Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: Halfway through its 120-year journey to save mankind, the hypersleeping passengers of the spaceship A.R.K. begin to fall victim to a serial killer.
About: This script finished in third place in the Mega-Showdown Screenplay Contest!
Writer: Mikael Grahn
Details: 112 pages

I was thinking about how Scriptshadow is a script review site and that I spend a lot of those reviews on scripts from the Black List – which I’m okay with. But it’s not as exciting as it used to be when the Black List script quality was better.

So, in the lead-up to reviewing the winner of Mega-Showdown, I thought to myself, “Why only review the winner? Why not review the top three scripts? If we’re going to review scripts on the site, we should be celebrating homegrown scripts over others, right?”

So that’s what we’re doing this week. I’ll review 3rd place Noah’s Choice today. 2nd Place Outpace the Dawn tomorrow. 1st place Bedford on Wednesday. On Thursday, I want to talk more about feedback. And then Friday, to add one last flavor to this contest, I’m going to tell you which of the final three scripts I liked the most.

That all begins today. So, let’s review… Noah’s Choice.

Noah’s Choice follows a deep-space ship with the final 100+ humans in all of the universe onboard. They’re headed on a one-hundred-and-twenty-year journey to a new planet where they will reboot the human species. The ship itself was hastily constructed because the earth was dying quickly so they had to make some technological sacrifices.

The mission commander, Trevor Norman, 35 years old, is awakened from his cryo-sleep halfway through the trip by the onboard AI, Keeper. Keeper informs Trevor that 20 of the females in hypersleep have been murdered, possibly sexually assaulted, and even eaten. Trevor is quickly on the case and starts looking into it.

Keeper starts waking up other relevant parties as well, like mission agriculturalist, Ahsan, mission astronomer, Kahaan, and physician (as well as Trevor Nemesis), Flavia. After the three make initial assessments, Trevor orders Keeper to wake up the rest of the men (there are only 10 of them) so they can do DNA cross-checks on some of these cryo-crime scenes.

Soon, all sorts of people are awake and everyone’s giving their opinions on who they think the killer is. The prime target seems to be a South Korean man named Moon who, it’s discovered, upon some extra research, was a sexual offender back on earth. The other primary suspect is a Chinese man named Yichen who didn’t have to qualify to get on the ship as his rich father was the one who built it.

The group doesn’t have a lot of time to figure things out because they’re limited on oxygen. They actually have to use these little oxygen candles to generate an hour of oxygen at a time. All in all, they only have hours to solve the murders. Or else they’ll have to go back into their cryo bays and pray that the murderer doesn’t take them out next.

The central conflict is between Trevor and Flavia as Flavia is convinced that Trevor is the killer since he was so cold in the lead-up to the launch, cheating on his own wife with one of the mission members. But as time ticks down, Flavia begins seeing holes in her theory and must reevaluate who, indeed, the killer is…

Whenever I read a script with a good concept, I’m desperately hoping the writer meets the promise of their premise. That doesn’t mean I have a pre-formulated idea of what the narrative should be. It’s more of a feel thing. I want the feeling of the script to match up with what I felt when I read the concept.

When I saw this concept, I imagined a slow burn – something akin to the beginning of Alien with shades of David Fincher’s “Seven.” Something has happened and the crew members are trying to figure out what it is. As the story continues, as more clues are discovered, the pace steadily increases, until a suspect is identified and now they have to eliminate them.

That’s not what we get. Noah’s Choice hits the ground running the second people come out of hypersleep. A ton of characters are thrown at us all at once and we spend a lot of those early pages trying to figure out who’s who. I thought Mikael did a solid job differentiating all of the characters, something that’s hard to do in these scripts.

But by unleashing a ton of characters, we never get that slow build-up. Everyone is launching theories at us at once and, at times, it felt like a bunch of drunk college kids being dropped into an Escape Room. Everyone’s clumsily yelling at each other, spouting out theories, throwing out blame, and running from area to area as soon as a new clue is found. There was no grace to the proceedings. The plot was being knocked forward with a blunt object, giving the investigation a lack of sophistication.

My guess as to why that happened is because Mikael was determined to use GSU, specifically the “U” part (“Urgency”). So he creates this rule with these limited supply oxygen candles whereby there isn’t a lot of time to figure things out. Theoretically, that’s a good idea. But when you use it to dictate the actions of 10 bickering people, it becomes a circus.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind here. One, if your central mystery is strong enough, the reader will give you ample runway to build your story up. You don’t need these intense ticking clocks nipping at your characters’ heels right from the start. Two, in serial killer movies, the Urgency is almost always measured by the next kill. There’s rarely some Police Captain saying, “You have 24 hours to find the killer or else!” It’s more that, if they don’t figure things out soon, the killer kills another victim. That allows for a slower, but still effective, type of urgency.

