Genre: Drama/Coming-of-Age
Premise: A dysfunctional group of friends living in San Francisco post-college find that making it in the real world isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
About: This script finished with 9 mentions on the 2006 Black List. Not knowing anything about the writers, Susanna Fogel and Joni Lefkowitz, I did some research after reading the script and found out they’ve recently written the remake script for Little Darlings for J.J. Abrams. The original movie starred Tatum O’Neal and Matt Dillon and was about two 15 year olds from opposite sides of the tracks competing to see who could lose their virginity first (someone called this movie a hit – but it’s not officially available on anything other than VHS). They also have another project in development with Elizabeth Banks in the lead based on the book “What Was I Thinking?: 58 Bad Boyfriend Stories.” It Is What It Is is listed as in development but doesn’t seem to have any movement right now.
Writers: Susanna Fogel & Joni Lefkowitz
Details: 120 pages – Sept 25, 2006 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).

Black List Time Machine! I took the Black List Time Machine back to 2006 to find this gem. Those early years unfortunately didn’t benefit from the Scriptshadow/widespread script reading presence, so many have since been forgotten. Do not shed a tear though cause I’m bringin’em back baby!  

I’ll admit though, when I started reading this and realized it was a 20-something “trying to find our way in life” flick, I groaned. I actually like the idea of these films. Leaving institutional life for the first time and realizing  all the promises that were made to us weren’t even close to true is a right-of-passage we’re all familiar with. But most writers take the subject matter to the self-important extreme, and we end up following a lot of depressed 20-something losers complaining about making the rent.  Borrr-innnnggggg.

Well I’m happy to say that “It Is What It is” is one of the best versions of this format I’ve read since Happy Thank You More Please. Sure it gets a little self-important at times, but the characters are all well thought out, the situations interesting, and the dialogue fresh. And oh yeah, it’s funny too!

There are four main characters here. We have the quirky semi-alcoholic Eliza, who’d really love to be a photographer but is stuck designing tween underwear for Forever 21. We have the unlucky-in-love trust fund baby Grant, our Jeff Goldblum character from The Big Chill – who no matter how hard he tries, can’t ever seem to get out of the “friend zone” with women. We have stiff-as-a-board Barry, whose disdain for spontaneity explains his desperation to be a lawyer. And we have Jules, a slutty tomboy who invades on our friends’ tight knit circle.

There are a lot of complications for our characters (as there well should be) and they start with Grant, who’s been desperately in love with Eliza since the Renaissance Era, but has settled into that horrible best friend consolation bubble hoping that one day she’ll change her mind. When she meets a guy on Myspace and falls head over heels with him, Grant realizes that that day isn’t coming anytime soon.

Barry’s about to embark on his prestigious law career which will finally allow him to pay back the mountain of debt he’s left behind when his longtime girlfriend tells him no mas. She’s concluded that he’s more boring than elevator music and just like that, a man whose whole world is stability, is no longer in a stable relationship. Everybody somehow convinces Barry to make a “bucket list” of crazy ass things he’d never do and finish it before he enters the corporate world. Get high, have a one night stand, that sort of thing. He doesn’t want to do it but peer pressure gets the best of him. 

Later on, Grant meets the tomboyish Jules, who’s in town to visit her feminist lesbian mother she has a Coke Zero relationship with. When Grant brings her into the tight-knit fold of the three amigos, it throws the delicate balance of this triple-friendship off. Barry immediately likes her, but Eliza sees her as a potential threat.

For a moment it looks like everything’s going to fall apart (story-wise) when Jules’ mother reveals she has a brain tumor and a one night stand from Grant’s past shows up telling him he’s the father of their child. I thought, “Uh oh, and into Hallmark Country we go!” But the writers, thank God, ignore the sappy trappings of the tumor stuff and the Grant-baby story actually turns out to be the engine for some great character exploration. 

