Genre: Art Heist/Thriller
Premise: An art thief who takes priceless objects from museums and private collections and redistributes them to their original countries of ownership is tracked by a dogged FBI Agent across the globe.
About: This script finished top 30 on last year’s Black List. Writer Ola Shokumbi recently adapted a book for the upcoming animated movie, “Onyeka and the Academy of the Sun,” that will appear on Netflix. Will Smith is producing. She also wrote one episode of the show, “The Fix.”
Writer: Ola Shokunbi
Details: 109 pages

Can today’s script reinstate confidence in the Black List?

If not, can we at least find a new writer with a fresh voice? Someone to get excited about?

I’m always down for a cool art heist script but these are tricky. The genre is well-traveled and, therefore, difficult to be original in.

Let’s see if today’s writer has come up with something cool.

The art thief known as “Ghost” steals art from random museums across the world. But unlike these greedy bastards who sell their stolen art to the highest bidder, Ghost sends the art right back to its country of origin. I’m not clear on how she makes enough money to, you know, fund this expensive hobby. But maybe she gets paid in moral superiority.

Halfway across the world, at an FBI office in America, is Ghost’s rival, Pire. Well, she doesn’t know he’s her rival yet. But she’s about to. You see, Pire has been tracking Ghost’s European museum escapades and he’s come up with a theory. She’s coming to America! Or *he* is coming to America. Nobody yet knows that Ghost is female. They merely assume she’s male cause of their internal patriarchal biases.

Long story short, Pire blows catching her, and Ghost, who we’re now told has instituted a name change (you can call her “Indigo”), flies a plane to France because I guess in between late night museum robbings, she learned how to become a pilot. Once back in Europe, her true plan is revealed. She’s trying to find a mythical lamp that is said to have the power to “raise an army.”

Her mark is a man named Walter, a sort of “sinister Indiana Jones” type, who is said to have the lamp. But Ghost – I mean Indigo – falls in BFF love with Walter’s assistant, Nooria. Nooria, you see, is Walter’s operations manager. She makes it so Walter can easily rob all these caves around the world.

Indigo points out to Nooria that she’s a prisoner, much like how art is a prisoner when it is inside the museums of a country where it did not originate. From here, “Indigo” turns into a full-on globetrotting action movie with vespa chases through the streets of Milan. We will find out, when this is all over, that Indigo played everyone like a fiddle, executing the most intricate plan in the history of the world, which should set her up for 20+ years of additional adventures.

One thing I can never forgive, no matter how hard I try, is when the concept itself is faulty. Work through this with me because I’m struggling to understand it. Let’s say you steal a painting from an American museum that originally came from an Italian painter from the 1700s. So you then “give it back” to Italy.

Who, in Italy, takes responsibility for this painting that was stolen and then “returned” to them? The Italian president? The Commissioner of Art? And what do they do with it when they get it? Do they send an “lol” tweet to the US government then put the painting up in one of their own museums?

We are operating under reality here, are we not? If so, doesn’t that mean the painting will have been the property of that museum? In which case lawyers are going to get involved and eventually litigate that painting back to the United States. That’s assuming Italy didn’t just send the painting right back to the museum in the first place. No government is going to publicly accept a stolen piece of art.

This is why in all the art-theft movies preceding this one, it’s a criminal stealing the art. Or a thief stealing art for a crime lord type. Because that avoids the problem “Indigo” has. If you’re a criminal, you can hide your act of crime. There isn’t a scenario where a government is going to have to publicly accept a stolen museum piece unless we’re talking two countries that specifically hate each other, which wasn’t the case with this movie.

It sounds pretty when you say it – a thief who steals art from museums and returns it to their country of origin – but it doesn’t make a lick of sense.

Strangely, just as you’re wrapping your head around that and deciding if you can buy into it enough to mentally commit to the screenplay, the movie changes gears and becomes James Bond. None of it is bad. I could imagine this movie looking pretty good if someone spent 150 million dollars on it.

But my criteria for any action movie is: Are you giving me things I haven’t seen before? Because when you’re writing a movie that costs this much money, you are placing your film in one of the most high-stakes competitive spaces in all of art – the blockbuster film. To stand out in that arena, you have to show us stuff we haven’t seen before.

For example, there’s a scene where Indigo is on a moving train and the cops are closing in on her and she heads up to the top of the train, activates a parachute on her back, that then extends backwards due to the wind, lifting her up into the air to safety. I don’t know if I’ve seen that exact scene before. But I’ve seen a thousand moments that are achingly similar to it.

