If I say to you the names Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, I’m guessing a little over 25% of you know who those two are. If I say those two names on anything other than a screenwriting site, that number drops to .001%.

And yet, those two are the writers of, at one point, the highest grossing movie of all time, Avengers: Endgame.

I want you to think about that for a second. The writers of the most successful movie ever made are so obscure that the overwhelming majority of the people on this planet – people who have seen the movie mind you – have never heard of them.

And yet, if I say the names Quentin Tarantino, Aaron Sorkin, Diablo Cody, and Taylor Sheridan, peoples’ ears perk up. They know those names. Those are respected screenwriters.

This got me thinking about the differences between pursuing a studio career versus pursuing an artist’s career.

In one, you become a cog in the machine, moving from high-profile assignment to high-profile assignment. However, you are a very generously paid cog. And if you can make it to the top of the studio mountain, like McFeely and Markus, or Shay Hatten (John Wick sequels), you are drowning in cash money. Even if no one knows your name.

In the other, you are writing for the love of it, and are getting recognized as a respected name in the business. If you can crawl to the top of this pile, you are fighting for Academy awards. And the public may even know your name.

But while you might never be a cog, you will spend a lot more time fighting to get your projects made due to the fact that they’re not obvious money-makers. So while you gain prestige and respect within the industry, you lose financial security.

I think it’s important for amateur writers to figure out which direction they want to go in because each path requires a different strategy. And I want to discuss those strategies today.

If you want to become a studio screenwriter, you need to become obsessed with high-concept. That’s going to be your ticket to ride. Back in the day, you operated on a 1-step process whereby you wrote a high concept script to sell it.

These days, they’ve added a step. You write these scripts to get recognized as somebody who’s good at writing this kind of script. A manager or agent takes you on based on the strength of that spec. They send your script around town to the big-budget production houses and studios, and hopefully, one of those places hires you to write *their* big-budget script.

This is exactly what happened to Michael Waldron. He wrote a script called The Worst Guy Of All Time, and the Girl Who Came To Kill Him, which had time-travel, comedy, and acton set-pieces. That script eventually got to Kevin Feige and Feige loved it. Which led to Waldron getting hired to write Loki, and now the next big Avengers movie, Secret Wars.

Another thing studio writers must have is a mastery of structure. You have to know the three-act structure like the back of your hand. You have to understand page counts and on which pages key plot beats happen. You need to know terms like the “inciting incident” and the “Mid-Point Twist” or “Mid-Point Escalation.”

You need to know these things because studios are way more technical in how they approach things. They don’t leave anything up to wish-washinesss or “feel.” They need to be able to say to you, “the first half of your second act is 10 pages too long. Cut 10 pages out.” And you have to know what that means.

They’re going to use words like “pacing.” They’re going to say, “The pacing in your third act sucks.” And you need to know what that means and how to fix it (it basically means that your third act scenes are dragging or you’ve got some extra scenes in there that aren’t needed).

Studios don’t have time to teach screenwriters. They’re expecting you to already know the technical details like the back of your hand. I learned this the hard way. I recommended a couple of screenwriters who weren’t ready for the intensity of a studio assignment yet, and received a couple of frustrated phone calls from the producers regarding the writers’ abilities.

These writers had previously written strong scripts. But they were scripts where they didn’t have to answer to anyone. The studio system is a collaborative system. You need to be able to work with others. You need to be able to receive notes and understand what they mean.

Which is I why I remind writers if they’ve written ten scripts and still haven’t “made it” yet, that doesn’t mean they should give up. All the learning they’ve gone through writing those scripts has made them great candidates to become studio screenwriters. Cause they’re familiar with a lot of the speed bumps associated with screenwriting and know how to tackle those bumps.

Meanwhile, if you want to become a respected screenwriter, aka an “artist,” high concept isn’t nearly as important. In fact, it might take away from the other aspects of your writing that you’re trying to showcase. You should still be seeking out a clever concept – something ironic maybe (Good Will Hunting – a Harvard janitor solves a math equation that nobody at Harvard could solve). But it doesn’t have to be a big flashy idea with a lot of kung-fu or time traveling going on.

What you *do* have to be great at is character development. If you don’t enjoy delving into the depths of people and what makes them tick, the “artist” route is not the route for you. It’s better to pursue the studio side. Cause studio screenwriters only have to know how to make their characters likable. They don’t have to write Oscar-worthy character journeys.

Character development boils down to creating imperfect characters who we still root for. Arthur Fleck from Joker is a good example. Or Louis Bloom from Nightcrawler. Or Cassandra from Promising Young Woman.

