“I want the truth!”

Every time I put the month’s logline winners up for Logline Showdown, I always get a dozen comments that amount to, “THIS IS THE BEST YOU HAVE????” I get it. It’s the internet. We want perfection. We want the posts on our terms. I do it as well on other sites.

But, just so you have more context, I want you to see the loglines that aren’t making it so you can better appreciate the ones that do. Because it’s hard to come up with a good concept and it’s hard to write a good logline. I think Scott said this – just being able to come up with a sentence that sounds normal is difficult. Much less one that effortlessly conveys a compelling movie idea.

For those interested, we do a Logline Showdown every month. Send in your title, genre, and logline. I pick the five best. You guys vote for your favorite. The logline that gets the most votes gets a script review the following week. We’ve found several good scripts already. Let’s find some more! Here are the details for the next showdown…

JUNE LOGLINE SHOWDOWN!

When: June 23rd
Deadline: June 22nd, 10pm Pacific Time
Where: e-mail all submissions to carsonreeves3@gmail.com
What: include title, genre, and logline

If you’re struggling with your loglines, you can always get a logline consultation from me. They’re 25 bucks. E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com and I’ll have feedback to you within 24 hours.

Okay, let’s take a look at some of the loglines that didn’t make it into the showdown and why. Actually, none of these loglines are bad. But they were all missing something. Let’s find out what those somethings were.

Title: Unwind
Genre: Dark Comedy/Mystery
Logline: Desperate for new material after her editor rejects her article, a high school journalist teams up with her ex-boyfriend to uncover a school conspiracy when she discovers a photo of a paraplegic kid standing on two legs.

Analysis: The first thought that went through my head when I finished reading this logline was, “So what?” The stakes don’t feel very high. Why do I care about a random kid who may have been faking his paraplegic-ness? In the writer’s defense, it’s a comedy. And the stakes for comedy scripts don’t have to be as high. But there’s something underwhelming about this mystery that’s preventing me from feeling that excitement I need in order to open a script. That’s not to say the script would be bad. If the writer’s got a really witty and sardonic voice, the script could work. But I’m just going off the logline and the logline isn’t giving me a big enough reason to care.  This is one of those scripts that I’d read if someone else told me it was great.  But it’s not a script that wins me over on the logline alone.  Which is a good lesson for every screenwriter trying to write a spec screenplay.  Try to win us over with your concept alone.  It shouldn’t need any extra convincing.

Title: Kill and Make-up
Genre: Satire
Logline: Down on her luck and bearing the weight of her world, flight attendant Amanda meets Bailey, a solipsistic psychopathic serial killer, who might just be her key to happiness.

Breakdown: Fun title. Nice play on words. And the story is kind of intriguing. A love story with a serial killer. There’s some nice irony there. But it feels like it’s missing that element to put it over the top. Like the logline from a couple of months ago where the serial killer was done killing but then went to the engagement party of her rich fiancé and had to do everything within her power not to kill his insufferable family. There was more of a story there, more of a plot. This logline is an idea. “I fell in love with a serial killer.” But where’s the plot? What’s the end goal? Finally, I’ve included a lot of serial killer loglines on the Logline Showdown this year. And I just didn’t want to include another one so soon. That’s a tough reality about the industry. Sometimes you have a good idea but the producers you send the idea to just made a movie like that or they just started developing a movie like that. Your logline could just be bad timing. Which is one of many reasons not to take rejection personally.

Title: Influence
Genre: Horror/Comedy
Logline: A group of influencers stranded at the shoddy island resort they’ve been promoting is terrorized by a manipulative entity that wants to harness their immense reach.

Breakdown: There’s not enough meat on the bone here. We’ve got a group of influencers. They’re stuck together in some scary situation. This is a VERY COMMON setup right now. Lots of writers are starting with a similar premise to this. Which means you have to differentiate your idea somehow. An entity that “wants to harness their immense reach” is not enough of a differentiation. To be honest, I don’t know want that means. It’s not specific enough. A logline needs to place an image in the reader’s head. When you are vague, you are doing the opposite of that. We can’t imagine anything. And if we’re not imagining the movie, we’re not going to request your script. I would rewrite the second half of this logline and BE SPECIFIC.

Title: Wicked Morning Star
Genre: Horror
Logline: In 1986, two ambitious girls obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons, heavy metal, and Lucifer ritually sacrifice a wealthy classmate and attempt to conceal the crime as their friends gather for his birthday party in the basement where they’ve hidden his body.