There’s this scene in Seven where Somerset and Mills just sit down in Mills’ place and share theories on what might be going on. It’s a deliberately slow scene that’s more about getting to know these characters and how they work together. We never get a scene like that in Noah’s Choice. It’s more like a Mr. Beast video where everyone’s just yelling at each other the whole time.

Now, when I peeked through the comments on Noah’s Choice’s day, I saw that Mikael was using Agatha Christie as a guide for this story. And, if that’s the type of movie he was trying to make, fair enough. The notes I just shared aren’t as applicable. But I would argue that a Seven-like tone is more conducive to a deep space murder mystery than Agatha Christie is. So I think that was the incorrect creative choice to make. I just didn’t like the bickering tone. I would rather we follow 2-3 people around who come across spookier and spookier clues. The mummy-kid was a great example of this. I wanted more stuff like that.

One of the biggest discussions all week has been the lack of cameras on the ship. Mikael had a spirited discussion with everyone who thought there should be cameras on the ship and I have to give him credit for being the only screenwriter I know who has been given the same note from 20 different readers and insisted he was still correct. But I don’t want that to be a big talking point today because I’m actually going to dedicate Thursday’s article to it. I want to talk more about feedback in a broader sense. So save your opinions about the cameras for Thursday!

Look, I’m aware that my expectations of what I hoped this script would be are coloring my analysis of it. However, even if I had wanted this to be “Agatha Christie in space,” I still think it needs work. Even the basics aren’t there yet. Like Trevor. I felt nothing for Trevor. I didn’t like him. I didn’t dislike him. I was 100% neutral. There was no effort made to make me feel anything about our protagonist. And no, a couple of family video messages isn’t enough. I need to like this character by seeing him take actions that make me like him.

If I don’t feel anything about your main character, nothing you write afterward will matter. But, let’s say I did like Trevor. The rest of this story is still messy. The way these characters interact is clunky and juvenile 70% of the time. There’s no elegance to how these character scenes are crafted. Everyone’s just thrown into a blender and a piece of food eventually spits out and Trevor goes to see what it is, which leads to another blender being turned on. That’s the basis for almost every interaction in this movie.

So even if you’re going for Agatha Christie, I think we need to go for a calmer space-version of Agatha Christie. Less characters. Conversations with a clearer purpose. Scenes with clear beginnings, middles, and ends. The plot to Noah’s Choice has structure. But the conversations within that plot have zero structure and that’s what frustrated me the most. I couldn’t make it through any scenes without getting agitated.

I still believe in this idea. But I would look at this draft more as an exploratory draft as opposed to a draft that we build future drafts on. Cause I think we need to rethink how this starts and how it evolves. Curious to hear if you guys agree or disagree.

Script link: Noah’s Choice (Contest Draft)

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

What I learned: The goal with a murder mystery is not to line up the plot and character variables in a way that makes things the easiest on you, the writer (aka, eliminate cameras so you don’t have to come up with a reason why they can’t check camera footage). It’s to line things up to make them the hardest on you. In other words, if your story is about a man who needs to save a cat stuck in a tree, don’t make it a bansai tree. Make it a freaking redwood.

The Mega-Showdown Screenplay Contest deadline is THIS THURSDAY. Go here for details on how to sign up!

Genre: Comedy/Supernatural/High School
Premise: A nerdy father secretly signs up to be the chaperone of his daughter’s high school field trip to an old Native American reservation, only to have a killer king take over the history teacher’s body and start killing people.
About: Verve is one of the few outlets that still cares about screenwriting so I’m typically encouraged when I open up one of their scripts. The writer, Sarah Rothschild, has one film credit, the 2020 movie, “The Sleepover,” for Netflix. Rothschild is also writing the remake of the 1984 film that made every young boy fall in love with Darryl Hannah, “Splash.” I have no doubt that it was today’s script that got her that job.
Writer: Sarah Rothschild
Details: 118 pages

A lot of times I’ll open a script, not with a sense of doom, but a sense of acceptance. I know this isn’t the kind of story I like. And so the next 90 minutes are going to be painful. They’re going to feel a lot more like 190 minutes.

