Genre: Horror/Comedy/Action
Premise: In modern day Detroit, Dracula’s eponymous servant, Renfield, is fed up with his abusive boss. So he puts in motion an exit strategy.
About: This is a project that came together two years ago with horror superstar Robert Kirkman (The Walking Dead) coming up with the idea. It’s part of the new Universal mandate to explore their ‘monster’ IP as a set of unique films as opposed to an interconnected universe (a la Avengers). The project is written by Ryan Ridley (Rick & Morty), will be helmed by Chris McKay (Tomorrow War), and will star Nicholas Hoult. It’s important to note that this is the 2019 draft so the script has likely evolved since then.
Writer: Ryan Ridley
Details: 98 pages
Readability: Very Slow

This is a pretty neat idea.

Take one of the most famous characters of all time – Dracula – and introduce a part of him that most people don’t know about – his servant, Renfield. Because the nature of servitude is humorous in a modern context, you make it a comedy.

For those of you trying to come up with a concept that lands with people, it’s always good to use characters who are known to audiences. I don’t see “Renfield” being nearly as compelling if Renfield is serving some vampire named Jake. The fact that we’ve got THE BIGGEST MOST RECOGNIZABLE vampire of all time is what gives the concept pop.

Now let’s see if the script is any good.

We’re in Detroit, Michigan, one of the worst cities in the United States. It’s here where we meet Renfield, a 40-something aging-hipster type, in his weekly support group for co-dependents – people who are stuck in abusive relationships that they don’t have enough self-esteem to leave.

After listening to one of the women in the group talk about how her partner sucks, we follow Renfield to an apartment, see him eat a cockroach, gain superhuman powers, then kill the man who we realize is the significant other of the girl in the group. While this is happening, ANOTHER person comes into the apartment – a hitman who also wanted to kill the significant other, and Renfield kills him too.

Renfield then takes the significant other’s suitcase, which it turns out is filled with drugs, as well as the significant other’s body, and brings it back to the sewers, where his master, Dracula, sucks him dry. Renfield then goes home to his apartment. What he doesn’t know is that because of that suitcase, the city’s biggest drug lord, Ella Lobo, is now after him.

Cut to a cop with a serious anger problem named Rebecca. Rebecca is tasked with figuring out what happened in this apartment. She eventually realizes that this Renfield guy is involved. Which means the cops are after Renfield too. When she catches up to Renfield, he falls in love with her, but she hates him because she thinks he’s a serial killer. Their relationship gets even more complicated when he informs her that he’s been Dracula’s servant for the past 100 years and he gains superpowers when he eats bugs.

After the cops catch and throw Renfield in jail, Rebecca really wants to take down the Lobo family and, therefore, breaks Renfield back out of jail and teams up with him. But, wouldn’t you know it, as this is happening, Ella Lobo makes a deal with Dracula, which means that Renfield and Rebecca aren’t just going to have to take down the Lobos. They’re going to have to take down the master himself!

I’ve only seen a few episodes of Rick and Morty but the fact that this is what today’s screenwriter is known for is telling. From the couple of times I’ve watched the show, I’ve found the jokes to be fast and furious and come from everywhere. That crazy disjointed nature is part of why so many people love the show.

But while that may work in half-hour animation, it does not work in a 100 minute feature. As you’ve heard a million times on this site, features need focus (FNF) and “Renfield” doesn’t have any. It doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. The engine driving the story changes every ten pages.

You can chalk some of that up to an early draft. But I’ve read a lot of first drafts that eventually became movies and what I’ve learned is that if the foundation isn’t solid in that first draft, the story never gets good no matter how many drafts you do.

I mean we start off with Renfield killing people for his master. So far, so good. Then we learn Renfield eats bugs to generate superpowers. That is not a very good idea. Then we have a bag of drugs dictating the plot. Okay, so we’ve just gone from an original concept to a generic one. Then we switch main characters for a while and Rebecca becomes our lead. At this point, the script is off the rails. Now Renfield is considered a serial killer by the FBI so everybody tries to capture him. I’m happy that the writer really liked Silence of the Lambs but that is the wrong plot development for this script. Oh wait, now it’s a team-up movie! Renfield and Rebecca become a buddy-cop team to take down the bad guys.

Again, you can get away with this type of concept-jumping in half-hour animation because the time is short and the level of emotional investment is low. But with a 100-minute movie, you have to build up investment in the characters, as well as the plot, and that requires patience and focus. If you start jumping around to any plot point that you fancy in that moment, the audience will tune you out. Which is what happens here.

Another person who read the script told me they couldn’t even get out of the first act due to how scattered the plot was.