Breakdown: When I read this logline, I have a couple of concerns. One, you’re asking us to root for two people who killed someone. There is a chance, of course, that you’ve made them sympathetic and the victim unsympathetic, so that we’re okay with the killing. But that’s the thing about loglines. There is no context. We don’t know for sure. Going off just the logline, I don’t want to give these killers my time. The other issue is that the idea feels small. I’m imagining this small basement, since all basements are small. I guess they’ve put him in a trunk or something. And the appeal of the story is, “Will someone find out?” But I only see that trick working for a few scenes, 30 pages at most. We’re not going to be on the edge of our seats on page 75, still wondering if Lucy is going to look inside that trunk and find the body. The gimmick will be up by then. So those two issues are the reason I didn’t feature this logline.

Title: The Men in White
Genre: Supernatural Thriller/Action
Logline: When Mikey McKay, a kind but dimwitted drug dealer, dies searching for his missing brother, the two mysterious Men in White appear to protect Mikey from the dangers of purgatory and guide him to the portal to Heaven before his soul disappears forever.

Breakdown: You don’t usually want to include character names in loglines. It tends to be a rookie move. Which means the reader’s going to assume you’re a beginner writer, which means they’ll be less likely to request your script. The exception is when your hero’s name is in the title (Forrest Gump, Jerry Maguire). But you should stay away from this if possible. From there, it’s too standard of a premise. I get pitched a lot of concepts where somebody dies and they have to do something before they can get to heaven. The more original the plot is between the death and getting to heaven, the more likely I am to request the script. This seems like a vanilla version of that journey. He has to avoid bad ghosty people and get to heaven. Feels like we’re missing that sexy “strange attractor” that amps an idea like this up.

Title: No Body Recovered
Genre: Horror/Thriller
Logline: After escaping a brutal police raid on his unhoused community, a wounded man flees downriver in search of his missing dog; desperate for survival, he accepts help from a local bowfisherman who unveils a sinister plan — remove the unhoused from his river one by one.

Breakdown: There may be something to this idea but the fact that I had to read the logline four times before I mostly understood it is a problem. First of all, “unhoused” is a weird word. I was annoyed that I had to look it up. I suppose it’s the latest politically correct way to refer to homeless people. But even if you get past that, this missing dog enters the equation out of nowhere. So I guess this is a “look for your dog” movie now? Then, also out of nowhere, a bow fisherman appears. That seems like a random character type to be introduced into this story. And then the bow fisherman wants to kill all the homeless people, I think? Or just scare them off? It’s a little unclear. But then he’s also going to help our hero find his dog? Even though he hates that our hero is homeless? Or does he not know he’s homeless and that’s why he agrees to help him? Or are you saying that, that’s the inciting incident of the story, in which case, they’re now mortal enemies? Our hero will look for his dog while the bow fisherman tries to hunt him? As you can see, the fact that there’s so much going on here makes it difficult to identify what’s happening. And the second a reader is unclear what the story is, THEY’RE OUT. They don’t give you a second chance. Cause the way they see it is: If you can’t be clear in one sentence, why would I expect you to write a clear 20,000 word story?

Title: 21 Shots
Genre: Slasher Comedy
Logline: On the eve of her sister’s wedding, a woman takes 21 shots to ring in her 21st birthday. When she wakes to a room full of dead friends, she must retrace her 21 shots to figure out the killer before the wedding begins… or the killer finds her.

Breakdown: Another confusing logline. I understood the story up to the point where she takes 21 shots to ring in her 21st birthday. So far so good. She then wakes up to a room full of dead friends. Okay, a mystery. It seems a little excessive but I’m still giving the logline a chance. Things fall apart with this segment: “she must retrace her 21 shots to figure out the killer.” How does one retrace 21 separate shots? “Hmm, I took my first shot over at the bed here. Then I took my second by the piano. Then my third in the bathroom.” Wouldn’t you be done with that investigation after five minutes?  Also, how is that going to help her solve the mystery? If you get past that, you run into the logline’s biggest problem: who cares about making it to the wedding WHEN ALL YOUR FRIENDS ARE DEAD!!!!???? I’m pretty sure getting to the wedding is the least of your worries at that point. Not to mention, instead of figuring out where your 17th shot was, why not just call the cops? There are just too many questions that pop up with this logline.

Title: The Girl Who Lived
Genre: horror
Logline: A young woman must survive a night of horrific attacks both by the living and the dead when she sets out to discover why she was the lone survivor of a mysterious plane crash as a child.

