it into your head how important they are. Good concepts don’t require great writing to sell sometimes.

With that said, once you come up with the concept, you have to execute it. And with these short stories, they’re limiting in the way you can explore big ideas. We’re talking about one of the biggest ideas ever here – a time-travel race. Can you really explore that in 20 pages? That’s where this story gets derailed. It’s the biggest story ever for 15 pages and then it’s the smallest story ever (save son from drowning) for 5 pages.

I don’t know, guys. I don’t think any screenwriters have a handle on this short story thing. They’re all just winging it. The one excellent short story sale that I’ve read so far, Big Bad, is a small story that takes place in a small town with a condensed time frame. It’s a perfect setup for a short story. And it still had marketable content as it was about werewolves. But I have to concede that writers like MacMillan have a better feel for how to exploit this market, since they’re the ones selling these things.

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

What I learned: The short story revolution has come upon us for a very specific reason. Back in the day, spec scripts with giant concepts were the biggest currency in town. However, 99% of those scripts had a concept and nothing else. So after a bunch of them bombed, Hollywood stopped buying them, which was a big reason for the fall of the spec sale.  Nobody thought we’d ever be able to con Hollywood with our big concepts and weak execution again.  Enter the short story.  The short story is actually BETTER at the shoddy execution delivery than the spec script because the stories are so short, you have a built in excuse as to why you can’t pull them off.  The buyers all understand this limitation so they don’t penalize you for it.  What does this mean for you, the aspiring screenwriter? It means write short stories with giant concepts. They are your best shot at selling something for a lot of money right now. Now, if you can write one of these big concepts AND ALSO MAKE IT GOOD you will literally control Hollywood for an entire week as the town desperately attempts to buy your script. It hasn’t happened yet. Which means one of you could be the first. Short Story Showdown is happening later this year. :)