Every Monday in October I’ll be reviewing a classic horror film!

Genre: Horror
Premise: After recovering from his friend being killed by a wolf, an American traveling in England heads back to his nurse’s London home, where he begins to suspect that he’s a werewolf.
About: The famous wolf transformation scene in this movie was so impactful that it forced the Academy to come up with a makeup Oscar. Director John Landis came up with the idea for the movie at 18. But no one wanted to make the script for a full 10 years.
Writer: John Landis
Details: 97 minutes

Do you feel that?

It’s the hair standing up on the back of your neck.

That’s because it’s October, the month of ghosts, ghouls, monsters, and zombies. “Smile’s” 22 million dollar box office proved just how much people love to be scared in October.

With horror opening weekends, I’ve learned, it’s not about how good the movie is. It’s about how good the marketing is. That means what does the poster look like? And what does the trailer look like? Smile has that in spades. And it’s something all of you horror writers should be thinking about BEFORE you write your horror scripts. Not after. This movie was marketed very simply on a sinister looking smile and boy did it work. Cause nobody expected this film to take in 22 million dollars.

The lesson Universal learned was a little more complex with “Bros” bombing. I think a lot of people are going to point to moviegoers not being ready to accept a mainstream LGBTQ movie. But I think if you put a real movie star in that role over Billy Eichner, the movie at least has a chance. Eichner is annoying. He built his comedy brand on negativity. He’s not a leading man and is, arguably, unlikable. He just wasn’t going to be the guy to break a gay romcom into the mainstream.

Not sure how we segue out of that into London circa 1981 so I’m not even going to try. I’ll just say that like a lot of you, I saw this movie as a kid, and that werewolf transformation scene blew me away. It was a part of my nightmares for years to come.

But the funny thing about that scene is that it was so good it overshadowed my memory of the rest of the film. I don’t remember anything about this movie other than that scene. So I was really looking forward to watching it again as it was basically like watching a brand new movie.

The film follows two Americans, David and Jack, just out of college, who are traveling around England. After visiting a weird Yorkshire pub, they’re attacked by a wolf and Jack is brutally killed. The Yorkshiremen from the bar shoot and kill the wolf before it can also kill David.

David then wakes up in a London hospital two weeks later where he learns that his best friend is dead. As David recovers, Nurse Alex gets a crush on him. And his doctor, Dr. Hirsch, believes David is suffering from a delusion that they were attacked by a wolf, as the Yorkshiremen claimed the two were attacked by a madman.

While at the hospital, David starts getting visits from his dead friend, Jack, who informs him that David’s a werewolf now and must kill himself because, if he doesn’t, he’s going to turn into a wolf at the next full moon and start killing people. David dismisses these visions as trauma. But in the back of his mind, he wonders if his dead friend is right.

Eventually David is released and he goes to stay with Nurse Alex. Meanwhile, Doctor Hirsch heads to that Yorkshire pub and believes that David might start to hurt people due to believing that he’s a werewolf. It’s too late, though. The full moon comes and – kazow – he finally turns into a werewolf. From that point forward, his killing spree begins.

First off, great movie.

I was starting to worry that I wasn’t capable of truly enjoying movies anymore because I’ve seen so many. But this proves that it’s not me. It’s the movies. The people making the movies have to do better. Cause this film was basically brand new to me and I thought it was great.

I noticed a lot of good choices here.

For starters, David and Jack were a lot goofier than I remember them being. And when Jack gets killed, I learned a valuable lesson. Which is that, these days, characters are goofy just to be goofy. But here, the goofiness and the jokiness serves a purpose. Which is that Jack’s shocking death hits you harder because of the fact that these two were such good friends. And that friendship was built in just 10 minutes by having these two be very comfortable and jokey around each other. In other words, the choice to make them jokey, was 100% story motivated.

Same thing for Jack’s transformation into a wolf. Of course I remember the actual transformation as a kid. But what I didn’t remember was how much pain Jack was in while it was happening. That’s what stayed with me this time. He was in immense pain as it was happening. And they really draw the transformation out so the pain we feel is extended. Again, it’s a STORY and CHARACTER related reason why the scene hits us so hard. Not just amazing special effects.

I also thought they did a great job with the exposition. I’m working on the exposition section of my dialogue book at the moment so this hit me especially hard. But every single exposition scene takes place when dead Jack comes back to explain to David how the werewolf thing works. The thing is, we’re so focused on the amazing special effects of Dead David (he becomes more disgusting with each visit) that we have no clue that massive exposition is being thrown at us.

And kudos to Landis because he created the biggest distraction of all for the biggest exposition scene of all – that being the porn movie where David and Jack talk in the back of the theater and Jack introduces David to all of his dead victims from last night. I can’t remember anything as creative as that to hide exposition.

