Genre: Supernatural Thriller
Winning logline: A young war widow awakens naked on an Alaskan military base and fights for survival as she’s hunted by her father’s vengeful soldiers after a whole platoon was ripped apart overnight.
Winning Movie-Crossover Pitch: American Werewolf In London eats Memento
About: Not only did this logline + movie-crossover win the Showdown, it is the payoff of an earlier setup (to use a couple of screenwriting terms). You may remember that David sent in this logline for a consult and I published the process via an official post.
Writer: David Laurie
Details: 99 pages

Excellent job by David. He didn’t actually make it into the traditional showdown. For this showdown, I added one entry for the best movie-crossover pitch regardless of logline. That’s how David got in. And boy did he take advantage, winning the competition!

David is best known around these parts for the killer logline he won with in his last Amateur Showdown review. You can read the review of that script here.

Call of Judy didn’t blow us away but maybe She’s Got Claws will. Let’s find out!

A woman named Ivy in Afghanistan turns into a cat werewolf thing and kills a bunch of people. We then cut to Alaska where we meet Holly, who we will later find out is Ivy’s sister.

Holly wakes up outside some guy’s place. She walks in, looks at herself in the mirror, and sees a lot of blood. She stumbles outside and finds people looting apartment buildings. She meets up with some cops who take her to the station.

Once there, the Marines (or special forces) show up and claim to be looking for something dangerous. The head of the group is Holly’s father, whom Holly avoids. Although we don’t know why, we get the sense that she needs to stay as far away from this man as possible.

Figuring that whatever happened last night that resulted in her waking up naked and bloody is probably related to this marine infiltration, Holly slips out and meets up with one of the cops, Miguel, at his house. It’s unclear if Miguel knows she’s a cat-werewolf or if he just senses she wants to get away from these marines.

As the seemingly amnesia-ridden Holly tries to put the puzzle pieces of what happened back together, we occasionally jump back in time, where we meet other players. There’s Elizabeth, who hates Holly. We get the sense that Cat-Holly may have killed her husband. And then there’s Ivy, who Holly had some massive sibling rivalry with courtesy of their father. There are also some sinister scientific labs in their past.

When we jump back to the present, the Marines are hunting down Holly, who, taking a page from The Hulk’s book, is forced to become the cat once again to kill them off. Then Ivy herself arrives in town, turning this sibling rivalry into a primal to-the-death showdown. Or will Holly team up with her sister to take down the real problem here – Daddy? That’s the ultimate question that must be answered in.. She’s Got Claws.

The aim for this review is to be constructive because I know how much time and effort David has put into this craft. There’s an aspect to David’s writing that’s holding him back. And if he doesn’t fix it, he’s not going to advance to the next level.

That issue is LACK OF CLARITY in the writing. It’s what I experienced reading his last script. It’s what I experienced in our e-mail exchanges. And I experienced it again here.

It’s such an important issue that it’s hard for me to even diagnose today’s story because I probably only understood 60-70% of what was happening due to the lack of clarity in the writing.

What’s frustrating is that it’s hard to explain *why* there’s a lack of clarity. It’s not immediately apparent when you’re reading the script. David obviously knows how to construct sentences and paragraphs and he has a very active vocabulary and a vivid writing style.

But there are two areas in particular that kept causing problems.

One, sometimes there will be something in a sentence that either is highly unclear or, at the very least, unclear enough that I had to re-read it. This is fine if it happens a few times during the script. But it happened a few times every page.

Two, whenever a new situation arrived in the script, it wasn’t set up clearly enough. Again, there’s some gray area here. I *mostly* understood what was going on. But it always felt like the situations were presented clumsily. You could never quite see them as clearly as you wanted to.

Let’s go into some examples of both of these issues. We’ll start with the first one. Here are a series of sentences from the script.

-“Ali is still upright. Staring with one eye. Ivy pulls a face.”

What does “pull a face” mean? I *kind of* understand it. But I could be wrong. And that’s the problem. You want your reader to *definitely* understand. Not kind of understand.

-“He shoots. THREE RAPID. We SQUEAL. Jump back from the edge.”

Is “three rapid” referring to the shots? Then why not say, “THREE RAPID SHOTS?” It’s a small thing but it makes a big clarity difference.

-“We pad slowly round toward the front—“

I don’t know what this means. What does it mean when you “pad?”

-“He always nods hi to his reflection and has not exactly gelled with Alaska’s low key ways.”

This is in reference to a character intro. I don’t know what to make of this. You’re saying that this character, EVERY SINGLE TIME HE EVER WALKS NEAR A MIRROR, nods hi to the reflection? A) Why would someone nod hi to themselves? And B) Why would you nod hi to yourself in every mirror for the rest of your life?