You need to know how to give these characters flaws (Cassandra could not see through her rage and let it dictate all her actions). You need to know how to explore those flaws. You need to know how to have your characters overcome those flaws at the end. Or fall victim to them if that’s the kind of movie you’re writing (like Cassandra). And you need to know how to do this with character relationships as well. You need to know how to start a relationship in one place (broken) and end it on the other end of the spectrum (fixed).

And you need to know how to make characters interesting. Not boring. The most respected screenwriters are the ones who can create classic characters. These screenwriters are obsessed with people and want to dig into them and know how they tick. That intense curiosity is what leads them to write these iconic characters.

You also need be great in one of two other areas. You need to be saying something important thematically with your script. Or you need to have a unique voice. These days, social issues are the easiest ways to explore a theme so they’re the perfect option if you want to go in the thematic direction.

If you’ve never been good with theme or you don’t have any interest in writing a script about 12 Native Americans who go to the moon, you need a flashy strong voice on the page. Taika Waititi. Emerald Fennell. Christy Hall. A voice that explodes and forces the reader to take notice.

Naturally, artists will be shooting at a different target. Instead of blanketing the town with a sexy action premise and hoping to get a meeting at 87North, you’ll be trying to make the Black List. If you can make the Black List, that’s going to give you the first bump you need towards becoming that “respected” screenwriter. It’s also going to put you in a great position to get your movie made.

I forgot what our last tally was, but I think it’s between 25-30% of Black List scripts get turned into movies. Which is great. Because one of the crappy things about being an artist is that it’s harder to get movies made since your script won’t have the same marketability as a high level, or even a low-level, studio release. So using the buzz of a Black List showing to get your script made is a legit strategy.

But the reality is that, as an artist, you’re going to have to do a lot more work than the studio writer types to break in because it’s always going to be harder to break in with unmarketable material. It’s just harder to get people to read things that don’t have a sexy premise. They’re always the last scripts I read and I think most people in town feel the same.

So as long as you know the journey will be longer and harder, you can accept the challenge and not get discouraged so easily.

Of course, there’s a third option – which is the TV option. But we’re out of time. Maybe that’s an article for a future date. Let me know if that interests you. In the meantime, figure out which kind of writer you are and start strategizing your career immediately!

Get A Screenplay Consultation with Carson! – Do you want me to look at your script?  Tell you how it stacks up to the other 10,000 scripts I’ve read?  How it stacks up to all the scripts being sent around town?  Is it up to par with those scripts?  Is it better than those scripts?  Is it not as good?  If so, what’s wrong?  How can you fix it?  This is my area of expertise so if you’ve been thinking about getting a consultation, now is the time to do it!  I can give you $50 off if you mention this article.  E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com to get started!

Genre: Sports Drama/Comedy
Premise: Mickey Bradley, a wildly talented minor league baseball player in his early twenties who returns home to Los Angeles after an injury and coaches a little league team full of misfits who remind him why he fell in love with baseball in the first place. And there’s a sweet romance in there too.
About: This script comes out of 2020’s Black List. The writer, Ethan Dawes, wrote and directed a small indie film in 2013 called Go For Broke. He was also Carrie-Anne Moss’s assistant in The Matrix Resurrections. Random factoid that has nothing to do with today’s script – Moss just signed on to the new Star Wars show, The Acolyte!
Writer: Ethan Dawes
Details: 107 pages

MBJ for Mickey?

There are certain staples in the studio release cycle that will never die. The “Adult Has-Been Forced to Coach A Kid’s Sports Team” flick is one of those. The reason I bring that up is because, as a screenwriter, you wanna be strategic about what you write. You want to look for the types of scripts that fit into the slots that Hollywood likes making.

I read this old article that Scott posted in the comments yesterday about a struggling screenwriter who surprisingly sold his script, Showtime (that reality TV cop movie starring DeNiro and Murphy), and noticed something interesting within the article.

The script wasn’t the writer’s idea. Someone suggested it to him. He admits he never would’ve written an idea like Showtime otherwise. Afterwards, he tried to sell a script about a 15 year old kid who lived on a floating casino. It didn’t sell. After that, it took him 17 years to get another movie made. And that was another out-there idea – some sort of 70s period piece about Steve McQueen stealing money from a secret fund of Richard Nixon’s.

The only idea that seems to have done anything for this writer was one that someone else came up with. And say what you want about that move – Showtime – but it very much falls into a slot of movies that Hollywood loves to make. Buddy-cop movies. And it was a fairly inventive spin on the genre at the time. So I can see why it got made.

