I have three words for when it comes to this whacked-out screenplay: The Squirrel Scene. Nothing more needs to be said.

Genre: Comedy/Satire
Premise: (from Black List) A satirically dark comedy about a homicidal foreclosure victim kidnapping a real estate agent and planning to kill her in the housing development where she finagled money from customers like him.
About: This script finished tied at the bottom of the 2011 Black List with 6 votes. Del Tredici is repped by WME and managed by Mosaic. He’s written exclusively in TV up to this point, penning episodes of 30 Rock and Bored To Death (among others).
Writer: Luke Del Tredici
Details: 104 pages – 8/21/10 Fifth Draft (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

Today’s script is one I’d never heard of before. And why would I have? It doesn’t even have a proper title. Which actually makes sense because when you read it, you realize it doesn’t have a proper anything. This script is about as improper as it gets. Del Tredici is clearly an insane person. I imagine him stalking Liz Lemon in his dreams with a cheese grater. Read this script and you’ll realize that’s not as weird a statement as you think it is.

But here’s the catch. Insanity can be a good thing for writers. With the right amount of focus, insanity can lead to genius! Edgar Allan Poe was insane right? And he came up with some pretty cool stuff. I don’t know if I’m ready to put Del Tredici in the same league as Poe just yet, but I can tell you this: You will not forget this script after you read it. I promise you that.

We’re in Harding, Arizona, June 2007. Harding is one of those upscale communities that investors just decided to build. It didn’t get there after years of growth. They took the Field Of Dreams mentality: “If we build a bunch of McMansions, they will come.” Will they Ray? Will they?

Cassie Francis is a real estate agent in Harding. She’s riding the wave of this booming industry, even owning one of these McMansions herself! Everything’s going swimmingly. That is until the housing market implodes.

Cut to two years later and the community is a ghost town. Nine out of every ten houses have been deserted. Cassie is one of the few remaining stragglers and it doesn’t look like she’ll be able to hold on much longer. She hasn’t sold a house in six months and her boss is coming up with more reasons to fire her than keep her. That’ll end up being the least of her worries though, since when she comes into work, she inadvertently witnesses an adjustable-rate mortgage victim sort of accidentally kill the big cheese.

This once normal but now crazed home-owner, Sonny, has no choice but to do something about the lone witness, so he kidnaps Cassie and brings her back to his home, which happens to be in the same community she lives in.

At first things are light and fluffy. Sonny looks like he’s going to let Cassie go as long as she promises not to tell anybody what she saw. But then his ex-wife shows up, starts pushing his buttons, and he ends up killing her too! Now that Cassie’ been a witness to TWO murders, he realizes he has to get rid of her. In order to make sure nobody’s looking for Cassie though, he decides to go to her house and snatch up her teenage daughter as well.

While that’s going on, Cassie manages to escape, and while Sonny brings her daughter back, she’s able to call the police. The thing is, there’s only one cop in this hellhole. The rest had to be let go when all these rich folks who couldn’t pay their mortgages fled town.

Now Cassie and this one cop must try and find which house she was actually being held in – not an easy task since every single house looks exactly the same! Cassie eventually finds and rescues her daughter, but with a very determined Sonny on their trail, escape is anything but guaranteed.

This script is so damn weird. But weird in a deliriously awesome way!

It all starts with Sonny, who’s one of the most unpredictable villains you’ll ever meet. One second he’s cozy and comforting and telling our heroine that he’s going to let her go. The next he’s a psychotic serial killer having our poor protagonist and her daughter dig their own graves. This dude was like a giant suspense yo-yo, with no rhyme or reason to his actions. And boy did that make him terrifying.

But none of his actions compare to the best scene I’ve read in a script all year. I’m not going to spoil it because you have to read the scene yourself to believe it. I will refer to it only as…The Squirrel Scene. I have never been so terrified of squirrels in my life. This scene has made me reevaluate squirrels as animals. I’m thinking of calling the National Animal Control Center and seeing if there’s a way we can get rid of all squirrels on the planet just because of this scene. It’s such a great scene, in fact, that I think this movie is worth making JUST for this scene. And I realize how ridiculous that sounds but this scene is just so unexpected and so weird and so terrifying that I stand by it.