I can’t even begin to describe the stupid stuff I, all of a sudden, need to look up on the internet when I’m struggling to read a script. Here’s a brief peek into what that looks like: “What page am I on? Seven? Hmm, I thought I was on page 30. (Stares at the wall) I haven’t bought almond butter in over two years. I used to love almond butter. What happened? Now that I think about it, during those two years, some new almond butter brands have probably entered the market. I should find out what the best new almond butter brands are.” I then proceed to, I kid you not, research new almond butter brands for half an hour.

But I’m also reminded, time and time again, that if you’re a good writer, you can override almond butter syndrome. Doesn’t matter how much a reader dislikes the genre you’re writing. Good writing trumps all.

And that’s exactly what happened with today’s script.

40-something Pete McGuire lives in Oak Park, Illinois, coincidentally the exact same town I grew up in – no that didn’t affect my review. The only thing he cares about these days is spending time with his 15 year old daughter, Cora. Which isn’t easy considering she stays with Pete’s ex-wife, who’s now married to a third baseman for the Chicago Cubs.

In a desperate bid to spend more time with Cora, Pete secretly signs up to be a chaperone on the school’s next big field trip, to the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, which once housed the biggest Native American city in all of North America, with 20,000 people. Then, one day, all those people disappeared.

One of the other chaperones, Cal, informs cluless Pete that these trips are often used by the teenagers to sneak away and have sex. This totally ruins Pete’s good vibes and now all he can think about is watching Cora like a hawk. But when they get to Cohokia Mounds, she immediately disappears with a group of other teens.

Meanwhile, two other kids stumble into an off limits dig site, find an old tablet, and accidentally drop it just as the history teacher, Mr. Truitt, arrives. A soul shoots out of the broken tablet, enters Mr. Truitt’s brain, and now all Mr. Truitt wants to do is kill people.

All of a sudden, it starts raining, so all the kids are huddled into the central building, clueless to the fact that there’s now a demon running around trying to kill people. Oh, and the operating thesis is that it only wants to kill virgins. When the other chaperones find out what’s going on, they assure Pete that, wherever Cora is, she’s fine, because she’s definitely not a virgin.

Still, Pete must find his daughter. So he teams up with another chaperone, Lindy, who, coincidentally, is her boyfriend’s mom. They head off to find them, realizing, along the way, that they kind of like each other. So if they can somehow save their kids (and save them from having sex), maybe there’s a future romance that will blossom.

Today’s script is a great example of finding fresh angles into time-tested concepts. Kids going on a field trip. We’ve seen that before. But that doesn’t mean the subject matter is permanently closed off. If you can find a different way into a field trip, you can still write a unique entertaining movie.

These field trips are chaperoned. Why not tell the story from that point of view? Already, we’re starting to see a different movie. But there’s an amendment to this approach. And it’s one a lot of writers ignore. That amendment is: YOU MUST COMMIT TO IT.

In other words, you can’t write “chaperones” into your logline, have the 5 chaperones show up at the beginning of the story, then just write your average funny high school horror flick. No, you have to go all in on the chaperone thing.

You have to establish five chaperones, give us their backstories, tell us what their relationships are with their kids, figure out what’s uniquely funny about them. For example, Cal is a “worst-case scenario” guy. He tells you exactly how bad high school kids can get on these trips any chance he gets.

And you should tell the story almost exclusively from the chaperone POV. Which is what we get here. Which works out great. Rothschild fully commits to the idea. We even have a little mythology. Each chaperone is assigned a group “color”.

That might seem insignificant to the newbie writer. But that stuff resonates with readers. The reader knows they’re not phoning it in. They’ve thought this through. Cause a bad writer will easily assume that there’s nothing to chaperoning but showing up and winging it. I’ll read a lot of bad scripts where characters are winging it simply due to the fact that the writer has no idea what they’re writing about.

I’m sure some people are going to compare this to the movie, Blockers. But this is a WAAAAAAY BETTER SCRIPT than that. That script was awful. I was so confused when people actually liked it. This script is actually good and if you’re into these types of movies, read it. It’s a great template for how to approach this genre with just the right balance of humor, horror, character, and craft.

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

What I learned: I always love when writers SHOW as opposed to TELL in some clever way. Early in the script, Rothschild needs to convey to the reader that Cora doesn’t think about her father as much these days. The way most writers would handle that is through dialogue. NO! DON’T DO THAT! Figure out a way to SHOW IT. So, before I tell you what Rothschild does, you tell me how you would convey this by showing. ** I’m waiting. Have you thought something up? Okay… here’s what Rothschild did.

