Genre: Comedy/Drama
Premise: Two scientists must go on a press tour to answer questions about an impending asteroid collision that will destroy all life on earth.
About: Big one today, guys. Some might even say it’s an extinction-level script. This is the big Adam McKay Netflix project that’s to star Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Jonah Hill, and Timothy Chalamet. Of his return to comedy, McKay said, “I don’t think it’s a ‘Step Brothers’-type of comedy. I would compare it more to somewhere between the Mike Judge stuff and ‘Wag the Dog.’ A hard funny satire is what we’re going for.”
Writer: Adam McKay
Details: 125 pages (Jan 2020 draft)

There aren’t too many scripts I get excited for these days. I’ve read so many screenplays and so many writers that I pretty much know what to expect when I open a script. That all changes today. Today’s screenplay combines a guy who I believe is one of the most talented in Hollywood, Adam McKay, with a unique idea. It also has an interesting cast. I mean, who would’ve thought that Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence would ever work together? I can’t think of two people more polar opposite. All of this implies that we’re getting something special. Famous last words, right? Let’s jump into it.

Scientist Kate Dibiasky works for tenured Michigan State professor Randall Mindy. During a party, Kate does a little work and, while tracking a comet, watches it collide with an asteroid, which then sends the asteroid on a collision course with earth.

Kate tells Randall, who confirms with everyone in the department that, yes, this thing is going to hit and destroy earth in six months. So they call the White House and get a meeting with the president, but to their dismay, the president says they want to sit on this information for three weeks, as they don’t want to throw any wild variables into the upcoming election.

Since every second passed is one more second the world isn’t stopping this asteroid, Kate and Randall go on a publicity tour to warn the world, in the hopes that it motivates our government to stop this thing. Except the exact opposite happens. Nobody takes them seriously. Even on the big shows, their interviews don’t trend. Everyone thinks their story is cute but, you know, not likely to be true.

As Kate gets angrier and angrier, Randall starts to cozy up with the White House, despite the fact that they’re not doing anything. Which makes Kate even angrier! Eventually, even the president can’t deny that this asteroid is coming for them. And so they FINALLY come up with a plan to send nukes at the thing and knock it off course.

But during the launch, just as the nuke delivery guy has made it to space, he TURNS AROUND. What’s happening, Kate demands. Well, it turns out the Elon Musk-like Peter Isherwell has discovered over 4 trillion dollars worth of gold and diamonds on the asteroid. He’s made a deal with the White House to use a series of drone-nukes that will latch onto the asteroid at strategic spots, blow it up into small pieces, which they can then mine from the ocean.

The problem with this plan is that the asteroid is now so close that if something goes wrong, they won’t have another shot to destroy the thing. Will they be able to pull this mission off? Or is everyone going to die because no one will acknowledge that this great big asteroid is really going to hit us?

One of the first questions that popped into my head while reading this was, “Why did Leonardo DiCaprio agree to make this movie?” The character of Randall isn’t like anything he usually does. I don’t remember the last time DiCaprio did comedy. I guess he’s sort of comedic in Tarantino’s movies. But I don’t think he’s ever done satire, has he?

Anyway, it all became clear when I realized this movie was an allegory for global warming. It’s about the fact that there’s this giant asteroid coming at us but nobody wants to “look up.” They all stare at the ground and ignore it in favor of the latest tick tock drama or what sexual misgiving the newest supreme court nominee engaged in 30 years ago. Global warming is DiCaprio’s passion (even if he likes to fly private jets everywhere). So if you share DiCaprio’s passion for this subject matter, you too, will probably enjoy this.

As a story, though, I had trouble getting into it. Satire has never been my thing. So that’s part of it. But the bigger part is that I didn’t care about Kate or Randall. And isn’t that what it always comes back to? It doesn’t matter if you have a great plot. It doesn’t matter if you’re passionate about the subject matter. If we’re uninterested (or even casually interested) in your characters, it’s not going to work.

Kate is one-note. All she does the whole time is be pissed off. That’s it. She tells people about the asteroid and when they don’t take it seriously she throws up her hands and says, “I’m done.” When you repeat the same beat over and over again for a character, that character becomes boring quickly.

Randall is a little more complex. He’s got this cheating scandal going on and he eventually turns to the dark side by cozying up with the president. But I never got a handle on him at all. At least with Kate, I could designate her. She was “the angry character.” You could give me all the time in the world and I still wouldn’t be able to tell you what kind of person Randall was.

This is why I remind writers, early on in their script, to figure out your character’s defining trait. Joker wants to fit in with the world. Jordan Belforte is addicted to excess. In Run, the mother loves her daughter too much. I don’t have any idea what Randall wants. And that hurts the story because if you have one character who’s too thin and another who’s undefined…. You don’t have a movie.