Granted, this is more of a writer-director trick since it wouldn’t have worked as well on the page (we can’t see special effects on the page). But it was still genius.

The only thing that perplexed me was the structure. David stays in the hospital all the way until page 35. He doesn’t turn into the wolf until 60 pages in! They just wouldn’t do that today.

And I was really thrown by it because I didn’t think it was necessary. Every movie can benefit from urgency. Urgency keeps the plot zipping along. So why did Landis turn his back on urgency??

Finally, I realized what was going on. They didn’t have any choice but to wait an entire month. Obviously, on the day David and Jack were attacked, it had to be a full moon. So we were going to have to wait another month until the next full moon turned David into a werewolf.

That’s why the movie doesn’t seem interested in pushing anything forward. David has these bizarre extended, ultimately silly, nightmares while he’s in the hospital. When he gets back to the nurse’s place, there’s an entire day where he has nothing to do so he just hangs out. Typically, you want to avoid this in screenwriting. Your hero should never be in a position where they have nothing to do.

Ironically, the movie works in spite of this. And I think it’s because they had such a large carrot dangling in front of the audience (the coming full moon) that we didn’t care that we had to wait. We were so locked in by the suspense, that time didn’t really exist (that’s what good suspense does, by the way – eliminate time).

It seems as if Landis wasn’t ignorant to David’s lack of purpose. When one has a protagonist without a goal, it’s important that someone else in the story does have a goal. At least that way, we can cut back to them occasionally, to give the story some forward momentum. That character came in the package of Dr. Hirsch. He’s the one who starts getting concerned about David. Therefore, he goes out to the Yorkshire pub to see if he can get more answers. He’s the one who grabs Nurse Alex to head back to the city in an attempt to find David before he can hurt people.

That’s a little tip for you if you ever find yourself with an unmotivated main character. Make sure at least one other key character in the story is motivated with a strong goal.

I just thought this was a really good film. It still holds up today. Yes, there are some goofy parts (I could do without the killer Nazi ghosts and ghouls nightmares). But the core of the story works. We care about the main character. We like all the supporting characters. We want to see what happens to our hero. That’s really the only rule that matters in writing: The audience needs to want to see what happens to your hero. If you have that, you have a movie. If you don’t, you have Bros.

Movie is free to watch on Amazon Prime!

Screenplay Link: An American Werewolf In London

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

What I learned: Intense suspense. If you can’t have the urgency, replace it with VERY STRONG SUSPENSE. It can’t be rinky-dinky suspense. It’s got to be intense suspense, like the impending full moon in An American Werewolf in London.

Is today’s script killing the Black List?

Genre: Biopic
Premise: The true story of the aftermath of the most infamous audition of all time – William Hung’s “She Bangs” cover on American Idol.
About: This script finished with 9 votes on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Tricia Lee
Details: 125 pages

Somebody made an interesting comment to me the other day.

They had this cool idea for a script and noted that they were trying to figure out what direction to take it in. They said they were thinking about writing it for the Black List, which meant making it a slow burn, character driven, and more “cerebral.”

Or, he noted, he could “write a script that will actually become a movie.”

This characterization of the Black List struck me. That the writer thought of it as a compilation of scripts that will never become movies.

Because it didn’t used to be that way. The Black List used to gleefully tout how many of its scripts would go on to become films. But is that the case anymore? A lot has been written about how the Black List cares more about social causes these days than what it used to be about, which was compiling a list of the best scripts in Hollywood.

So I decided to do a quick unscientific look at a current Black List compared to an older Black List. I went through the 2019 Black List and counted how many of the scripts went on to become movies. I didn’t use 2020 or 2021 because scripts need time to get produced. But 2019 is still within the time period where the Black List had refocused its mission, leaning into more socially conscious screenplays and writers.

Here’s what I found. In the 2019 Black List, 8 out of 66 scripts became movies. That’s equal to about 8%. In the 2010 Black List, 36 out of 76 scripts became movies. That’s equal to 47%.

Now I know a few of those scripts from the 2010 list took longer than 3 years to get made but it’s clear to me that the Black List used to be a place where, if you made the list, you’d have an almost 1 in 2 shot of getting your movie made. Now it looks like that’s closer to 1 in 8.

What this tells me is that the writers have figured the Black List code out. They know that they can write scripts that have no shot at becoming movies but because the Black List loves those types of scripts, they’ll make the list. And since more scripts are being written to make the Black List as opposed to writing scripts that could be movies, the Black List has become more and more dominated by screenplays that aren’t movies.

Today’s script might be the perfect example of this.