At least one part of the script works: Renfield’s co-dependency support group. If you remember, I told you the other week that you want to be doing MORE THAN ONE THING in your scenes. That’s what the co-dependency group does. First, it cleverly establishes that Renfield is in a bad relationship (with Dracula) that he is trying to get out of. Second, this is also where he finds his victims for Dracula. He gets the names of these support group members’ evil significant others, seeks them out, and takes them to his master.

When I read that, I said, “Okay, this could be good.”

But literally everything that follows doesn’t work.

Just this idea that he eats a cockroach or a centipede and, all of a sudden, becomes a superhero… I’m sorry but that’s not a good idea. How do you even rationalize that connection? That bugs can provide powers? At least with Ratcatcher 2 (from The Suicide Squad) she had an entire backstory about how she learned to control rats. It was baked into her character. This just felt like one of those exhausted 3am throwaway ides – “What if he like…. GAAINED SUPERPOWERS WHEN HE ATE BUGS???”

Another problem with the script is one I hadn’t considered, which is that you have this looming shadow over the whole story that is Dracula. He is the reason we’re here. As I stated earlier, the movie doesn’t work if Renfield is a servant to Random Vampire Jeff. It works because he’s a servant to the biggest vampire of all time.

And therein lies the problem. We want Dracula. But the more Dracula you show, the more you overshadow Renfield. So what do you do? Neither Kirkman nor Ridley seems to have the answer. Oddly, Renfield doesn’t even live with Dracula. Dracula lives in the sewer system while Renfield lives off in some apartment somewhere. So they’re not even around each other for 90% of the screenplay. That seems like a miscalculation in a movie about a master and servant.

I’m not the comedy expert but I’m thinking your comedy is going to come from your actual concept – which is that Renfield is the servant to Dracula. The comedy isn’t going to come from some 30 year old drugs-in-a-suitcase plotline.

Some of the choices here are kind of baffling to be honest.

You may have noticed that I’ve added a new category to my reviews – READABILITY. Why did I do this? I realized that one of the most important qualities for a script is HOW EASY IT READS. I’ve read 150 page scripts that were breezy reads and 90 page scripts that felt like my eyes were sinking in quicksand. As spec screenwriters, your script’s ‘readability’ should be a top priority.

Readability refers to having a clear and concise writing style. For example, some writers love to be clever. But cleverness only complicates the read, especially if you’re not very good at it. So be clear and concise. You also want to say as much as possible in as few word as possible. Most of the things you say in six lines you can say in three. And finally, some writers have a natural ability to blend words together in a way that’s pleasing to read. All those things make for an easier reading experience.

“Renfield” was clunky. It was unclear. There were giant paragraphs for days. And this is a comedy script. Comedy is the one genre where the readability has to be light-speed. If it’s even medium, its’ not going to work. So “Renfield” was really disappointing on that end.

I wish I had more good things to say about Renfield but unless they’ve come up with a completely different take on the subject matter since this draft, I’m going to say that this project has an uphill battle. The one argument you can make is that it’s comedy and, as we all know, comedy is subjective. I know tons of people who LOVE Rick and Morty so it may be that I just don’t get the comedy here. Which wouldn’t be the first time (I had a lot of these same criticisms for the “Ted” script, for example, and that movie went on to be a mega-hit). So we’ll see. I just wish there was a clearer vision on the page.

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

What I learned: “MARK, 50s, a gentle giant a la John Carrol Lynch, the leader of this support group.” Don’t use obscure real person references in your screenplays. Nobody knows bit actors’ names. Even if they did, when you make references like this, it looks amateur. This is a Screenwriting 101 mistake.

Genre: Crime/Thriller
Premise: A single mother who’s about to be kicked out of her recently deceased father’s home becomes a hostage during a bank robbery that ends in shocking fashion.
About: HBO Max is not playing around anymore. They want their own IP. Which is why they bought up Black Choke. I’m thrilled about this development. The more buyers there are in this town, the more opportunity there is for screenwriters like you to sell scripts. And not just any scripts – ORIGINAL MATERIAL. Which, as we know, is sorely lacking in Hollywood. Black Choke sold last week and comes from Doug Simon, who’s previously appeared on the Black List with his contained thriller, “Breathe,” about a family who’s quarantined in a special underground tank after the world’s air becomes unbreathable.
Writer: Doug Simon
Details: 119 pages

Cormer for Nina?

Today’s script is an update on the 1998 movie, A Simple Plan. And dare I say, its execution is even better. Let’s take a look!

30-something Nina Trainer is barley making ends meet. She works two jobs, one of those as a maid. All so she can barely put food on the table for her young son. Nina needs a big break soon since the bank is about to re-claim her home.

40-something Sara, a security officer at that very bank, has seen better days. She was once the best cop on the force, until she tried to save some people from a burning car and has never been the same since.