This is a long way of saying that we can get so obsessed by and blinded by our own ideas that we don’t ask the question – does Hollywood actually make the type of movie I’m writing? Cause if they don’t, you’re turning already bad odds into insurmountable odds.

We can make fun of how cliched today’s genre is. But at least this writer is playing to win. Whereas so many aspiring screenwriters are playing to lose.

Mickey is 13 years old pitching to win the Little League World Series when the Japanese team hits a home run off of him to win the game. 15 years later, 28 year old Mickey (hey, didn’t we just cover a Mickey in yesterday’s review??) is pitching in the minor leagues and tears his something-or-other muscle. He’s quickly dropped from the team.

Mickey heads back to the valley in Los Angeles to pick up the pieces and figure out what to do next. After a video goes viral of Mickey throwing a fit in the locker room after getting cut, his agent suggests that he rebuild his image by coaching the same little league team that he played on as a kid. Mickey figures, “why not?” only to learn that the team is now made up of almost entirely girls!

It’s a bit of “A League of Their Own” mixed with “Bad News Bears.” Mickey can’t see himself coaching a bunch of girls but he’s got to rehabilitate that image so he signs on. Naturally, all the girls are terrible (one of them likes singing in the outfield more than catching balls) except for the studly chick who hangs around the park and isn’t on the team… yet!

With a little help from his old catcher, Pickles, and the cute older sister of one of his players, Mickey will have to stop being so serious about the sport and learn how to have fun! If he can figure out that little life hack, he may finally realize that the real wins in life come on the inside, not the outside.

What can I say?

This was a really smart idea to write a script about.

Same old formula. But instead of a boys team, you make it a girls team. I don’t know if it’s possible to tailor something to 2020s Hollywood better than that! Dawes probably reserved his spot on the Black List months beforehand by alerting Franklin Leonard to what he was writing. “Boys bad, girls good!!??” Franklin responded. “You’re in!!”

That had to be how it happened, because if you actually read this script, you saw that nothing else changed. Minus the gender-swap, it’s the exact same Bad News Bears formula.

I don’t know how I feel about that. As someone who critiques screenwriting, I want more. I want originality. I want the writer to push themselves. As someone who closely monitors the business, however, I respect the hustle. The writer knows he doesn’t have to do anything extra here. He gave us the “different” in “the same but different” equation. Why stress yourself beyond that?

As for the writing overall, it was decent but not exceptional.

A reminder to Ethan and all screenwriters out there to be aware of the reader experience. Writers are often so in their heads, they’re not gauging how their writing is being received. If you’re too cavalier about this, you can leave confusing moments on the page. Or moments that cause the reader hiccups. Here’s an example. In this scene, Mickey gets fired from his minor league team…

Mickey says, “Im done?” So we know he’s being let go. The next line is, “A coach seat?” The first thing that I thought of, in that moment, was, “Oh, they’re asking him to retire as a player and become a coach.” Because what else would “coach” mean in this context? But then I realize, “Oh… he’s talking about a coach seat on the plane.”

I get it. You want to get the “coach seat” line in there to emphasize how little they value him. But if it’s going to confuse the reader or cause a hiccup, is it worth it? I say it isn’t.

Now it’s true that the parenthetical in there tells us to focus on the ticket, which helps stave off potential confusion. But here’s something that writers may not know: Readers are not reading your script like it’s some classic novel where they’re savoring every syllable like a fine wine. Their eyes are moving down the page fast.

Most readers don’t even read parentheticals. Not because they’re lazy. But because they’ve read so many scripts in the past where writers use parentheticals superfluously. They don’t tell us anything we don’t already know. So we skip them.

Just watch out for that stuff.

To show you that I’m not picking sides here, soon after that scene, Mickey flies back to Los Angeles. The writer uses 3 lines – just 3 lines – to create one of the clearest characters I’ve read all month. Here’s that moment in the script.

By far, the best way to create a strong and clear character is through a strong and clear introduction. Tell me you don’t know exactly who Mickey’s mother is after this scene. Any mom who will show up at the airport for her son, after he’s been let go, and bring a sign with her that highlights how great she thinks he is? That’s the most supportive mom ever. So we immediately know she’s a great mom and that these two have a great relationship. IN JUST 3 LINES!!!

That’s awesome writing!

But let’s be real. This concept, while marketable, is so susceptible to cliche that even when you swap in an entirely different gender, it still feels dated and predictable. Maybe if Mickey had been a more interesting character, it might’ve worked. But he’s pretty generic.