The story is simple. William Hung is 21 years old in 2002, attending Berkley as an engineering student, when, on a whim, he auditions for American Idol, which was still early on in its run and Simon Cowell was fast becoming one of the biggest stars in the world for how mean he could be to aspiring singers.

An American Idol producer recognizes that she’s struck gold as soon as she hears the earnestness behind William Hung’s audition despite being a terrible singer and puts him through to audition on tape in front of the official judges.

It doesn’t go well.

Months later, when the show airs, William Hung is walking around Berkley and everyone starts approaching him, congratulating him on his audition. What quickly becomes apparent is that William is being made fun of, and the only one who doesn’t seem to realize this is William himself.

So when he’s offered a singing contract, he’s more than happy to sign it. His goal is to use this fame to make enough money to buy a house for his parents. Along the way, he’ll deal with fake friends, girls who use him, lots of ridicule, and even a woman who marries him and later takes half the money he earned from all his singing in the divorce. But through it all, William Hung always remains positive.

Let me start off by saying this script isn’t bad. It’s actually pretty heartwarming. The writer explores themes of celebrity and the pressures of being an Asian in America. And there’s something very sweet about William Hung as a character. His priority is spreading a positive message within a worldwide tsunami of negativity. It’s not reaching to say that we need more people like William Hung on this planet. Especially today.

But come on.

This movie is never getting made.

And while I don’t claim to know what’s going on inside the writer’s head, I’d be surprised if she said she wrote this script in the hopes of it becoming a movie. It’s a music biopic, the catnip of all Black List catnips. Just by writing that word – biopic – next to the genre category, the script’s chances of making the list went up 5000%.

You’re probably wondering what that means. “A movie?”

What’s the difference between a script that’s a movie and a script that is only ever going to be a script?

The answer is in the word itself: “Movie.”

“Move.”

A movie script tends to have MOVEMENT. Characters need to go places. They need to do things. And they need to do them NOW. Because if they don’t, something terrible is going to happen.

Several years ago I did a script consultation for a writer. The broad strokes of his story were that a guy comes back to his hometown for a weekend and spends some time with a girl he kinda likes.

This writer’s plan was to sell the script. And I kept telling him, in as many ways as possible, that this wasn’t a movie. Two people hanging out isn’t a movie. There was no hook here to build a marketing campaign around. It was just two people chilling. And nothing even happened between them.

I told him, literally, the only way this becomes a movie is if you’re the director and you find the money and make it yourself. Nobody’s going to buy this because it’s not something anybody can make money off of.

There’s no MOVEMENT. There’s no hook. There’s nothing important going on. Nothing with genuine stakes attached.

Maybe today’s script isn’t the best example because, at least with music biopics, you have famous music. And people will show up to a movie to see all their favorite songs performed from that group. But this isn’t even a real artist. Nobody’s pining to hear William Hung sing a Richard Marx song.

Another growing problem I’m noticing in the industry is that we’re in this weird state of having so much content that it’s easier than ever to convince yourself that your obscure script idea can get made. And to a minor extent, that’s true. There are more openings for content than ever.

But the principles for what sells are still in place. You got to have a concept with a hook, something that entices a mass audience. You gotta have that MOVEMENT I’m talking about – characters with goals that have stakes, and urgency. And freaking CONFLICT. That was another problem with the consultation script. There wasn’t enough conflict between the main character and the girl.

Even TV shows are becoming like this. They’re moving away from strictly character-driven stories to mini-movies. So they need that concept, goal, stakes, urgency, conflict as well.

Look.

There’s an opportunity out there for someone who wants to start chronicling the best scripts in Hollywood again. Cause The Black List clearly isn’t doing that anymore. And even though I thought this script was fine and it was a fast read, it shouldn’t be celebrated as one of the top scripts in town.

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

What I learned: A few weeks ago, I pointed out the opening bully scene in Lord of the Rings as an example of a great way to create sympathy for your main character. Readers immediately like a character who’s being bullied. However, the reason the scene worked was that it found an inventive way to approach the bullying. This little girl lovingly creates a little origami boat and then floats it down the river. And some jerk boys start throwing rocks at it to try and sink it. It wasn’t the on-the-nose bully scene that I usually read in scripts. “Idol,” however, does contain the bully scene you DON’T want to write. William Hung is 10 years old. He’s singing badly. And then we get this line: “Suddenly, a FIST comes rushing toward William’s FACE and makes HARD CONTACT with his right eye. The fist belongs to ANGRY WHITE KID (10).” The “angry white kid” then starts yelling at him that he can’t sing. It’s the epitome of a stereotypical bullying scene, which is why it doesn’t work. Bullying scenes are one of the best ways to create sympathy for your hero. But just like everything else in screenwriting, you have to be creative with it. You can’t give us the on-the-nose, “anybody could think of this” bullying scene.