When Pete comes over to pick up his daughter from his ex-wife’s house, he realizes there was a scheduling mistake and Cora is going to hang out with friends tonight. Pete says no problem. They’ll do it next week. Here’s the ‘show don’t tell’ part from the script itself.

Cora hugs her mom. Pete holds his hand out for a handshake. Their special “thing.” Cora smiles, uncertain. After a few flubbed movements, it’s clear she doesn’t remember it. Pete laughs, hiding his disappointment.

What I learned 2: What I’m learning from a lot of these scripts that make the Black List is that they often get the writer chances at rewrites for old franchises. My friend Leah got a shot at Grease after writing Voicemails for Isabelle. Rothschild got a shot at Splash. And I’ve heard of lots of other cases where that’s happened as well. So, whatever franchise you want to reboot, write something in the same vein.

Actually, now I’m curious. If you could reboot one franchise, what would it be?

Script sale! Just sold!

Genre: Thriller/Horror
Premise: A young Asian woman becomes concerned when her Asian roommate begins dating a white man and she slowly starts becoming white herself.
About: This script has gotten a lot of heat in the last 24 hours because the trades announced it had been sold. It’s not clear if the actual sale just happened or it happened a while ago and they’re just now reporting on it. I know that happens sometimes. The script has been floating around for a year now which is good news for writers who feel like their script’s been passed up by Hollywood. You’re never passed up! You just have to find that one producer who loves it. So keep hitting people up. Keep pushing them to read your script. It’s like dating. You can have nine bad dates and on the tenth date, you find the love of your life. But does the love of your life have an artificial face?
Writer: Ran Ran Wang
Details: 96 pages

Sonoya Mizuno for Jo?

At the end of the day, screenplays are subjective.

You like some. You dislike others. It’s all part of the game.

But that doesn’t mean you throw up your hands and give up. You can still weight things in your favor so that you’re more likely to end up in the “YES” pile than the “NO” pile. One of the first things you can do is give us a new twist on an old formula. If you do that, you’re ahead of the majority of screenwriters.

And today’s writer does that. This is a serial killer movie. But it’s a serial killer movie with a twist we’ve never seen before. The killer is dating Asian women, slowly turning them into white women, and then murdering them.

Haven’t seen it! And I’m guessing you haven’t either.

The question is, is that a *good* different idea? Or just a different idea? Cause if it’s only different, it’s not going to get you into the YES pile.

20-something Rina, a Korean American lawyer, is out on a date with 20-something Preston, a very white man, who’s also a lawyer (at a different firm). Usually, Rina hates dating app dates. But there’s something intriguing about Preston. She likes this guy.

Not long after the date, we meet Rina’s roommate, Jo, a lesbian who’s secretly in love with Rina. She’s not happy at all to hear that Rina’s date with Preston went well but because she’s such a good friend, she encourages Rina to pursue him.

But then Jo actually meets Preston and he freaks her the hell out. He’s super pale. He’s socially unaware. And he looks psychotic. Sometimes you’ll be talking to him and he just stares at you. Creeeeeeep-y. Jo notices that Preston keeps giving her sexy eyes when Rina isn’t looking.

As the weeks go by, Jo sees less and less of Rina and whenever she does see her, Rina seems paler. As Rina’s relationship progresses, we keep hearing about these blond girls getting murdered by a serial killer. One night Rina starts looking into these dead girls and realizes that one looks exactly like her Asian friend who went missing a year ago. But how can an Asian woman become white and blonde? It doesn’t make sense!

One day when Rina isn’t around, Preston shows up and corners Jo in the kitchen. He then kisses her, biting her lip. Jo gets away and, over the course of the next few days, she becomes super strong. At this point, she knows something crazy is up with Preston and desperately attempts to get Rina away from him. But Rina is now a blond blue-eyed white girl. Which means Jo needs to act fast.

This is a very ambitious screenplay and I’m not sure I was always able to follow along.

I liked a lot of the early stuff. In particular, I liked the subtext behind Jo being in love with Rina but Rina being obsessed with this new guy she met. In screenwriting, you’re constantly looking to build relationships that allow conversations to have subtext.

So when Jo is poo-pooing Rina’s new boyfriend, she’s not literally hating on the boyfriend. She’s got a dog in this fight. She wants Rina. So of course she’s going to hate on the new guy. But she can’t say she loves Rina out loud and therefore has to convey these things through subtext.

I also liked how casual the writing was. Sometimes we writers can obsess over every single word so much so that we end up with these technically correct paragraphs but those paragraphs read like jagged edges. The action description throughout this script read like butter.