Ted Lasso has really raised the bar for sports comedy. And Here Come The Bandits couldn’t reach that bar if all its players stood on top of each other.

This script didn’t have anything beyond the smart marketing strategy.

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

What I learned: Weird ideas (like 15 year olds living on fictional floating gambling islands) should be treated experimentally, not as legitimate attempts to make it in the business. Don’t spend too much time on these scripts. Accept that they will probably only be used as writing samples. If you have that attitude, you’ll be fine. But don’t spend an entire year writing a period piece about Steve McQueen trying to steal money from a secret presidential fund that only exists in your mind. It’s not an efficient way to spend your time as a screenwriter and is only going to lead to frustration. Spend the bulk of your time writing movies THAT HOLLYWOOD ACTUALLY MAKES.  Today’s script is an example of one of those movies.

Logline Rewrite: The logline I included at the top of the review comes from the Black List and was likely written by a first-time manager. Here’s what the logline should’ve been — After a devastating injury, a tough traditional-minded baseball player returns home to coach his former little league team, only to find out that it’s become an all-girls squad.

Get a logline consultation for $25. It includes a 1-10 rating, a 150-200 word analysis, and a logline rewrite. Improve your logline from that awful version at the beginning of this review, to the one I just wrote above. E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com (5-pack of logline consults for $75!)

Oh Mickey you’re so fine, you’re so fine you blow my mind, hey Mickey 7!!

Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: Set in the future on a mining colony, an “expendable” named Mickey 7 – someone built to die over and over again on dangerous missions, their mind re-uploaded to their cloned successor – is erroneously assumed dead, and comes home to find out they’ve already created his replacement, Mickey 8.
About: I always pay attention to what an actor, at his hottest point, chooses for his next project. Because when you’re at your hottest point, you’re being offered the best roles in Hollywood. So whatever you choose in that moment tells us writers something about what actors are looking for. At Robert Pattinson’s peak of stardom – as he played the Batman, which was in theaters at the time – he announced that this would be his next project.  Parasite’s Bong Joon Ho is directing.
Writer: Edward Ashton
Details: 280 pages

One of the paradoxes present in my life is that I love sci-fi yet dislike so many sci-fi movies I’ve seen lately.

Moonfall, Tenet, The Tomorrow War, Dune, Reminiscence, The Adam Project, Interstellar, Infinite, Life, Blade Runner 2049.

Where the good stuff at?

What I like in a sci-fi script is rich mythology and a good story that moves along at a brisk pace. A good example would be The Martian.

Some of you are probably angry that I’m including “Dune” in movies I don’t like. Dune is the perfect example, for me, of a movie that only gets it half right. It has a rich mythology. But it slogs along at a glacial pace. Then you have something like The Adam Project. That movie moves along at a brisk pace but has some of the weakest mythology this side of Battlefield Earth.

I need both.

Let’s see how today’s novel fares. And whether it will make a stellar movie or not.

Mickey 7 is an “expendable.” He lives in a colony on a planet far away, with about 200 people on it. Mickey has a unique job. He goes out on dangerous missions – usually to suss out whether giant worm-like “creepers” are threatening the base – to die. His deaths give the colony data they can use to stay safer.

As soon as he dies, his backup consciousness is uploaded into a new cloned version of him. So Mickey never truly dies. When we meet Mickey, he’s dropped into a new area and falls through the ice into an underground cavern where a giant worm-like “creeper” sizes him up. Mickey calls base, says he’s about to die, and then waits for the end to come.

But when the worm doesn’t eat him, he finds his way back to the surface and back to base. Except, now, Mickey 8 is in his room. Mickey 7 and Mickey 8 quickly discover that they don’t want to kill each other. So they’re going to try to live together. Which is going to be hard because the base recently instituted a 2000 calorie limit for everyone due to a slow-down in food production. That means each Mickey only gets 1000 calories a day.

In addition to this, our Mickey twins are going to have to fool Mickey’s girlfriend, flight commander Nasha, and Mickey’s best friend, pilot Berto. If they can do that, maybe they can make this “two Mickeys are better than one Mickey” plan work. But when the super angry base commander gets word that something is up, the Mickeys will need to accelerate a plan for figuring out the true purpose of Mickey.

Back in the day, there was this trick literary agents used to use in order to sell scripts. They would send a script off to several buyers at once, let each buyer know that other buyers were reading, which would result in studios quickly reading through the first act to see if they had a movie here, then bidding before they reached the second act, just to beat the competition to the punch.