I will cut action films some slack in this area if they give me a great hero. Like I always say, you should be spending tons of time on creating a great protagonist because they’re going to be in every scene. Therefore, if we like them, we’re going to like every scene. But I found Indigo to be arrogant and too cool for school. She was always 15 steps ahead of everyone so she never sweat. Therefore we were never worried for her.

Go through that opening scene in Indiana Jones and tell me that Indiana didn’t sweat. Literally every single obstacles nearly killed him. Yet Indigo could’ve touched up her make-half the times she was pursued. That’s how little danger she was in.

The Black List needs to be careful. When you hear those words – The Black List – you now associate them with “competent” rather than the word you used to use, which was “good.” It’s not the worst thing in the world to be competent. Competency is still hard to achieve in screenwriting. But a list’s job should be to get you excited about the items that are on that list. And The Black List isn’t doing that at the moment.

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

What I learned: Dramatic irony is when the audience has more information than at least one of the characters on screen. Usually, that information will imply a negative outcome for that character. There are two common ways you can use this. You can use it so that we have more information than OUR HERO. Or you can use it so that we have more information than OUR BAD GUY. Dramatic irony will always be more effective when the audience has more information than OUR HERO. Because it puts us in a state where we want to help our hero, want to scream to them to watch out, that there’s a bad guy around the corner, or that the person they’re talking to is dangerous. Early on in Indigo, Pire goes to a museum that was recently robbed by Ghost and meets with the curator, who we find out is Ghost in disguise. It’s a fairly decent dramatic irony scene, but because the scene is set up so that we have more information than OUR BAD GUY (Pire) as opposed to more information than OUR HERO (Ghost), it never gets to that next level of dramatic irony that grabs the audience by the neck. Compare it to the dramatic irony scene in Die Hard where John meets Hans on the roof, as Hans is pretending to be a hostage. In that case, we have more information than OUR HERO and that’s why the scene is more riveting. We want to scream to John, “THAT’S THE BAD GUY!” That’s why this version is always the more effective dramatic irony.

What I learned 2: I keep telling people – UPDATE THIS GENRE. Any movie idea that could’ve been written 100 years ago is going up against too much competition. It’s too hard to come up with fresh ideas in that space. Art heist movies should now be focusing on NFTs. I’ve given you your concept prompt. Now run with it!

I’ve spent so much time analyzing bad screenplays lately that it’s gotten a little depressing. This would be a good time to remind everyone that I *HATE* giving negative reviews. There are so many more benefits to reviewing good scripts. For starters, I get to read something I actually like. Which is way more enjoyable than trudging through yet another average screenplay.

But I also think you get more out of a good script than a bad one. Sure, it’s great to point out a bunch of things that aren’t working in a screenplay. But all that’s really giving you guys is stuff to avoid. And nobody writes a great script if their only focus is avoiding bad screenwriting practices.

You write great scripts because you’re inspired. And there’s nothing more inspiring than reading a great story. You also get a bunch of actionable tips you can add to your screenplay. Instead of avoiding stuff, you’re implementing new character tips, new plot tips, new scene tips, new dialogue tips, all of which you know work since you’ve seen the proof of concept with your own eyes.

So I’m glad that, at least for a day, we get to celebrate writing. I watched two great shows this weekend. The first was the finale for “Peacemaker” and the second was the new Ben Stiller-directed show on Apple TV called “Severance.” Severance follows a worker, Mark, who agrees to split his consciousness in two halves. The first half exists at work. This version of him knows nothing about his normal life. The second half exists outside of work and knows nothing about his work life.

By the way, what’s cool about this show is that it comes from a first time writer, Dan Erickson. Something I love about Red Hour Productions – Ben Stiller’s company – is that they’re open to anyone who’s got a good concept. You don’t need to be Aaron Sorkin to win them over. Them taking a chance on this neophyte writer is proof of that.

Erickson’s script actually first gained attention when it appeared on the 2016 Blood List. From there, it somehow got to Red Hour. And when Ben Stiller read it, he loved it. Stiller is always looking for things that bring both incredible comedy and incredible sadness and this script had both. Still, it took five years from when Stiller first read the script to make it to air.

Imagine waiting for that as an unknown writer. You’ve got nothing else going on. A major director loves your script but, because he’s so popular, he’s getting pitched new projects every day and, at any moment, one of those projects could catch his interest and become his priority. To wait all that time and see his show come to fruition? That’s the dream we all live for, baby!