One rainy day, two men in masks break into the bank and steal half a million dollars from the vault. While this is happening, a dumb teller tries to intervene, resulting in the robbers killing both him and the bank manager. Sara was shot as well and is barely hanging on.

As the robbers exit, they’re forced to take a random person in a rain parka so they don’t get shot by the police. They then speed away. Once inside the van, we pull away the parka hood to reveal… Nina! She was coming to the bank for one last ditch effort to stop them from taking her home.

Later, when they’re driving up the hills, trying to figure out what to do with Nina, she pounces, and the truck goes plunging down the hill killing everyone inside except for… Nina! As Nina is about to call the police, she notices that there’s a car with two dead people and HALF A MILLION DOLLARS inside. Free money! Money that will solve all her problems.

She takes the money, finds and steals a car, and drives home. Nobody saw Nina inside her parka so she’s Scott free. That is until her awful ex-husband, Ray shows up. Ray spots the money and wants in. Because she knows he’ll call the cops otherwise, she’s forced to bring him into the fold.

Meanwhile, Sheriff Keene heads over to the hospital to find that his old partner, Sara, is hanging in there. He wants to know what she saw during the robbery so they can find out who these dudes were. Not to mention the person in the parka they kidnapped. But Keene doesn’t know the half of it. You see, Sara was in on the robbery. And she quickly figures out that whoever her accomplices kidnapped now has the money. She just needs to find that person… and get the money back.

Not long ago, a writer sent me a bank robbery script for a consultation, and my big note to him was that the script didn’t have a hook. It was just characters committing a crime. He came back with a good point. He said, “Did The Town have a hook? Did Hell or High Water have a hook? How bout Heat?” I had to concede that he was right.

However, while a story hook isn’t necessary to sell a screenplay or get a film made, they’re the screenwriting equivalent of having your own publicist. Every time you send your query out, there’s this cool hook dangling there, making it impossible not to request the screenplay.

By not having a hook, you basically cut down the number of people who request your script ten-fold. Let’s run the numbers. If you send a query out for a screenplay that has a great hook, you might get 8 out of 10 requests for the script. If you send a query out for a script that doesn’t have anything resembling a hook, you’ll be lucky to get one request.

In other words, you’re playing 8 lottery tickets instead of 1.

Does that mean you should only write scripts that have a big hook? The short answer is yes. Especially if you’re an unknown. But there’s a bigger point to be made here, which is that, the less of a hook you have, the better the script needs to be. Since less people are going to read it, those people will have to be louder in their endorsement of the script. And they’re not going to be loud unless you blow them away. Let me now ask each and every one of you here at Scriptshadow, how many times are you BLOWN AWAY by a script?

Conservatively…. Once a year? Once every two years maybe?

But this gets into an even DEEPER question, which is, should you assume that you’re the exception? Should you assume that you’re the one writer a year who writes the script that BLOWS PEOPLE AWAY? And therefore, because you are that exception, you don’t need a hook? Theoretically, we should all feel this way, right? If we don’t believe in our writing, who will?

But my whole thing is, why make things harder for yourself? They’re already hard. The odds are already stacked against you. Why not do something that makes things easier for you? You can still believe in your writing. You’re just making sure that more people get a chance to read it!

I bring all of this up because today’s script has a fairly basic premise (it’s got a *bit* of a hook but nothing I haven’t seen before) and despite its pedestrian setup, it’s one of the rare instances where the writing is so good, it makes up for the lack of a hook.

For starters, Doug Simon does an incredible job making you fall in love with Nina Trainer. I’ve talked about using bully scenes to make your hero sympathetic before. If you show a bully picking on your hero early on in the screenplay, we’re going to have sympathy for them.

But you don’t have to approach the bully setup literally. In Black Choke, when we meet Nina, she’s a maid riding up the elevator to clean an office floor. When the elevator doors open, we see a group of drunk laughing office workers who’ve just finished up the day with a party. They stumble into Nina – to them a faceless maid – who then comes out onto a trashed office floor, cake and ice cream scattered about, no thought whatsoever for who has to clean up their mess. This is going to take all night. These jerks have effectively bullied Nina, just in a non-traditional way.

Now, normally, you’d look at this and say, “Who cares? Everyone knows you have to make your hero likable or sympathetic. That’s screenwriting 101. This should hardly be considered ‘good writing,’ Carson.”

But here’s where the skill is. Later in the movie, Nina is going to be doing some bad things. She’s going to be stealing half a million dollars, for example. She’s going to be killing someone. When your hero is going to be doing some truly despicable things, your average “save the cat” or “kick the dog” trick isn’t going to be enough. You have to come up with something that’s going to make us love this character no matter what they do. Which is why this opening is so good. We see this woman being dehumanized by these jerks to such a degree that we’re going to love her no matter what.