This is what allowed so many bad scripts to get purchased. When you write a high concept script, the first act is the easiest part. You just introduce your cool concept and you don’t have to prove that it can result in a good movie because the studio doesn’t even get to the second act.

This trend of novels becoming the new spec scripts has a similar con in play. Nobody has time to read anything. Nor does anybody in Hollywood like to read. Agents know this. So they send these books out knowing that nobody is going to read more than 30 pages because doing so would take up 8 hours of their day.

So buyers read the first 30 pages, and if they like the setup, they buy the property. Which has to be how this book got through the system. Because if anybody read the last 200 pages of this, they would not have purchased it. It’s not that it’s bad. But it fails at its primary goal – which is to exploit its concept.

This movie is built around the idea that a guy comes back to find that they’ve already created a new copy of him. Two living copies is illegal. They’re not allowed to exist. That’s our setup. So how does our author explore this dilemma?

One of the copies ends up taking a lot of naps.

No. I’m serious.

This is how the author explores the idea. By ignoring it. He keeps Mickey 8 back in the room so that Mickey 7 can go walk around the base.

The only way this premise works is if we’re scared for Mickey 7. That being discovered would mean instant termination. Yet we’re never once scared for Mickey 7. There are veiled insinuations that bad things might happen if they’re caught. But they’re all so vague, we’re not even kind of worried for Mickey.

What’s frustrating about Mickey 7 is that there are some intriguing ideas being explored in the book. This ongoing question of, is Mickey 8 still Mickey 7, and is Mickey 7 still Mickey 6, going all the way back to Mickey 1? That’s a cool question to think about.

It’s the same concept Christopher Nolan explored in The Prestige, I believe. If you’re immediately uploaded to a new body when you die, did the last version of you die or did you really get transferred?

I liked how this script played with that idea when Mickey 7 discovers Mickey 8. Before this, Mickey 7 was okay with dying because he’d still be alive once his new clone was created. But his new clone – Mickey 8 – has already been birthed. So this person in front of him was already developing his own life and, therefore, wouldn’t be Mickey 7, if Mickey 7 were to voluntarily die.

The book also explores some really interesting backstory stuff about other colonies that went haywire. For example, there was another colony where everybody died except for the expendable and, to make up for it, the expendable kept recreating himself until there were 200 expendables in the colony and no real people. There were several backstories like that that got your noggin thinking.

However, these previous stories were bittersweet to read as they were all a lot more interesting than what was happening in our story, which amounted to, “I’m going to nap for a while, then I want to come out and get some food.”

This was a writing lesson I learned way too late in life. If your characters are talking about things that happened to them (or situations that mirror their lives), and those things are more interesting than the story you’re actually telling? You should probably consider ditching your current draft and writing one of *those* stories. I would’ve loved to have read the version of this where the expendable keeps replicating himself until he takes over the entire base.

If I were this writer, I would’ve sat down and asked myself, how can I exploit this idea as much as possible? For example, there was a brief moment, towards the middle of the book, where I thought Ashton had done something brilliant. I thought that he was actually slipping in and out of Mickey 7 and Mickey 8’s POV and telling the story through their points-of-view without telling us that he’d switched. And we were going to be tasked with trying to figure who was who. Cause they both think they’re Mickey, right? So it would stand to make sense that when telling this story, they both sound the same. And it’s up to us to decipher what’s going on.

Instead, we get this very straight-forward execution that amounts to Nap-Gate and a Tremors ripoff.

Why, then, did Robert Pattinson sign on to this project? That answer is in the What I Learned section below!

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

What I learned: With this novel being only okay, it leaves me to conclude that there was only one reason why Pattison signed onto it. He signed on for the same reason so many actors before him have taken these types of roles – because he gets to play two different people. It seems almost too easy of a strategy as a screenwriter. But if you want to grab that big-name actor, write a dual role screenplay. It’s one of the most effective strategies in the book.

Why do Ryan Coogler and James Cameron get to write mega-scripts while you’re obnoxiously constrained by the script-length Gods?

We are about to be hit with two of the longest studio releases of the decade. We’ve got Black Panther 2, clocking in at over 2 hours and 45 minutes. And we’ve got Avatar 2, which is somewhere north of 3 hours.

This got me thinking about the age old question of script length. When I first got into screenwriting, I was told (and promptly ignored) that your script should never extend beyond 120 pages. As time went on, that number dropped to 110 pages.