Breakdown: Tal complains a lot that his loglines don’t get picked so I thought I’d extend him the courtesy of explaining why I didn’t pick his latest submission. To start, why isn’t “horror” capitalized?  You want to put your best foot forward.  It’s not a dealbreaker but it implies you’re not taking the submission seriously – that you’re rushing through it.   — Like a lot of Tal’s loglines, this sort of feels like a movie but, at least for me, I’m having trouble connecting the first part with the second part. She’s going to finally solve the mystery of being the only survivor of a plane crash. So as soon as she looks into that, random living and dead people start attacking her? I don’t get it. The fact that it’s not one or the other (dead or alive) scatters the focus of the idea, weakening its impact. If it was just ghosts that went after her – preferably dead passengers she remembers from the flight – at least then there’s a logical connection between the first part of the logline and the second. But trying to solve a plane crash mystery and having dead and alive people all try to kill you – it’s just not a very eloquent idea. It feels messy. Blunt. Quickly cobbled together without any self-scrutiny. I commend Tal for putting these elements in his idea that are high concept and sexy (plane crash, ghosts). But neither of those elements connect to one another in a harmonious way, at least from how they’re presented in the logline.

Title: Parousia
Genre: Psychological Horror
Logline: An apprehensive pregnant couple, still haunted by a past miscarriage at the hands of a doctor, go to a remote midwifery for the perfect birth but strange occurrences and sinister undertones soon signal the experience may not be so idyllic after all.

Breakdown: This is a good example of an intriguing logline that falls apart in the home stretch. I see this ALL THE TIME. You get to the part of the logline that may actually seal the deal. Then you shroud it in a fog of mystery. I get why this happens. You’re thinking: “I must create mystery!”  But that’s one of the more common misconceptions about loglines – that you want to be mysterious. You actually want to tell the reader exactly what they’re going to get. You do this because reading a script is a business proposition. People will take the time to read your script because they think it might make them money. It’s not an enjoyment proposition, like paying for a ticket to go see a movie. That’s a different type of pitch and, therefore, one where mystery can be strategically infused.  Know the difference!

Title: Her Deafening Silence
Genre: Thriller
Logline: After a violent attack leaves her with a debilitating hearing disorder, a reclusive assault survivor fights to maintain her sanity as visions of her assailant and a distant, mysterious scream threaten her isolated existence.

Breakdown: You’re not giving us a movie here. You’re giving us a short film. I’m not saying that your script doesn’t have a full movie in it. But this logline? This logline implies a story that is, at most, 15 minutes long. A deaf person starts hearing a scream in the distance. Where’s the plot? Is it that the scream keeps getting louder? Closer? Okay. But screams happen all the time in horror movies. That’s not big enough to build an entire story around. I get the sense that there’s more that happens in this script. But then that needs to be in the logline. We need to be able to see the plot of the movie in order to gauge whether it’s something we’d be interested in.

Get a Script Consultation With Carson for $100 OFF! – In addition to logline consultations, I do full screenplay consultations, pilot script consultations, outline consultations, first act consultations. Anything you need help with, I can help! If you mention this article, I will give 100 dollars off a feature or pilot consultation to the first four people who e-mail me. :). E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com

Today’s short story receives such a bad rating, I had to revert back to Scriptshadow 1.0 to give it.

Genre: Apocalyptic/Drama
Premise: A college professor is annoyed by the death of a mid-level banker during the end of the world.
About: This is another Stephen King short story sale. It comes from the collection, “If it Bleeds.” It has Darren Aronofsky on board to produce (not direct). Two other stories from the collection have already been purchased. “Rat” by Ben Stiller and “Mr. Harrigan’s Phone” by John Lee Hancock.
Writer: Stephen King
Details: About 120 pages

It used to be that, when you talked about Stephen King, you talked about what a great writer he was. Nowadays, when you talk about King, it’s usually because of some spat he’s having with Elon Musk on Twitter.

It’s kind of sad. But it hasn’t affected his ability to sell his content to Hollywood. Almost every King story that gets written, gets optioned. The man has the Midas touch. Then again, nobody has seen The Life of Chuck Yet.  When they do, it could end King’s career…. for good.

Marty is an English professor at a small college in New England. He’s dealing with the deterioration of the internet, which only works sporadically these days. This is because the world’s infrastructure has been falling apart over the last year.

California has fallen into the Pacific Ocean. Florida is, basically, gooey swampland. Food shortages mean that In and Outs are closing down (not in King’s story, just my personal guess). It’s bad, man.

Amongst it all, Marty is mesmerized by the local bank’s billboards and commercials that keep popping up promoting Charles “Chuck” Krantz, who has just retired after giving the bank 39 great years. Or they’re congratulating him for his life and dying at 39 years old. The story is so shabbily written, it’s not clear which of those is the case. But the point is, there are ads everywhere celebrating Chuck Krantz’s contributions and Marty is annoyed by it.

We then find out that Chuck is on a respirator because of a brain tumor. And then he dies. This sends us into Act 2, nine months prior, where an ignorant-to-his-sickness Chuck dances. That’s right. The second act is a dance.

Chuck goes downtown to work, stops in front of some guys playing the drums on the street. He decides to dance. Everyone cheers. Some girl hops in and dances with him. The song ends. They bask in the post-glow excitement. Then they go back to their normal lives.