Simon also does a kick-ass job of keeping us guessing in a plot where we already know he’s trying to trick us. Pretty much every major story beat had a surprise development in it. Hill achieved this by setting up each plot beat so that you’d only ever assume one outcome. That way, when the other outcome occurred, you were shocked.

When Nina’s ex-husband, Ray, finds out about the money, he becomes the most important variable in the story. Nina can’t do anything without figuring out how to keep Ray happy, since he knows the secret and has to be involved. Now, as a screenwriter, I would tell you that this is dramatic gold. Keep Ray front and center because he complicates Nina’s journey so much. Therefore, when Ray’s accidentally killed later (in a really fun scene), it’s a total shock because the twist HELPS rather than HURTS Nina.

But then Simon hits us with another twist. It turns out Ray told his current girlfriend, Eliza, about the money. She calls Nina, wanting her cut. Which means Simon was able to both give us a shocking twist AND keep the exact same amount of pressure on Nina, by supplanting Ray with Eliza.

There’s a lot more good here I could write about. This script is really clever and really fun. My only complaint is that there are too many characters. I’m not convinced the script needed so many people. But, boy, it’s so well-done. If you want to write a crime script without a hook, check this one out. It shows you where the bar is.

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

What I learned: I used to dislike small town crime movies. They didn’t have that sheen a big city crime movie has, like “Heat” with Los Angeles. But now I know why they work. They work because the small town setting means everybody knows each other. And when everyone knows each other, you can have a lot more fun with the characters. For example, bank security guard Sara is trying to help Sheriff Keene find the money. Normally, this is a standard pairing. But their scenes are charged because they used to be partners, and when they were partners, they were sleeping together. That’s harder to do in a big city crime movie where the individuals are more separated. So if you’re trying to decide between the two, know that the big city crime movie will feel bigger. But the small-town crime movie has more character possibilities.

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One of the reasons I have a unique perspective on screenwriting is that I’ve read more bad scripts, from cover to cover, than anyone else on earth.

I can’t prove this, of course. But if I’m not number 1, I’m definitely in the top 5. And that’s because I do something really unique, which is I review screenplays. And when you review screenplays, you can’t stop reading them when they suck.

Almost everybody else in this industry (and this industry is the only place where anybody actually reads screenplays remember) will stop reading a script the minute they get bored. They only finish a script when they’re enjoying it.

I would stop whenever I was bored if I could. But I can’t. I have to keep going so I can accurately review (or consult on) the script.

Maybe there are some readers – especially back in the 90s when agencies and production houses had to keep up with a massive screenplay-driven industry – who have read as many bad scripts, cover-to-cover, as I have, since they had to write up coverage. But I doubt it.

So why am I bringing this up?

Because you don’t truly understand what you *shouldn’t do* in a screenplay until you’ve been forced to read 80 pages past the first moment you knew the script sucked. Let me give you an example.

I read a script a long time ago. It might have even been reviewed on this site. It was about a group of people who were stuck inside a castle during a zombie attack. Absolutely nothing happened during this script. I think the zombies attacked once or twice. By and large, the script was about people waiting inside a castle. I figured out pretty early what the main script mistake was – that the protagonists weren’t active. That they sat around and did nothing until the zombies attacked, in which case they’d ward them off, then go back to doing nothing for 40 pages.

It’s one thing to learn what’s wrong with a script and give up on it immediately. It’s another to know what’s wrong with a script then have to endure two more hours of it. When you’re forced to sit with a mistake for that long, it gets tattooed into your brain. You will never again make the mistake of writing non-active characters after reading Zombie Castle.

But it goes further than that. Because then I had to ask the question, “Well, wait a minute. There are good movies with characters trapped inside of one location. Why do those movies work?” You research those movies then you say, “Oh yeah, a big difference is that there’s way more conflict between the characters in this one than in Zombie Castle. That conflict kept the scenes entertaining even though the protagonists weren’t actively trying to achieve something.”

In Cloverfield Lane, a group of characters are locked in a bunker the whole movie, the difference being our main character WAS TYRING TO ESCAPE. In other words, she wasn’t just waiting around chatting like the characters in Zombie Castle. She was scheming. She was plotting. That kept the plot moving despite the fact that it was contained.

I wouldn’t have learned this stuff if I hadn’t endured two hours of the worst version of it and then asked myself “Why?” That’s my favorite question to ask when I’m watching something bad, by the way. “Why is this bad?” Not “why” in a general. “Why” as in SPECIFICALLY WRITE OUT WHY. It’s a powerful way to learn.