Outside of that, there’s a nice little statement going on about the housing crisis. While I didn’t personally feel the sting of that implosion, I know people who did. And I just remember how helpless and angry they felt – like they’d been duped and there was nobody out there willing to help them. I remember them having to jump through a million hoops just to get a minor extension and how oftentimes, even when they did everything right, they’d still get screwed. In that sense, Sonny embodies everybody’s frustration. And without getting too deep, there’s a strange part of you that understands him – that understands why he’s gone nutzos. And it’s that subtext that makes this screenplay more than just a silly exercise in weird comedic choices.

I only disliked two things about the script. The first is it felt a little clunky at times. The writing wasn’t as smooth as maybe it could’ve been. And the other was the ex-husband stuff. Cassie has this ex-husband who’s now dating a 24-year-old fluzie who’s quite possibly the dumbest girl in the world. He’s the only person she’s able to contact for help so he has to drive back to save her with his nagging girlfriend tagging along. It’s not a terrible subplot by any means but it just gets old quickly. We keep cutting back to the car, listening to the same argument over and over again (“Why are we doing this?”). I suppose it had potential but I’d rather have stayed back where all the action was.

In the end, I think you gotta admire Del Tredici for taking so many chances. When I read scripts like The Knoll or Selfless, I’m always bummed out by how predictable they are. The writers never take a single chance! They do everything exactly by the book. This script is the opposite. And it’s really original as a result. I challenge anybody to read this script and forget about it. It’s impossible. This one would get people talking if it ever became a movie. Let’s hope that that happens.

[ ] Wait for the rewrite
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: One of the easiest ways to write an original scene is to ask yourself, “What’s the last thing my audience expects this character to do right now?” Everybody knows what the character would *likely* do. We’ve seen enough movies to be able to predict that. So put your thinking cap on and ask what it is they’d *least likely* do. When Sonny kidnaps Cassie, bringing her to his house, we think we know what’s going to happen. He’s going to tie her up and threaten her and blah blah blah. But the writer asks that question, “What’s the last thing the audience expects Sonny to do right now?” Why: Give Cassie a tour of the house of course! So we get this awkward but intriguing scene where Sonny gives his kidnapped captor a tour of his place. Not only is it original, but it creates the added benefit of making our villain seem even scarier. If this guy is so delusional that he’s giving the girl he kidnapped a tour of his place, then how crazy can he be??

Peter Pan mixed with Lord Of The Flies mixed with…zombies? Sounds like an interesting little screenplay. Let’s find out if guest reviewer Amy Suto liked it…

Since I’m tired of giving you guys vague updates about my book, the site re-launch, and Twit-Pitch, I’m putting together an official schedule (with real dates!) that I plan to post this weekend. I’m like the U.S. Government. I’m posting about a post that I’ll make later. Heh heh. In the meantime, I’m bringing back guest reviewer Amy Suto, (who reviewed Celeste and Jesse Forever a month ago) to take on some zombie madness. Or, errr…are they zombies? I’m confused. You know what, I’ll just let Amy clear it up.

Wait a minute. A 2011 Black List comedy that’s actually funny? Can it be? Or has Carson once again misjudged the definition of “comedy?”

Genre: Comedy
Premise: Taking place over one day, a group of couples deal with a myriad of issues while attending a wedding together.
About: This was originally sold as a pitch to CBS films in August of last year. The subsequent script finished at the bottom of the 2011 Black List with six votes.
Writer: Andrew Goldberg
Details: 104 pages, September 14, 2011 (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).

I’m ready for the claws to come out. It’s another big comedy script which also happens to be a comedy script that Carson likes. And we all know how those go. Despite some of these scripts being loved by everybody in Hollywood, they seem to be hated by you guys! Which means you’re all wrong! But I do have a streak going with Winter’s Discontent here. Granted it’s a streak of one. But that’s better than the streak I usually have going, which is zero.

Here’s the thing with today’s script though – the idea behind it is pretty genius. An entire movie based around a wedding? I’m not sure that’s ever been done before in a comedy. We’ve seen plenty of movies leading up to weddings. But I’m not sure we’ve had a comedy that’s *just about* the day of the wedding itself. It’s one of those ideas that’s so simple, you wonder why you didn’t come up with it yourself.