-“Same Frankensteins. Same table. SNOW BLOWER THRUM drifts in.”

This is one of the easier lines to discern what’s going on. But still, “Snow blower thrum” is not an everyday phrase so when it’s presented in this quick staccato manner, it requires a re-read.

-“He cups his hand around his phone and rolls a die onto it.”

I’ve read this one a ton of times and I still don’t understand what it means.

I would implore David to stop writing in this style. I understand why he’s doing it. It’s part of his voice. But it’s undermining the clarity of the story. I would try to write a couple of scripts in proper English. Full sentences with subject, verb, and object. “John ate the taquitos.”

Cause I don’t think that these scripts are going to be clear enough until that change is made. Then, once you master that, you can start to pepper your voice back into your storytelling. Remember, your unique voice doesn’t matter if the reader can’t understand what you’re saying.

The second issue is an inability to clearly set up your major plot beats. For example, in Titanic, you don’t start with the ship hitting the iceberg. You have to set everything up first.

We meet Holly waking up from something bad happening. She walks into this apartment of a guy and sees herself bloody in the mirror. So my assumption was she slept with this guy then inadvertently turned into a were-cat and killed him. Then we go outside and, out of nowhere, the marines (or special forces) are in town cleaning the town out, supposedly to find this killer were-cat. But… she literally *just* killed someone and nobody knows about it yet. How are the marines there?

Later in the script, it’s mentioned that they came because she slaughtered a bunch of military people the previous night. So I go back and re-read that part of the script and realize that before we introduce Holly, we show glimpses of this animal killing people. So I thought, “Oh, okay. She didn’t kill the guy in the apartment. She killed people before she got to that apartment. But then where was the guy in the apartment? Did she kill him too? Was he gone on vacation?” It just seemed like it could’ve been set up clearer.

Holly is then taken to the police station, although I wasn’t entirely sure why. I think because she needed to be evacuated from town like everyone else?

From there, she sneakily exchanges texts with cop, Miguel, for some reason. I’m not sure why. I don’t know if she knows Miguel from before or if she just showed up in town yesterday? I don’t know! To be honest, I didn’t even know this was a military base UNTIL AFTERWARDS when I re-read the logline. When I was reading the script, I assumed it was a town.

She then sneaks away when the cops and marines aren’t looking and travels to Miguel’s house, where they meet up. I’m not sure why she goes there. I’m not sure why they need to team up.

This is what I mean when I say it’s like reading through fog. I would always feel as if I *mostly* understood why things were happening. But it was shaky enough that I was always doubting whether I was comprehending the moment.

As frustrating as this is for David to hear, it’s just as frustrating for me to explain because I want to fix this for him and I don’t know how. I wish it was as easy as “Do A, B, and C.” But there are minute details I haven’t identified that are playing into my inability to follow along.

All I know is that when I’m reading a good script, everything is crystal clear. Every word, every sentence, every beat, every action, every plot development, every character motivation. That’s not an issue that ever even comes up when I’m reading a good script. Clarity and presentation are a given. And that’s not happening here. It wasn’t happening in Call of Judy either.

Which means I can’t even assess the overall story.

I’m going to call on you guys here cause some of you are better at this than me. Read the first ten pages of She’s Got Claws. Tell me if you experience the same issues I had. If enough of you didn’t, I will concede I’m bad at reading. But, if you do, explain what you think is going on as specifically as possible. Because I want to help David. And I want to be better armed to help writers in the future who have this issue.

I still think this has movie potential. These dual-cat-human killers running around and ripping up Marines – I could see people paying for that. The script does have some gnarly imagery. But we need a way clearer AND cleaner story.

Script link: She’s Got Claws

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

What I learned: You have to be aware of what your weaknesses are as a screenwriter and write around them. David has lack-of-clarity issues. When you have lack-of-clarity issues, you don’t want to write Memento, something with a lot of intricate flash-backing (which I didn’t get into in the review). We’re having a hard enough time following the present storyline. Prove you can tell a clear concise simple story first. Then you can get fancy.

An excerpt from my upcoming book, “The Greatest Dialogue Book Ever Written”

There was a time when I didn’t think I was ever going to finish this book. There were too many technical obstacles (mainly regarding how ebooks interpret screenplay-formatted text) that required endless troubleshooting. But I’m SOOO excited that I’m finally about to release the book because I truly believe it will be the seminal book on dialogue for the next 50+ years.

