Genre: Horror/Family/Comedy
Premise: A recently downsized father moves his family into a dying town, only to find out that it’s infested with killer mutated insects.
About: This script made the lower third of the 2009 black list. It sold to Paramount earlier that year. The writer, Marc Haimes, used to be an executive at DreamWorks. He also produced The Legend of Zorro and Hotel for Dogs.
Writer: Marc Haimes
Details: 103 pages – October 2009 draft (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And you thought yesterday was the apocalypse…

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

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

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

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

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

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

BACK TO THE FUTURE

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

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

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

THE GOONIES

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

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

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

INCEPTION

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

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

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

UP

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

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

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

AMERICAN BEAUTY

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

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

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

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

 

Genre: Drama
Premise: A war photographer is the only witness to a huge massacre in Pakistan. An ex special ops soldier with ties to the massacred party hires him to travel to Afghanistan and enact revenge on the men responsible.
About: This script came together as an idea by Zack Snyder (300, Watchmen, upcoming Superman movie) who hired the writer, Kurt Johnston, to write it for him. The script has been in development for a while and this is one of the early drafts. Christian Bale and Sean Penn recently signed on to play the lead roles and the director of the Swedish version of “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” is set to direct.
Writers: Kurt Johnstad (story by Zack Snyder)
Details: 112 pages – 1.5 draft – October 10, 2008 (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A while back, I wrote an article about surprise box office hits and what we as screenwriters can learn from them. I love trying to figure out why some movies succeed and others fail, and especially how those successes and failures relate to screenwriting, so I thought it would be fun to tackle a new batch of films and see if we couldn’t gleam a few lessons from them. Now I’ll reiterate the obvious. Directing and marketing and star power are huge factors in why movies do well at the box office. But it all starts with the screenplay. Every trailer, every poster, every marketing campaign, every great acting performance – all of those things stem from the screenplay. It’s with that spirit that I bring you my second installment of five surprise hits and what we can learn from them as screenwriters.

THE SOCIAL NETWORK
Rough Projected Gross: 45-50 mil
Actual Gross: 95 mil
Written by: Aaron Sorkin

What We Can Learn: I’ll give you the first trick to getting your movie to overperform. Cast Jesse Eisenberg. No really. If you remember, he was in one of the films from the last list (Zombieland). But seriously, the success of The Social Network was one of the bigger surprises of 2010. I remember leading up to the film’s release a lot of nervous people close to the project wondering how a dark look at a shiny new Internet tool was going to play to the masses. Who the hell in Omaha Nebraska wants to watch a 20-year-old kid become a billionaire and whine about it? Ahhhhhhhhhhhh. But that’s the thing. That’s the exact reason why people showed up.

Irony.

Don’t believe me? I want you to go to any piece of marketing material you can find for The Social Network. Find me one shot or one video clip of the main character, Mark Zuckerberg, smiling. You can’t can you? That’s because there isn’t one. The Social Network is about a young man who made 50 billion dollars and is unhappy. That doesn’t make sense. Rich people are supposed to have it all. The cars, the houses, the vacations. So when we see the richest 20 something in the world looking miserable, there’s a mystery there that we want answered. And let’s not forget that this is a man who created a network of 500 million “friends,” who’s himself friendless. So we have two high level uses of irony in play here, and in both cases, they’re used to create a compelling dynamic main character. That’s important to remember. You come to The Social Network to see the person, not to be wowed by the plot. The Social Network, as a film, actually has a funky narrative structure. It’s not always easy to follow and it doesn’t reward you in the same way a traditionally structured movie would. But you watch because the main character is so interesting. So before you go out and you write your next screenplay, try to come up with the most intriguing main character you can. Whether you use irony or not is up to you but you better find a way to make him as interesting as possible.

BRIDESMAIDS
Rough Projected Gross: 45-55 million
Actual Gross: 167 million
Writers: Annie Mumolo and Kristen Wiig

What We Can Learn: Talk about a movie that came out of nowhere. I still remember when Deadline Hollywood was reporting that this thing would make 13 bucks on opening weekend. The argument was that nobody wanted to leave the safety of their homes to watch women burp and fart. They were wrong. Audiences were begging this movie to give them as many noises from as many orifices as possible. The thing is, this film just as easily could have disappeared into one of those orifices. I mean it had no real stars. It didn’t even have a hook. At least with The Hangover, there was a neat concept driving the story. This is just a bunch of bridesmaids, which last time I checked you could find every other hour on E!. So why did it work? I think I know. And it shouldn’t be that shocking. It’s the characters. But unlike The Social Network, where it was more about creating one giant captivating character, the feat in Bridesmaids was how much effort they put into all the characters. Normally, in these types of movies, the main character is pretty well defined. That’s what the screenwriting books drum into your head. Make sure your main character rocks. But most books stop there. When it comes to the secondary characters, they could care less. But what I’ve found is that you can usually separate the wheat from the chaffe by how much effort a writer puts into their secondary characters. That’s where the real work comes in. It’s so easy to just give a secondary character a minor quirk and then move on. It’s hard to sit down and spend just as much time trying to figure them out as you would a protagonist. However, by doing that extra work, your script always shines brighter. That’s what Bridesmaids got right. Every character here was extensively thought through. Kristin Wigg’s character was the unlucky in love girl who always found herself with the wrong man. Maya Rudolph’s character was the stoic steady-as-a-rock best friend. Rose Byrne’s character was the bitter sad stepmom trying to hide behind a false smile. Melissa McCarthy’s character was the crazy happy go lucky overly optimistic even when she has no reason to be character. I read tons of comedies where the drop-off after the main character is so steep, it’s as if the writer just gave up in hopes that some hilarious comedian would be cast and make the role funny. But as you know, there’s nothing uglier than a comedian in a thinly written role trying to do a song and a dance to make up for how undefined the character is. If you don’t believe me, go watch Night At The Roxbury.