The final act sends us back even further into Chuck’s life when he was a kid where we basically watch him grow up. We hit all the low-points, like his parents and grand-parents dying – uplifting stuff – before a semi-adult Chuck walks solemnly around the house his grandfather left him. The end.

In an industry that has fully embraced the short story and given out huge monetary rewards for writing these stories, The Life of Chuck has thrown its hat into the ring to win the “worst short story ever” contest.

I’m not exaggerating when I say this may be the worst short story I’ve ever read.

It’s bizarre because you pick up a Stephen King story and you expect to be a) entertained and b) learn something about the craft. A) I was the opposite of entertained.  What I went through could better be categorized as torture. And b) The only thing I learned is that Stephen King doesn’t care about writing good stories anymore.

The first act of the story starts off well. The internet is barely working. There’s word that California is falling into the ocean. End-of-the-world scenarios are movie catnip. We moviegoers love them. I love them. So I was intrigued to see where this was going.

Then King leans heavily into, basically, a PSA about the environment. It was as if the story stopped and King, the activist, transported himself in.  I remember back when King used to talk about theme in writing.  He would write the best story possible then, while rewriting it, he’d search for a theme and place more emphasis on it.  These days, he seems to be starting with the theme.  His stuff just doesn’t work nearly as well with that approach.

The irony is that the first act was still the best part of the The Life of Chuck.  Because at least in the first act, things are happening. The world is falling apart.

The second act is about a middle-aged man dancing. That’s it! That’s what 50 pages are about. A man, Chuck, is walking to work, happens to spot a drummer, starts dancing, is joined by a random younger woman, and they dance while everyone cheers. And that’s the second act!!

If you’re waiting for a point to emerge, get in line. I would not be surprised if King wrote this 120 pages short story in half an hour. Cause there is no fore-thought put into it. There are no setups or payoffs. None of what happens before connects to what happens after. It’s random to the extreme.

Then, the final act – the part of your story that’s supposed to go out with a bang – is just backstory!!!! Long drawn-out boring backstory. Parents died in a car crash (wow, that’s original. I only read about 50 scripts a year that have a car crash backstory). Grandparents die one at a time. And, in between, Chuck sits around so that King can fill us in on whatever other pointless moments in Chuck’s life he can think of.

This is baaaaaad, guys.

I understand that King’s name has weight in the business. But did they read this story??????? Cause this is the worst thing he’s ever written. And you’re going to put it out there for people to see who are going to make fun of you for the next 25 years for it.

Actually, I take that back. This isn’t bad in a fun way where people make fun of it. It’s bad in a sad way. In that way where, the second you finish it, you’ve forgotten it. Nobody will remember this movie for more than three minutes.

There’s this moment in the story where Marty is going to visit his ex-wife, gets to her house at night, then proceeds to notice that every single window in every single house as far down as you can see, all contain a reflection of the “Thanks Chuck” billboard.

It is not explained to us why this happens. It is not explained to us how it happens. It’s as if King’s 10 year old grandson stumbled into the room while he was writing, mumbled, “window reflection” and King just wrote the moment into the book without missing a beat. I cannot emphasize how sloppy and random every choice in this story was.

The only logical reason I can come up with for why they bought this story would be the first act. The first act is all about the world falling apart. California falls into the ocean. The South is a dust bowl. Florida is a swampland. Sinkholes are everywhere. There is no longer enough farmland which means people start starving. Worst of all, the internet stops working.

All of that stuff is very cinematic. So maybe they’ll use that as a jumping-off point for a different story than the one that is told here. Because if they bring in Chuck Krantz, they are signing this movie’s death warrant. Chuck Krantz is the worst character in American history. He will depress you, he will bore you, he will make you never want to read again.

One of the tell-tale signs of bad writing is when the reader stops reading, stares off into space, looks back down at the book, and says to himself, “What is this about?” I must have done that two-dozen times.

Fiction has hit a new low-point.  So much so that I’m bringing back a retro rating to rate this script.

[x] Trash
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Backstory is non-story. Part of me thinks King is trolling us by making his climax the least interesting part of any book – backstory. But by putting it on display at such a critical juncture, it highlights just how little payoff backstory provides. Unless you have some sort of extremely unique and interesting backstory or event your main character has gone through that is IMPERATIVE for the reader to know in order for your movie to work, avoid backstory like the plague. Throw it in there in little bits and pieces (Ferris Bueller to Cameron on the phone: “You’ve been saying that since the second grade.”). But, otherwise, avoid it like you would avoid this book.

If I had to guess why Fast and Furious didn’t do boffo numbers this weekend (it came in at 67 million – Fast 7, six years ago, made 150 million its first weekend), I’d venture it’s for the same reason I chose not to see the film myself – It doesn’t look different enough from previous incarnations of the franchise.

