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.

Did we get duped?

All along, were the Russos, actually, bad filmmakers?

This is a bold, maybe even triggering, accusation.

But the question needs to be asked because I watched Citadel this weekend, the gigantically budgeted new Amazon show that uses the words “highly enriched uranium” in its very first scene — WHAT YEAR IS THIS? 1984??? — and it was created by the Russo brothers.

The show’s 51% Rotten Tomatoes score clearly isn’t accurate as the show can’t be measured in ripe and rotten tomatoes.  It must be measured in those mass produced faded tomatoes you find at the big brand supermarkets, the ones so devoid of taste, you wonder if they can even legally be called tomatoes.  If we’re measuring this show by those tomatoes, it gets 100%.  Because it is 100% bland.

Since their Marvel experience, the Russos gave us their gritty miscast character piece, Cherry, which I hear did quite well at the cast and crew screening, the only people who actually saw the movie.  They then gave us The Gray Man, possibly the most generic piece of action filmmaking the universe has been subjected to. And now this. This…. Whatever Citadel is. If nobody had told me, I might assume it was a very long commercial for a new fragrance.

The Russos have long been an anomaly. They were comedy directors, giving us the Owen Wilson film, “You, Me, and Dupree.” They then became TV show directors, helming episodes of Arrested Development, Happy Endings, and Community.

People thought Kevin Feige had lost his marbles when he gave the Russos a Marvel film (Captain America: Winter Soldier). But they delivered. That got them Captain America: Civil War and then the Avengers films, which turned them into household names.

But are the Russos merely beneficiaries of the Marvel formula at a time when it was at its most potent? Or are they actually exceptional?

Hollywood is a strange place that has the power to make people and things look bigger and better than they actually are. It’s a spin zone, the most formidable of all time. They can spin you up or, when they no longer need you, spit you out.  It’s that spitting part that exposes you – that leaves you naked and bare.  Those who were actually good survive this spitting.  Those who don’t churn out an endless stream of tomato compost.

I watched this Jennifer Lawrence trailer for her latest movie, No Hard Feelings. The film, about an older woman who gets paid by a couple of parents to help their son lose his virginity before he goes to college, is the result of Lawrence “taking control of her career” and making her own choices, as opposed to doing her agents’ bidding. It literally looks like the worst film of all time.

I see that streak Lawrence was on with Hunger Games, Silver Linings Playbook, and American Hustle, and she just looked invincible. When you saw her getting nominated for Oscars, you didn’t bat an eye. It made sense because the Hollywood machine told you it made sense. This was one of the greatest actresses of our generation, they said, and we nodded like zombies who’d been promised fresh brains for dinner.

Since then, she’s made Red Sparrow, Serena, X-Men Apocalypse, Joy, Passengers, Mother, Dark Phoenix, Don’t Look Up, and Causeway – a stretch of extremely mediocre films. So which one is the real Jennifer Lawrence? Is it the one who went on that first streak or this one?

There’s an argument to be made that it’s so hard to make anything good in this town that if you can make even ONE great film, you’ve done the impossible. And if you can make three great films? You’ve done something 99.99999999% of people who come to Los Angeles never achieved. That cannot be a fluke. So why not celebrate that instead of focusing on all the duds they made?

Fair. But when you make five bad movies in a row (or six, or seven, or eight), it’s hard not to question whether you were as good as everyone said you were. Maybe the powers that be knew how to protect your weaknesses as an actor, or, in the Russos’ case, as directors.

If you’re looking to watch something actually good, I suggest staying away from Amazon’s solipsismistic snafu, and starting up Beef, on Netflix. I know some people have had a problem with this series because Amy Lau (Ali Wong) is the single most unlikable person on the planet. But if you push past the first couple of episodes, she becomes more tolerable.

The series is about a down-on-his-luck landscaper, Danny, who gets in a road rage incident with the CEO of a Goop-like wellness company, Amy. Danny chases her down, finds out her name, and starts stalking her. She retaliates in kind. And the two go back and forth at each other, the stakes escalating each time, until they’re at life-destroying levels.

There are a couple of great screenwriting lessons the series teaches us, the most obvious being the power of conflict. This entire series is built around a strong case of conflict. But conflict all on its own can’t carry a story. And it definitely can’t carry 10 episodes of television. You need something more.

So the second thing we’ve got is CLASS. These aren’t two rich people going at it. It’s not two poor people battling. It’s one rich person and one poor person. This turbo-charges the conflict because now we’ve got a class war. Also, in that initial interaction, Amy “wins” the road rage duel. Which creates an underdog scenario. Because, now, we want Danny to get her back. That’s why we’re going to tune in to the next episode. And the episode after that.