Despite this unofficial or official (depending on who you talk to) page rubicon, the newbie screenwriter receives mixed messages every time they go to the theater. They’re told their scripts have to be 110 pages as they watch Avengers Endgame arrogantly clock in at 150 pages. How does a young and confused newbie screenwriter reconcile this?

Over time, I’ve learned that the script length question is a nuanced one. There are certain genres that have low page counts and other genres that have high page counts. There are also additional variables that affect page length, all of which make up a complicated picture, one that seems to change depending on which angle you view it from.

But the basic equation works like this…

Character Count + Location Count + Plot Complexity = Page Count

Less characters = less characters to develop = less pages

Less locations = less situations to set up = less pages

Simple plots = less explaining = less pages

The horror movie I reviewed at the beginning of the month, Deadstream, about a single character live-streaming inside a haunted house… that movie was 90 minutes long. And, for those who don’t know, one page of screenplay equals one minute of screen time (this is why screenplays are written in that weird spaced out manner – to match out page time to screen time).  So 90 pages is usually where you’re going to be when writing a 1-3 character movie in 1-3 locations.

If you prefer to write non-contained thrillers, you’re going to need more page space. The word “thrill” implies a fast pace which means you’re still keeping the page count low. But these movies have a few more locations and characters, which should put them closer to 100 pages.

“Taken” is a good example of this. Tiny character count (only two main characters – the father and the daughter). Our hero is constantly on the move. Final page count for the script: 101 pages.

If you move over to comedies, these tend to work best in the 105-110 page range. Like thrillers, they need to move fast. And since most comedy plots are bare bones, you don’t need to spend a lot of time plotting. Even the slightly complicated storyline of The Hangover didn’t affect the page count that much, as the screenplay came in at 111 pages.

When you move up to action or action thrillers (Bond, Fast and Furious, Mission Impossible), now you’re tempting the page count Gods, moving closer to that most evil of script overseers: PAGE 120. This is because you’re visiting more locations, which requires more setup, as well as more explanation. And managing any plot big enough that we’re jumping to entirely different cities requires more time on the page. So these scripts will hover around that 120 page zone.

When you add sci-fi or fantasy into that mix, you really start struggling to keep the page count under 120. That’s because in addition to everything else you’re doing, you’re also adding mythology to the recipe. You need scenes that show how your world works (The Matrix spent 25 pages setting up the rules of its world). You also need more description than your average script because you have to explain all this stuff you’ve invented in your imagination. This can really bulk scripts up.

In general, however, the two things that have the biggest influence on your page count are your character count and your plot complexity.

It takes time to adequately set up a character. You need to show who they are in their everyday life. You need to show us what their job entails. You need to establish their relationships with other people. You need to introduce their flaw. That takes time.

If you then have two major characters – or three, or four – you can see how that could start chewing up page space. Cause you have to do the exact same thing for all those characters. This is why movies like Black Panther 2 and Avatar 2 are so long. They’re not only covering Black Panther and Jake. They’re covering the lives of the many many people around them. Like that Ironheart girl (the Iron Man offshoot). She’s going to need 10 pages of setup easy. That’s a lot of pages!

Also, to be clear, when I talk about character count, I’m talking about legit characters who have major roles. I’m not talking about the waitress or some loser who comes in for one scene to provide exposition. I’m talking about characters who have at least five scenes in your movie. The more of those characters you have in your script, the more pages you better prepare for.

The other thing that adds a lot of pages is plot. But it’s not just the plotting itself that brings your page count up. The more complex the plot, the more extensive the exposition. It requires more scenes with characters explaining things to other characters: what’s going on, what they’re after, where it is, how they’re going to get it. And that information is constantly changing, which requires another set of extensive exposition scenes.  Watch an Avengers movie and track how often characters talk about what they need to do and how they’re gong to do it.  It’s a lot!

Complexity of plot = more exposition, and more exposition is a page-eater. Your Fast and Furious crew discussing how they’re going to break into the White House could take up 5 pages easily.

Bringing this back to Black Panther 2 and Avatar 2: Both these movies have extremely extensive plots and tons of characters. I’m amazed that they’re able to keep the scripts under 300 pages with how much territory they cover.

The question then is, why aren’t we allowed to do that in our scripts? This question requires a multi-faceted answer that I don’t have the time to get into. But the bullet points are, you’re writing a script to win a reader over. Ryan Coogler is making a movie to win over an audience. Two completely different scenarios. Look no further than the exit point options for each. Once Ryan Coogler has you at his movie, you’re stuck there. A reader, however, can stop reading your script the second they get bored. And if they’re wavering on page ten and see that they still have 120 pages to go, believe me, they’re going to give up on your script.

