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. :)

But Mega-Showdown is Ready to Rise!

It was not a good weekend to be any writer who liked ballet. Etoile, on Amazon, didn’t even make it to its second season. And now we’ve got Ballerina, toe-scuffing its way to a 25 million dollar opening.

I don’t think you need to look far to figure out what happened here. The issue is two-fold. You can’t just create a brand new character in a universe and hope we’re going to love them. It doesn’t work that way. The way it works is you prove yourself as a secondary character in a bigger franchise. The audience falls in love with you. Then you go make your own movie (or TV show).

This formula has worked for decades. I don’t know why you think you can change it. It speaks to the value of great character writing. Creating a strong character that audiences resonate with remains the hardest thing to do in screenwriting. Which we’ll talk about more in a second.

The other problem was that Ana De Armas is not a movie star. It’s not even that audiences don’t like her. It’s that they don’t REMEMBER her. She doesn’t have that “must see” quality that only a dozen people in this profession have. The combination of those two things doomed this movie.

It’s too bad because Ballerina, as some of you remember, started out as a spec sale. This was one of those dream scenarios for a screenwriter. Most spec sales get stuck in forever-development. For your script to be pulled into a billion dollar franchise is the stuff dreams are made of. The fact that the movie has now flopped means less of that will happen in the future.

But I’m not here to dwell on the negative. I want to focus on the positive: What can we learn from this? Especially considering that the greatest screenplay competition is coming back to Scriptshadow. How can you use the lessons from Ballerina to create better characters and win the Mega-Showdown?

One of the tougher lessons I’ve learned over the years is that you come into every script with a handicap. With studio scripts, your hero must be grounded in reality. They can’t be wacky or wild or untethered. Why is this problematic? Because grounded people are boring. How’s that for a challenge: With every studio script, you must figure out a way to make your boring hero compelling.

The default solution to this is to make them likable. There’s only one problem with this. Likable people are still boring. We want to find a way to make these characters COMPELLING.

Lucky for you, I know how to pull this off.

You have to lean into real life and create a flaw for your hero that’s relatable and that resonates with others. You have to see grounded characters as an advantage. It allows you to explore the “real shit” and the “real shit” is what everyday people relate to.

Let’s say you want to write about someone who’s stubborn, someone who only sees the world the way they want to see it. It is their way or the highway. They are such a prisoner to their world-view that they cannot accept the views of anyone else around them, even their closest friends and family.

That may seem like a relatively boring flaw on the surface. But if you truly commit to it and explore it like you were researching a real person in real life, that character is going to feel REAL to the audience.

Once you achieve that reality in their eyes, they can now compare that person to people THEY KNOW. This is the trick to getting audiences to become obsessed with a character – when the character becomes a stand-in for real people.

This means that reading your script, or watching your film, offers the viewer the chance to CHANGE THEIR LIVES by reading your script to the end. You see, to them, if your hero can change, it means their friend or family member can change too! So they have no choice but to read to the end.

If you want to see this play out in a movie, check out Hoosiers. When Gene Hackman died last month, I watched a few of his old movies, including this one. Sure, it’s a formulaic sports movie about a tiny basketball team trying to win the state championship.

But what elevates it beyond the traditional sports flick is this stubborn coach at the center of the story – this guy who only does things his way. The writer and Hackman committed to that flaw so thoroughly that the character became real to the audience. I knew people like that Coach. Seeing him gradually bend and listen to others gave me hope that the people I knew could change as well.

Do you see what’s happening here? Your script is connecting the imaginary world (yours) with the real one (theirs). Now you’re playing in 4-D space and this is when movies become magical.

Absent a flaw, the other thing you can do to make us care about your main character is to create a genuine relationship in their life that contains an issue that is unresolved in some way.

I use the word “genuine” aggressively. If it’s not genuine, it won’t work. You have to dig into your own life and find these unresolved relationships that you can draw from and transplant onto the hero of your script. Only then will this work.