The only two people Grant’s ever had sex with are Eliza, on a drunken college night, and this girl, this *beautiful* girl, who clearly took pity on him one random evening. At first Grant is horrified by the prospect of raising a kid, but as they wait for DNA results to prove he’s the father, Grant becomes addicted to the feeling of having another half, a half he’s dreamt of having his whole life.

But the girl only wants financial help from Grant – nothing more. Watching him cling to her when she won’t even give him the courtesy of PRETENDING she’s interested, is so difficult to watch I had to stop reading a couple of times. You feel so bad for the guy.

Eliza has a great storyline as well. She falls in love with this guy online, they have a whirlwind romance, and for the first time in her life, she’s able to break away from her friends. But after he casually mentions a female friend of his, she looks her up on Myspace (I presume we’d change this to Facebook) and becomes obsessed with her and her strange philosophical blog ramblings.

ISWIS has what I’m looking for in every script. It doesn’t go the way you think it’s going to go. There were so many times where I was like, “Oh boy, here it is. Now we’re going to blah blah blah,” but five pages later, I was proven wrong. For example, I was sure that once Grant met Jules, the two would get involved and he would use her to finally get Eliza to like him. But one scene later, Jules ditches Grant at the bar and starts making out with a random bartender, making me rethink everything. I loved it.

I can also always tell when I’m reading a script with a female author (and in this case 2). In most dude-written screenplays, the women aren’t complex in any way. There’s a particular script I cite to others where there were 11 male characters and 7 female characters. Each male character had a 3-line introduction. Each female character never had more than a 3-WORD introduction!

It never occurred to me how insulting this might be to a female reader until I read an amateur script by a woman who approached her male characters the same way. Each had a short curt boring description, while all the women were elaborately complex. I remember thinking, “God, is this how women think of us? As a five word stereotypical blurb?” I completely changed the way I wrote women after that.

I didn’t see any glaring problems here. The script doesn’t have an all-encompassing plot, so the characters’ journeys are the only thing driving the story, and I suspect that might make it boring for some, which I understand. While the tumor storyline wisely avoided melodrama, I think there’s a stronger more appropropirate choice for this story. And there are a few times where you wanted to slap these guys in the face for acting like their lives were just – so – horrible. You’re 26 and not in jail. Your life is fine.

This is updating Reality Bites with, I presume, a hip soundtrack to boot.  The difference is, this script is actually good. I liked it quite a bit and if you like these movies, you should check it out.

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

What I learned: This is why you should never include pop references in your work. One of the lines in the script is (paraphrasing)… ‘Ooh, someone’s just been watching the Meg Ryan boxing movie.” In that moment, I was totally taken out of the story. The Meg Ryan boxing movie? That film that was out for, what, 2 seconds in 2004? It just completely ruined the flow of the read and made me very aware that I was reading an old script. Hollywood doesn’t like old stuff. They like new stuff. They like the hot new script. So don’t give them anything that’s going to clue them in on your script belonging in the Museum of Natural History.

The next two weeks should be fun.  We have a pretty big spec sale we’re reviewing later in the week.  We also have a “Reality Bites” type script that makes Reality Bites look like a shitty student film (which some will point out isn’t hard to do).  We have another comedy spec that’s made some headway and we’re also reviewing movie-as-script, Monsters, so try and see that to join in on the discussion.  As a bonus, I’ll also be offering my thoughts on The Social Experiment. With the addition of the new “Script News from around the Web” posts, keep checking in cause it should be rocking.  Now it’s been awhile since we’ve done a theme week, and I know that some of you hate when we cover anything that’s already a film, but I’ve always been fascinated by how much Christopher Nolan bucks conventional screenwriting trends, yet still manages to create films people love.  So next week Roger and I are going to review 5 Nolan films-as-scripts and figure out what he’s doing differently and why it still works.  Anyway, on to Roger’s review.  He decided to do something different himself and look at the piece that got Damon Lindelof (of Lost fame – yay, more Lost arguments!) into the business.  Take it away Roger. 