It’s a book with 250 dialogue tips. This in an industry where you’re lucky to find someone who can give you 10 dialogue tips. And I just can’t contain how thrilled I am that I can finally share it with you. I already posted the opening of the book the other week. In today’s post, I’m including a segment from the “Conflict” chapter. This is arguably the most important chapter in the book and it contains 21 tips total.

TIP 121 – Make sure there’s conflict built into the relationship of the two characters who are around each other the most in your movie/show – Who are the two characters who will be around each other the most in your script? You need to build conflict into the DNA of that relationship specifically. That way, almost every scene in your movie is guaranteed to have conflict. John and Jane in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Tony Stark and Steve Rogers in Civil War, Allie and Noah in The Notebook, Lee and Carter in Rush Hour, Danny and Amy in the Netflix show, “Beef.”

TIP 122 – Using worldviews to create conflict – Okay, but how do you build conflict into the DNA of a relationship? One way is to give characters different worldviews. Have them see the world differently. If you do this, your characters will be at odds with each other for an entire movie as opposed to one or two scenes. In the Avengers movies, Tony Stark’s worldview is he’s willing to get dirty to protect the universe. Steve Rogers’ worldview is governed by honesty. He wants to play by the rules. That difference in their worldviews is why the two butt heads so much.

TIP 123 – Embrace the word “NO” – “No” is the OG conflict word. Without it, most conversations become boring. Let’s say your hero tells his wife, “I’m going to the store,” and she replies, “Okay.” How is that going to result in an interesting conversation? Or your assassin asks his handler, “Is it okay if I skip this assassination? I don’t think it’s safe enough.” And the handler replies, “Sure, no problem.” When people agree with people, the conversation immediately stops. This is why you want to integrate “No” (and all forms of it) into your dialogue. Here’s an example from the HBO show, White Lotus. In it, 23 year old Albie has fallen in love with a local Italian prostitute who owes her pimp money. Albie wants to help pay her pimp off, so he comes to his rich father to ask for money.

TIP 124 – Make them work for their meal – The reason “No” is so great for dialogue is that it forces your character to work for their meal. They don’t get a free pass. The above scene goes on for another three minutes and Albie has to resort to offering something to his father to get the money. That’s what makes the scene entertaining – that he has to work so hard for his meal. And he wouldn’t have had to do it if his dad had said, “Yes.”

The Scriptshadow Dialogue Book will be out within the next two weeks. But there’s a chance it could be out A LOT SOONER. So keep checking the site every day!  In the meantime, I do feature script consultations, pilot script consultations, short story consultations, logline consultations.  If you’ve written something, I can help you make it better, whether your issues involve dialogue or anything else.  Mention this post and I will give you 100 dollars off a feature or pilot set of notes!  Carsonreeves1@gmail.com

How to immediately gain 50% more interest in your script

Genre: Crime/FBI
Premise: Two FBI agents are pitted against a crew of bank robbers–and each other–as they grapple with order and chaos inside their department and home lives.
About: This script finished with 11 votes on last year’s Black List. Screenwriter Will Hettinger wrote on the series, Painkiller, last year.
Writer: Will Hettinger
Details: 115 pages

Jon Hamm for Gamen?

I’m gonna jump right into it.

How do you gain 50% more interest in your screenplay?

Four words.

“Inspired by True Events.”

That’s what today’s script says on its title page and the best thing about it is that it only needs to be barely true. You can have the smallest most smidgeon-ish tiniest teeniest connection to a true story but if there’s a thread you can pull on, you damn well better say your script is inspired by true events.

Cause when you hand those four words over to a movie exec, dollar signs start appearing over their heads accompanied by the “ding ding ding ding” sounds of hundreds of slot machines.

50-something Robert Gamen is a tough FBI vet who lives to work in the gray. He likes mixing it up, crossing lines, crossing back, pushing the envelope. And right now he’s determined to take down the Armenian mob based up in Glendale, Los Angeles.

Assistant Senior Agent in Charge Katie Martin is in charge of Gamen’s crew and realizes that, in order to get the most out of the operation, she needs a translator. So she recruits the nerdy Andy Walsh, a former Air Force soldier who left the nitty gritty action of the Middle East to work as a translator at a desk.

Gamen and Andy seem to like each other all right. Gamen is more of a ladies man whereas Andy is dedicated to his wife. The two spend many nights hanging out outside Armenian bars and clubs listening in on bugged Armenian thugs in the hopes of figuring out where all their money is going.

But Gamen has a secret. He uses his Armenian operation as a cover to go rob banks with a crew of fellow agents. Andy is the only one inside Gamen’s crew who doesn’t know about the bank-robbing thing. But over time, he senses there’s more going on under the surface. Eventually, he’ll be thrown into opposition with his own group, and must decide whether to take out the partner he’s become so close to.