Then, like any good TV show, it starts giving you insight into these peoples’ lives, particularly Amy’s life, which, we find out, is a difficult one. She’s the breadwinner in her family. Her impotent husband is a lousy artist living off his much more famous father’s talent. So all the pressure is on her to make the money.

The screenwriters wisely create this storyline in which Amy is trying to sell her company to a bigger company, which places a ticking clock on the timeline and also places something at stake. If Danny were to do something that ruins this sale, Amy’s entire life would fall apart. Which means that all their interactions have weight. There are consequences involved.

The mistake a lot of amateur writers make is that there are never any real consequences to anything the characters do. You need to create situations where a conversation actually has implications on the characters’ lives.

The show still exhibits issues that Streaming TV hasn’t solved yet. Which is that if you’re a straight serialized show, your series inevitably falls into a rut. As a reminder, a serialized show has one continuous storyline, like Breaking Bad. A procedural show, like CSI, is a series of self-contained stories with little continuity or overarching plot.

It’s much harder to create episode ideas in a serialized show because, unlike Grey’s Anatomy, you can’t just throw in a new “sick person of the week.” You have to create brand new plot and, inevitably, these shows don’t have enough plot to fill up all that space. This forces them to start going backwards, via flashbacks, disrupting the forward momentum of the story. Which is exactly what happens in Beef, a show that is at its apex SPECIFICALLY when it has momentum.

The writers will always defend these choices as “getting to know the characters better,” and that’s true. We do learn more about the characters if we go into their pasts. But good writers are supposed to be able to do this WHILE KEEPING THE STORY MOVING. Any schmo off the street can write a flashback scene to some traumatic event that happened when their character was five. Real screenwriters are supposed to be able to come up with creative ways to get those details across within the flow of the story.

With that said, faults and all, I really liked this series. Beyond what I talked about, it does a great job expanding all of the characters’ lives. Characters who you think are going to be unimportant turn out to have these fully fleshed out complex storylines. I loved Danny’s lughead brother and Amy’s talentless stay-at-home husband. And the series isn’t afraid to get weird. It’s the polar opposite of Citadel. And gosh darnit, thank god for that.

One of the more controversial new screenwriters on the scene comes at us with yet another one of his high concept ideas

Genre: Drama/Thriller
Premise: (from Black List) When her domineering director makes her film the same scene 148 times on the final night of an exhausting shoot, actress Annie Long must fight to keep her own sanity as she tries to decipher what is real, and what is part of his twisted game.
About: Screenwriter Collin Bannon routinely makes the Black List. He’s done it again here, as this script finished with 12 votes on last year’s list, the unofficial compilation of the “best screenplays in Hollywood.”
Writer: Collin Bannon
Details: 109 pages

Scarjo for Annie?

All right, now that we’ve got all of that conflict out, let’s take things down a notch and review a screenplay about going crazy!

I remember reading these stories about Stanley Kubrick forcing Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman to do a million takes on Eyes Wide Shut and how Kidman, in particular, almost went insane.

Then later, probably because he was inspired by Kubrick, David Fincher did the same thing to his actors. I remember Edward Norton being particularly thrown by the first scene he shot for Fight Club. Norton thought he did a pretty good job on take one. But Fincher ended up making him do 20 more. And not just doing the takes, but not giving any direction. I got the feeling from Norton that it was a bit of a mind f—k.

I think the idea of tons of takes is to strip the acting away from the actors. And just have them “be.” I’m not convinced it works. I guess if a scene requires you to look emotionally spent it might work. But it’s hard to give when you’ve been told you’ve failed 27 times in a row.

So I thought building a movie around this concept was cool. It’s also a unique way into a loop narrative. Whenever you can exploit a trend in a way that doesn’t feel like the trend, I always give writers props for that.

It’s 1981 and we’re filming an elevated horror movie (Think The Exorcist, not Friday the 13th) in the middle of some eastern European country. At the start of the script, Annie, our hero, is at her wit’s end. They’ve filmed the entire incredibly intense movie. There’s only one scene left. And Annie is desperate to finish so she can get home for her cancer-stricken mother’s surgery.

There’s one man in the way, though. Howard Bloch. I could get detailed about who Bloch is but just think: Stanley Kubrick. The final scene in question has Annie’s character fighting with her husband in their bedroom, who she seems to suspect did something terrible – maybe even murdered someone. Annie is screaming at him that she’s not crazy, she knows what he did, which leads to a physical altercation.