Genre: Period/Biopic
Premise: On the precipice of World War 2, the son of King George V, who has an embarrassing speech impediment, is tasked with giving one of the most important speeches of the 20th century.
About: The King’s Speech just won the Audience Award at the Toronto Film Festival. The film stars Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, and Helena Botham Carter. For those of you writers getting long in the tooth and afraid that Hollywood ageism is conspiring against you, David Seidler, the writer of The King’s Speech, is 73 years old and just signed with UTA! Talk about paying your dues, huh? This script should prove to many that your best work is usually your most personal. Seidler had a terrible stuttering problem when he was growing up and was inspired by Bertie’s (King George VI) story. He’s been trying to get the film made for over 20 years. The script was finally made because it got into the hands of Tom Hooper’s parents (the director). They gave it to their son, who was shooting John Adams for HBO. He showed up at Seidler’s door, waving the script, calling it the best script he’d ever read in his life. In classic Hollywood fashion, they then proceeded to write 50 more drafts!
Writer: David Seidler
Details: 115 pages – Sept. 17, 2008 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).

I remember last year around this time when An Education debuted and people were talking about it as an Oscar contender. I didn’t personally see anything Oscar-contention-worthy about the script, so while I know a lot of people liked it, I wasn’t surprised to see it disappear off the radar. I still don’t know why you’d make a movie about an inappropriate relationship where nobody in the movie cares that the relationship is inappropriate! But alas, I’m not here to complain about An Education.

I’m here to look for some weightier scripts. Last week’s half-hearted attempts at screenwriting left me cold so when I heard that, once again, companies were marching out their Oscar contenders, I perked up. You figure, at the very least, the scripts have to be decent, and this is what led me to The King’s Speech, the movie that came out of Toronto with the most attention.

I’m by no means an expert on British royalty so you’ll have to excuse me if I get some facts wrong. The King’s Speech is about Albert, or “Bertie” as he’s known, The Duke of York and second son of King George V. It’s the 1930s and some lunatic named Hitler is wreaking havoc up and down Europe. With King George on his last legs, a new king will have to reign soon, and that king’s voice will be one of the most important voices in the world, as it will convey to every country what Britain’s stance is on the dictator.

Enter Bertie, who has a colossal stuttering problem, so much so that his own wife, Elizabeth, is embarrassed by him. Lucky for Bertie, his older brother David, the Prince of Wales, will be taking over the throne, not him. David is a media darling and extremely popular, however he falls in love with a common woman, and is therefore scandeled out of the throne, forcing Bertie into the role he thought he was free and clear of, that of The King.

During this time, radio was becoming huge. For you youngsters, think 3-D times a thousand. Actually, 3-D’s not a good example, since it will be gone in a year. Let’s see. Like the internet! Yes, like the internet. Radio was like the internet back in the 1930s. Except there was no e-mail in radio. Or web. Or Twitter or Facebook. This reminds me, did you guys hear about that college that experimented for one week with no cell phones, texting, or internet? I guess the whole college grinded to a halt because nobody knew how to operate.

Anyway, the point I was making was that radio was huge, and more leaders were required to give public addresses. In particular, the world was awaiting the most important country in the world’s response to Hitler. Enter Bertie, a man who stuttered so bad he couldn’t find his way out of a sentence with a map.

So terrible is his problem that his wife actually seeks a speech therapist outside the royal circle. She finds a man with a great reputation, an Aussie named Lionel Logue. Lionel is of course brash, unconventional, and inappropriate, sort of like a 1930s Mr. Miagi with more attitude. Bertie hates him immediately. But after a clever first session in which he proves to Bertie that he can speak without stuttering, Bertie has no choice but to continue the therapy.

This is where the script really takes off, when these two are clashing against each other. The pitch-perfect conflict, one steeped in convention, the other dripping with disrespect, makes for some fun back and forth. Characters who buck convention and live by their own set of rules are always good, and when I heard that they got Geoffrey Rush to play this part, I knew they’d hit the jackpot.