I have a question for you guys.

I know a lot of you don’t like romantic comedies. So, when you are forced to watch a romantic comedy (after your girlfriend mercilessly hassles you for two years), can you tell a good one from a bad one? Or are they all equally bad to you?

I ask this because these crime scripts all read the same to me. They all have the same perceived problems.

They’re either not covering a unique enough angle or the characters feel like the exact same characters I see in all of these movies.

But maybe that’s just me. Maybe I don’t understand these films.

All the crime films I have understood: Godfather, Goodfellas, Training Day, Heat…

They all had one thing in common: BIG MEMORABLE CHARACTERS.

You know what’s great about having big memorable characters? EVERY ONE OF YOUR SCENES IMPROVES. Because your scenes all have the benefit of operating with these big personalities.

When Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) in Goodfellas says, “Funny like how? Like I’m a clown? I amuse you?” That scene is amazing because that character is so amazing.

With Final Score… Gamen is fine. Andy is fine.

But do either of them have personalities that pop off the page? Do they say things that are memorable? Do they have backstories or internal conflicts that make them compelling?

There’s a bigger question at stake here… are screenwriters okay with writing an approximation of the types of movies they like? Are they happy with merely giving you a taste of what it’s like to read a good script in this genre? Or do they want to give you the full meal?

Most screenwriters are perfectly fine giving you a taste. And that’s not enough for me.

You also have to be aware of what genre you’re writing in and meet the bar of that genre. Yesterday, I covered Road House. I said I didn’t mind that the villain was one-dimensional. But there’s a reason for that. Road House is silly fun. Nobody’s going into that genre expecting to be moved or learn something about life. They just want to have fun.

But a movie like Final Score has a higher bar because it’s aiming at a higher-IQ audience. Therefore, you can’t get away with straight-forward obvious facsimiles of characters we’ve already seen in this genre. We need more.

I’m going to keep saying this until the end of time: 95% of screenwriters vastly underestimate how high the bar is.

And I get it!

I get that you see trash in theaters and on TV all the time. The Marvels. Citadel. Ricky Stanicky. The 6000th Walking Dead spinoff.

And that makes you think the bar is low. But the bar is always higher than you think it is. Which means, when you’ve come with a solid character, you’re not done. You have to figure out how to push that character and make them good. And then, once you’ve done that, you’ve got to push that character and make them great.

Cause the difference between that effort is the difference between Emma Stone’s character in Poor Things and Dakota Johnson’s character in Madame Webb.

THE READER KNOWS WHEN YOU DIDN’T PUT IN ENOUGH EFFORT.  You cannot and will not EVER FOOL THEM.

I’m mad about this because I see it EVERY SINGLE DAY. Reading one script after another. I can tell the writer didn’t put all of themselves into the characters or the script. And look, sometimes you get that rare newbie writer who puts every ounce of their being on the page but they don’t yet understand the craft enough to make it work.

Still, I’d much rather read that than yet another one of these “lottery” scripts. I call them lottery scripts because they’re not good enough to sell on their own. They’re good enough to go into the big Hollywood Lottery slush pile where their success will be determined by luck.

Don’t you want to write a script that doesn’t depend on luck?

Pick a unique and marketable concept. Outline a plot that moves all the way through the story. Come up with at least one extremely memorable character. If you do those three things, you’re ahead of almost everyone you’re competing against.

I’ll give you one snippet of the dozens of red flags that signaled to me I was reading a script that didn’t meet the bar. About halfway through the script, the boss woman asks Andy, “How’re you finding SA Gamen? You’ve been with him for months. What’s your impression?”

There are two MAJOR things wrong with this line. One, I had no idea it had been months since they were together in the first place. If you questioned me on their time spent together, I may have guessed a week or two. The fact that you’re not clear to the reader about how much time has passed is a major red flag. Cause it means time doesn’t matter in your script.

But also, it’s a red flag that your story is taking that long in the first place! And that we don’t have any clear ticking time bombs guiding the story. I’m not saying every movie needs a deadline and tons of urgency. But this is a movie with guns and crime. These movies need urgency!!!

Or, if they don’t have overarching urgency, you need each individual timeline within the story to have urgency. For example, your story may cover an entire year. But pages 30-50 need to cover the gearing up for a specific heist. Or bust. “We’ve got one week to pull this off.”  Now you’ve developed urgency for the next 20 pages.

Or else your story is just floating in the ether. We don’t feel any need for the characters to achieve anything. And if that’s where you are, your story’s dead. We need a reason to keep turning the pages. Urgency is a huge reason.