Anyway, we start out with Tim and Beth, a married couple in their 30s. Tim is madly in love with his wife but his wife doesn’t seem nearly as enthusiastic. In fact, once at the wedding, when the bride and groom finally say, “I do,” Beth tells Tim, “I don’t,” informing him she’s filing for divorce. A baffled Tim will now spend the rest of the wedding trying to figure out where his marriage went wrong – and why his wife seems to be having so much fun with this mysterious guy he’s never seen before.

Roger and Kate are an interesting ex-couple. They used to go out until Kate found out Roger was having sex with half of America. She subsequently jumped ship and has spent the better part of a year trying to get over him. She’s finally succeeded, finding a guy she really likes, who she’s brought to the wedding. When Roger finds out Kate has officially moved on, he of course ditches his date and focuses exclusively on getting Kate back.

Danny is the class clown/best man. He’s the overweight jokester who’s great for a laugh but not very good with the ladies. He’s shown up here by himself – the way he always rolls – and plans on getting wasted and having a great time with the guys. But when he makes a connection with the wedding singer, a hottie named Larissa, he has to find out if she’s just being nice because this is a wedding or if she really likes him.

Ryan and Caroline have been together for three years and it’s just hit Caroline that he’s never going to propose. When’s the last time you want to go to a wedding? When you learn the guy you’re with never wants to get married. So as she sees all of this love swirling around her, she becomes more and more frustrated, and resolves to do something about it, to Ryan’s horror.

There are plenty of other wedding favorites, like the weirdo uncle who’s constantly saying inappropriate things and staring at young girls. There’s the girl who showed up without a date and has to deal with the all the questions about her ex-boyfriend. And there’s the 17-year-old who’s looking to get deflowered.

I don’t really know what to say about this script other than it’s really good! It’s sort of like “Can’t Hardly Wait” but in wedding form. I love the contained time frame idea. It makes the story so immediate. Everything needs to happen RIGHT NOW so you know all of these unresolved relationships need to get resolved TONIGHT. And that keeps each relationship moving along at a brisk clip. Whenever we cut to someone, they’re usually in the throes of an important moment – something you don’t always get when the time frame for the story is spread out over weeks or months.

And that’s really the key to making these movies work. When you don’t have an overriding concept – in other words, a main character with a goal (find the Ark, prove the one-armed man killed my wife, get to Paradise Falls), the focus shifts over to the unresolved relationships. These will be the engines that carry the story forward.

It’s so important that you understand this because a lot of beginners don’t realize without a big character goal, the story can go south quickly. But if you create a bunch of interesting characters who have big problems, then every time we cut back to them, there’s going to be something interesting going on. We want to know how that conflict is going to get resolved. And that’s another key word here – conflict. Because these relationships are unresolved, there’s always conflict. And conflict is the heart of drama and drama is the key to entertaining.

In other words, if all of these people are happy, you don’t have a movie. So when we cut back to Kate and Roger, we’re wondering, is he going to convince her to be with him again? Or with Tim – Is he going to get his wife back? Or with Caroline – Is she finally going to confront Ryan about their relationship? Or with Jeremy, the 17-year-old – Is he finally going to get laid?!

I’ve read versions of these stories where the writers have no unresolved issues to play with. They then try to fill that void with “funny” dialogue – observations about people at the wedding, or crass sex jokes. The scenes feel desperate, though, because they’re just filling time. When you’ve built real problems and issues that need to be resolved, you don’t need to worry about writing funny dialogue. The dialogue ends up writing itself.

And then there are just a bunch of nice touches to the story. I love this idea that we never see the bride and groom. We only see their backs or flashes of them – never their faces. For once, this is about the people *at* the wedding as opposed to the people getting married. That was really clever.

And easily my favorite character was the creepy uncle. We’ve all seen this guy at our own weddings and boy he is on fire here. He wears sunglasses the whole night so nobody can see his eyes. He laughs at the most inappropriate moments. He calls Danny “Rashad” for some reason and thinks he’s a cop. He’s hilarious.