Unfortunately, for some reason, the script deviates from the Lionel-Bertie storyline in the later half of the second act, focusing instead on in-family political issues and some nonsense with the prime minister that we don’t really care about. While I understand why so many writers get lost in this part of the script (I think it’s the hardest part of a screenplay to get right), this seemed like a pretty obvious mistake. Why go away from the best part of your story?

While it could be characterized as a hoighty-toity period piece, The King’s Speech uses the simplest most classic story structure there is. Man has problem. Man tries to fix problem. Believe it or not, it’s not that different from a script like Bad Teacher, the Cameron Diaz comedy I reviewed earlier this year. In that script, woman has problem (she needs bigger boobs so she can find a sugar daddy) and woman tries to fix problem (Steals money from the school she’s employed at).

What makes The King’s Speech so successful at this format, however, is first, irony is built straight into the concept. A man who can’t speak is tasked with making the biggest speech ever! What a great premise. Next, the stakes are extremely high (possibly the freedom of the world). There’s a natural ticking time bomb (the speech), and our character is super sympathetic. He’s an underdog! As I’ve pointed out before, there’s no character we root more for than an underdog. Put all these things together and you have a winning formula.

Now that doesn’t mean the structure is foolproof. One of the problems you run into with such simple stories is deciding how complex to make them, namely how many subplots to add and what to do with those subplots. This is a critical decision. If your subplots are too few or too thin, the story feels empty. If they’re too many or too complex, they create deep chasms of screenplay real estate that bore the audience to death. This is what I was referring to above. When we move away from Lionel and start concerning ourselves with Bertie’s brother, he’s just not tied into Bertie’s issue enough to make him interesting. Or, at least, not in the way they chose to include him.

Finally, I have to mention the dialogue in this script, specifically between Bertie and Lionel. Once again, it proves that the SITUATION is the most important factor in creating great dialogue. The dialogue here comes because you have an uptight man who demands respect working with a selfish man who respects no one. Before you’ve even written a word, the conflict you’ve created by placing these two characters in the same room is going to lead to great dialogue no matter how inexperienced you are.

It’s really too bad that the dreaded late second act blues hit this script because it was shaping up to be an impressive. Still, this was an enjoyable read and I’m not surprised it’s playing so well to audiences.

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

What I learned: Failed period pieces often try to cover too much territory. It’s as if the writer feels he/she must live up to the weightiness of the time and the material by exploring as many different aspects of the subject matter as possible. Instead, the next time you write a period piece, consider telling a simple yet powerful story that audiences can understand and relate to, like The King’s Speech.

First thing’s first.  If you want to complain about the new look of the site, I’ve created a forum for you!  A lot of people have said to just go back to the old look but unfortunately that’s one thing I can assure you isn’t happening.  I’ve always despised the look of the site and while I’m clearly not an esteemed member of the design club, I’ll keep tweaking it until it’s acceptable.  If you’re a graphic design master and want to shoot me some tips, feel free to!  

You’ll also notice there are now ads on the site.  People have called me a moron for not monetizing the blog earlier and I guess you can say I finally came to my senses.  My adsenses.  Heh heh.  If you’ve spent countless hours here and always wished you could help out somehow, support the site when you see something that interests you. :)  It will definitely be appreciated.  

This week Roger starts us off with a Western.  I then review scripts for two movies that played over at Toronto, both of which are getting some early Oscar buzz (Oscar buzz?  In September??).  I’ll also review an enormous super-thriller that’s been kicking around development for awhile. And for those freaking out because I didn’t do Amateur Friday last week, fear not as I am doing one this Friday.  In my world, Friday is September 31st.  Now, here’s Roger with a review of a Richard Donner project.  Enjoy!  