I’m going to make a grand assumption here and guess that McKay was so set on exploring his theme that he overlooked the people delivering it. This happens to all writers. Whenever we start a script, we have a specific reason we want to write it. Maybe it was the concept, a character, a theme, we want to tell a breakup story because we just went through a devastating breakup. Whatever it is, it’s often specific. What happens, though, is we develop a blindspot to everything else in the story. Those other variables aren’t the reason we wrote the story so we don’t care about them as much.

The script does have some funny moments. There’s a whole thread about “impact deniers.” Congress doesn’t initially approve the “Save The Planet Bill” due to partisan politics. The woman Randall has sex with gets off on being told the specific scientific ways the asteroid is going to destroy the planet. And there was the occasional funny line, such as this exchange in an early interview on a news show – Kate: “Well, it became apparent that the large asteroid’s orbit was changed by the hit, the collision… and it is now on a course to directly and catastrophically hit earth in just over five months.” Newsperson: “Now how big is this rock? Could it damage say, someone’s house?”

Also, even though I wasn’t that invested in the story, I did want to read til the end. There’s something to be said about a strong hook and wanting to see how that hook is resolved. I genuinely did not know, until the last 15 pages, if McKay would have earth get its s%$# together or kill everyone off. So at least I was uncertain where the story was going, which is more than I can say for most of the scripts I read.

But I don’t know, guys. I’m neutral on the script’s theme. The main characters were average at best. I didn’t laugh as much as I hoped to. And satire is one of my least favorite genres. When you add all those things together, you get my lukewarm response. It seems like a good movie to put on Netflix though. I’m not convinced something this off-center could have been produced for theatrical distribution. What do you think?

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

What I learned: Spec screenwriters should stay away from the satire genre. It’s one of those genres, like dark comedy, where the execution bullseye is microscopically small. This tends to be a “showoff” genre anyway. A genre for those who like to prove how smart they are. But even if you’re good at it, the chances of you sticking the landing on one of these scripts is incredibly small. Therefore, I’d steer clear.

A funny thing happens when you read a ton of scripts in a row. Especially the way I did it over the weekend. I needed to finish all the entries and I was running out of time since I had to post the semifinalists Monday, so I had zero breaks. As soon as I finished ten pages of one script, I put it in a pile and immediately opened up the next one.

When you’re reading that much, an almost “Matrix-like” clarity comes over you about what really matters in the first ten pages (and, by extension, the script). I realized that all I cared about were two things. One, give me an entertaining scene that grabs me. And two, introduce me to somebody I care about. If you do one of those two things, I’ll read on. If you do both of those things, I’m *excited* to read on.

Let’s unpack this because we talk about these things all the time, but I’m not sure everyone knows why they’re important other than they hear people like me say they are. Too many screenwriters approach the craft from a subjective point of view. They think that because they are writing something, the script will automatically be interesting. It is their belief in themselves that guides their decisions.

So, for example, if they like ‘driving and talking’ scenes, they might start the script with a married couple driving and talking and simply assume that because they like that scenario, other people will as well. But two people talking while driving without anything else going on is a poor scene prompt. In all likelihood, it isn’t going to yield an interaction that a third-party (the reader) would enjoy.

The mental shift writers need to make is to stop seeing their script from their own selfish point-of-view and start looking at it from an OBJECTIVE point-of-view. Transport yourself into the reader’s head then ask if what’s on the page is entertaining *to that person.* It is from this perspective that you will more likely generate a strong scene.

From there, you either come up with a new, more entertaining scene prompt, or you can reimagine the current scene in a more entertaining way. The best way I’ve found to do this is to inject a problem into the scenario. A problem achieves three things. It forces your characters to act. It forces your characters to make choices. And it creates conflict between characters. Because, often, when two (or more) people are faced with a problem, they have different ideas about how to deal with it. And those ideas conflict with one another, resulting in an interesting dialogue.

So if we’re going with this car scene. What if, instead of them driving in the car, we start with them on the side of the highway, their car having broken down. This is our “problem.” Already, it’s a more interesting situation because we’re curious how they’re going to resolve the problem. And what good writers will do is they’ll add factors that pressure the characters, which make the situation even worse.

For example, if this were a married couple, maybe Doug, the husband, dragged his feet all morning even though, Lucy, his wife, stressed to him how important it was that they be on time today because she has a huge meeting. So they’re already late as it is, and now their car has broken down, and she’s got a huge meeting. Look at how much more interesting the dialogue is getting. He might want to call AAA to get the car towed first but, since she’s in such a hurry, she wants to get an Uber, now! That’s what they’re arguing about.

And we can go even further. Maybe they have a 4 year old daughter they’re taking to pre-school. And it’s burning up outside. And she’s in the back of the broken car and now she’s burning up. And so Lucy is already furious that Doug has put them in this position but now their daughter’s safety is in danger. You can see how introducing a problem and then building little agitators into that problem can take a boring car driving scene and turn it into this intense compelling opening.