And the relationships were all well-handled. I particularly liked the Danny and Larissa storyline. I loved how he was built up as the underdog – the loner. And when the wedding singer starts flirting with him, he (and the rest of the guys) have to figure out if she’s just doing it because that’s her job or if she’s doing it because she really likes him. We love Danny so much that we’re on the edge of our seats trying to find out the answer to this question ourselves!

You know, this script came REALLY close to getting an impressive, simply because I couldn’t find anything wrong with it. But much like “Can’t Hardly Wait,” there was just something indefinable missing – an x-factor to really take it over the top. Maybe it was the lack of that big unforgettable character (although the uncle comes close – he was more of a sideshow). Maybe it was the lack of surprises. I’m not sure. But there’s *something* missing here. Still, this was a really good script.

[ ] Wait for the rewrite
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: A goal and a ticking time bomb aren’t as important in stories which take place over a short period of time. The whole point of the character goal is to push the story along. But if the timeframe is contained (24 or 48 hours), the story tends to push itself along. You saw the same thing in movies like “Dazed and Confused” and “Can’t Hardly Wait,” which take place over one day. Likewise, a ticking time bomb doesn’t need to be a dominant part of the plot because the point of a ticking time bomb is to create urgency. If your story takes place inside of a day, the urgency is inherent. That’s not to say you *shouldn’t* use these tools in these situations. Just that they’re not as big of a factor in the story’s success.

Today’s amateur screenplay teaches us that Grandma may not be as cute and cuddly as you think she is.

Amateur Friday Submission Process: To submit your script for an Amateur Review, send it in PDF form, along with your title, genre, logline, and why I should read your script to Carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Keep in mind your script will be posted in the review (feel free to keep your identity and script title private by providing an alias name and/or title). Also, it’s a good idea to resubmit every couple of weeks so that your submission stays near the top of the pile.

Genre: Thriller
Premise: Before he can break up a well-connected ring of terminally ill senior citizen suicide bomber killers for hire, an FBI agent must confront the sweet little old lady sent to kill him.
Writer: Patrick J. Power
Details: 100 pages

I have a soft spot for people who’ve been trying to get their scripts read on the site forever. Especially people who have been so supportive of Scriptshadow. I feel like they deserve to be rewarded. Which is why I chose today’s script. Patrick has been very persistent (yet polite) in his attempts to get his script read so I felt like he deserved a shot.

But before we get to that, I want to point out why I never would’ve read it otherwise. The premise feels goofy to me – one of those premises where you’re not sure if it’s a thriller or a comedy. And while that’s fine if it turns out to be a comedy, it’s not fine if it turns out to be a thriller. Old people suicide bombers? I don’t know. It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke. Am I off base with that?

But hey, once I pop open a script, I’m MORE than ready to be proven wrong. Every script deserves a fair shot and believe me, I wanted nothing more than to love this.

Paul Lucas is a San Diego FBI agent hanging out at the federal building, preparing to watch a Colombian drug lord walk free. Then, while the lawyer makes an official statement for his client, a large blast blows both of them to pieces. When the FBI takes a later look at the security footage, they see a little old lady named Juliet Ivy standing next to the duo. Hmmmm. I knew old people were gassy but this is too much.

After 15 more characters are introduced inside roughly 7 pages, Paul decides to take a closer look at the little old lady. He heads over to her son’s home and learns that Juliet had cancer and belonged to an upscale hospice known as “The Healthful Healing Medical Center.” Paul speeds over there and meets the suspicious manager, who confirms that Juliet had a one million dollar life insurance policy. Paul rightly wonders how an 85-year-old woman secures a one million dollar life insurance policy.

Off in another part of the city, someone on a gondola blows up another few people and when they look into it, they find that that too was done by a senior citizen. As if allowing these people behind the wheel wasn’t enough! So now Paul realizes they’re dealing with organized attacks. But where are these attacks being ordered from and why??

Eventually, Paul finds out that it all goes back to that Healthful Healing place. So he finds an old retired FBI agent, Norman, who has cancer (I think – he might’ve been faking – I’m still not sure) and sends him in undercover to find out exactly what’s going on.