Genre: Biopic
Premise: A look at the years leading up to John Wilkes’ Booth assassination of President Lincoln.
About: Booth is one of those scripts that’s been bouncing around Hollywood for a long time. Although all we have to go on is rumor here, it’s said that many who have read it loved it, and that the only reason it hasn’t been made is because it’s a hard sell. Christopher McQuarrie, who wrote the script with Dylan Kussman, has talked openly about his screenwriting career and about how winning an Oscar on only his second movie with “The Usual Suspects” put an enormous amount of pressure on him. He’s spoken about how freeing it was to write the script when he knew nothing about “the rules of screenwriting,” and how that allowed him to make choices he never would have made today. He talks about the subsequent decade long process of being stuck in development rewrite hell on numerous projects, which is why he seemed to disappear after Suspects, and he’s talked about wanting to quit the screenwriting business because of how difficult it is to get movies made (even for an Oscar winner!). Lucky for McQuarrie and us, Tom Cruise called him up one day and wanted to do a movie about Hitler, which has given his career a resurgence. McQuarrie’s favorite movies include, “Deliverance”, “The Verdict”, “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”, “The Taking of Pelham 123”, “Die Hard”, “Electraglide in Blue”, “Lone Star”, “The Big Country” and “The Lives of Others.” Kussman is primarily an actor, appearing in such films as Leatherheads and X-Men 2.
Writers: Christopher McQuarrie & Dylan Kussman
Details: March 18, 2004 draft – 121 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).

I don’t know if Booth has hit “cult” status in the screenplay world yet but it is one of those screenplays that people say you have to read. I’ve been meaning to read it myself until hearing McQuarrie talk about it. I don’t know what it was but there was just this sense of…frustration when he discussed it. Maybe it was not being able to get it made but it sounded more like he knew the script had problems. I lost interest after that but finally decided to give it a read.

One of the things that drew McQuarrie to Booth was that he wasn’t your average mentally unstable weirdo stalker who thought killing a famous person would bring him closer to a higher power. He was actually a pretty levelheaded guy. In fact, he was quite popular, one of the more famous stage actors of the time. Booth toured from city to city, directing and acting in his own hit plays, charming any man or woman who stepped in his path. He was also frighteningly handsome, although if this picture below is anything to go by, there probably weren’t too many good looking people back in the 1800s.

We meet Booth on that infamous day, as he’s shooting Lincoln and jumping off the rafters, shouting those immortalized words, “Sic Semper Tyrannis,” which is probably why we’ve always assumed he was a nut. Killing people and shouting out phrases in an ancient language usually means “crazy town.”

We then jump back five years to Richmond, Virginia before it all started. This portion of the story is somewhat Wikipediaish. Booth has a big family. He doesn’t have the best relationship with them. In particular he and his brother Edwin, also an actor, don’t see eye to eye. This conflict stems from their father’s passing, who apparently drank himself to death, which (I think) Booth believes Edwin is responsible for.

Around this time, the Civil War is gearing up, and after seeing a Union soldier hanged for freeing slaves, Booth has an epiphany and rededicates himself to becoming a great actor (I’m not sure what seeing someone’s death has to do with acting either. Though Tom Cruise has taught us inspiration comes from the strangest of places).

Eventually Booth meets up with his childhood friends Sam and Michael, who are off to the war. Booth promises to join them but then makes a second promise to his mother that he’ll never become a soldier. This leaves Sam and Michael pissed and is a critical turning point in Booth’s life, as he will never get over the guilt of abandoning his friends.

However, Booth gets another chance to help out the cause when the Confederacy comes to him and asks if he’ll secretly deliver medicine to the Confederate army on his tour stops. Delighted to be of use, he accepts, and this is probably the most dramatically compelling portion of the screenplay. There’s a great scene where some officers stop him and ask to check his suitcase for weapons, the very suitcase the medication is in. Watching him try and squirm out of it is fun stuff.

As Booth’s star rises, his side falls. It’s looking more and more like the Union is going to win the war, and for that reason, people are coming up with desperate ideas. Booth is no exception. He starts concocting a plan whereby he kidnaps the president in order to bargain for many of the captured Confederate soldiers.