I think you know where I’m going with this. That’s right. I’m telling you you have to read bad screenplays. And I don’t mean two or three total. I mean at least one a week. Because until you become a high intermediate screenwriter, you will learn more from a bad screenplay than you will a good one. Hands down, guaranteed. You need to sit in these mistakes for hours at a time for them to resonate. And once they resonate, YOU WILL NEVER MAKE THE SAME MISTAKES IN YOUR OWN WRITING.

I can already hear the whining. “I don’t want to.” “That sounds like my own personal hell.” “What a waste of time.” Guys. You want to make this your profession, right? Then that means, sometimes, you’re going to have do things that you don’t like. And this is one of them. Cause I’m telling you, it’s going to make you a better screenwriter.

The irony of only reading good scripts is that you get so lost in the glow of the script, you don’t actually understand why the script is working. You just have a good “feeling” after you’ve read the script. This feeling then “inspires” you to work on your own stuff.

But all you’re doing is riding the high of inspiration adrenaline. There isn’t some Law of Writing Transference whereby if Aaron Sorkin writes a great scene, you too, will write a great scene just because you enjoyed his. Let me quantify that for you: Feeling good while you’re writing doesn’t mean you’re writing well.

Don’t get me wrong. Inspiration is a good thing. But unless you identify what it is about a screenplay that works, you’re probably not going to be able to transfer that into your script. For example, if you don’t know that the main reason The Rock’s and Kevin Hart’s characters in Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle work because of irony (a weak insecure teenager is placed into the strongest body in the world, a star high school linebacker is placed into the weakest body in the world) and instead try to generically mimic the banter between the characters, it isn’t going to work because you haven’t actually learned anything.

When you’re bored out of your mind reading a bad script, that’s all you have time to do is identify why you hate the script so much. It’s actually the perfect situation for learning because you’re stuck.

Let me give you another example.

I once reviewed a script with a really fun premise called, Liar, Coward, Judge. Here’s the logline: “Deep winter in Civil War Era Missouri – A Union Deserter, a Priest and an Assassin must fight for survival when they are stranded in the wilderness and hunted by a terrible Sasquatch.” Cool right? How can something like this be bad? But it was bad in the worst kind of a way: It was boring.

Because I was forced to sit with my boredom for so long, I got punched in the face over and over again with the script’s biggest mistake. That the characters were too simplistic. Here’s what I wrote in the review…

“But strangely enough, I didn’t sense depth to any of the characters. They were all surface-level people. A priest who’s a dedicated priest. An assassin who’s a mean assassin. A deserter who’s a coward.

The best characters tend to be dynamic. Bad people who have good qualities and good people who have bad qualities. That unexpectedness adds a rich extra layer to the character that makes them far more interesting to watch.  Think of one of the most popular characters in the history of cinema – Batman. He’s a good person, but he’s not above doing bad things to get the job done.”

Sitting with weak characters for so long taught me the value of adding dimension to characters. I guarantee you I don’t figure that out if I stop reading the script the second I get bored.

So many of the mistakes I see writers make wouldn’t be made if they had read just ten bad screenplays cover to cover. For example, let’s say a writer sends me a 150 page script, which happens more often than I’d like. I guarantee they never would’ve done that, if they themselves, were forced to read ten 150 page scripts cover to cover. “Oh yeah,” they’d realize. “Reading one of these kind of sucks. Okay, I’m never making that mistake again.”

Where do you find bad screenplays? Head over to SimplyScripts.com. They’ve got a lot of beginner screenwriters over there posting stuff. You can also do a search here for “Amateur Showdown” and there are many amateur scripts you can download from the posts.

I’m going to say it one last time. You will be more likely to not make a mistake if you yourself were tortured by that mistake.

Happy weekend writing (and reading)! :)

Genre: Drama/Supernatural/Comedy
Premise: A family becomes internet sensations when they find a real ghost in their home and start posting videos about it on social media.
About: One of the hot projects that came together this month was the David Harbour Anthony Mackie collaboration with director Christopher Landen (Happy Death Day, Freaky, Paranormal Activity 2). Landen will be adapting the Vice short story by Geoff Manaugh, which you can read here. This one came out of nowhere, as the short story was published all the way back in 2017. Netflix bought the package.
Writer: Geoff Manaugh
Details: about 5000 words (one-quarter of a screenplay)

Today’s story institutes the dreaded 3-genre mash-up. For those new to screenwriting, the 2-genre mashup has resulted in some amazing movies (Comedy and Supernatural = Ghostbusters). But it is REALLY hard to pull off the 3-genre mash-up. Why? Because the more genres, the less focus. And focus is everything in a screenplay narrative.