In Fast’s defense, it becomes difficult to differentiate yourself when you’ve had nine sequels. But it is doable. When I look back at the Fast franchise, there are three things that have gotten me to watch their films. One: doing something different. I liked the Tokyo Drift angle cause they were trying to do something different from the first two films.

Two, they promoted an action scene that was so amazing, you couldn’t not go. That fuel robbery action scene on moving fuel trucks was one of the coolest action sequences I’ve ever seen in my life. It was also the best edited action scene I’ve ever seen.

And the last thing they do well is stunt casting. They bring in some name that bathes the entire franchise in a new exciting light. That was the case with The Rock. The Rock vs. Vin Diesel? Sign me up!

They went with choice number 3 again this time around but they crapped the bed with their casting. Jason Mamoa. I’ve taken naps more interesting than Jason Mamoa’s performances. Bless Jason. He seems like a genuine guy. But the man does not move any of the needles on the dashboard.

If they want to bring us back for Fast 11, they need to do all three. New fresh concept. Come up with the best action set-piece in the entire franchise. And give us the coolest stunt-casting ever. Maybe a de-aged Jean Claude Van Damme AND a de-aged Steven Seagall? I’m kidding. Or am I? (I’m not)

I’ve been keeping tabs on the Cannes Film Festival. And by keeping tabs, I mean keeping track of how long each standing ovation is. It’s tough to keep up. At one point, a random journalist came back from the bathroom, crossing in front of the audience, and ended up getting an impromptu 3 minute standing ovation.

Indiana Jones got a respectable 5 minute standing ovation but word on the street is that the movie is kind of a mess. Indiana is running up against the same issue Fast and Furious is, which is that you’re attempting to squeeze a new experience out of an old ratty towel.

But you know what? I DON’T CARE. Because it’s Indiana Jones and even though I got burned worse than twice-cooked toast with Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, there’s nothing quite like the Indiana Jones experience. I’m doing my best to avoid spoilers and I’m hoping that the de-aged Indiana Jones stuff figures out a way to get us some vintage Indiana.

On Saturday night, Killers of the Flower Moon got a NINE MINUTE standing ovation, a full six minutes more than Bathroom Guy. I’m bit a torn about this movie. As you remember, I loved the book. LOVED IT. It was so freaking good. And the trailer they just released? A-PLUS. Stunning. Best trailer all year. Maybe even the best in the last five years.

But listening to the press conferences of the movie, it seems like they’ve made a major change to the book. The story of the Osage is, no doubt, sad. But what balanced out that sadness was the investigation into who was doing the killing of these Osage members. The author had built this procedural element into the mix, which had us curiously turning the pages. And that made it exciting.

But, apparently, Scorsese took that out. Which has turned the movie into one giant sad-fest. Maybe even a moralizing sad-fest. If their plan here is to make people feel bad for things other people did 150 years ago? I don’t want to be rude but go walk barefoot in a room full of loose legos.

Sure, if you go that route, it gets you standing ovations and pats on the back from people within the industry, not to mention those back pats you’re giving yourself. But it leaves audiences feeling cold. No actual moviegoers want to see a movie designed to make them feel bad about themselves.

What I’m hoping is that this is just the media doing its media thing. They have to play up these narratives cause it makes them feel good about themselves. But the reality is, we moviegoers just want a good movie. That’s it! We don’t want to be preached to. So, hopefully, that’s what this movie is. Because I’m rooting for this film. I want it to be great. It’s such an interesting story. And I’m a sucker for a great ironic premise, which is exactly what this is.

I have a feeling it’s going to be a neck-and-neck Oscar battle between this and Oppenheimer. I can’t wait to see who wins.

Okay! I’m going to finish up with a quick script-to-screen breakdown of “Air.”

I LOVED the “Air” script. It made my top 25. What made the script so good was that it FLEW BY. It had a great underdog main character whose relentless determination gave the story incomparable momentum. You both loved Sonny Vaccaro and were swept up by his pursuit of Michael Jeffrey Jordan (whose face is never seen in the script or film – love it!).

For these reasons, I was more than excited to see what it looked like in movie form. I knew that, if it hit on all cylinders, it had the potential to be the next Jerry Maguire.

I probably shouldn’t have placed those expectations on it. No, the movie isn’t bad. But it’s not nearly as good as the script. And there is one big reason for that: It doesn’t look like a movie.

It looks like a student film.

I’m sorry but it does. This is Ben Affleck’s worst directing effort to date. And while Matt Damon may not have phoned it in, he occasionally barks it in from the other room.

The entire movie feels like it was done via a series of second takes. Not a single scene feels thought-through or lived in. You could practically hear the A.D. saying, “We’re running out of time. We gotta keep moving. You only get two takes for this setup!”