It’s funny, I threw on Next Goal Wins on Hulu the other day cause it was free. By the way, I had to scour the service to find it. That’s how much it didn’t want anyone to watch it. It’s about this Samoan soccer team that’s terrible. Then a new coach comes in and tries to teach them the game.

There’s an early practice session where the players are all haphazardly stumbling around the field randomly kicking balls in any direction they see fit. There’s no effort. There’s no purpose. Sometimes I feel like 95% of screenwriters approach screenwriting the same way. They don’t take it seriously enough.

The funniest thing about this rant is that today’s script is not a bad script. It’s fine. BUT ALL THAT FINE DOES IS PUT YOU IN THE LOTTERY. You have no agency over your career with fine. You’re dependent on everyone else. But when you put your heart and soul into a good idea and you have a strong enough understanding of the craft to execute a good story and you make it a priority to hold the bar up high and surpass that bar?

You’re unstoppable.

You’re literally unstoppable because so few other writers are doing that.

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

What I learned: Direct subtext – I see writers do this every so often. They’ll use their parentheticals to directly tell you what the subtext of the dialogue is. In this case, we’re just meeting the characters so we don’t yet know who’s sarcastic, who lies, who says one thing but means another. In that case, the writer has to directly tell the reader what the subtext is for them to get it. Here, we’re seeing Gamen and Assistant Special Agent in Charge Katie together for the first time…

Genre: Action
Premise: When a Florida Keys bar starts attracting the wrong crowd, they hire a reclusive ex-UFC fighter who had a traumatic exit from the sport, to get things back in order.
About: Based on the original film from 1989. This is the movie that director Doug Liman fought the evil Jeff Bezos over. Liman made the movie for MGM right before Amazon bought MGM. So the film went from a theatrical release to a streaming release in a heartbeat. Which destroyed Liman. You can watch a fun little vignette of the story over on Casey Neistat’s channel. Fun note here. The script was written by two guys with almost no credits. Anthony Bagarozzi only has one other credit in The Nice Guys and Chuck Mondry is credit-free. I point this out because it means that YOU could be the next writer of an 80 million dollar film. You just have to write a great spec script that impresses folks like Doug Liman. Now if only there was someone out there helping you write a great screenplay…
Writer: Anthony Bagarozzi & Chuck Mondry
Details: 120 minutes

Best casting of the year?

I know I’ve demolished The 3-Body Problem enough already. But I just saw the latest promo picture for the ill-fated show: a woman with a sword.

Isn’t this a movie about aliens coming to earth?? What is even going on with this show!!??

Anyway, let’s come back to the present. Or should I say, the past. That’s because today’s movie might as well be set in 1989, when the original movie debuted. This is a throwback if I’ve ever seen one, which is ironic to say, since I never saw the first film.

Alas, that made this movie fresh to my eyes and I couldn’t be happier, cause it was like getting to see a 1989 movie made in 2024 for the first time, if that makes sense.

I get Doug Liman’s frustration with this film being released on streaming. It’s not an ego thing like it is with most filmmakers. This film was genuinely made to play in front of an audience. It’s got a lot of those silly lines that work well in a theater (Dalton crawls into Knox’s boat and Knox squares up against him. Knox: “Looks like we’ve got our own little octagon.” Dalton: “What?? Who taught you shapes?”).

And then it has these big fun fights in the bar that are practically begging for audiences to “oof” and “ohhhhh” while watching. It also has way bigger production value than your typical “dudes fighting” movie. It truly feels like something that was meant to be seen in the theater. And it would’ve crushed Ghostbusters Afterlife if it went theatrical. I’m guessing it would’ve had a 75 million dollar opening.

Alas. I’m sure everyone involved in the film will be just fine.

A woman who’s inherited a Florida Keys bar called The Road House shows up at some back door fighting bar in the middle of nowhere where she watches a fighter walk away when he realizes his next opponent is Dalton (Jake Gylenhaall). Wherever Dalton goes to fight, potential fighters walk away. As for why, we’ll find out later.

She recruits the reluctant Dalton with hard cash to come protect The Road House against its increasingly violent clientele. Long story short, a local jerk face named Ben Brandt is trying to scare the owner off so he can destroy the bar and develop the land into something more profitable.

Dalton shows up and immediately makes his mark, taking down five of the town’s toughest thugs while barely breaking a sweat. When this gets back to Ben, he isn’t sure what to do. But then the choice is made for him. His super-thug father, from behind bars, hires a guy even more dangerous than Dalton, Knox (Connor McGregor), to come in and take Dalton down.