If you have never had your heart broken and try to write about a relationship where one character breaks another character’s heart, I guarantee you it’s not going to work. We won’t care. It will feel disingenuous. You have to draw from real life to pull this off.

The trick is to pinpoint WHAT, in the relationship, is unresolved (in a marriage one person does all the work, in a friendship there’s zero communication). If you don’t know, you won’t know what to build their scenes around. But once you know, it becomes extremely powerful because to explore any unresolved issue, your characters must push through conflict, and conflict is where all the drama is.

More importantly, the audience again gets to compare what they’re seeing onscreen to their life. And if it’s genuine enough, they will be able to mentally work through those same issues with the person they share that problem with. Whenever the character onscreen does something, they will be able to think, “I could do that. And maybe that will fix the issue we have.” Or, “Ugh, that’s what my person always does! I hate that.”

When they are thinking these things, they are EMOTIONALLY INVOLVED in your movie as opposed to casually involved. And once you’ve got them emotionally, they are captivated.

But it’s not easy! You have to draw from real life and you have to make sure the characters’ actions reflect how things would genuinely go down in the real world. The second you start cheating and making up reactions or lines based on what you want to happen rather than what would happen, you will lose them. Which is why so few writers are able to pull great characters off.

But the point is, when you’re writing these bigger movies, and you’re forced to ground that main character, you don’t have many avenues to make that character interesting. Is that why Ballerina didn’t work? I don’t know. I didn’t see it and it’s been forever since I read the script. But if I had to guess, I’d say that nobody’s coming out of that movie feeling like they’ve connected to the Ballerina character for the reasons I just brought up.

So, to summarize. If you like to write wacky heroes, write an indie movie that costs less than 5 million bucks to produce. Or use the secondary characters in your studio scripts to have fun with. But if your script depends on a hero that must be grounded, the main ways you’re going to make those characters compelling to an audience are to explore a genuine flaw or explore a genuine broken relationship.

Remember this when writing your Mega-Showdown screenplay.

VIVA LA MEGA SHOWDOWN!!!

Genre: Dark Comedy
Premise: When a lonely and socially-stunted young woman mistakenly receives a severed thumb in the mail, she makes it her life’s obsession to return it to the hand it once belonged to–putting her on a collision course that will upend her world forever.
About: This script got on last year’s Black List, with 10 votes. Screenwriter Cesar Vitale has one TV credit, a show starring Peyton List (Cobra Kai).
Writer: Cesar Vitale
Details: 104 pages

Jessica Gunning for Addie?

The other day I said you either need to give us a strong concept or a strong character. Your script cannot survive without either. Today’s script shows that you can actually include BOTH if you want. We’ve got a flashy plotline as well as a flashy character. Let’s see how it worked out.

Addie has a serious case of antisocial personality disorder. In other words, she’s a psychopath. It’s not her fault. Her parents were drug addicts who both overdosed, which means Addie got tossed around the foster care system for years.

These days, she lives alone and works as a bagger at a local grocery store. Every day is a battle with Addie because she doesn’t feel empathy. If someone spills their groceries in front of her, she will not help. She just watches them pick their own groceries up right in front of her.

One day, Addie receives a thumb in the mail. The thumb is from a rich guy named Tyler. Tyler’s been kidnapped by his drug dealers, Dakota, Shawn, and Bug. They want a million bucks from his father to return him. Which is why they sent the father the thumb. Except they’re so stupid, they messed up the address and the thumb went to Addie’s address instead.

Excited about figuring out the thumb’s origins, Addie heads to the money drop-off point where Bug is waiting. She tasers him and brings him back to her apartment and starts questioning him. Unfortunately, Bug hit his head hard when he fell and soon dies. Addie then cuts him up and puts him in her fridge.

After some more investigating, she locates the business where Tyler is being held and heads there. She kills both Dakota and Shawn to save Tyler. But there’s a caveat to releasing Tyler. She wants to be his friend. She’s tried to make friends her whole life and she figured, if you save someone’s life, they HAVE to be your friend.

Tyler realizes that this girl is batshit insane and that he still has to escape, just like he had to before. But before he does, the cops show up, confused about who’s good and who’s bad. They start shooting and not everyone survives.