This is actually what was supposed to happen all along until a few days before the kidnapping, when Booth’s conspirators changed the plan to killing Lincoln instead, something Booth was never totally on board with. And while he went through with the killing, his conspirators left him out in the cold. They were supposed to kill the entire presidential body, including the vice president and secretary of state, but they all choked and didn’t go through with it. Which kinda sucked for them, since they ended up getting hanged anyway. And that, my friends, is the story of Booth.

Whoa.

This was a tough read. There’s so much information packed into this novel-esque screenplay that every page you read feels like you’re reading four. Indeed, the student inside me wanted to highlight all the necessary passages for the test I would surely have to take tomorrow. When I do my whining on this site, it’s usually for biopics that make me feel like I’m back in school in the middle of a boring history course, and unfortunately, that’s how I felt here.

My big problem with Booth was that there wasn’t enough drama. There wasn’t enough conflict. In Valkyrie, Quarrie’s last film, there were so many scenes where people were clashing up against each other. You could feel the tension in each of the scenes. Here, it was just a person’s life unfolding before us, and that wasn’t enough for me. That’s why I loved the medicine-luggage scene so much. It was the only time where Booth’s journey was difficult – where his world was challenged and where something bad had the potential to happen.

The central conflict in Booth is internal – specifically his troubled relationship with his dead father. The problem is that the source of that conflict and the reasoning behind it are all very confusing. It’s somehow related to his brother and he’s mad at his brother for not stopping his father from drinking himself to death, so he blames his brother for killing his father but his brother also blames him for it I think and then he’s also trying to live up to his father’s name (who was also an actor) and I think somehow we’re supposed to make the connection between his unresolved relationship with his father and him killing Lincoln but I just didn’t see it. It was way too complicated.

I also found it a strange choice to put the assassination at the beginning. On the one hand, it makes sense. We all know what happens anyway. Why not start the movie off with a bang? The problem with this is, the rest of the story is so slow (and I think deliberately so), that we need something to look forward to. We need that exciting finale to pay off the huge investment we’re putting into this. But since we’ve already experienced the finale, we’re not sure what it is we’re driving towards, why we want to get to the end.

My question is, is Booth’s story worth telling in the first place? As far as I can tell, the bullet points of his motivation are, “He sympathized with the south, felt bad for not joining his buddies in the war, and eventually that guilt caught up with him which resulted in him killing Lincoln.” It’s almost as if what’s interesting about Booth as an assassin, the fact that he was pretty normal, is what makes his story so uninteresting. There’s no deep-set shocking reasoning for his actions. He was a normal guy and decided to do something stupid. I don’t know if that’s enough for a movie.

I think McQuarrie’s a great writer but this subject matter didn’t interest me.

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

What I learned: Now I know that some of you disagree with me on this but I believe, and will continue to believe, that telling a story where the audience already knows what’s going to happen severely handicaps one of your biggest advantages as a writer – the element of surprise. To me, when your audience is 30-40 pages ahead of you (or in this case, 100 pages), you have to work twice as hard to keep them entertained. Sure, if you have super-compelling characters, unlimited obstacles, and every scene is dripping with conflict, you can keep our focus so in the now that we don’t care that we already know what will happen (For example, we loved Apollo 13 even though we knew how it ended) but why make it so hard on yourself? I remember watching Toy Story 3 this year, probably my favorite film of 2010, when the toys are heading towards that incinerator (spoiler), and for the briefest of moments thought, “Oh my God. They’re really going to do this. They’re going to end these toys’ lives.” I was riveted in that moment, on the edge of my seat. Imagine if the opening scene of that movie was a flashforward showing us that those toys had made it out okay. How that would’ve eliminated every drop of mystery from the movie. How it would’ve stolen one of the best scenes of the year. Writing a good story is hard enough. Why handicap yourself?