Knox shows up and challenges Dalton immediately. The two fight to a stalemate but you get the sense that Knox was only in third gear. The promise is that another fight is coming. And when it happens, Knox is going to go all out. Along the way we learn that the reason everyone’s afraid of Dalton is that he willingly killed his best friend in the ring. So if he can do that, what can he do to someone he *doesn’t* know? We’ll see when these two psychopaths square off in a final battle.

GOOD MOVIE!

Good. Movie.

As I watched Road House, it occurred to me that the movie was quite different than a lot of Hollywood films I watch these days – the main difference being: it was stationary.

We’re not going anywhere. We’re stuck in one location. The reason that’s relevant for screenwriters is because it can be difficult to power a narrative that stays in one place.

But there is one tried and true way to do so. And that’s through CONFLICT.

For stories that stay in one place, you need to pack them with more conflict than your average script. Because, otherwise, where is the entertainment going to come from? In a movie like The Beekeeper, we’re always going somewhere. In a movie like Wonka, we’re constantly traveling around the city.

But The Road House takes place… AT THE ROAD HOUSE. So there isn’t as much to work with.

Therefore, the writers pack the script with conflict. When Dalton comes in, he immediately has to clean up the thugs that have infected the bar. Once he does that, Big Bad Ben comes in and threatens him. After that happens, a local mobster comes in and tries to kill him. After that happens, Knox comes in and starts threatening him.

And then, of course, Dalton has his own inner conflict to deal with. He killed his best friend in the ring and it haunts him every second of his life. It’s the reason he hates fighting, he hates doing this. Because every time he beats someone up, he has to be reminded that he killed his own friend in the same way.

Dalton’s entire character journey is resisting going “over the top.” He knows if he gets pushed too far, he will crack, and turn into the same guy that killed his best friend. There’s a great moment later in the movie where Dalton finally admits to the bad guys that “he’s afraid.” We’re sitting there thinking, “Oh no. Dalton’s given up??” But then he finishes the thought. “I’m afraid of what I’ll do to you now that you’ve pushed me too far.” It is the culmination of his inner conflict. He has no choice but to give into it if he’s going to save The Road House.

That’s the reason this movie works. The main character works and the writers pummel him with conflict. Things are never easy for Dalton, even as the best fighter in the world.

You know what else I liked about this movie? It harkened back to a time when bad guys were just bad because they were bad. Knox is such an over-the-top villain with no other motivation than he wants to crack some skulls and I loved him for it. It was total 1980s villain energy.

There’s a moment (mini-spoiler) where Knox has essentially defeated Dalton in the final fight and Ben Brandt, who’s injured, stumbles up and screams, “Finish him! Take him out!” You might as well have just copy and pasted the final tournament battle in The Karate Kid. It was the epitome of 1980s one-dimensional villainy.

You may be thinking, “But Carson, don’t you like complexity in villains? Shouldn’t screenwriting purists be promoting depth and motivation in their antagonists?” Sure. IF THE MOVIE CALLS FOR IT. Every movie is different. This is a movie about protecting a bar. It’s not that deep, nor is it trying to be. When you write something like that, you don’t need outrageous character arcs for your villains.

In fact, they can hurt your script if you’re not careful. I’ve seen writers try to imprint elaborate character arcs onto characters in simplistic stories and it’s like dressing up in a tuxedo for dinner at McDonald’s.

The only thing I didn’t like about the movie was that some of the fighting mechanics felt fake. It’s funny because, back in the 80s, the fighting was fake as well. The actors swung, purposefully missed, and we used camera angles and punching sound effects to make it look like a real punch.

Nowadays they’re doing this weird thing where it looks like they’re punching the air and then they’re retroactively digitally placing the actors faces in the punching line so it, theoretically, looks like a real hit. The problem is that the actors who are hit aren’t reacting to being hit properly. That’s the fake part.

To be fair, sometimes this was less apparent than others. But they need to perfect this technology if these fights are going to resonate.  We have all this technology.  The fighting in movies can’t be going backwards.

All in all, a VERY fun viewing experience. I say you all check it out.

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

What I learned: To create a character that pops, contrast their external with their internal. Dalton is the most dangerous man in the world. Yet he walks around smiling and being nice to everyone. Before he beats up the five thugs in his opening scene at The Road House, he pauses and asks them, “Does everybody here have health insurance?” He wants to know that they’ll be okay once he beats them up. He even drives them to the ER afterward!

An excerpt from my upcoming book, “Scriptshadow’s 250 Dialogue Tips”

It has been promised. But as of yet, it hasn’t been delivered.

Over the next month, I’ll be including excerpts from my upcoming dialogue book, which I’m planning on releasing a month from now. Here is the introduction to the book. The world of screenwriting is about to change forever.