Now I’m not saying it’s impossible! No no no no no. Don’t you misquote me now. Yesterday’s movie, which I loved, spanned three, maybe even four genres. But the degree of difficulty rises exponentially with multiple genres. And I’m not convinced Ernest rises to the challenge. All things considered, this is such a weird short story, that I’m not going to dismiss it out of hand. It’s worth discussing for sure.

Frank Presley, the newly headhunted president of a suburban hospital-billing firm, has just moved into an old house in the Chicago suburbs with his wife, Melanie, his 14 year old son, Fulton, and his 18 year old son, Kevin. One night, while trying to sleep, Frank hears a noise, goes downstairs, and finds a ghost hanging out.

Frank pulls out his phone camera, presses record, and, for some reason, starts laughing uproariously. He later puts this up on Youtube. People don’t take it seriously because, of course it’s not a real ghost. But Frank keeps seeing the ghost, who he names “Ernest,” and keeps recording it, putting more and more videos online until people can’t deny anymore that it’s a real ghost!

The good vibes don’t last long, though, because Frank is a big fat jerk. He yells at the ghost, tries to scare the ghost, throws things at the ghost, mocks the ghost, and, of course, laughs at the ghost. Melanie is not a fan of the way her husband is treating Ernest. She believes it’s because he hates his work and needs an outlet for his anger.

Then, one day, Ernest disappears. And Kevin does also. The millions of people who watch Frank’s videos pour through them and spot all these background conversations where Kevin and Ernest were secretly chatting with each other. The two have run off together. When the police catch up with them, Kevin tells the world that Ernest was murdered by his uncle and justice must be done!

But the FBI puts Ernest behind bars for the crime of kidnapping. A bummed out Kevin goes on Jimmy Kimmel to make a case for the government to release Ernest. But Kimmel has a surprise. It’s Ernest! Who’s just been released. They verified the murder. And although the uncle who killed Ernest died 20 years ago, Ernest finally has peace. Which means he can disappear into the next realm. Kevin asks if they’ll ever see each other again. Ernest says, without question.

I always love speculating on how a project got purchased. It’s important to study these things if you’re a writer because you want to understand what things buyers are interested in. At first, this seemed too zany to fall into any obvious sale category.

But a couple of things stuck out to me.

First of all, any idea with a ghost in it has the potential to be marketable. If this were a movie about a family that found a normal person living in their house, it’s not nearly as marketable, right? (Although, as I typed that, I realized that could be a pretty interesting movie in its own right) I bring this up because I read so many scripts that don’t have a clear element for a studio to market the movie around. You need that if you want to get people excited about your screenplay.

On top of that, the idea is fresh. I’ve never seen a movie before about a ghost going viral on Youtube. I’m not the biggest fan of the idea. But, objectively, it’s a fresh idea in so much as we haven’t seen it before. So now you’ve got two things working in your favor.

Finally, there’s actually some interesting character stuff going on in this story. The dad clearly has issues. He’s torturing a ghost, laughing about it, and putting it up on Youtube. Wherever there’s interesting character stuff, there are actors who want to play those parts. Between the dad and the ghost, there’s some juicy stuff to play around with here.

The problem is that there isn’t a clear movie structure to this story. I’m guessing that’s why nothing’s happened with it since 2017. It’s kind of hard to see where the movie is.

You can’t tell the movie through Frank’s eyes. He’s too much of an asshole. I suspect that the story will be told from Kevin’s POV, even though he’s a background character for most of the short story. He’s the one who wants to connect with Ernest. You’d probably also move them leaving to earlier in the screenplay. That’s the big “journey” that jumpstarts the narrative so it can’t show up 60% of the way into the story. I’m thinking it should happen at the beginning of Act 2.

And then you would need to clarify why they’re going on this journey, which the short story does a lousy job of explaining. You have to explain that Ernest is trying to solve his murder. In which case you CANNOT under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES have his killer already be dead. There’s no dramatic value in that choice whatsoever. It’s way more interesting if the guy who killed him is still alive and Ernest (with Kevin’s help) is going to confront him.

Speaking of the murder, I kept asking why it took half the story for Ernest to mention he was murdered. Why didn’t that come up earlier? Even if he didn’t want to bring it up, the tens of millions of people studying Ernest on the internet would’ve known his entire life story within ten minutes of him going viral. They would’ve figured out he was murdered, which would’ve necessitated us to explore the murder plot. Here, it feels like something that came up as an afterthought. Oh yeah, and I was murdered.

This is the kind of story that needs somebody really weird to tell it. A Charlie Kaufman type. Maybe even the director from yesterday’s wonderfully weird movie, Anders Thomas Jensen. Christopher Landen is a good director who understands the balance between horror and comedy. But I’m not sure that’s what this is about. This movie wants to make some deeper statements about humanity and Ernest has some, dare I say, Edward Scissorhands qualities to him that will require a deft touch. If Landen can nail it, though, he’s going to jump to the next level as a director.