”Andor” asks, can a Star Wars experience without humor or padawans who hate sand entertain a rabid fanbase desperate for a good Star Wars show?

Genre: Sci-Fi Fantasy (TV show)
Premise: After a thief kills two employees from a large corporation while looking for his missing sister, he becomes hunted by the company on the backwater planet where he lives.
About: It’s finally here! Andor, the series. I’ve talked about it endlessly on the site. Tony Gilroy, who reportedly saved Rogue One from original director, Gareth Edwards, was gifted this show as his reward by Lucasfilm head, Kathleen Kennedy. Despite Gilroy insulting poor Star Wars every chance he gets and making the world’s most confusing statement about how the timeline in “Andor” is going to work, the show finally debuted today.
Writer: Tony Gilroy
Details: This review is for the first 3 episodes, which are each about 30 minutes.

Let us start by stating the obvious.

Before this series was announced, nobody was asking for a Cassian Andor show.

Which makes you wonder why they wanted to make it so badly. Lucasfilm has become infamous for terminating in-development Star Wars projects. So why were they so determined to get this one to the finish line?

Who knows? Most of you will probably say, “Who cares? As long as the show is good.”

To this, we can agree. I may not have asked for Andor but you can bet Chukhuh-Trok’s hunting spear that I’d love to be proven wrong. Probably more than anyone on this planet, I want to love a Star Wars show. And, from what we’ve been told, this show was made more for my demographic than any Star Wars project yet.

Are we ready for this?

Okay, let’s dig into Andor!

We meet Cassian Andor on some planet run by what Amazon might look like in a thousand years. Andor heads to a brothel where he appears to be looking for his sister, who may have worked here at one point. He doesn’t get any information on her so he leaves, and is immediately confronted by a couple of drunk-with-power Amazon employees. He quickly kills them both.  Take that, Bezos!

Andor then heads back to his current planet of residence where he’s putting together some plan that is so secretive even the audience is not allowed to know it. In between scenes of him sneaking around and never allowing his voice to rise above 3 decibels, we cut back to when he was a kid on some planet living with a bunch of other kids and they discover a crashed ship.

Back at Amazon, a middle management type wants to sweep these employee murders under the rug. But a young ambitious dude in the company wants to kill the murderer in the hopes of propelling himself up the company ladder. So he recruits a dozen soldiers and heads off to Cassian’s planet to find him.

Cassian’s super-secret plan finally reveals itself when he meets with a mysterious rich guy named Luthen Rael. Cassian thinks he’s selling Luthen a star-thingamacalit, after which he’ll use the money to escape to some place far away. But it turns out Luthen has other plans for Cassian. Seeing how crafty this guy is, he wants to recruit him into his shadowy organization. Cassian has to make a decision fast – yes or no? He decides ‘yes,’ and that is the end of our third episode.

I was worried about two things going into this show.

1) That Cassian Andor isn’t a very interesting character.

And…

2) That this show would be way too serious.

I am sad to report that “Andor” confirmed both of these fears.  Much like Tion Medon’s infamous botched dental visit, it’s a big fat whiff on each front.

Cassian is boring. He’s active, which is good. But if we never understand what our character is being active for, it doesn’t really matter. Being ultra-mysterious about who your main character is is one of the riskier moves in screenwriting. Because you’re basically saying, “You must like my character even though you know nothing about him or what he’s doing.”

There are examples of this working but they’re few and far between.

On top of this, the show is more serious than Emperor Palpatine when he’s drawing up his latest galaxy takeover. I think there were two attempted jokes in 100 minutes. And they were highly neutered. This is something I tried to warn the Star Wars fan base about. If you go super dark with Star Wars, it’s no longer Star Wars. An essential component of Star Wars’s makeup is fun. And this show is about as fun as when Malakili watched Luke kill his pet Rancor.

The closest to fun we get is the droid, B2EMO, and while I’d anoint him as my favorite character in the series so far, he’s got five minutes of screen time.

So is there anything good about this show, Carson?

I’ll say this. The dialogue is way better than any of the other Star Wars shows. There’s a level of sophistication you’re not used to seeing in this franchise. For example, there’s a scene where Andor comes to a work friend and asks him to provide an alibi for why he wasn’t at work earlier.

The dialogue is not framed in a clunky on-the-nose manner where Andor says something like, “I need you to help me with an alibi. I flew off to another planet which is why I missed work and now I need you to tell Boss Doug that I was hanging out with you.”