What you’re about to read is the introduction to the book…

Not long after I started my website, Scriptshadow, a site dedicated to analyzing amateur and professional screenplays, I was hired by an amateur writer to consult on a script he had written. The writer had completed a couple of screenplays already and was excited about his most recent effort, a crime-drama (“with a hint of comedy”) he felt was the perfect showcase for his evolving skills. Although I won’t reveal the actual script for privacy reasons, we’ll refer to this screenplay as, “Highs and Lows,” and we’ll call the writer, “Gabe.”

Highs and Lows was about a guy obsessed with a rare street drug and, to this day, it is one of the worst screenplays I have ever read in my life. We’re talking 147 pages of unintelligible nonsense, a script so aggressively lousy, I considered submitting it to the CIA as a low-budget alternative to waterboarding.

After I put together the notes on Highs and Lows, I spent a good portion of the day debating whether I should call Gabe and aggressively suggest he pursue a different career path. I’d never done such a thing before. But, in my heart, I knew that if this man pursued this craft, he may very well end up wasting a decade of his life. If it wasn’t for my girlfriend ripping the phone out of my hand and telling me there was no way I was going to destroy this writer’s dreams, I would’ve made the call. Instead, I sent him his notes, detailing, as best I could, what needed to be improved and how to do so, and moved on.

Cut to five years later and I was contacted by a different gentleman (we’ll call him “Randy”) for another consultation. In stark contrast to Gabe’s script, I experienced what every reader prays for when they open a screenplay, which is a great easy-to-read story with awesome characters. But it was the dialogue that stood out. Randy wasn’t ready to challenge Tarantino just yet but the conversations between his characters were always clever, always engaging, and always fun.

I sent his script out to a few producers and one of them ended up hiring him for a job. He wrote back, thanked me, and mused that he’d come a long way since our first consultation. “First consultation?” I said to myself. “What is this guy talking about?” I looked back through my e-mails to see if we had corresponded before and nothing came up. But then I dug deeper and discovered that I *had* worked with Randy before. Under a different e-mail address.

The owner of that e-mail?

Gabe. Which was a pen name he had used at the time.

This was not possible. Randy wrote with confidence. Gabe wrote like he’d accidentally fallen asleep on his keyboard. I went back and re-checked, checked again, checked some more, only to return to the same baffling conclusion. This page-turning Tour de Force was written by the same writer who had written one of the worst screenplays I’d ever read!

After my denial wore off, I got in touch with Gabe and asked him the question that had been eating at me ever since I confirmed his identity: “What in the world did you do differently this time around?” I especially wanted to know how his dialogue had skyrocketed from a 1 out of 10 to an 8 out of 10. His answer is something I’ll share with you later in the book, as it’s one of the most important tips you’ll ever learn about dialogue.

But for now, I want to emphasize the lesson Gabe’s dramatic improvement taught me, something I remind myself whenever I read a not-so-good screenplay: You are always capable of improving as a screenwriter. If Gabe could go from worst to first, so can you.

Which is why I want to share with you one of the biggest lies you’ll encounter when you begin your screenwriting journey. I heard it a bunch when I first started screenwriting and I still hear it today: “You either have an ear for dialogue or you don’t.” This faulty statement, which you’ll hear mostly from snobby agents, jaded executives, and impatient producers, is dead wrong.

Writing good dialogue can be learned.

Let me repeat that:

Writing good dialogue can be learned.

To be fair, doing so is challenging. More so than any other aspect of the craft. Aaron Sorkin, who many believe to be the best dialogue writer working today, admits as much. In an interview with Jeff Goldsmith promoting his film, The Social Network, Sorkin confessed that while storytelling and plotting are built on a technical foundation, making them easy to teach, writing dialogue is more of an instinctual thing, and therefore hard to break down into teachable steps.

Indeed, dialogue contains elements of spontaneity, cleverness, charm, gravitas, intelligence, purpose, playfulness, personality, and, of course, a sense of humor. This varied concoction of ingredients does not come in the form of an official recipe, leaving writers unable to identify how much of each is required to write “the perfect dialogue.” Which has led many screenwriting teachers to throw up their hands in surrender and label dialogue, “unteachable,” which is why there hasn’t been a single good dialogue book ever written.

When screenwriting teachers do broach the topic of dialogue, they teach the version of it that’s easiest on them, which amounts to telling you all the things you’re NOT supposed to do. My favorite of these is: “Show don’t tell.” Show us that Joey is a ladies’ man. Don’t have him tell us that he’s a ladies’ man.

“Show don’t tell” is actually good screenwriting advice but why do you think screenwriting teachers are so eager to teach it? Because it means they don’t have to teach dialogue! If you’re showing something, you’re not writing any conversations.