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

What I learned: Who you choose as your main character has a huge impact on the story. Here, you can choose between Frank, a dude who’s having a mid-life crisis and taking it out on the ghost who lives in his house, or Kevin, who’s much more grounded, much more sympathetic, and therefore makes a cleaner protagonist. They were just talking about this issue for the development process of Jungle Cruise. That movie had been in development for a couple of decades. The way they finally cracked the story, according to the producer, was to shift the protagonist role away from The Rock’s captain character and make Emily Blunt’s scientist character the hero. By doing this, it freed up The Rock’s character to be more fun and goofy, similar to what they did with Jack Sparrow in the Pirates movies. If the movie being told in your current draft feels boring, ask yourself, “What would the movie look like through the eyes of [Second Biggest Character] or [Third Biggest Character]?” Ya never know. Your boring movie could instantly come alive. Go ahead, do it right now. I dare ya.

Today’s film will end up in my Top 10 movies of the year, maybe even my top 5!

Genre: Thriller/Drama/Comedy
Premise: After a highly volatile army general loses his wife in a subway crash, a trio of mentally unstable men come to him with evidence that the crash was orchestrated by a criminal organization known as the Riders of Justice.
About: Nikolaj Arcel and Anders Thomas Jensen have written a ton of screenplays together. Anders has something like 25 feature credits. I guess they write and make movies a lot faster in Denmark! Star Mads Mikkelsen has worked with Jensen a number of times. Here’s Mads’ insight into their most recent collaboration process: “As far as I remember, I think Anders Thomas pitched both the story and the idea of morphing his two dramatic universes together: his own “insanity world,” and his more [straightforward] writer side, which writes dramatic things for others … Normally, he pitches me his stuff, and if I call him and say, “What the f**k are you doing?,” then that’s a good sign. Because it’s always insane, what he’s doing, and if I’m on board it gives him the confidence to continue writing.” Riders of Justice is currently a digital rental so you can watch it right now!
Writer: Nikolaj Arcel and Anders Thomas Jensen
Details: 2 hours long

I, of course, could’ve gone and seen “Old” this weekend.

The reason I didn’t was because I could’ve written that review without seeing the movie. I already know what’s going to happen. I know Old is going to be sloppy. I know it’s going to be inadvertently silly at times. I know the last 20 minutes are going to be terrible and not make sense. I know I’m going to get triggered about how someone as untalented as M. Night was able to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes for so long and make a living in this business. I’ve written that review a dozen times already. Nothing ever changes with Night.

Conversely, Riders of Justice may be the most unpredictable movie of the year. You have no idea what’s coming next. Not only that, but everything about this movie screams “This shouldn’t have worked.” The main character is aggressively unlikable. The tone of the movie shifts wildly between dead serious and sitcom-level broad. It’s weird. It’s unruly. It’s unconventional.

I love when scripts take big risks that shouldn’t have worked and somehow make them work because those are the scripts that have the decoded matrix within them. If something works that shouldn’t have, there’s some insight into the fabric of storytelling we don’t usually get.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the story. A teenage girl, Mathilde, and her mother, are riding a packed subway car. Otto, an odd man who uses extreme mathematical equations to predict car accidents, has just been fired from his job. Still, he offers the mother his seat. After she sits down, a sheet of metal from another train slices through the side of the train, killing everyone who was sitting on that side, including the mother (Otto and Mathilde survive since they were standing).

Markus, an army captain currently on duty, gets the call that his wife has died and flies home. Markus, who’s consumed with violence and anger issues, has a terrible relationship with Mathilde. This should be a time of togetherness. But he and his daughter seem as distant as ever. They are soon visited by Otto, who’s been studying the train crash. His computer model has discovered that this was not an accident, but rather a hit. A gangbanger who was also sitting on the fatal side of the train was about to name the Riders of Justice gang in court for a series murders. So the Riders of Justice had the other train deliberately crash into this one to kill him.

A furious Markus is now determined to kill every single member of the Riders of Justice, something he can’t do without help. So Otto enlists his buddies Lennart (who’s spent a large amount of time in a mental hospital) and Emmenthaler (an overweight OCD hacker with anxiety and depression) to help find each of the members and kill them. Of course, when the Riders of Justice figure out what’s happening, they take the fight to our motley unorthodox crew instead.

One of the hardest things to figure out about this movie is how a main character THIS UNLIKABLE could work. We talk all the time about how important it is to make a character likable because if the audience doesn’t like who’s leading them on the journey, they’re not going to care about the journey. And they certainly aren’t going to care whether the hero succeeds or not.