The focus of the story then shifts over to Norman, who realizes that one of the women at the center, Mary Margaret, has been there for a long time. In a place where people go to die, this stands out as a red flag. Indeed, Mary Margaret turns out to be the leader of this crime syndicate, sending old people out there to blow pre-determined targets up. I have to admit that I never figured out what her scheme was, but it seemed very important to Mary Margaret. And I suppose that’s all that matters.

Patrick and I have an interesting relationship. He used to write me all the time with these nice e-mails pointing out plot synopsis mistakes I’d made in my reviews. If I said that the aunt slept with Larry, he would send me an e-mail explaining that, no, it was actually the ex-wife that slept with Larry. Over time, however, he became less cordial, and just started sending messages like: “Not Don. Joe!”

I bring this up because I’m sure I screwed up at least some of the synopsis here. But in my defense, there were like 35 characters in this script. Which is actually a great place to start. I’m kind of shocked. For someone I know reads the site all the time, why would they make the one mistake I rail against the most – insane character counts. ESPECIALLY on Amateur Friday! Instead of going on a thousand word rant about this issue like I usually do, I’ll just say that the insane character count made it impossible for me to keep track of everyone and everything that was going on.

But that issue pales in comparison to my main critique of the screenplay. And this is the part of my job I hate the most because it’s the most painful critique you can give a writer: The concept here simply doesn’t work.

It’s too goofy. You’re talking about old people suicide bombers. There isn’t a story you can wrap around that idea that doesn’t feel silly. I could never get past that while reading the script.

But even if the concept were squared away, there were still too many wonky choices in this screenplay. For example, you have Norman, who jumps into the script at the midpoint. We’ve barely met the guy, yet all of a sudden he’s thrust into, basically, the protagonist role of the story. That’s just a strange thing to ask the reader to roll with. You’re following one hero. Then midway through the story, you say, “Let’s go follow this other guy instead.”

And then you have the strange choice of giving Paul terminal cancer. That was the official point where I realized the train had gone off the tracks. You have a story based on a bunch of old people who have terminal cancer, then you also give your main younger character terminal cancer as well?? It’s just such a bizarre coincidental choice that calls into question the entire story.

Finally, I’m not sure what that climax had to do with anything. There were a few mentions of this boat called “Code Blue” over the course of the script. Since that was also the title of the movie, I tabbed it as important. But it didn’t play into the story until this final scene when, for some reason, everybody went out on the Code Blue for a big showdown. I just didn’t understand what was going on. And I’m still not sure what Mary and her group were ultimately trying to achieve.

I know how obsessed Patrick is with attention to detail so I’m sure he could lay out for me, in a specific line by line breakdown, all of the places in the script where this stuff was explained. But when you’re reading a script, it doesn’t work like that. Once you start losing confidence in the story, it becomes harder and harder to stay invested in it. I didn’t believe in the concept. The never-ending character count had me forgetting who was who. And the switch to a different story and different main character halfway in had me scrambling to muster up the energy just to finish the script, much less make sense of it.

I know how long Patrick’s been trying to get me to read this, so it sucks I didn’t fall in love with it. But I do think a good lesson can come of it. This script needs to be retired and Patrick needs to move on to a snazzier concept, something more believable, less silly, and that readers can really sink their teeth into. All of the problems in this screenplay come back to a writer trying to make a concept work that can’t work. I would love to see Patrick tackle something that has a chance from the beginning. And I’d also love to hear your thoughts about this premise. Am I right? Does it feel like a bad joke? Or am I way off base and this concept actually has potential? Believe me, I’d be more than happy to be proven wrong because I HATE telling writers to scrap an idea they’ve labored months over and start something else.

Script link: Code Blue

[ ] Wait for the rewrite
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again. The number one way to kill your chances of getting a script read is a bad premise. I hear writers say it all the time: “Nobody will read my script.” Trust me, if you have a great premise, PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ YOUR SCRIPT!!! I GUARANTEE IT! I WILL BE ONE OF THEM! If you’re not getting that excited response when you send your idea out, take a second look at the idea itself. It’s probably the reason.

He claims his script is better than every script sale out there. He repeatedly trashed Disciple in favor of his own masterpiece. But does writer Jai Brandon deliver on the goods?