If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s one hell of a trippy show. For example, at one point, a new worker at the company says she wants to quit. The place is too damn weird. Mark points out that if she does that, it will essentially mean she’s killing herself. “How so?” She asks. “Well, since this version of you only knows this world (the work world), once you quit, everything that’s ever happened to you here disappears from existence. That version of you would, essentially, be dead.” Chew on that for a while.

Erickson’s rise to produced writer is not what I’m here to talk about, though. I’m here to talk about what makes the show so good. And, more specifically, what makes both Severance AND Peacemaker so good. There’s got to be commonality there, right? Something that explains why these two shows were so much better than all the other trash on TV?

The answer, not surprisingly, is character. But I’m not talking character in an abstract way. I’m talking about a specific type of character. And that is the character who is built around CONTRAST.

While adding contrast to a character does not guarantee that the character will be memorable, or awesome, or compelling, it exponentially increases the chances that those three things will happen.

Let’s look at why. When you have contrast in your character, it means that the character is out of balance. And because they’re out of balance, there’s always going to be conflict within them. That conflict is going to be what makes them interesting.

Let’s say you have a devoted priest who also happens to be a serial killer. For the sake of this argument, we’ll say that he only kills bad people. Think about what this character wakes up to every morning. He has to share the word of God with his followers, despite knowing that he just brutally murdered someone last night. You can’t square that away without being in extreme conflict with yourself.

Peacemaker has a similar issue. His job is to kill people. And yet, in his heart, he’s the kindest guy in the world. This means, like the priest, he’s in constant conflict with himself. It’s never as easy as point and shoot.

You can see the value of this contrast when you compare Peacemaker to his best friend, Vigilante. Vigilante is a fun character. But he’s not compelling enough to be a lead character. “Why?” you ask. Well, Vigilante, like Peacemaker, has one job – to kill. But unlike Peacemaker, he doesn’t care that he kills. He has no resistance to it whatsoever. Without that contrast, the character is fairly one-dimensional and, therefore, only mildly compelling.

Meanwhile, what’s so fascinating about Severance, is that it builds its character around the same concept – contrast – but does so under completely different rules. Mark’s contrast comes from the fact that he’s living two separate lives. The “extremes” come in the form of his home life, where he’s a sad lonely widow, and his work life, where he’s a happy and content company man.

Just to emphasize the importance of contrast, imagine this same setup but Mark was happy at both his home and work life. Or sad at both his home and work life. You need the contrast in order to create the conflict. That’s what creates dramatic questions such as, “Which one is going to win out here? The happy Mark or the sad Mark? Who is going to win out on the tug-of-war for Mark’s consciousness?”

When you don’t apply this contrast to your main character, you get characters like Nathan Drake in Uncharted. To Uncharted’s credit, it did better than expected at the box office this weekend (50 mil if you include President’s Day). But the knock on Uncharted is its excruciatingly vanilla. And “vanilla” is always what you get when you have a hero with no contrast. The fact that nothing’s rubbing up against anything else inside of this person is what’s providing a friction-free journey.

I’m sure some of you are wondering if your screenplay is doomed without contrast. Of course not. Does John McClane have contrast? He wishes he’d worked harder to keep his marriage stable but that’s not contrast. That’s personal family issues. Contrast is easier to avoid in features because you’re only with the characters for two hours and there are other ways to make characters interesting for two hours (such as giving them family issues).

However, it is essential in television that your hero contain contrast because not only are we going to be with your story a lot longer than two hours, but TV shows rely a lot more on character than spectacle, meaning the characters must be more captivating. And one way you ensure that a character is captivating is to give them that contrast. Peacemaker will always struggle with killing. Mark will always be changing back and forth between his happy work life and sad home life.

This is one of the most valuable tools you’ll ever use as a writer and if you can effortlessly integrate it into a character so that the contrast feels organic, you’re going to create a character for the ages.

Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: A group of illegal time travelers must perform the, quite literally, heist of the century, in an attempt to steal a special time piece that, when operated, will change the course of history.
About: This script sold to Original Films and Paramount recently in a competitive situation. I didn’t realize it when I read “Relay,” but the writer, Macmillan Hedges, wrote a Black List script from a couple of years ago called Cosmic Sunday. So my entire review of this script was written before I went back and found that out. I only bring that up because, if I had known, I would’ve been better prepared for what I read today.
Writer: MacMillan Hedges
Details: 119 pages

Now today’s script is more my speed.