Or they’ll say, “Avoid on-the-nose dialogue.” Again, not bad advice. But how does that help you write the dialogue that stumbles out of the mouth of Jack Sparrow? Or sashays out of the mouth of Mia Wallace? In order to write good dialogue, you need to teach people what *to* do, not what *not to* do.

If you ever want to test whether a self-professed screenwriting teacher understands dialogue, ask them what their best dialogue tip is. If they say, “go to a coffee shop and listen to how people talk,” run as far away from that teacher as possible because I can promise you they know nothing about dialogue. If someone is giving you a tip where there’s nothing within the tip itself that teaches you anything, they’re a charlatan.

What the heck is good dialogue anyway?

Good dialogue is conversation that moves the scene, and by association the plot, forward in an entertaining fashion. “Entertaining” can be defined in a number of ways. It could mean the dialogue is humorous, clever, tension-filled, suspenseful, thought-provoking, dramatic, or a number of other things. But it does need those two primary ingredients.

• It needs to push the scene forward in a purposeful way.
• It needs to entertain.

What prevents writers from writing good dialogue? That answer could be a book unto itself but in my experience, having read over 10,000 screenplays, the primary mistake I’ve found that writers make is they think too logically.

When they have characters speak to one another, they construct those characters’ responses in a way that keeps the train moving and nothing more. They get that first part right – the “move the story forward” part – but they forget about the “entertain” part. Don’t worry, I’ve got over a hundred tips in this book that will help you write more entertaining dialogue.

Yet another aspect missing from a lot of the dialogue I read is naturalism – the ability to capture what people really sound like when they speak to each other. You are trying to capture things like awkwardness, tangents, authenticity, words not coming out quite right. You’re trying to mimic all that to such a degree that the characters sound like living breathing people.

And yet, while being true-to-life, you’re also attempting to heighten your dialogue. You’re trying to make every reply clever. You’re trying to nail that zinger. You’re giving your hero the perfect line at the perfect moment. How does one combine realism with “heightened-ism?” That’s one of the many paradoxes of dialogue.

So I understand, intellectually, why so many teachers are terrified of dialogue. The act of writing movie conversation is so intricate and nuanced that the easy thing to do is leave it up to chance and tell writers that they either have an ear for it or they don’t (or to go to a local coffee shop and “listen to people talk”).

But dialogue is like any skill. It can be learned. It can be improved. And I dedicated years of my life looking through millions of lines of dialogue, ranging from the worst to the best, to find that code. And I believe I’ve found it. By the end of this book, you’ll have found it as well.

It won’t be easy. This is stuff you’ll have to practice to get good at. But, once you do, your dialogue will be better than any aspiring writer who hasn’t read this book. That much I can promise you.

So let’s not waste any more time. I’m going to give you 250 dialogue tips and I’m going to start with the two biggest of those tips right off the bat. If all you ever do for your screenwriting is incorporate these two tips, your dialogue will be, at the very least, solid. Are you ready? Here we go.

TIP 1 – Create dialogue-friendly characters – Dialogue-friendly characters are characters who generally talk a lot. They are naturally funny or tend to say interesting things, are quirky or strange or offbeat or manic or see the world differently than the average human being. The Joker in The Dark Knight is a dialogue-friendly character. Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad is a dialogue-friendly character. Deadpool is. Juno is. It’s hard to write good dialogue without characters who like to talk.

TIP 2 – Create dialogue-rich scenarios – Dialogue is like a plant. It needs sunshine to grow. If every one of your scenes is kept in the shade, good luck sprouting great dialogue. A scene where a young woman introduces her boyfriend to her accepting parents is never going to yield good dialogue. There’s zero conflict and, therefore, little chance for an interesting conversation. A scene where a young woman introduces her boyfriend to her highly judgmental parents who think their daughter is too good for him? Now you’ve got a dialogue-rich scenario!

I need you to internalize the above two tips because they will be responsible for the bulk of your dialogue success. Try to have at least one dialogue-friendly character in a key role (two or three is even better). Then, whenever you write a scene, ask yourself if you’re creating a scene where good dialogue can grow.

Don’t worry if these two things are confusing right now. We’re going to get into a lot more detail about how to find these dialogue-friendly characters and how to create these dialogue-rich scenarios.

A pattern you’ll notice throughout this book is that good dialogue comes from good preparation. The decisions you make before you write your dialogue are often going to be just as influential as the ones you make while writing your dialogue.

There’s more to come next week! If you want to hire me to take a look at your script and help you with your dialogue (or anything else), I will give you $100 off a set of feature or pilot notes.  Just mention this post.  You can e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com