Markus shouldn’t have worked. He’s not only an asshole (one of the first lines we hear from him after he gets home from the mother’s funeral is to tell Mathilde that she needs to work out so she doesn’t get fat) but he doesn’t talk a whole lot. When someone’s an asshole and ALSO doesn’t say much, it exaggerates the assholeness. We’re not able to get inside their head to understand why they’re an asshole, so the fact that Markus just stares forward angrily all the time makes him even more unlikable.

So why do we still care? Why do we root for Markus?

Well, when you have an unlikable hero, it’s critical that you incorporate something called OFFSETTING. Offsetting is exactly what it sounds like. You come up with a bunch of things to offset the hero’s negative disposition. For starters, Markus’s wife was just killed. We’re always going to feel sorry for a character who’s just lost someone.

Markus is active. Audiences love active characters. They love characters who go after what they want. The more aggressively they go after it, the more we tend to like them. As soon as Markus realizes that his wife was murdered, he goes into Active-Mode. It’s time to kill the Riders of Justice.

Audiences also like characters who are good at what they do. There’s a scene early on where Markus goes to ask their first ‘person of interest’ what they know and the guy sticks a gun in his face and tells him to leave. Markus doesn’t say anything, lets the guy close the door on him, walks back to his car, and then, out of nowhere, he spins around, walks right back up to the door, knocks, and when the guy opens the door with the gun, Markus executes a blink-and-you-miss-it takedown of the guy, snatching his gun away then shooting him in the face. It’s not only an intense scene. It shows how skilled Markus is. After that moment, we think, “Yeah, I’m glad this guy is on our side.”

Another thing I noticed Jensen do was he offloaded more screen time than normal to the other characters. Riders of Justice is more of an ensemble piece than a “John Wick” style revenge movie. The reason why that’s important is because all of the other characters are interesting and positive and cool and fun. So we’re not stuck, 90% of the time, with this dreary angry man. That’s a big takeaway for me. If you have an intensely negative hero, consider making your script more of an ensemble piece.

The other thing about this script that shouldn’t have worked was the tone. On one side, you had Markus living in the most extreme intense dramatic movie you could imagine. While on the other side, you had Denmark’s version of Larry, Mo, and Curly.

There’s this whole subplot whereby Mathilde insists that her father see a psychiatrist for his anger issues and when she catches him talking to Otto, Lennart, and Emmenthaler in their barn, the four of them freak out and lie to Mathilde, telling her that they’re Markus’s new psychology team, here to make him better. They’re going to be sticking around for a few weeks and working with him 24/7. At one point, the ruse goes so far that Lennart, who, remember, is certifiably crazy, pretends to be a psychiatrist and does a therapy session with Mathilde. I mean that’s a scene you might see on Modern Family.

It took me a while to figure out how they made this work. Because this is the kind of thing I routinely rip screenwriters for – jumping back and forth between wildly different tones. What I realized was that these three characters weren’t just wacky to be wacky. As the movie goes on, we get into all of their backstories, which inform us why the three of them are so broken. In other words, their psychosis is anchored in reality. It’s not like Jensen said, “Eh, let’s just make him a goofball hacker and have him say funny nonsense.” This hacker has led a tortured life, as have the other two.

I still don’t think many writers could’ve pulled this off. But the ones who can are the ones who build up those backstories so that the “crazy” characters’ lives are based in some level of reality.

In the end, the thing I liked most about this script is that it morphed into this unexpected family movie. All these weird people were living together under one roof. And despite being the most unlikely family ever, they managed to make it work in a weird way. There was something sweet about that. And I don’t think I’ve ever used the word ‘sweet’ to describe a John Wick style premise. Riders of Justice shows you how to subvert expectations THE RIGHT WAY. If you liked Parasite, you’ll definitely like this.

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

What I learned: Always try to link your hero’s journey to what you’re personally going through in life at the moment. It will instantly add depth to them. Here’s Anders on how he came up with the character of Markus: “It started with me having this completely normal 40-year crisis that all men have where you look at your kids, you look at your life, and you wonder, “How did I get here, and did I do enough?” You start rebuilding, you start looking forward, and you start looking for connections that will give your life meaning. That’s basically Markus’ character, a guy with PTSD returning home who’s lost faith in everything but needs to find a way to move forward in his life. Of course, it’s highly dramatized, but the core is very personal for me.”

What I learned 2: Anders is okay with ditching outlines if the script calls for it: “Normally, I’ll put a structure up on the wall then write a script from that. But with a script like this, it was a gut feeling. Especially in this film, it had to be a gut feeling. You had to get around so many characters and themes and layers, and if you put that up on the wall, it becomes somehow schematic. You can see the technicality of it. People in film schools hate when I say this, but it’s not something I can teach anyone.