Amateur Friday Submission Process: To submit your script for an Amateur Review, send it in PDF form, along with your title, genre, logline, and why I should read your script to Carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Keep in mind your script will be posted in the review (feel free to keep your identity and script title private by providing an alias and fake title). Also, it’s a good idea to resubmit every couple of weeks so your submission stays near the top.

Genre: Thriller/Crime/Serial Killer
Premise: (from writer) The lives of two opposing forces collide, after an argument escalates between a telemarketer and the recipient of his phone call – an active serial killer. Unfortunately for this serial killer, the man that he threatened is no ordinary telemarketer.
About: Jai Brandon has been pushing me to read his scripts for over a year. His constant hyping of The Telemarketer has made him impossible to ignore.
Writer: Jai Brandon
Details: 100 pages

I have experienced my share of confident screenwriters. I, like most of you, lived through Trajent Future (for the time of your life, grab some popcorn and read through the 500 comments of that post). The House That Death Built taught us that the quality of a man’s script is dependent not on one’s bravado, but rather one’s writing. Jai Brandon seems to have ignored this lesson. He places his screenplay up on the highest pedestal, betting that it’s not only better than recent entries such as The Disciple Program, but even some of the classics that have graced our movie theaters for years.

I’d tell Jai that’s a recipe for disaster, but I don’t think he’d listen. However, I’ll give Jai this. At a time where I’ve received more script submissions than any other time in Scriptshadow’s history, this man figured out a way to get me to read his script. True it was done through incessant badgering and enough e-mails to break Gmail’s servers (true story – I opened one of his e-mails and Gmail crashed), but you gotta get your name out there somehow and Jai did it.

Of course, this brings us to the actual script, and I’m not going to lie. I was expecting it to be somewhere between really bad and extremely terrible. My experience has taught me that those who yell the loudest usually have the least to say. The good news for Jai is that the script did not fall inside that category.

But it did fall inside a new category I like to refer to as, “Logic, flow, and tone be damned.” This has to be one of the strangest scripts I’ve read in a while in that Jai actually has a lot of talent, to the point where you occasionally wonder if you’re reading a pro. Unfortunately, that talent is eclipsed by a poor story sense. The script has so many weird combinations going on as to make it almost indecipherable. I’ll get into that in a second but let’s deal with the plot first.

20-something James Walker is a deliveryman. Well, that’s not entirely true. He’s a telemarketer. He’s a telemarketer/deliveryman, working delivery by day and telemarketing by night. Confused? So am I. I guess James doesn’t have to sleep. But neither did Edward Norton in Fight Club so I’m going to let it slide.

Our favorite telemarketer/deliveryman goes to deliver a package at a house only to see three burglars holding a woman hostage inside. Since James is not the kind of person to sit back idly, he sneaks in through the window and systematically kills the men. Add ass-kicker to James’ resume.

Later, a couple of detectives stop by to try and figure out what happened but come to the conclusion that no man could have taken these burglars out the way they did. It would have been impossible.

Off in another home we meet a man known as The Clown Face Killer. This Caucasian fellow likes to dress up in blackface and an afro wig and kill African American women. He also has Alopecia (he’s hairless) which means he never leaves a single trace of DNA evidence wherever he goes. He’s the perfect killer. The perfect CLOWN FACE KILLER.

In the meantime, those “savvy” detectives find a delivery notice on that burglarized lady’s front porch. So they head over to James’ telemarketing job to ask him some questions, namely why the notice is marked with the exact time this burglary took place. But James is as cool as a Kumquat (and as sarcastic as a snapping turtle) and convinces the doofus detectives that he wasn’t involved.

Across town, Mr. Clown-Face Killer continues attacking young unsuspecting African-American women, but during one of these attacks, James calls the house as part of his telemarketing gig. He and Clown Face have a brief conversation and the clown killer decides he’s going to make this personal. He then begins killing everyone in New York named James Walker – our hero’s name!

In the end, the Clown-Face Killer with alopecia gets so worked up that he actually targets James’ own mother. James will have to call on not only his telemarketing and delivery skills to take this man down, but his mercenary skills as well. Wait, what?! Oh yeah, I forgot to mention. James used to be a mercenary too! Will he succeed? I’m not sure. Nothing is certain in…..The Telemarketer.