Matt Damon is giving us these perfunctory performances where you can sense that he hasn’t fully memorized his lines. Compare his acting in this movie to Good Will Hunting where you could tell he’d tried EVERY SINGLE ANGLE in every one of those scenes so he knew what worked best by the time the camera was rolling. Not even remotely the case here.

And where is the money? Show it to me!

Where’s the money on the screen?? That’s one of the ways you can tell a good director. They can make a movie look amazing for way less money than they wanted. This film is the opposite! It cost 90 million dollars! Yet it looks like a 15 million dollar film!!! They shot it in a bunch of rooms! I could’ve done that.

The one set they built – Nike headquarters – is dark, boring, and empty. Where are the people??? Could you not afford extras?  Compare that to the agency set in Jerry Maguire. You could feel the life in that set. Here, it looks like they turned half the lights off to save money.

You may say, Carson, the money is in Matt Damon and Ben Affleck! They’re movie stars. You gotta pay for that. Sorry: BUT NO! This is Matt and Ben’s first movie for their new production company. They shouldn’t be getting paid anything. They should be putting every single dollar on screen.

I cannot emphasize how lifelessly this was directed. It was as if they went to each actor’s home and did close-ups and had them read lines and then stitched the performances together via clever editing. Go watch this film. It’s 90% talking heads in dark rooms. What is this? A 1970s TV show??? Where did the money go???? 90 million dollars!?? Robert Rodriquez made a better looking film for 7000 dollars!!!

I’m baffled.

But you know what? This shows the power of a great script. The movie survived this dreadful display of directing solely because of how good the script was. Even with Matt Damon getting his lines phoned in through an earpiece, the dialogue was still good. His character’s desire to sign Michael Jordan kept us engaged.

But it never ceases to amaze me how a director’s interpretation of a script can screw up what the original author had in mind. The directing here needed a shot of adrenaline. Ben Affleck is a good director. He won an Oscar! Which is why I will never understand what he was thinking with this one.

A secret about screenwriting that only the tippy-top screenwriters know

One of the weirder things I’ve learned about screenwriting over the years is that there are things that work in a script that don’t work in a movie and there are things that work in a movie that don’t work in a script. Understanding why this bizarro process takes place can help you elevate your scenes – especially your dialogue scenes – to another level.

For example, montages work great in movies. Montages don’t work very well in scripts. That’s because movies are great for images and music. But you can’t see images and can’t hear music when you’re reading a script. In a screenplay, a montage is just a bunch of factual description a reader has to read through. Where’s the fun in that?

On the flip side, limited characters and limited locations work great in scripts because everybody who reads a screenplay wants it to read fast. So they love it when there’s any setup with 2-3 characters, minimal description, and a lot of dialogue. So if you have two characters trapped on a tower talking most of the time (“Fall”), a reader can get through that script in 30 minutes. It’s a dream read.

However, limited location movies, especially if they’re set somewhere stagnant, like a basement (the Duffer Brothers’ “Hidden”) become very boring on screen. That screenplay that read faster than lightning is boring to watch because it’s aesthetically boring to look at.  Same background and little-to-no movement aren’t exactly cinematic.

This opens up a “4-D Chess” strategy to screenwriting because you’re now making choices about whether to write something that’s going to work in the script even if you know it’s not going to work in the movie (good idea for spec writers), or something that’s going to work in the movie even though it doesn’t work in the script (good idea for a writer who’s already hired). In other words, do you write for the ‘great read’ or do you write for the ‘great movie?’

It’s an interesting topic that I was thinking about the other day because I watched this show where, in a scene, two girl friends (I forgot their names but we’ll call them Sara and Nancy) needed to have a discussion about whether Nancy was going to marry her fiancé.

Whenever you have two people trying to work out a problem via dialogue, there’s a lot of variety in where you can set the scene. Theoretically, you can place a conversation anywhere. So, in this case, the writer placed it at a gym. Sara and Nancy were doing a workout routine with one of those giant tires that you flip over again and again. And, while doing so, they talked about whether the fiancé was marriage material.

The scene was actually okay, mostly because you were invested in the characters. But also because the movement and pauses and catching of their breath gave the conversation a little extra oomph.

However, I noted that, if you had read this scene in a script, nothing about this workout would affect how you read the scene at all. You could’ve set the very same scene at a cafe and it would’ve read the exact same. Because dialogue reads the same on the page whether your characters are working out or hanging out.

I’ll see this a lot, also, with characters doing the dishes together. Instead of placing your characters on a couch to have a conversation, you give them something to do, like dishes, while they have their conversation. Again, in a movie, that’s a good idea. But in a screenplay, it doesn’t matter where that conversation is had because we’re just reading the dialogue. We don’t care if Husband Joe properly places the egg-beater in the right dishwashing compartment.