We’ve got time travel.

We’ve got heists.

We’ve got… well, do we need anything more than time travel and heists?

Let’s find out.

When we meet Jack Ledger, he’s stealing something from the past while being chased by his nemesis, Zoey Beckett, a time travel cop determined to take him down. This chase is special because, although they are in a foot race in the 100 year old Bismark Hotel in San Francisco, they are jumping through pockets of time. It’s 1910, it’s 1953, it’s 1969, it’s 1992. We have no idea what’s going on here and, unless you received a 1600 on your SATs, you’ll probably never find out.

Jack is able to escape to 2025 (our present) but his criminal boss, Whitechapel, betrays him, siding with Beckett and sending Jack to prison. Ten years later, Jack is released. And Jack knows why he’s released. It’s so that Whitechapel can track him to all his other time travel buddies so he can put them in the slammer as well!

Jack doesn’t care. He’s got other things on his mind. He wants to break into “the vault,” the basement of the time travel headquarters. It’s there where all the things that have been stolen from the past are being kept, including his “timepiece,” the special thing that allows you to travel through time (I think – more on that later).

To achieve this feat, Jack will need to construct a crew of people throughout time… and some from the present. Or maybe mostly from the present and a couple from throughout time. It’d be cool if they were all from throughout time but since this script was so confusing, I can’t definitively say where everyone was from. The point is, he needs to construct a “Mission Impossible” crew.

Oh, by the way, we’re told how time travel works here. During the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, a fault line was established that reconstructed time and space. Any structure along that fault line can be used to travel back through time. The older the building, the further back you can travel. Which is why really old buildings in San Francisco are so valuable to time travelers.

Anyway, for reasons that are still confusing to me, you can’t just go steal something and bring it back to the future. It’s better if you use the “relay” technique. This is where you set all your crew members in different years, and then have each heist member in the chain give it to a person who then puts it in a pouch, where it is then picked up many years later by someone else, who then puts it in another pouch and hides it for someone 30 years from then, and so on and so forth. We’re told this is done because it’s harder for the time police to catch you, if I’m to understand the rules correctly.

The ultimate goal seems to be retrieving Jack’s old timepiece. Unfortunately, we won’t know why he needs the time piece until the very end. So hold onto your shorts and get ready for one final wild twist!

Today’s script is a giant reminder that when you write time travel movies, they need to be simple. In a way, Back to the Future ruined time-travel movies because they made it look so effortless. In reality, getting these things right is nearly impossible, which is why you have to rewrite them to death. That’s what Gale and Zemeckis did. They rewrote Back to the Future so many times, their typewriters broke.

Nobody does that anymore. As a result, you get scripts like this, which have all these big ideas, but you need an industrial sized shovel to dig all those ideas up and assemble them into any sort of cohesive narrative.

The number one rule of time travel scripts is: DON’T OVERCOMPLICATE THE TIME TRAVEL PART. It’s clear, here, that the Relay rules only make sense to the writer and no one else. I don’t say that flippantly because it’s a mistake all screenwriters have made at one point or another. They write a script with incredibly complex rules and simply assume that because it makes sense to them, it’ll make sense to the reader as well.

Here’s the information we’re given about time travel in the first act. There’s something called a “timepiece” that you must have in order to time travel. I think. I’d say I’m 80% sure about that. But when you steal things in the past, instead of, you know, just taking them back with you, you for some reason have to put them in “time caches.” Little pouches. And then, in the future, you can conceivably retrieve your pouch and retrieve what’s in it.

Except you can’t just create a time pouch in 1910 and pick it up in 2025. You must have someone pick it up in 1930 and put it somewhere else. And then someone else pick it up in 1960 and move it. And then someone pick it up in 1980 and move it. And so on and so forth until we reach 2025.

Anyway, so our hero, Jack, rescues his buddy, Brigance, in 1910. They then jump to 1951. Keep in mind, I was told that you needed a timepiece to time travel and we were told that Jack got his revoked from the time travel police in the opening scene. So they don’t tell us how he is still able to jump back to 1910. They only tell us, in a side note, that “it will be explained later.” I’m serious. That’s an actual note in the script.