A quick side story regarding this review. The logline created a different expectation from what the story ended up being. The logline made it sound like us and the main character were on this journey together, trying to solve the mystery of where this thumb came from and why.

But that’s not the script. The script starts off in the villains’ lair, so to speak. We’re there when they cut off the thumb. As the story evolves, we’re with the bad guys just as much as we’re with Addie. In that sense, we’re waiting for Addie to catch up with what we know.

It’s a slight difference but an important one. Because you want your logline to convey what the accurate experience is going to be when the reader reads the script or else you risk disappointing them. I was disappointed for a while because I liked the logline version of the story better.  Eventually, the new way won me over. But just be careful about that as screenwriters. And, by the way, I do logline consults. They’re just 25 bucks (carsonreeves1@gmail.com). So I can help you with this.

Moving on to the script itself – the other day I was talking to a producer because a writer had sent me a good dark comedy. I asked the producer if he’d want to read it and he said, “Too hard to get off the ground. They never make any money.” I bristled at the response but after reading this script today, I understand where he’s coming from.

When I finished “Thumb,” I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to be crying, laughing, or satisfied that the goal had been achieved. In other words, these scripts can be hard to track. They’re riding a finer line than a straight comedy or a straight drama. Sure, when you ace the test, they’re great. But when you don’t, you always leave the reader a little confused about what they were supposed to feel.

I will say this, though – dark comedies are great canvases to create memorable characters. Whether you like Addie or hate her, you will remember her. Some of the strongest characters you can write in movies are characters who react the opposite to how normal people react.

There’s this funny yet heartbreaking scene where Addie goes on a date for the first time and has no idea what she’s doing. All she knows is that she hates sushi and that’s where the guy invited her. So, in her world, if you don’t like something, you simply bring your own food, which is what she does.

Addie’s every move is counterintuitive to normal human beings, which makes her fun to watch. You may not like what she does at times, but you’re always on the edge of your seat anticipating what she’ll do next. For all the fireworks behind The Hider’s recent sale, Robert Downey Jr. probably would’ve done better securing this role and playing Addie. She’s a more interesting character than The Hider for sure. :)

But I think this script breaks down as we move into the third act. I was not convinced I was viewing the authentic actions of a psychopath. It felt like sometimes we chose laughs (Addie’s obsession with Jack in the Box) or buzzy imagery (Addie watching TV with the decapitated head of Bug on her lap) as opposed to more genuine actions.

That’s one of the tricks when you write about mental disorders. You have to do a ton of research to make sure that the character stays consistent with their mental disease. Cause once you start guessing what they’d do or have them do something for a laugh instead, we lose faith in the character. The suspension of disbelief cracks.

Once we make it into the third act, Addie becomes obsessed with finding a friend. Every third sentence  is some variation of, “I want friends.” And I don’t think psychopaths want friends, right? Or they don’t care? Maybe I’m wrong but it didn’t feel honest. Which contributed to an already shaky tone that had been bee-bopping its way around throughout the second act.

WITH THAT SAID, I still thought the script was fun. I liked not knowing what was going to happen next. The plotting was pretty tight – it evolved in a pleasant way. And Addie was such a weirdo that anytime she was in a scene, you were at least entertained. For those of you who want a story with a better version of this character, check out the book, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. But, otherwise, this is still pretty good.

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

What I learned: When relevant to the story, we need to know whether your character is attractive or unattractive. Addie works as a bagger at a grocery store. A handsome man named Nathan asks her out. Which was confusing. Addie is clearly strange. She doesn’t seem to wear nice clothes. She doesn’t work out. Her daily diet consists of coke, ice cream, burgers from Jack in the Box, chicken nuggets, and potato chips – which means she’s probably severely overweight. Why in the world would this handsome shopper ask her out? UNLESS she’s just a genetic beauty. In which case WE NEED TO KNOW THAT. In almost every story where there’s romance or dating involved, it’s important that we know how attractive the characters are.