THE KING’S SPEECH
Rough Projected Gross: 25-45 million
Actual Gross: 135 million
Writer: David Seidler

What We Can Learn: Raise your hand if you predicted before The King’s Speech came out that the movie would gross over 100 million dollars. Anyone? Anyone? To be honest, I’m surprised that all of these movies did so well. But a stuffy British costume drama rocking the box office was particularly surprising. People say the adult drama is dead, but you wouldn’t know it if you counted the box office receipts from 2010. So then what is it that made this film such a surprise success? Well, I’ve talked about it before. The King’s Speech utilizes two of the most time-tested and well-worn story devices out there. The first is the underdog. Stories always work when they have a good underdog in the lead role. You can sell an underdog story to anybody – doesn’t matter if they’re 7 or 77, especially if it’s true. Seeing and enjoying people overcome adversity is in our moviegoing DNA. The other device is the crazy mentor. I use the word “crazy” loosely, but people are just really familiar with that kind of character and love seeing them operate. But I think The King’s Speech took it one step further and added – yes, there’s that word again – irony. In this case, the situation allowed a nobody to stand up and demand things from the King of England. There’s just something funny and ironic about a peasant ordering around a King. Anyway, the combination of these two well tested tools are what made a stuffy period piece one of the sexier box office hits of the year. Yes I just used the word “sexy” in conjunction with The King’s Speech.

BLACK SWAN
Rough Projected Gross: 20-30 million
Actual Gross: 110 million
Writer: Mark Heyman

What We Can Learn: This is a great movie to study for today’s purposes because every movie Darren Aronofsky had made up until this point had been a box office dud. His biggest film, The Wrestler, made only $26 million. So there was really no reason to believe Black Swan would do any better. In fact, with our subject matter dressed snugly in a leotard, it can be argued that this movie would’ve been lucky to hit the $10 million mark. So then what was the difference? Why did this one succeed when all the others failed? You’re lucky you tuned in into Scriptshadow today because I’m going to tell you. Whereas before, Aronofsky chose stories with broad unclear narratives (Requiem For A Dream, The Fountain, even The Wrestler had a bumpy throughline), Black Swan had one of the cleanest narratives of the year. The main character has the crystal clear goal of maintaining the lead actress role in her play until opening-night. Nipping at her scuffed heels is her evil understudy. How do you get cleaner than “Get to the end of the maze before the villain defeats you.” That doesn’t mean there weren’t complex aspects to the story. We still got some trippy dream sequences and plenty of hallucinations. However, the objective was never in question. The stakes were never in question. We understood every story point clearly. And that’s something Aronofsky didn’t do in the past. So I think this is a great lesson. Remember that when you’re writing independent fare, you’re fighting an uphill appeal battle. It’s in your interest to make elements of your story clean and easy to understand. If you can nudge your narrative closer to a popular genre, like Aronofsky did here by making Black Swan a thriller, you can stay true to your indie roots yet still draw in a big audience. Oh, and it also doesn’t hurt to add a sex scene between your two lead female characters.

INCEPTION
Rough Projected Gross: 90-120 million
Actual Gross: 292 million
Writer: Christopher Nolan

What We Can Learn: I remember reading an article about this last month. In it, a reporter noted that Inception was a box office shock of epic proportions. Warner Bros. had made the movie to keep Christopher Nolan happy between Batman films. They had no idea it would become as big as it did. So the writer of the article was interested in how the success of the film was going to change the moviegoing landscape. What was Hollywood going to do about this? The answer? Nothing. They just watched a sleeper film become a $300 million behemoth and had no idea what to do with it. Now I’ve made my feelings clear about this film. I think it’s really flawed. Regardless of that, I believe the box office for Inception is trying to tell Hollywood something. People want more challenging big budget fare. This may sound contradictory to what I just said about Black Swan. But actually I think the statement is complementary. Independent films need more audience friendly storylines. Big-budget films need more challenging storylines. Hollywood is confused by this because it thinks audiences only want one or the other. I believe audiences are getting sick of the comic book movies and the mash up movies and the movies based on rides and the movies based on toys. They go to these films and feel empty afterwards. At least when you left Inception, you thought about something. You talked about it with your friends. And those are the kinds of conversations that get people back into the theater a second and third time. I think Hollywood is really missing out on the bigger picture here. The thing that the Internet has done is it’s allowed conversations about movies to be had by millions. But Hollywood keeps giving these people movies that aren’t worth talking about. Now I know that Disney VP just came out with a statement proclaiming that story doesn’t matter when you’re making a tentpole flick, and pointed to the terribly written billion-dollar earner Alice In Wonderland as an example. I think there will always be a market for high concept well marketed family fare. But I also think that there’s an appetite from the more serious moviegoers for big budget tentpole films that also make you think. The thing is, those movies aren’t being written. And the truth is there just isn’t a lot of material out there that teaches writers how to successfully write these kinds of movies. You have to balance the challenging aspects of your screenplay with the high concept marketability of a big-budget picture. If you get too esoteric or “out there” than the movie no longer becomes thoughtful. It just becomes confusing. Using our previous director as an example, Aronofsky wanted to make The Fountain for 100 million bucks. There’s a good chance the box office for that film would’ve topped out at $10 million. So really, it’s up to you guys to figure this out. It’s up to you guys to come up with these concepts that balance the two extremes. As always, it begins with the screenwriter. So get the fuck off Scriptshadow and start writing.