My issues with the script had to do with the mythology.

I had a hard time following it. The antagonist, Preston, is fashioned after a vampire. For example, if he bites you, you gain superhuman strength. And there are many allusions to how pale he is and how pale he makes others. So we’re at least partly in vampire land.

But then I don’t know what that has to do with turning Asian women into white women. That whole aspect of the mythology seemed to have different rules. And once you create a mythology that contradicts itself, the reader gets confused and loses confidence in the story.

This is quite common, actually, especially in the early stages of a screenwriting career. We tend to see mythology as this giant candy store where we can pull out any piece of candy whenever we want. But good mythology is the customer who walks into the candy store and only buys the candy that he really needs.

Cause I had a tough time figuring out what the point was here. I know there’s this “toxic masculinity” theme running throughout the script. But there’s also this toxic friendship theme running throughout the script (Rina is terrible to Jo). I suppose, if you wanted to dig deeper, you could even say that this was a story about toxic heterosexuality since Jo is gay and the two people who screw her over are straight.

That’s not how you present your theme.

You don’t give the reader a bunch of choices and say, “Pick one.”

Yes, good movies explore multiple themes but the best movies have a dominant theme – one message they’re trying to get across.

And the problem with a script like this is that it’s clearly a THEME script. It’s created to be deconstructed for its message. So if that message isn’t clear, then you’re not executing the most important part of your presentation. Us moviegoers don’t need a theme when we watch The Fall Guy. But we do when we watch indie movies like this.

Even the title confuses me. “If I Had Your Face.” At first I think that’s coming from Rina’s perspective. She’s eager to have a white woman’s face. But then, later in the script, we get all these shots of mirrors and Jo’s face becomes Preston’s face sometimes and Rina’s face sometimes and the last dead girlfriend’s face sometimes. It just felt like we were throwing spooky stuff up on the screen even if we didn’t understand why.

By the way, this is something newbie writers do all the time in horror. They write trippy stuff and expect the reader to do the work for them. The writer doesn’t know exactly why they’re doing it but they’re HOPING the reader will come up with an explanation. You never want to write like that. You shouldn’t ever expect the reader to do your work. Even though it’s harder, you should always do the work yourself. You should always write things that make sense.

There’s a good lesson to be learned here, even if it’s a confusing one. I believe that Ran Ran is great with character stuff and dialogue. I think she’s weak in horror and mythology. However, this script doesn’t sell without the horror and mythology. That’s how powerful marketable genres are. Even if you’re not great with them, they give you a much better chance at selling your script, even if you didn’t perfectly execute the genre part. And that’s because producers read the script and see the poster and the trailer. Posters and trailers always look better when there’s a marketable genre popping off them.

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

What I learned:“Running Commentary Description” – Running Commentary Description is when you occasionally use your action lines to commentate on what’s happening. It helps create a more casual read. So, for example, we get this line early on: “Finally, a waiter comes by with two glasses of red wine. A lifeline.” That last part – “A lifeline,” gives the reader a little more information on what that red wine means in the moment. Or later on, when Jo is speaking to a couple of Irene’s work friends and they’re going their separate ways, one of the friends says, “We should all catch up some time.” And the action line that follows is, “They never will.” I kinda like running commentary description but just like anything, if you do it too much, it can get annoying. So be careful out there.

We’re just 11 days away from the Mega Showdown Screenplay Contest. Details on how to enter are here!

The only time when the box office is interesting is when something unexpected happens and we had one of those unexpected moments this weekend when Longlegs shocked Hollywood by pulling in 22 million bucks.

What’s interesting about this is that Longlegs is what I call a “tweener.” It is in between genres. It’s technically a serial killer movie but it’s shot and treated like a horror film. I mean, check out this trailer. Tweeners are where screenwriters go to gamble. Because when you get them right, the rewards are huge. Everybody tells you, “Oh my god, it was genius to mix those two genres!”

But when you fail, you fail spectacularly. We saw that with another tweener movie that came out this weekend, Fly Me to the Moon, a film that did about as good (9.5 mil) as I expected it to when I reviewed the script two weeks ago. It’s part biopic part rom-com??? I’ve seen some questionable tweener combos before but this one is up there.

Getting back to Longlegs, it’s a vindicating moment for me because I remember reviewing Osgood Perkins’ script, February, so many years ago and finding it to be excellent. It’s a strange thing, screenwriting, when you know someone is an excellent writer but the results don’t prove it.