So I’m guessing that they jumped to 1951 because Brigance had a timepiece and he used it for both of them? Maybe. Who knows? But, for some reason, despite Brigance being able to jump them to 1951, he can’t jump them any further. For that, they need Jack’s timepiece, which is in a local church that is acting as the time travel police headquarters. I do not think the police have the timepiece in this year, though. I believe it’s still in 2025. Which is funny, cause we then jump to 2025. Except I thought we couldn’t jump to 2025……..

I think you get the idea of how confusing this is. But in case you don’t, here’s a standard line of exposition from the movie: “First we need to acquire equipment, map out each time period in The Upstart, place TimeCaches for each handoff through time and acclimatize to our designated time periods — find the specific moment for each change to the alt. timeline.” And another: “The VaultMaker never worked in The Upstart. But Whitechapel will keep a descendent nearby. As a security protocol. So we need to find that descendent. That’s how we can get access to the vault.”

Not that anyone who’s producing this will listen to me but I am making a promise to the producers of this movie that if they don’t massively – and I mean MASSIVELY – simplify the time travel in this script, this movie will fail. I know this because I have read every single time travel script of significance from the last 30 years. I know which ones succeed and I know which ones fail. And the ones that fail are the ones that have massively overly complicated rules such as this one.

I was so disappointed by this script, I can’t even tell you. I was thrilled when I saw it in my e-mail, particularly after yesterday’s yawner. Finally, we have a cool new script in a genre I like! But within the first ten pages, I knew the script was toast. Literally nothing made sense. All this crazy stuff was happening with no context for how it was happening. It was like watching a really intense dramatic dialogue scene in a foreign film without subtitles. You see that everyone in the scene is really emotional yet you can’t understand a single word they’re saying.

If I take a step back, I think I can understand the writer’s vision here: Let’s make a big time travel heist movie. In theory, I love that idea. And, if I’m making an argument for the script, the writer *is* doing what I tell everyone who writes high concepts to do. He’s creating a story that can only exist inside his movie and no other. The heist here is extremely unique.

But there are very few movies that can work which are swallowed up by exposition. And here’s something it’s pivotal to remember as a screenwriter: You decide how much exposition your script will need when you decide how many rules your script will have. The more rules you have, the more explaining you will have to do. That’s what doomed this script. There were so many darn rules that the characters spent the whole movie explaining them, and even when you’re doing your best as a writer to get all of the rules into the screenplay, it won’t matter if there’s too much to keep track of. I tell this to writers all the time: readers are not robots. We don’t simply download whatever you write. There is a limit to what we can process. And scripts like this stretch beyond our processing limits.

Everything needs to be massively simplified here for it to have a shot at being a good movie.

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

What I learned: Since you will inevitably ask the question, well then how did this sell? It’s the perfect example of the value of coming up with a big exciting concept. If people love your concept enough and want to make your movie, they will overlook weaknesses in your script. And the more they like the concept, the more they’ll overlook. This combined with the fact that The Tomorrow War set off an industry-wide need for big sci-fi ideas, and that’s how we came to this sale.

Genre: Drama?
Premise: In 1992 a seaplane crash in a lakefront community sparks a relationship between three young sisters and the mysterious, injured female pilot.
About: This script finished Top 30 on last year’s Black List. Jessica Granger has been writing on some TV shows over the last few years. Most recently, she wrote an episode of the La Brea.
Writer: Jessica Granger
Details: 103 pages

There are some scripts you pick up and, within minutes of finding out what they’re about, know there’s very little chance of you liking them. They just aren’t your thing. And that’s fine. Not every movie has to be for everyone. But this is where it becomes challenging to review a script because if you’re bored by the subject matter, it can be hard to gauge whether the script is any good or not.

I do know this. Regardless of whether I enjoy the subject matter, I can tell when dialogue is good. I can tell when a writer’s voice is fresh and unique. I didn’t like the highly controversial screenplay, “Get Home Safe.” I, in fact, hated it. But there’s no way I was denying that voice. That voice was stronger than any script that came out that year.

So I guess I’m saying, there are ways to determine if a script has value even if the subject matter isn’t to your liking. And that’s what I’ll be looking for today.

The year is 1992. It’s rural Connecticut. A beautiful place with lots of trees and lakes. But you wouldn’t know if it you talked to our 16 year old protagonist, Isla. Isla hates Connecticut and wants nothing more than to get out of this miserable town as soon as possible. Her younger sisters Elliot (13) and June (10) are a little more tolerant of their town. But maybe they just need to catch up to Isla in age and then they’ll want to escape as well.