But the more nuanced answer is that you *are* allowed to write long scripts. You just need to know all the dramatic tricks in the book to suspend time. One of the reasons Titanic could be 3 hours and 14 minutes is because James Cameron is a master at suspending time. His entire story is built around dramatic irony (we know the iceberg is coming and the characters do not) which creates a strong line of both anticipation and suspense, each of which help us forget time. And that’s just one of the many tricks he uses.

If you know how to do that, then, theoretically, you can write a 300 page screenplay. I’m being serious. If you know how to make time go away in the reader’s head, they won’t check the page length. Cause they won’t want your story to end.

Unfortunately, this is a really hard thing to do. The best authors on the planet struggle to do it every time they sit down and write a book. So it’s going to be extra hard for anyone without a lot of writing experience.

And that’s where the real problems with page count lie. The people who usually write the longest screenplays are the newbies who know the least about screenwriting. They are in that wonderfully ignorant stage where they believe everything they write is gold. But it isn’t gold. It’s trash. Which means that readers are conditioned to think that any long script from another amateur will also be trash. Which is unfair, I guess. But, guess what? Life is unfair.

To summarize, your script’s length will be determined by the genre, concept, and content. More characters equals more pages. More intricate plots equals more pages. So watch out for both. The more you have to explain and describe (think sci-fi and fantasy), the more pages you’re gong to add. Use this information to make informed decisions about which scripts to write.

I’m not saying don’t write a long script. Some stories require more time. But you do want to be realistic and understand that the industry isn’t accepting of longer screenplays from unproven talent. So, if you’re going to write one, make sure you have a plan for distilling and eliminating time to such an extent that the reader never thinks about the page length while reading. They’re too busy enjoying your story.

Good luck!

P.S. – Newsletter coming to your Inboxes tomorrow night with an AWESOME(!!!) script that seems to have been forgotten by time.  Oh, and don’t forget to e-mail me if you want a script or logline consultation.  $100 off if you mention this article!!! (carsonreeves1@gmail.com)

Genre: Action-Comedy (Family?)
Premise: Two former thieves are having a hard enough time with their fussy newborn baby when a mishap draws them back into their old lives, forcing them to recover a priceless jade bangle, escape their boss’s murderous son and, toughest of all, get their baby to sleep through the night.
About: This script finished with 7 votes on last year’s Black List. The writers, Ted Kaplan and Jenni Hendriks, have written a couple of small novels. This is their first success story in the screenwriting world.
Writers: Ted Kaplan and Jenni Hendriks
Details: 109 pages

Real-life married couple Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively for the leads?

Comedy and Action.

If you can master the combination of these two genres, a huge world opens up to you. Cause this is where all the money is made. This is the powerball winning ticket. Not that thieving nickel slot machine.

Look at all the movies that make the most money. Marvel. Star Wars. Fast and Furious. Even Bond. What do they contain? They contain copious amounts of action, and humor!

In other words, these are great writing sample specs to get into the Marvel, the Lucasfilm, and Universal offices so you can pitch your takes on writing one of those movies.

My concern with today’s spec, however, is that it might be too family-oriented, and therefore get pigeonholed in the “lightweight” category. The lightweight action-comedy writers DO NOT get pulled in by Marvel and Lucasfilm. So let’s see which side of the thin cool line Sleep Factor finds itself on.

Mia and Ryan are the ultimate thieving couple. Because they’re in a relationship, they can read each other minds, as Mia utilizes her tech skills to fly drones around the museums they’re casing, pulling security guards along with them, while Ryan slips in and steals whatever they need to steal.

But those days are about to come to an end because Mia is pregnant. Congratulations, Mia.  Cut to a year and a half later and these two are lame-o suburbanites who work at both Home Depot and some boring office job.

The two are not dealt a nice baby hand, as their daughter, Penny, can’t strop crying. The sleepless nights are taking years off the couples’ life. The only solution they’ve found to get their daughter to sleep is to drive her around in their car.

One day, when Ryan is coming home from the grocery store, he sees a car robbery taking place and immediately recognizes his wife as the leader of the team. Ryan chases her down then yells at her. She apologizes and says she’s lost her lust for life. That’s the only reason she started doing these late night robberies. And, after some discussion, Ryan admits he does the same thing.

While this conversation is happening, Mia’s very “hip” crew (“JIN-WOO, Korean-American, intense, probably wearing a social justice tee, LOLA, Black, the brains of the operation, and BEX, non-binary, all attitude”) steals the rare extremely valuable bangle bracelet that Ryan stole from his last job, and drive off.