Instead, the dialogue is framed as if it really happened. So Andor immediately jumps in with, “I was at your house yesterday. We drank all night. You got mad at me because I bought cheap liquor.” “I would’ve yelled at you for bringing cheap liquor. We were drinking [different booze] instead.” In other words, they set up the alibi by speaking as if it really happened rather than asking for help and then coming up with a story together.

With dialogue, you’re always looking for ways to make the exchange different somehow. You want to avoid straightforward, Character A: “This is what I have to say,” Character B: “And this is how I respond to that” dialogue if possible. You could tell Gilroy is a step above all these newbie screenwriters that Star Wars has been hiring to write their shows. At least in the dialogue department.

Ironically, that same knowledge hurts Gilroy in the storytelling department. What usually happens when you get older as a writer is you show more restraint. You don’t feel the need to constantly titilate the audience every scene. You trust yourself and therefore take your time setting up the bigger plot developments.

But what sometimes ends up happening is you cross the Rubicon and show so much restraint that huge chunks of scenes go by without any payoff. We’re watching you setup and setup and setup and setup and it’s like, “Dude! Give us something for all the hard work we’re doing!”

I get the impression that Gilroy is playing to the highest common denominator here – the 60 year old intelligent veteran moviegoer who’s seen it all and is, therefore, willing to make the trek down Patience Lane.  It’s a risky game to play in a franchise built off a never-ending supply of entertaining moments.

I would not have watched Episode 2 if they had only posted the first episode on Disney Plus today. I wouldn’t have even watched Episode 3 if they’d posted the first two episode on Disney Plus today. That’s how slow the story develops.

To Gilroy’s credit, all the things he was setting up in episodes 1 and 2 start to pay off in episode 3. This is the episode where the Amazon Corporation sends their soldiers to Andor’s planet to find and kill him. Gilroy did a really good job building up to this confrontation. What I enjoyed most about it was he made the whole thing just as scary for the Amazon soldiers as he did the locals. These soldiers are inexperienced. They’re 12 in a city filled with thousands of people. At any moment, if the people decide to revolt, they’re screwed.

That combined with the mystery of where Andor was going and who he was meeting created a tense atmosphere throughout the episode. It helped me see the potential of the series I was unconvinced it possessed in the first two episodes.

This has led me to a very confused place going forward with Andor, and with Star Wars in general. The Obi-Wan Kenobi show was a mess. Those rookie writers shouldn’t have been let anywhere near a franchise this big. The Boba Fett show was some of the worst writing I’ve seen on a show with that kind of budget. The Mandalorian is uneven but has some good episodes. It’s written well at times.

I would say that Andor is the most sophisticated written Star Wars show by far. I’m just not sure that’s showing the dividends it needs to after three episodes. Clearly, Gilroy knows how to write a scene. But is his overarching narrative as compelling as he thinks it is? I’m not sure. And is his main character as interesting as he thinks he is? Probably not.

I think this begs the question: Does Gilroy mesh with the Star Wars brand? Or is he pulling a Rian Johnson, where you hijack a franchise to tell the story you want to tell rather than the story that’s right for the franchise?

I’ll probably check back in with you guys at the season midpoint to give you better answers to those questions. In the meantime, tell me what you thought of Andor.

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

What I learned: Andor is yet another example of why all writers should seriously reconsider adding flashbacks to their story. We saw this in Boba Fett with the silly sand people flashbacks. We see it here with all this time spent on Cassian’s childhood that doesn’t tell us anything we couldn’t have already imagined ourselves. You have to ask the question, is what the flashbacks give you worth the momentum-stoppage they take from you? In this case, the answer is clearly no. The flashbacks dragged along. I’ll never say never. But, in my experience, flashbacks almost always take more from the story than they give.

Write dialogue like this guy!

The bulk of the Scriptshadow Dialogue book is written. The one chapter I’m still working on is this chapter I’m tentatively titling, the “verbal arena.” This is the chapter that’s going to teach you how to write like Tarantino, Woody Allen, Diablo Cody, Aaron Sorkin. I know some of you will scoff at this but that’s my goal.  Sure, I can’t make you as good as those writers. But I can give you the tools to get a lot closer to them than you are now.

So, I’ve been watching a lot of “verbal arena” movies – flicks where the dialogue is inventive and fun and memorable – trying to decode that unique dialogue Matrix within. The other night, I watched Barry Levinson’s, “Diner,” which I hadn’t seen in 20 years and didn’t remember well. But I’ve heard a lot of people talk that movie up as an example of great dialogue.

Man, I have to say, I was really disappointed. Outside a couple of minor exceptions (“Where’d you get this attitude?” “Borrowed it. I’ll have it back by midnight.”) it was mostly mundane middle-of-the-road conversation. I *was* shocked when I realized just how much Swingers borrowed from the film. But, other than that, it was an average movie with, maybe, slightly-better-than-average dialogue.