Okay, so like I said, Jai shows a lot of skill in his writing. Open up this script and read the first scene and you’ll notice the writing is crisp, lean and professional.

The problem is, Jai’s lack of storytelling sense becomes increasingly problematic as the story goes on. What I mean by “storytelling sense” is the combination of structure, tone, understanding of genre, and how to build a story in a believable, compelling and logical way. The Telemarketer builds, but nothing is ever believable. And rarely is the tone of the story consistent. It kind of feels like a pastiche of several different genres slapped together in no particular order.

But let’s back up for a second and start with the title. The reason I resisted reading this in the first place was that the title and the logline didn’t jive. It sounded like a set up for a comedy as opposed to a thriller. A telemarketer taking on a man with alopecia who dresses up in blackface and an Afro wig? I don’t know. That just doesn’t sound like a subject matter you can treat seriously. So that was the first problem I had, and that was before I even opened the script (again – why testing your concept is SO important!).

The next problem I had was the dual jobs. I understand some people work two jobs to make ends meet, but in this case, the two jobs were obviously created for the purpose of instituting key plot points. Jai needed James to be a deliveryman/vigilante killer in order to get the detectives after him. And he needed his hero to be a telemarketer so he could call the woman that would begin Clown Faced’s obsession with him.

My question is, since the deliveryman job has absolutely nothing to do with the story, why not ditch it? Just make him a telemarketer. That’s the name of the movie anyway. By calling a movie “The Telemarketer” and starting off with your hero as a deliveryman, you’ve already confused your audience. In the very first scene! That’s a big problem with the writing here. It just seems to go wherever it wants in order to make the story work for the writer.

In addition to these problems, we just have these really weird scenes that appear out of nowhere. For instance, in addition to being a telemarketer and a deliveryman, it turns out that James also used to be a mercenary. So right in the middle of the script, for no discernible reason, we jump back to James during his mercenary days taking down Somali pirates. To the writer, this may all seem completely logical. “Of course he’s a mercenary. That’s my hero’s backstory!”

But to a reader, it’s utter confusion. We’re adding on to a character who already feels schizophrenic the title of mercenary??? How can an audience take that seriously? It would be like in Silence Of The Lambs if, 60 minutes in, Jodie Foster participated in a local disco competition, won, then went right back to hunting Buffalo Bill. You can’t just do whatever you want in a story. It has to make sense, it has to feel natural, it has to fit within the theme. If it doesn’t, it just feels random.

Another scene that came out of nowhere was James driving his delivery truck and getting stopped by some detectives, but it turns out those detectives were fake and actually robbers! Who rob him! The scene is just some random isolated incident that has NOTHING to do with the plot at all! These moments kept coming in The Telemarketer. Which was a big part of what made the read so frustrating.

The thing is, Jai really does have some talent. And despite his insane bravado, he actually seems like a nice guy. I don’t think he’s going to be telling everybody here (along with myself) that we’re all worthless and don’t know what we’re talking about and he does, a la Trajent Future. But he needs to back up and study storytelling a little more. Storytelling isn’t about throwing a bunch of shit on the page you think is cool. It’s about slowly building up a story where all the pieces fit together in a natural way. There are very few pieces in The Telemarketer that fit together and that’s why, despite the talent, the story doesn’t work.

What did you guys think? Is this better than The Disciple Program, as Jai claims? Or is my review completely off?

Script Link: The Telemarketer

[ ] Wait for the rewrite
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Be elegant in your plot construction. The more you strain, the more we’ll notice. In other words, never push an improbable or illogical plot point onto your story just because you *really need* something to happen. Here, Jai wanted these detectives to pull his hero, James, into the story. So he created this deliveryman job, which allowed his hero to murder these men, so that the detectives could question him. Keep in mind this job has NOTHING TO DO with the rest of the story. Never once is delivering something ever broached again. So it obviously feels false. You easily could’ve achieved this plot point without adding another job. Why can’t James be the woman’s neighbor? He’s about to go to work and sees something suspicious going on? Or maybe part of the telemarketing gig is delivering flyers about the service. You must be elegant in the way you weave things into your story or you’re going to pull your reader out of that story.