That bracelet belongs to Ryan and Mia’s longtime handler, Joe, who tells them he’s going to kill them if they don’t bring it to him by morning. So off Ryan and Mia go, their baby in tow, to retrieve the bangle. But when the young hip crew make a side-deal with Joe’s biggest rival – the Estonians! – the stakes go up considerably. Do Ryan and Mia still have what it takes? And can they perform this mission with a baby in tow?? We’re going to find out!

Since this script has a lot of car-chasing in it, let’s talk about lanes.

You, the screenwriter, need to know what lane your script is in. You then need to play by the rules of that lane. So, if you’re in the slasher lane, you probably aren’t going to have any car chases. If you’re in the buddy-cop comedy lane, you’re probably not going to have any steamy sex scenes.

Your lane determines the rules you abide by.

I’m not sure Sleep Solution knows what lane it’s in. At first I thought this was a family action movie in the vein of Adventures in Babysitting. But there’s quite a lot of swearing here. And you can’t swear so much in a family movie. So that told me they’re trying to pull in the regular action demographic.

Except which action fans are going to to pay to see a movie about a couple stealing things while trying to keep their baby asleep? It’s not cool enough. I’m sorry but you can dress it up any which way you want. Parents aren’t cool. nd babies aren’t cool.

That leaves the script with a very narrow audience, as far as I can tell. You’re basically aiming for the “young parents” demo. And I don’t know if those people have time to watch any movies, much less this one.

In addition to this, the movie missed out on its best idea. They establish early on that the baby can’t sleep unless it’s in a car driving at least 45 miles per hour. I loved the motivation for this. The baby was in Mia’s tummy during all her wild car chase burglaries. So it makes sense that it feels the need for speed. But that storyline is abandoned early on. There are plenty of times when our couple stops and discusses things. At one point they even pawn the baby off on a babysitter.

Isn’t the best version of this movie a modern-day family-friendly take on Speed? They can’t let the car stop or else the baby wakes up? Admittedly, that would be a very challenging script to write. But I say go with the best hook you’ve got. There’s no true hook here if the baby can be given over to other characters at certain points in the story.

The script also suffers from a vanilla execution.

I’ve struggled with whether the family-friendly comedy can have anything other than vanilla execution. You can’t get too wild in the PG space. But then I always think of Pixar movies. Those films manage to bring in parents, kids, as well as the 18-35 demo. They achieve this because their films are highly imaginative and put a premium on character development.

There’s very little imagination in Sleep Solution.

In fact, there was only one scene that I felt was worthy of a good spec screenplay. Mia and Ryan capture one of the woke crew members and demand to know where the other crew members are exchanging the stolen bangle bracelet..

The scene happens in the back of their car and Bex, the crew member, won’t budge. He’s not giving up the information. So Mia proceeds to change Penny’s diaper in front of him as a torture device. To a 21 year old kid, this is pure hell. He fights it and fights it as Penny goes into extreme detail about the diaper-changing process until it just gets too disgusting and Bex cracks.

I absolutely love when writers do this. They write a scene THAT COULD ONLY OCCUR IN THEIR MOVIE. You have to remember, people, that readers read the same average to slightly-above-average scenes all the time. We’ve become immune to them. One of the most effective tools you have against this is mining the unique nature of your concept.

If Mia and Ryan had threatened Bex with a gun or a knife, we could’ve seen that in any movie. This was the far better, and funnier, option.  But that was it.  We never get another scene like it again.

Due to the vanilla execution and lack of imagination in Sleep Solution, I can’t recommend it. It has that professional sheen to it that differentiates it from the average amateur script. But in order to get your script beyond the bottom layer of “professional,” you have to push yourself in the execution stage.

A writer once told me about the way his mentor would critique his screenplays.  Whenever he encountered a scene, moment, or set piece that felt average or slight-above-average, he would write down: NGE.  That stood for “Not Good Enough.”  In other words: YOU NEED TO TRY HARDER.

Script Link: Sleep Solution

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

What I learned: Again, write scenes that can only happen in your movie because they evolve from your specific premise. A classic famous example of this is the birth scene in A Quiet Place. That scene could only be that effective in that specific environment. Sadly, whenever I see writers succeed at this, they only do it once or twice a script, like here. Push yourself more. Try to come up with five of these scenes — six, seven, ten. The more you’re mining your specific premise, the more original your script is going to be!