At that point I was going to go to sleep but then I remembered a script whose dialogue had always impressed me and decided to bust it open and read a few pages to see if I still felt the same way. The script is called “Daddio.” It was a high ranking Black List script from five years ago.

Let me tell you: I’ve been reading A LOT of dialogue over the past few weeks — from amateur scripts, to pro scripts, to pantheon level classic movie scripts — I’m not exaggerating when I say the dialogue in the first ten pages of this script blows almost all of those scripts away.

So much so that I’m going to spend the next few days ONLY diving into this script and trying to figure out what Christy Hall is doing that makes her dialogue so good.

Now, the scene that I’m about to show you is a little different in that it’s more a monologue than a dialogue. But it’s so good I think it’s worth highlighting. In the scene, our main character, Girlie, has just landed at JFK airport, and is going to meet a guy who, from the limited text messages we’ve seen between the two, doesn’t seem all that into her, which is something she’s trying not to think about too much.

The cabbie guy becomes a temporary distraction from this potential down-the-road problem. The script takes place entirely in the cab as we ride from JFK to this guy’s place. It’s one long conversation. What we’re seeing here is the beginning of the conversation.

The first thing you want to pay attention to here is the organic nature of the conversation. This isn’t a “normal” scenario. For example, this isn’t two people waiting at a valet stand for the valet to pull their car up. It’s a long cab ride. There’s a lot of down time involved. Conversations are different in down time. They’re not as immediate or necessary. People are more likely to ramble, which is why this scene works, whereas, if it were at the valet stand, a long philosophical rant about rideshare apps taking over the world would feel try-hard.

My point is, know the situation in order to know what kind of dialogue you can use. The rambling nature of this dialogue works because it’s organic to the situation.

The first segment of Clark’s dialogue is the most “normal.” It’s a guy talking about how his day sucked, he didn’t get a lot of good fares, and he’s unhappy about this payment switch to credit cards cause he makes less money on it. Most writers could write this segment. Although, I thought the “Monopoly money” choice was thoughtful. More creative than saying, “Cash.”  Look for these little opportunities to replace standard words with something more imaginative.

The second segment, however, is where Hall starts to take off. She’s in a triple-7 and everyone else is putt-putting around in a Mini Cooper. Quite frankly, it makes me jealous. Usually, when I read dialogue, I can break down what the writer is thinking and how they crafted the scene to make the dialogue work. But here, there’s so much going on, it’s impossible to keep up.

I like the exaggeration and specificity after the mention of the word “app.” It isn’t just, “These f#$%ing apps are making my life miserable.” It’s, “And now, these f@#%in’ apps, all of ‘em – can get a cab, a coffee, burger, soap, socks, wine, water, Chinese f@#%in’ take out – you can get all that s@#t, and not even reach for your purse, not once, not even for tip.”

Reeling off a number of items drives home the reach of this emerging “app world” Clark hates so much.

From there, the monologue accelerates even more. I’m noticing that in “verbal arena” writing, writers use a lot of metaphors. A metaphor takes an object or action and compares it to something familiar but unrelated. “Charles was a fish out of water.” “Love is a battlefield.” “Life is like a box of chocolates.”

Good writers don’t just use quick familiar metaphors. They take those metaphors and play with them. They extend them (which is why this device is known as an “extended metaphor”). That’s a big part of what’s going on in this scene. Our cabbie character is obsessed with this idea of “the cloud,” and how everything goes up into the cloud. But instead of solely treating the cloud as the technical thing that it is, in this case, it’s used as a metaphor for a real cloud. And what happens when real clouds get full? They start raining.

Hall also intermittently uses something called “personification.” This is when you take a non-human object and you give it human traits. “That big f@#%in’ cloud, thinkin’ it knows better. Swearin’ it can keep a secret.” Then later: “they’re gonna be like f@#%in’ pay phones. Just sittin’ there. Lookin’ dumb. Waitin’. Waitin’ for somebody, anybody to give ‘em a ring. Havin’ no idea… the world’s moved on.”

Another device Hall uses is something I call the “history lesson.” It’s when a character will bust out some historical story or fact that teaches the reader a little something and adds variety to the monologue.  We’re in the present and then – BAM – we’re in the far-off past.

“I mean… Salt used to be money. Mother fuckin’ salt. The same shit you sprinkle on your eggs. Yeah. Every mornin’ you toss that cheap-ass-shit all over your eggs with no idea that people used to die for it. Tea, coffee, same thing. All that shit you gloss over at the grocery store, at one point in time, humans fuckin’ killed each other for it.”