You wonder why so many other less talented writers have these giant credits instead. Hacks like Mattson Tomlin or massively overrated teacher’s pet Michael Waldron. Perkins is a way better writer than either of these guys so why are the coloring book professionals making a million bucks a script?

I suppose when you look closer, it makes sense. Perkins lives inside the burn. He lives inside the subtext. Whereas these other writers live inside the party. They live inside the bells and whistles. And those things get more attention. Especially when it comes to the types of movies that make the most money in Hollywood.

But Perkins has finally made a, “Studios take note” movie that will most certainly elevate him to high profile status.

This past week, I’ve been talking with writer friends, I’ve been working with writers as a consultant, I’ve been reading scripts for the site, and I’m even reading a book. A major theme emerged from all this reading and it’s the topic of TRUTH in writing.

There are so many times when I read something where a character will say something or do something that’s not truthful. In other words, whatever they’re saying or doing is not reflective of what one would say or do in real life. And the second that happens in a script, a little switch gets flipped in the reader’s head where they think, “That’s not realistic.”

Every time that switch gets flipped, the reader gets closer and closer to disengaging his suspension of disbelief. It doesn’t take many flips for the reader to give up entirely. It only takes 2 or 3 times depending on the degree to which the moment affects the story. In other words, if a character says something untruthful when he’s joking around with a friend, it doesn’t bother the reader much. But when a character says something untruthful during an important high stakes moment in the story? That could be the end of your script right there.

To understand this, you have to see suspension of disbelief as a balloon. And every time you lie to the reader, it’s the equivalent of throwing a sharp rock at that balloon. Maybe the balloon survives a few throws. But eventually it’s going to pop.

So what does a lie look like in writing?

Let’s start with a simple example. You’re writing a horror script. You have a babysitter in a house. Your plan for the scene is to get the killer inside the house because you need him to kill her. So you have your killer dress like an electricity guy and ring the doorbell. The babysitter comes to the door, the fake electricity guy says there’s an electricity problem on the block and he needs to check the basement. What does the babysitter do?

Does she let him in?

I have news for you. If your answer is yes, you just lied to the reader. You’re lying because the babysitter isn’t going to let a strange man into this house at 9pm at night. At the very least she would tell him to hold on and call the owners of the house to inform them about the man and let them make the decision. But if she just lets him in because he wants to come in, you are lying to the reader. Which is inexcusable.

Okay, let’s look at another example.

Your female hero has been handcuffed and thrown in the back of a cop car, which is on the move. We establish that the cops are dirty and it looks like they’re taking her somewhere to kill her. For context, this is a family woman who’s never been in a situation like this before.

Our hero, when the cops aren’t looking, reaches up, grabs a bobby pin out of her hair, and discreetly goes to work, using the bobby pin to open her handcuffs, and jump out of the moving car.

Would you write that scene?

If so, you have just lied to the reader.

The lie is that this character would a) know how to do this and b) be able to pull it off. Have you ever opened handcuffs with a hairpin? Would you know how to do it? If you don’t know how to do it, why would this character know? You may say, “But that always happens in movies, Carson!” That’s literally the worst response you can use for justifying an action in your script.

“All those sh#tty movies did it Carson. Why can’t I?”

If you want to model your script off a terrible movie, go ahead. But I promise you that’s not going to help you when somebody reads it.

“I wanna go home!”

One of the reasons that The Acolyte has completely fallen apart as a show is because it lies so much. Keep in mind, the audience isn’t aware that this is the reason they’ve lost faith in the show. All they know is they don’t like it. But the writer lying to them so much is the primary reason they don’t like it.

In this most recent episode, we go back in time when the twin girls, Maye and Osha, were still with the witch clan. The purpose of the episode is to show us why Master Sol came after and adopted Osha. It’s a big deal for a man to take a kid from her mothers so it has to be a major reason.

What ended up being the reason? He saw Maye and Osha playing in the forest and got a sixth sense that they were being taught an “incorrect” way of living. Not that they were in danger, mind you. Just that he didn’t like the way he assumed they were being raised.

That’s a lie.

That’s a bold-faced writer lie.

The writers needed to get Master Sol to the witch clan so they had Sol “get a sense,” by watching the two play, that further investigation was needed.

Character motivation is something writers lie about all the time because finding a valid motivation can be challenging. This is where most writing lies are born – in the face of having to do more work. Rather than do the work and find a valid motivation, they’ll lie and hope that the reader doesn’t pick up on it. But I’m telling you, that’s a dangerous game to play. Readers are always smarter than you think. And this Sol moment here became a viral discussion over social media, leading even hardcore fans to give up on the show.