One day, while canoeing in their lake, a small plane crashes in the nearby water. They hurry over and help the pilot, Sky (30s, half African-American), until the boat medics can show up. Later, they learn that Sky is the daughter of some guy from around here who just died. That and she’s really mysterious. She left here when she was Isla’s age and hasn’t been back since!

The mystery is answered not long after it’s posed. Sky is gay. And her father didn’t approve. So she ditched town and became a bush pilot. That’s not a play on words, I promise. She came back for the funeral and, once she’s heeled up, she’s going to leave again.

The girls take an interest in Sky, especially Isla, who finds her cool and empowering. So they make up two excuses to hang around her. One, Isla wants to interview Sky for a local radio show she does. And two, they’re going to help her fix up the crashed plane so it can fly again. Sky is resistant at first, but eventually warms to Isla, seeing a bit of herself in her, and the four develop a friendship, if only for this one summer.

So, since I can tell you’re all dying to know: Did the script make up for the subject matter with a strong voice and kick-ass dialogue?

Unfortunately, no. The dialogue was standard. And I would actually categorize this as the poster child for a voice-less script. That sounds like a diss but it actually isn’t. Not every script needs the overly-inflected voice of its author telling the story with flash and panache. One of my favorite directors ever, Robert Zemeckis, was known for having no voice. He just wanted to tell a good story.

But therein lies the problem with Candlewood. I just don’t think it’s a good story. It took me forever to figure out what the story actually was. For a long time it seemed like it was about three sisters getting to know a random bland 30 year old woman. There were no goals. The stakes were lower than sea level. And the urgency was non-existent.

Eventually, I realized, it was a coming-of-age story.

It was about this girl, Isla, trying to figure out what to do with her life. A young person living in a small town that they want to escape is the pre-text for some successful movies. But it was all told in this really blasé casual way where nothing ever felt that important.

I think that Sky being gay was supposed to be this intense plot point that made the story feel big and important. But there are so many movies and TV shows covering this subject matter right now that sexual preference goes right through the front of the head and out the back for the large majority of audience members. You gotta give us more than “Character X is gay” to move the interest needle.

I think the big mistake this script made was one I encounter every so often. Which is that when you write these “stuck in a small town coming-of-age” stories, the tendency is to have the story mirror the slow lazy environment of the setting. But if you do that, you risk the story feeling too casual. Which is exactly what this felt like.

One of the ways to offset this is to include some monster stakes. Make the stakes sky-high. That way even though the story is slow, we feel like it’s building toward an important conclusion. Sky had zero stakes attached to her story. And I didn’t give a crap if Isla left town or not. To be honest, I found her ungrateful. She grew up in this idyllic town and her single mother is doing everything she can to prepare her for life and it’s not enough for her.

When it comes to coming-of-age stories, I much prefer when writers come up with a PLOT. Instead of plopping your characters down in a town and having them wander about, dealing with whatever randomness comes up that day, give them something big and important to do. The classic example that comes to mind is Stand by Me. They could’ve easily written that movie so that the four kids stayed in town and dealt with jerky bullies for 2 hours. But by creating this road-trip aspect, they provided their coming-of-age movie with purpose and structure. Going on that trip to find the dead kid is what made it feel like a movie.

I think the hope here was that Sky was a strong enough hook to make this a movie. She was, in theory, just as compelling as four kids traveling by themselves through the woods to find a dead body. I couldn’t disagree more. I found her to be both boring and predictable. Again, we’re seeing gay characters doing so much more these days than deal with parents who don’t accept their sexual preference. I feel like that’s a very dated storyline. And yes, I know this is set in 1992, but that doesn’t give you a pass. It’s still dated character storyline.

There wasn’t anything in this script I could connect with, unfortunately.

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

What I learned: I think writers still make the mistake of forgetting that they’re writing A MOVIE. The two hours that someone sits down to watch a movie must be time significantly better spent than doing something else. A movie is supposed to be a special experience. It’s supposed to be something someone leaves thinking, “Wow, am I glad I saw that.” Writing a slow casual story where the biggest plot moments register a 3.3 on the Richter scale, that’s not good enough. Or else write for TV. TV allows for these slower stories to take shape. But not movies. Movies need some thunder behind them. And this script was a light drizzle.