The more I thought about this, the more I realized that the real problem here was that you wrote a scene that was so stale, you needed all this artificial movement — whether it be a giant tire workout or loading the dishwasher – to make up for the weak scenario. A scenario should never be so boring that it needs an extra on-screen boost.

Instead, you should be looking to write scenes that work on the page AND on the screen. To achieve this, you need a two-pronged approach.

First, you want the CONTENT of the scene to be good enough on its own that it wouldn’t matter where you placed it. You could have something as static as two characters sitting in bed together before they go to sleep. If the content of the conversation is compelling, we don’t care where it takes place, either on the page or on screen.

There’s no better example of this than Marlon Brando’s famous “I coulda been a contender” scene in On The Waterfront. It was the culmination of his entire life, this “contender” admission. So it was a very important moment. And, originally, the director, Elia Kazan, had this elaborate background projection sequence planned that would play behind the two characters as they had this conversation in the car.

But the projection broke, forcing them to film the scene with the back window closed, making it the most boring background ever. But it didn’t matter because the content of the scene was so strong. So make sure the content of the conversation is awesome first and foremost. That will take care of 75% of bad dialogue scenes.

Second, if possible, you want to use the physical scenario the characters are in TO ENHANCE the conversation, not just be incidental movement. Let’s say our married dishes couple is just getting things back on track after some infidelity by the husband. It still stings for the wife. So there’s pain there.

If these two had a dinner party with another couple and the wife thought the husband was too flirtatious with the guest wife, then that dishes scene is going to be a little more interesting. Just the way that the wife is handling the dishes. You could have her GRAB them and SHOVE them into the dishwasher to add an exclamation point to her frustration.

But guess what? You could make this scene EVEN BETTER if you used the scenario to enhance the conversation, not just use it as a minor visual distraction.

One thing you could do, for example, is to set the scene at a restaurant. The husband is taking the wife out to patch things up. But then, they get a really attractive waitress. And the waitress keeps coming in. She seems to be giving the husband more attention than the wife. This starts upsetting the wife. And now we’ve got a scene where, if you’ve taken care of the content part, we’re using the scenario they’re in to poke the bear – to fire up the coals beneath the dialogue. It becomes a much more interesting scene cause there’s an extra element going on.

I just watched this Portuguese show called “Gloria,” about the Cold War. Our hero, a spy who was transporting highly classified audio tapes across countries, regularly has to drive through checkpoints. But he knows all the checkpoint people so he’s able to shoot the sh— with them and move on.

In one of the scenes in the pilot, though, he’s chatting with a checkpoint friend but then, behind them, a new checkpoint guy strolls up. And this new guy decides to inspect the trunk, where our hero has hidden one of his audio tapes. So you’ve got your dialogue between the hero and his checkpoint friend. And then you’ve got the other thing going on behind them that, if it goes badly, our hero could be thrown in prison.

That scene’s going to work on the page and on the screen. Which is what I’m asking for here. First and foremost, make sure the scene works on the page. Cause you have no control over whether your script is going to get produced. All you have control of, at the moment, is making the read as good as possible.

Once you’ve got that down, see if you can improve the scene so that it also works on screen. Maybe it already does cause you got lucky. But if it doesn’t, see if you can find a way to create a scenario that enhances the good dialogue you already have. If you do that, you’re going to turn that good dialogue into great dialogue.

Guardians of the Galaxy 3 is, probably, the best movie Marvel could’ve released right now, the reason being that IT’S ITS OWN THING. The problem Marvel’s been facing lately is that all of its movies have been intertwined with one another, and while that was great when the MCU was cooking, it’s become the world’s draggiest anchor ever since it entered its Marvels/She-Hulk/Dr.Strange era.

Still, I couldn’t muster the enthusiasm to get myself to go watch the end of Starlord’s trilogy. There were two main reasons why. One, the film looks sad! It looks like it’s going to lean heavily into its feels and that’s not why I go to see big Hollywood films. It’s why I watch smaller films and some TV shows. But when I go to see a big movie, I want to have fun. I want my spirits to be lifted, not dragged down to Sadsville.

And to be honest, I don’t think Guardians has earned the right to have a big emotional ending. This isn’t Iron Man after 20 films. This isn’t Luke Skywalker at the end of the greatest trilogy ever. It’s Chris Pratt, people in weird makeup, and CGI creatures acting goofy in space. Let’s be real here. People aren’t asking for Manchester by the Sea when they’re watching gun-wielding raccoons.

Then, of course, there was that second movie. That second movie was awwwwwful. It was weird. It was bumpy. It ditched its main character in favor of focusing on its two villains. Had that movie been good, I probably would’ve seen Volume 3 regardless. But the stink from that misfire still lingers in the back of my nostrils.