In that same episode, one of the Jedis in Master Sol’s clan, Torbin, gets overwhelmed by the fallout that happens when they encounter the witches and promptly says, “I want to go home.” He keeps whining, telling everyone how uncomfortable he is. He wants to go back to Coruscant. I want to go home. I want to go home. I want to go home.

This is another lie.

For starters, the character is somewhere between 18-22 years old. “I want to go home” is something a 5-10 year old character says. Not an 18-22 year old character. So you’re lying about how a character of this age would react. Second problem, he’s a Jedi. Jedis are trained from a young age to be calm. This reaction goes 180 degrees in the opposite direction of that. So that’s another lie. Finally, they’re not 10 minutes from their home hut. They’re 7 billion miles from their home planet. “I want to go home,” doesn’t make sense within that context. It’s a complete and utter lie.

So when you watch that character freak out and get this overwhelming feeling that it’s inauthentic, this is the reason why. The writer lied three full times within one action.

This is why truth is so important in writing and it’s simpler to incorporate than you think. All you have to do is ask, “Is this how it would happen if we were in the real world?” Keep changing the action of the character until that answer is “yes.”

:)

16 days left to enter the Mega-Showdown Screenplay Contest! Head over to this post for details on how to enter. It’s easy!

Genre: Horror
Premise: A hacker tasked with looking into a strange suicide begins to find herself followed by random crowds of people who she suspects may want to kill her.
About: There are a lot of Jack Hellers. I think this is the producer Jack Heller, who’s produced all of S. Craig Zahler’s movies. This script of his finished on last year’s Black List and was one of the only scripts on the list to get a coveted “must read” rating from me.
Writer: Jack Heller
Details: 97 pages

In the comment section yesterday, we were talking about Eddie Murphy and how he went from the biggest comedic actor in the world to 35 years of missteps.

Here are some of the concepts he signed up for…

The Adventures of Pluto Nash – In the future, a man struggles to keep his lunar nightclub out of the hands of the Mafia.

Vampire in Brooklyn – A Caribbean vampire seduces a Brooklyn police officer who has no idea that she is half-vampire.

Metro – A hostage negotiator teams up with a sharpshooter to bring down a dangerous jewel thief.

Holy Man – An over-the-top television evangelist finds a way to turn television home shopping into a religious experience, and takes America by storm.

Norbit – A mild-mannered guy, who is married to a monstrous woman, meets the woman of his dreams, and schemes to find a way to be with her.

Meet Dave – A crew of miniature aliens operates a spaceship that has a human form. Their plans get messed up when the human form falls in love.

Some of these concepts are misguided (why is the vampire, oddly, Caribbean?), some bland (hostage negotiator tries to take down a jewel thief??), some forced (aliens piloting a person), some lacking a clear comedic angle (Pluto Nash).

The reason I bring these up today, of all days, is to remind everyone HOW IMPORTANT CONCEPTS ARE. When you have a great concept, the majority of the script writes itself. When you don’t, you spend 90% of your time forcing things to work. And they never quite work because the concept itself never worked.

This is why, when you stumble upon a good idea, you must cherish it, like a rare Pokemon. It is worth more than you could possibly imagine.  I mean that.  A good idea could conceivably last CENTURIES.

I would place today’s concept in that category.  Well, it’s maybe not centuries-lasting good but it’s one of the first concepts I noticed when last year’s Black List came out. I wanted to save it for a rainy day. It’s not exactly raining out but I’m in the mood to read something awesome.

Let’s check it out.

We start off by seeing a girl, Tabitha, hurry into a subway with a giant crowd slowly following her. The crowd of people eventually surrounds her and positions her head in the path of an oncoming train and she’s beheaded.

Cut to several days later, where we meet Lou. Lou is one of those “Girl with the dragon tattoo” types. She’s a hacker who does occasional jobs for an insurance company. The company is trying to prove that a girl (Tabitha) killed herself so it doesn’t have to pay out her life insurance.

Lou, who’s at the tail end of a long journey to end her conservatorship for, presumably, mental instability, starts looking into the video of Tabitha’s death, which shows… NO CROWD. Only Tabitha. But Lou curiously finds a strange blur moving towards Tabitha that warrants more investigation.

So she goes to the last person who saw Tabitha before she died, the subway ticket guy. That guy doesn’t want anything to do with Lou’s questions and goes home. Lou follows him and oddly sees the guy screaming to random nothingness, “Get away from me!” 20 minutes later, back at his home, he kills himself.