This moment in the monologue is important to highlight because I don’t think 99% of writers would’ve written it.  Why go off on that tangent when you can be more succinct?  But that’s who this character is.  He’s a tangent guy.  So you want him to go off on a lot of tangents.

Hall then writes my favorite line in the monologue: “Little numbers on a screen. You can’t touch it or hide it or bury it. Nah, you just tie it to a fuckin’ butterfly and send it to that cloud up there.” I have no idea what the device is here or how Hall came up with this line. It seems to be pure imagination, the writer’s own creativity. She could’ve easily written, “You can’t touch it or hide it. It’s just up there in the cloud, hovering.” Not nearly as imaginative.

I like how she also uses adjectives to spruce up, otherwise, bland objects: “But, one of these days, I’m tellin’ ya, that cloud’s gonna open up and it’s gonna pour acid rain down… all over our dumb faces.” It’s not “rain.” “Rain” is way too bland. It’s “acid” rain. It’s not “our faces.” “Our faces” doesn’t tell us much. No, it’s our “dumb” faces.

At every opportunity, Hall is looking to turboboost her sentences. She’s using every pixel to weaponize these words so that they have impact.

From there, she continues to use metaphors to make the dialogue more interesting. “We’re f@#%in’ Blockbuster, you know?” And, “We’re fightin’ it too hard, swimmin’ up stream. Busy swimmin’ and missin’ the whole f@#%in’ boat… Me, too. I been fightin’ it, too. Swimmin’, swimmin’ hard…”

The biggest lesson to take away from today’s dialogue example is metaphors. A lot of the color from this dialogue comes from Hall repeatedly dipping into metaphors. Yes, there’s more going on. But if you try to ingest it all, I’m afraid it will be too much. Just start to look for ways to incorporate more metaphors into your dialogue. Make sure you’re doing so in an organic way. And try to play with them a little bit so they’re not cliched metaphors. You don’t want to say things like, “Flying off the handle” or she has a “heart of gold.” These are actually referred to as “dead metaphors” because they’ve become so overused. Try to come up with your own metaphors and then extend (play with) them.

Here’s the screenplay for Daddio if you want to see more of Christy Hall’s writing. Leave your thoughts about what else she’s doing right in the comments. And, if you disliked the dialogue, tell us why.

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Genre: Legal Drama (True Story)
Premise: The life of a cynical San Francisco criminal lawyer at the top of his career unravels when he agrees to represent a father accused of killing his infant son in an extraordinary case that challenges widely accepted medical beliefs, a biased justice system, and his own personal worldview. Based on true events.
About: This is the second script in last year’s Black List that has three writers on it! The first was the script written by the Murder Ink trio, which I liked. These writers have begun to make some minor inroads into the industry. Nathan Gabaeff has a movie he wrote and directed called Avenge the Crows. His brother Isaac wrote a TV episode. But making the Black List appears to be their big break.
Writers: Thomas Berry, Isaac Gabaeff, and Nathan Gabaeff
Details: 121 pages

Carrell for Conlon?

If it’s taken me this long to review a Black List script, it typically means there’s something I find questionable about the concept. With False Truth, the concept seems to be both too small and too misguided. Let me explain. The idea is small in that it could be a Good Wife episode. Courtroom thrillers used to be common until legal TV dramas pillaged all their scenarios.

This makes almost every courtroom concept today a TV episode in the audience’s minds. Back in the day, John Grisham was able to find a few big flashy legal cases that felt like movies. But, since then, we’ve had a few thousand television courtroom cases, so it’s super rare to find one that’s worthy of a movie canvas.

The other problem I have is that there’s no winning when the subject matter is a baby’s death. If the father wins the case, so what? His baby doesn’t come back to life. So all of us still lose. Can a concept get more depressing?

I was confused as to why anyone would want to write a movie about this until I got to page 28. That’s when I read this line: “But if it’s a shaken baby case there’s one guy you really want to get… Doctor Steven Gabaeff.” Gabaeff? Where have I seen that name before? It took me a moment but then I realized, wait a minute, this is the writer’s last name!

So, obviously, the writers knew someone – I’m guessing it’s their dad – who was involved in this case and because they have such intimate knowledge accessible to them about the case, they said, “We should write a movie about this.” The fact that the writers did have that connection made me more intrigued. But I still think it’s a tough sell with a concept like this. Let’s see if I’m wrong.

Jennie gets the worst call imaginable from her husband, Kristian, who’s just told her that their infant son is in the hospital because he dropped him. She races to the hospital where she gets updated. Her son is now in a coma (he eventually dies) and the doctors suspect that Kristian has attempted to kill his son with something called “Shaken Baby Syndrome.”