Every time they shoot the scene, Bloch says, “Let’s go again.” Annie asks what changes he wants but he never answers her. He just says, “Let’s go again.” That alone would drive a person crazy. But to make matters worse, everyone on set seems to hate Annie, who, by the way, is the only woman on the entire production (this is 1981 remember). So she feels super isolated outside of her assigned personal assistant, Laszlo, who’s a sweetheart.

As the night turns into day, and 1 take turns into 20, then 50, then 70, Annie really starts to lose it. She’s convinced the eye-patch that the DP wears has switched eyes. She thinks the wallpaper in the bedroom has changed color. The photo on the wall of her character and her co-star’s character turns into a photo of her and her mom. She repeatedly sees her mom in the back of the set. She thinks one of the stunt doubles wants to assault her.

Then the worst imaginable thing happens. The hospital calls and lets Annie know that her mom passed away unexpectedly. Bloch apologizes profusely. He tells Annie that he’ll get her on a flight home immediately. But now Annie is determined. She asks Bloch if he got the take. Bloch confesses he did not. “Then let’s go again,” she says. It’s clear that nobody’s leaving until they GET THIS TAKE RIGHT.

The byline of this post is, “yet another high concept idea.”

Since I know “high concept” can be confusing, I want to explain why this idea is high concept. The best way to do so is by showing you what the “low concept” version of this idea looks like.

The low concept version of this is the aftermath of an actress who’s had a long day after trying to film a scene that wasn’t working. We see her depressed and struggling and maybe her boyfriend has to build her back up again for the next day. Another version would be an actress trying to make it through a tough production in general. Every day is a challenge and she’s beaten down by the process.

In other words, straight-forward boring explorations of what it’s like to be an actress on a difficult shoot.

The second you make it 150 takes, the whole concept takes on an elevated feel. It feels bigger. It’s more intriguing. This is what makes the concept “high,” is the clever elevation of the common interpretation of an idea.

But what about the execution?

I’m, self-admittedly, not a fan of descent-into-madness screenplays for one simple reason. The screenwriter never gets the line right between keeping the script understandable and the story crazy. They always bring the craziness and messiness into the writing itself so we’re not sure what’s going on. These scripts have to be understandable even if what’s going on in the story isn’t supposed to be understood.

That’s a hard balance for even experienced writers to master.

While Bannon’s tackling of the problem isn’t perfect, he does a pretty good job. He definitely captures this character’s insanity but I still, usually, understood what was going on. I think the reason he was able to do this was because he kept the story simple.

Literally, we’re on the same set filming the same scene over and over again. So when there are crazy elements like, say, a mysterious woman that nobody else can see walking around in the background, we’re able to identify that as the lone variable that has changed and therefore an extension of Annie’s psychosis.

Plus, Bannon added some smart elements to his screenplay that exploited the idea. For example, at one point, Annie’s P.A. accidentally lets out that Howard has been telling everyone on set to be mean and isolating to Annie so he can get the performance he wants out of her.

There’s also mystery elements. The hospital calls to inform Annie that her mother passed away. But we’re immediately questioning, did that really happen or did Bloch make that up in order to get a better performance out of her? So now we have this carrot dangling in front of us, pushing us to keep walking, cause we want to know if her mom really is dead or not.

In other words, it isn’t just about doing the scene over and over again. There are other unresolved threads.  Thank God for that because the movie would not have worked if that was the only thing propelling the narrative. Lots of newbie writers would make that mistake, by the way. They’d only focus on what’s in the logline – the bare-bones interpretation of the concept. But movies are too long for that. You need to keep feeding the beast – the beast being the reader – new meals every ten pages or so to keep them interested.

The irony about this script is that if it was ever tuned into a real movie, it would have the exact same effect on the real actress who took the part. She would be shooting 300-400 takes of the same scene. Cause she’s shooting multiple takes to get each of the takes right within the story itself. You’d have to be crazy to volunteer for that. But maybe that’s the point.

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

What I learned: Your most clever dialogue lines are going to stem from YOUR CONCEPT. Your concept is the primary generator of all that is unique within your script. So if you want to write clever lines, lean into the concept. For example, early on, the hair and makeup guy comes up to Annie before she’s about to shoot her scene and he says, referring to her exhausted face, “Are those dark circles mine or yours?” Annie responds, “I think they’re mine.” “You make my job easier every day.” So, why is this a clever line? Cause the obvious line is, “You look like s—t. We need to get you back in makeup pronto.” That line contains the exact same sentiment, but is on-the-nose and, therefore, boring. A compliment that’s actually an insult delivered in a way to make the heroine feel bad about herself – that’s good writing.