REMINDER: A quick reminder that you have one month left! The month of March on Scriptshadow will be me guiding you through your first act. Which means you still have a month to figure out a great concept. If you’re on the fence and need feedback, I do logline evaluations for $25. You get a 150-300 word analysis, a logline rewrite, and a 1-10 rating. My threshold for whether a concept is “write-worthy” is a 7 out of 10. So you’ll instantly know if you have a keeper on your hands. E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com if you need help.

Flashbacks.

Around here we call them “flashbads.” Cause it’s never a good time to use flashbacks.

Remind me again why that is, Carson. It’s because movies work best when every scene pushes the story forward. When you’re flashing back, you are obviously violating that rule. I mean, the word “back” is literally inside the word “flashback.” That should tell you everything you need to know.

This topic is all up in my face this year because The Book of Boba Fett is obsessed with flashbacks. The majority of the first four episodes were set in the past.

Now I don’t want to get too sidetracked but since I think it’s part of the larger picture, I’ll bring it up: The Book of Boba Fett is a total mess. The last two episodes have contained three seconds of Boba Fett…… IN A SHOW CALLED ‘THE BOOK OF BOBA FETT!’

There’s clearly something weird going on behind the scenes. I don’t know what it is. But this cannot have been the original plan. My theory is that they didn’t complete the overall set of scripts for The Book of Boba Fett, necessitating that they pull in the first few episodes of Mandalorian Season 3, which had already been shot, and shoehorn them into this show.

The reason I bring this up in relation to today’s article is because the flashback issue in Boba Fett is clearly a symptom of a bigger problem. They didn’t know what to do with this series. They didn’t have a story. And when you don’t have a story, you run in place. Think about it. How can you move your characters forward if you don’t know where they’re going?

That’s when, as writers, we get these ideas that we think are good at the time – “Let’s go back to Boba’s past and see how he got here” – when in reality, we’re procrastinating the story. We’re writing about sh*t that doesn’t matter since it’s set in the past. No matter how much depth it adds to the character, you still haven’t moved the present-day story forward, and that’s caused the audience to get bored.

Which brings me to Station 11.

Station 11 is this weird show on HBO Max. It covers a pandemic that wipes out 99% of the population. And we cut to 20 years later where a traveling Shakespeare Theater Company goes from apocalyptic small town to apocalyptic small town, putting on plays. The central character is a woman named Kirstin, who tends to play the lead character in all their plays.

The structure of Station 11 is a bit schizophrenic. While we do spend a fair amount of time with the Shakespeare Company, we’re constantly flashing back to before the pandemic, to the early days of the pandemic, and to a year after the pandemic.

And we’re doing it with multiple characters. Sometimes we follow Young Kirstin and the man who saved her, Jeevan. Sometimes we’re covering movie star Arthur, a man who died of the virus on day 1 but who’s left a strong influence on many of the other characters, including Kirstin, who was in his play. Sometimes we’re covering headstrong Miranda, who was once married to Arthur, and who has written a graphic novel called “Station 11” that plays into the story in a myriad of ways.

Anyway, something funny happened as I took in the first few episodes of the show. I found that I enjoyed the flashbacks. And not just enjoyed. I looked forward to them! Being a person who loves to deal in absolutes, this blew up my newfound theory that The Book of Boba Fett had enshrined upon my screenwriting coda – that all flashbacks were bad. Obviously, flashbacks could be good. So what was it that Station 11 did that Book of Boba Fett did not?

Before I answer that, let me first acknowledge that when it comes to flashbacks, more so than many other aspects of screenwriting, there is gray area. It’s not always clear why flashbacks don’t work sometimes and do work other times. What I do know, however, is that they usually don’t work. Which is why I advise against using them. But since there are examples of them working, it’s worth figuring out why.

The biggest reason that The Book of Boba Fett flashbacks failed is because they filled in a storyline that was unnecessary to know. There was nothing about Boba Fett being helped by sand people that affected the present day story. It affected a few things about his character, such as the way he fought. It also made him more forgiving and nicer.

But one of the best ways to identify whether a flashback is needed is to ask yourself, “Does the present day story suffer if I get rid of this flashback?” I would argue, 100 times out of 100, that nothing in the present day story changes if you eliminate Boba’s flashbacks. That’s how you know they’re not needed. “Let’s get to know him a little better” is never a good motivation to write flashbacks. Flashbacks need to do more than that to justify their existence.