I’m so hot and cold when it comes to James Gunn. Never connected with his pre-Guardians content. Love Guardians Volume 1. Hated Suicide Squad. Loved the Peacemaker show. Hated Guardians Volume 2. I’m actually excited to see what he does with DC because he has an opportunity to dethrone the flailing Marvel. But this one? This Guardians 3 movie? I’m sitting this one out.

So, after my No Guardians For Me temper tantrum I just made you endure, did I give up on the weekend?  Absolutely not. I did watch something. And that something ended up totally surprising me. It surprised me so much that I did research on the creator, Graham Yost, only to find out he was the writer of SPEED, one of the best action movies ever!

The show I watched was called Silo, which is a post-apocalyptic story about people who live in a giant underground silo city. Every once in a while, someone demands to go outside, convinced that the air isn’t poison and that humans can, once again, live on the surface. But all of these people make it a total of about 20 steps before they fall to the ground and die.

The pilot episode is about the silo Sheriff’s wife, who suspects that the governing body of the silo is lying to them, and that the outside is, indeed, livable. (**spoiler**) So she goes outside. And dies just like everyone else. The sheriff is left heartbroken. But as time goes on, he considers giving the outside a shot as well.

I actually read the book the show was based on (called “Wool,” which refers to the wool everyone has over their eyes) which started as a short story that the author, Hugh Howey, shared with an online group. The enthusiasm inspired Howey to turn the story into a novel (the first chapter in Wool, which was the original short story, is utterly riveting so I’m not surprised people fell hard for it). It’s very much like the “Lost” narrative where there are a lot of secrets and reveals, which makes it ideal for a TV show.

So then why isn’t anyone talking about it? They probably will as word gets out. But I think it has more to do with the fact that Apple has zero concept for how to promote a TV show. None of these streamers do, really, beginning with Netflix. But the thing about Netflix was it was a destination site. You went there looking to watch something then you saw the latest greatest Netflix show being promoted so you checked it out.

Apple TV not only doesn’t have enough material to be a destination site, it’s buried under too many layers of menus and buttons. Every time I fire it up, I feel like I’m turning on a nuclear reactor. Is this where the original shows page is? Or is it over here? I suppose Apple gets some credit for making me feel like a genius every time I find the show I came for. But the poor ease-of-use severely hurts its chances of anyone watching a show on its service.

Then, of course, it doesn’t spend on advertising. Which is bizarre for a company with a 1 trillion dollar market cap. Great shows are going to find an audience no matter whether they advertise or not. But everything else needs to build awareness. Apple literally has a media strategy whereby they don’t tell you about a new show and make it hard to find any show you do hear about. With that strategy, the ONLY way anybody’s going to be able to find your show is if it’s Game of Thrones level awesome. It baffles me that there are smart executives getting paid millions who don’t do anything about this.

Is Silo a great show? I don’t know yet. But the pilot is darn good.

I’m always surprised when something pulls me in. Since I know all the buttons and levers writers are pushing to get me to buy into their story, I’m hyper-aware that whatever I’m watching is being written. For that reason, it’s hard for me to get lost in a show/movie. But I got lost in Silo’s pilot.

What wizardry did the writer use to achieve this?

Well, they start by giving us an intense opening scene then flashing back.  Yes, this is a cliche.  But they do it well. They start us in the present, briefly setting up the world of the silo before the Sheriff tells the government he wants to go outside. The story makes it clear that this is a death wish, which is a nice way to intrigue the viewer.

That wasn’t what hooked me, though.

What hooked me was the story of the Sheriff and his wife once we flashed back. The entire episode takes place in the past and shows the Sheriff and his wife trying to conceive a baby.

I can’t emphasize this enough – when someone becomes hooked on your story, when they buy in – it’s almost always because of the characters. And it’s almost always because you’re being truthful with those characters. You’re showing us characters who are going through the same trials and tribulations that real people go through. It’s that authenticity that makes us care about them.

All the Sheriff and his wife care about is having a baby. That’s it. That’s all that matters to them. And each day that goes by, each day that they become a little less hopeful, pulls us closer to them, makes us feel more sympathy for them, makes us root a little harder that tomorrow will be the day they get pregnant. By the end of this pursuit, I was in love with these two. I was ready to run through a wall for them.

So when the wife says she wants to go outside, the equivalent of committing suicide, I was heartbroken. Cause I knew what that meant. I knew she wasn’t coming back and I knew that he would be wrecked.

It’s something I try to remind myself of all the time, whether I’m helping another writer or working on something myself. Don’t get distracted by the bells and whistles – the twists, the mysteries, the mythology, the double-crosses. If you make us care about your characters, we’ll follow you through any door. Hell, we’ll follow you right out the silo! Into that poisoned air.

Assuming we can find your show, of course.