Lou then begins having dreams of a crowd of people in her bedroom watching her while she sleeps. It creeps her out enough that she reconnects with her ex-boyfriend, Wes, who assures her she’ll be fine.

But as Lou starts to move around the city, she notices crowds starting to form, sometimes following her, sometimes just looking at her. It becomes apparent that she is in some sort of chain of people who are killed by a crowd. She must figure out how to stop this crowd before it makes her its latest victim.

The first question that pops into a reader’s head after a script is, “Is this script good enough to recommend?” If the answer is yes, the writer is in a very good place. Because it’s hard as hell to get people to recommend a script.

The section question that enters a reader’s mind is: “Could this be a movie?” A screenplay is a proposed blueprint for a movie. So readers want to know if the blueprint could be successful.

Now here’s the part that drives aspiring writers crazy. You can get a “no” on the first question, a “yes” to the second question, and people will still want to buy your script. That’s because “Can it be a movie?” is the only question that really matters.

The Crowd is a movie. Potentially a very successful one. It’s as if someone combined It Follows and Smile and injected the offspring with several performance-enhancing drugs.

Crowds are scary. The fact that nobody has thought to make a horror movie about one is shocking. And the writer knows exactly how to milk fear from a crowd.

I love how the crowd kills. It keeps following you and following you until it’s surrounding you. Then, it keeps moving in, moving in, and soon, it’s crushing you. And it doesn’t let up. It keeps crushing and crushing til bones start snapping, til eyeballs start popping. The crowd is ruthless.

And I love how the writer didn’t stop there. In addition to the crowd, there’s an individual within the crowd – a sort of alpha demon of sorts – and as the crowd holds you in place, the demon weaves through the crowd, getting closer and closer. It’s another scary element within an already terrifying element.

The crowd can also appear momentarily. You can be walking somewhere in the city and then, all of a sudden, everybody stops and turns to you. In this iteration, the crowd only wants to watch. Or to warn.

It’s genuinely spooky stuff.

And I liked what the writer did with the main character as well. We meet Lou at the end of a long journey where she’s been trying to get herself out of a protective conservatorship (think what Britney Spears parents were doing to her), which gives her a personal goal that works, concurrently, with the plot goal (find out what this crowd is before it kills you).

As someone who’s read a million and one characters, I don’t remember a single script where a character was trying to get out of a conservatorship. I love writers who go the extra mile and come up with unique angles like that.

But I do have one beef with The Crowd.

There isn’t enough crowd!

When you have an idea this original, you want to take advantage of it! So much of this script is about the investigation into how the crowd came to be and how it ended up with her. I don’t go to a movie about scary crowds to spend 75% of the time watching characters look at computer screens and say stuff like, “Yeah, that person in that video clip DOES look strange.”

I want my character in CROWD SITUATIONS!

I actually thought this script was going to be one long real-time story where the main character must make it through the city with crowds moving in on her wherever she goes.

I’m fine that that’s not the case but, at least give me 25% of that!

I’m guessing the writer thought that if there was too much crowd stuff, it would lose its impact. I suppose that’s an okay argument. But not if you get inventive. I already liked this rule he created where sometimes the crowd just watches. It doesn’t move in on you. So I know the writer has the creative ability to come up with different variations of the crowd. I would like to see more of that variety.

I’ve said it once, I’ll say it a million more times: GIVE US WHAT’S UNIQUE ABOUT YOUR MOVIE. That’s the one thing of value you possess – that unique asset.

Any time you are not focusing on that asset, you are focusing on things MOVIEGOERS HAVE SEEN BILLIONS OF TIMES ALREADY. You know how many investigations I’ve seen in movies? 11 billion.

That’s my only issue here. More crowd. Cause crowds are scary and the writer did a great job showing that. So show it more.

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

What I learned: Don’t overthink verbs – “Tabitha strolls her eyes to a confusing sight.” If the reader has to stop to try and figure out what “strolling” one’s eyes means, you’ve written a clunky sentence. Just use normal words! “Tabitha notices something confusing.”

What I learned 2: Horror writers. Yeah, I’m speaking to you. YOU ARE NO LONGER ALLOWED TO WRITE SCENES IN BATHROOMS ANYMORE! STAY. AWAY. FROM BATHROOMS.  No bloody sink scenes. No mirrors with monsters behind you in the reflection scenes. No foggy messages in the mirrors. Stop! Stop stop stop! You are writing things that a reader has read in 4 other horror scripts JUST THAT WEEK. If you’re going to write something in a bathroom, it must be something truly original.