One of my favorite storylines in Station 11 is the relationship between Young Kirstin and Jeevan. What happens is that Jeevan is at a play right before the pandemic. Spoilers, obviously. In the play, Arthur dies onstage. In the chaos that ensues, Young Kirstin, who has a part in the play, has no one to take her home. So Jeevan reluctantly offers to take her. But when they get to her house, nobody is home. So Jeevan has to take her back to his place. That’s when he gets the phone call about the virus and Jeevan and Young Kirstin get stuck together as the virus cascades over the city.

When we cut to the 20-years-later storyline, we have Kirstin. But we have no Jeevan. And here’s where Station 11 establishes why its flashbacks actually matter. We now want to know what the hell happened to Jeevan. Why is he gone? It’s a mystery. And every time we cut back to Young Kirstin and Jeevan, we get a little more information on what happened to them.

In addition to this, the writers of Station 11 established conflict between Jeevan and Young Kirstin. He’s resentful towards Kirstin. He was supposed to be able to leave her at her home and go. Instead, he’s been made responsible for this girl, which is something he never wished for. So there’s a burden there that creates an ongoing unresolved conflict between the two. And the reason that’s relevant is because conflict is what generates entertainment in scenes. If the two were hunky-dory, their scenes would not be interesting. It’s the fact that he doesn’t want to be responsible for this girl, combined with the fact that he isn’t around in the future, which has us asking, “What happened?” And makes us actually look forward to the flashbacks.

Another big flashback sequence occurs in episode 5. In this flashback, Clark, an actor who used to do stage work with Arthur before Arthur became a movie star, gets stuck at a small airport at the early stages of the pandemic. At first, everyone at the airport thinks it’s your average delay. But, the next thing you know, it’s been five days, and then ten, and then 30. So we watch it play out as the people realize they’re stranded here. This is their new home.

Theoretically, this episode should not work. Up to this point, Clark has been an ancillary character. All of a sudden, he’s getting his own episode. Shouldn’t this fall under the same blanket as the Boba Fett episodes? Will the present day story still work if this flashback is eliminated? It probably would. And yet, this was one of the best episodes of the series. Why?

This is where we enter the gray area of screenwriting theory. The reason this flashback episode works is because it’s a really good story. You’ve got all the ingredients for a good story in place. These people get stuck at the airport. A worldwide pandemic hits in real time. They realize nobody’s coming for them. They have to live there. They have to make rules. There are some people who don’t like the rules so they push back, causing conflict. At a certain point, one of them may be infected. The actions the group takes towards the infected character up the intensity considerably. We’re curious if the airport group is going to make it or if they’ll implode. It’s an interesting story.

In the spirit of debate, I would bet that the writers of Boba Fett would argue that Boba being captured by the sand people was, likewise, a good story. That the viewers would be caught up with what the sand people did to him and how he escaped them. And they’d love the fact that Boba eventually befriended the sand people and they worked together to take on the bad guys who were raiding their land.

This is where storytelling becomes subjective. I thought that storyline was C+ at best. It wasn’t very compelling. We never got to know any of the sand people well enough to care that their land was being stolen. The drama was mild. The plot development was standard stuff we’ve seen a million times before. You never felt like you NEEDED to know what happened next. Whereas, with that airport episode in Station 11, there were several developments (one of which included a plane full of dead infected people) that definitely pushed the plot forward in interesting ways.

That may be what flashbacks come down to. If you can justify a flashback’s existence (it must affect the present-day story in some purposeful way) then it comes down to the exact same challenge you deal with in writing your present-day stuff: Are you telling a good story? The airport story was way more intricate, way better thought-out, and had way better reveals, than the sand people storyline in Boba Fett. So we were more eager to see it through.

But just remember this. While a film or a show can withstand slow scenes here and there, it cannot withstand slow scenes IN ADDITION TO a slog of a flashback story. Which is why it’s so important to scrutinize the addition of flashbacks. A lot of writers just add flashbacks to fill up the time. They don’t add them because they’re essential or because they want to use them to tell a story they can’t tell in the present. And that’s what you need to do to justify your use of flashbacks.

Now some of you might be saying, “But Carson. You’re talking about TV shows here. They have a different set of rules than movies.” That’s true but it’s also false. Let’s be real. TV shows have become long movies in disguise. So they should still operate under that same mantra of: KEEP THE STORY MOVING FORWARD. That’s not to say you can never use flashbacks. But if you do, they better be justified. And they better be damn entertaining.

Anybody else see Station 11? What did you think about the flashbacks?