This is when you shake a baby too fast. Kristian is quickly carted off to jail and Jennie hires noted San Francisco attorney Elliot Conlon, a man who used to stand for things but now seems content with making a lot of money, no matter who the defendant is. That’s going to be pushed to the limit since he’s now defending a potential child murderer.

Conlon digs deep into the science of Shaken Baby Syndrome and learns that they have the nastiest lobbyists in the world. These people make sure that every person who gets accused of this spends the rest of their life in prison. Conlon’s also been dealt a bad defendant, as Kristian is big and emotionless. He’s immediately compared to Lennie Small from In Mice and Men.

As we race towards the court case, Conlon finds out that the whole Shaken Baby world is a lie. That the science doesn’t hold water. In fact (spoiler), he learns that the medical community and legal community know this but that they’ve convicted so many people of it by this point that there’s no going back. They have to keep reinforcing the lie. Luckily, Conlon puts enough fear into the establishment that Kristian is inevitably let go.

There are a couple of approaches you can take to a story like this. You can create doubt about the suspect and then take your reader on a roller-coaster ride where sometimes you make the suspect look innocent and sometimes you make them look guilty, and the reader is constantly trying to solve that puzzle.

This is the approach they take in docs (or series) like The Staircase. At first we think the husband definitely did it. Then, when we hear him talk, he doesn’t sound like he did it at all. Then, a little later, we learn that he was having affairs. Now we think he did it again. But then we’re told that the wife knew about the affairs. Then we hear another woman he knew died from a staircase fall and we’re back on the “guilty” train again. These can be fun when executed well.

The other approach you can take is the one they took in this script. Which is that the father is clearly innocent but everyone in the world thinks he’s a child-killer and they’re determined to make sure he’s convicted as so. This creates an enormous amount of sympathy from the reader because nobody wants to see something bad happen to someone who’s clearly innocent. Even less so if everyone wants to take him down in bad faith.

For that reason, the script worked for me, which I was surprised by. I mean, yes, I still think a script like this is a losing proposition cause it’s so depressing. But I was into the stuff where they’re trying to take down Kristian. I wanted him to overcome their full-force attack.

Which is a perfect segue into today’s dialogue lesson. The following scene is a long one. But it’s also a great example of how you can write good dialogue without being a wordsmith. If you’re good at setting up the right scenario, the scenario will do the work for you. I think most of you could write this scene yourselves if it was set up for you. Whereas, with a Tarantino scene, maybe .001% of you could write something similar. In other words dialogue scenes like this are within reach.

The scene takes place with Kristian being brought in to see Child Services not long after he and his comatose child arrive at the hospital.

You want to note a couple of key things here. One, the child services characters have the goal in the scene. It’s to find out what led to the kid’s injury. However, here’s where our nifty dialogue lesson comes into play. The child services people are framing the conversation as if that’s the goal. But what they’re really trying to do is get Kristian to admit he killed his kid.

Dialogue always plays better when there’s something going on on the surface, as well as something that’s going on underneath the surface, which is clearly happening here.

Also, note the extremely high stakes of the scene. If Kristian screws up and says the wrong thing, he doesn’t get a pass. That thing very well could be the smoking gun the prosecution uses to convict him of murder in court. Dialogue is electric when the stakes are high.

Another thing is that the child services people are being disingenuous. They’re trying to trick him – pretending they’re on his side when they’re the exact opposite. What this does is it makes the reader protective of Kristian. We feel like he’s being misled, so we become his ally in the scene. We’re rooting for him to survive.

Finally, note the conflict. Almost every good dialogue scene has some level of conflict in it. And what creates more conflict than one side trying to ruin a guy’s life and the other side hanging on for dear life?

By the way, the reason this doesn’t have to be Tarantino-type dialogue is because the content of the scene is so strong. There are real consequences to this moment. And when that’s the case, you don’t need to prove your verbal jousting skills. Those will actually make the scene worse.

Once you’re able to consistently write a scene like this, you’re going to be okay dialogue-wise. Cause these scenes can really carry a script. Just note that a lot of the work here was done before the scene, not in the scene. Once the scene is set up, the dialogue writes itself.

I’m still not thrilled that the overall feeling I get from this script is one of depression. I like to either feel good at the end of a script or, at the very least, I want it to make me think. With that said, the script surprised me by how much it pulled me in. So I think it’s worth checking out.

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

What I learned: It helps in these scripts when the case is about something bigger than just winning the case. While False Truth isn’t making a point about racism or anything gigantic like that, it is about the fact that these “shaking baby” cases are bogus and that evil overly-emotional people have been using their influence to convict a lot of innocent people through pseudo-science. So we do get the sense that the court victory has a bigger effect on the world.