I’m not sure writers who see writing through a subjective lens can come up with that scene. It’s only writers with an objective mindset that come up with scenes that entertain others. Now there is a writing philosophy out there that goes something like, “Write whatever you want and, if you like it, others will too.” While I’m not going to completely dismiss that philosophy, it relies more on luck. When you completely dismiss the audience and write for yourself, you tend to come up with blander, less dramatic, more pretentious stories.

And, by the way, you shouldn’t be thinking this way ONLY for the opening. The opening may be the most important scene since it’s the scene that either hooks the reader or doesn’t. But you want to take that attitude into every scene in your script. Ask yourself, is the reader being entertained right now or am I assuming they’re enjoying themselves because I’m writing words for them and I’m a good writer?

The other way to hook a reader is to introduce a character who’s instantly intriguing in some way. They are a ‘hook’ in and of themselves. This is the harder route to go, for sure, because character is the hardest thing to get right in screenwriting. Most characters in scripts read like characters when they need to read like people.

There are lots of theories on how to construct a character that feels real and lively and compelling. But I’ve found the starting point is always a commitment to creating a compelling character in the first place. I know that sounds obvious but it actually isn’t. Most writers come up with an idea, start writing the script, and figure out the characters along the way.

If you want to write a strong character, you must think of them apart from your story. This is how Wes Anderson created one of his most famous characters ever, Max Fischer, from “Rushmore.” He and Luke Wilson started with Max, tried to make him as weird and unique as possible, and only then did they come up with a story for him. I dare anybody to go watch that movie and not come away mesmerized by that character.

So you first have to make that mental commitment. Then use your first scene as a resume that lets the reader know what they’re going to be getting. I have a couple of examples for you. The obvious one is “Joker.” Joker, the movie, doesn’t even really have a plot. It’s just this really weird damaged person trying to fit into society who keeps getting kicked down. And that’s how we meet him. He literally gets kicked and beaten down. You want to keep reading after that opening scene SPECIFICALLY to see what happens with that character.

Another example is Cassandra from the upcoming movie, “Promising Young Woman.” That script starts out with a really drunk woman at a bar who gets picked up by a seemingly cool guy who then tries to take advantage of her back at his place, only for her to reveal she’s stone-cold sober and exposes his motives. This woman goes around doing this all the time. But what really makes her interesting is that she doesn’t know where the line is. Is she a hero? Or is she a villain? That’s when you really get into “interesting character territory,” when the answer to that question isn’t easy.

By the way, you’ll note that both Promising Young Woman and Joker started with entertaining scenes. Joker has his sign stolen that he’ll have to pay for if he doesn’t get it back. And we’re pulled into Cassandra’s situation because we’re worried for her. We see this wounded animal at a bar and think she might be in danger. That’s the ideal way to do it. Start with an entertaining scene AND a compelling character. Those always turn out to be the best scripts.

This topic is obviously more nuanced than 1500 words allow. There are scenarios where two people in a car talking can be entertaining, such as if you have strong dialogue skills able to carry a scene all by themselves. And there’s a discussion to be had about how writing for yourself can lead to some off-the-wall weird stuff you’d never be able to tap into if you’d focused solely on pleasing others. So I’m not saying you have to do it the way I’ve laid out.

All I can tell you after reading that many pages in a row is that the scripts that suffered the most were the ones that started with a weak or common scenario and had bland or simplistic characters. Your two most important components are your story and your characters. If you can’t make either of those pop in the first scene, why would anyone keep reading? This article is a game plan to tackle that. I’ll leave it up to you whether you want to use it or not.

Carson does feature screenplay consultations, TV Pilot Consultations, and logline consultations. Logline consultations go for $25 a piece or $40 for unlimited tweaking. You get a 1-10 rating, a 200-word evaluation, and a rewrite of the logline. They’re extremely popular so if you haven’t tried one out yet, I encourage you to give it a shot. If you’re interested in any consultation package, e-mail Carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line: CONSULTATION. Don’t start writing a script or sending a script out blind. Let Scriptshadow help you get it in shape first!

Genre: Romantic Comedy
Premise: (from Black List) MEET CUTE, the hottest dating app on the market, brings couples together by giving them their Rom Com moment. When the app’s biggest skeptic, Haley, matches with one of its developers, Russ, their instant connection starts to change her mind.
About: This script finished on last year’s Black List. Which begs the question. Is there going to be a Black List this year?? There wasn’t a Blood List. It appears that Covid has infiltrated Hollywood’s ability to send out scripts. Does that mean The Last Great Screenplay Contest becomes 2020’s Black List? Lots to figure out in these last few weeks of the year! (edit! My bad. I just learned there was a Blood List. Not sure why nobody told me!)
Writers: Chris and Dan Powers
Details: 109 pages

Chloe Moretz for Haley?

You may be noticing a trend this week. Easy-to-read genre yesterday. Easy-to-read genre today. Why am I picking easy reads? Maybe because I READ 1000 PAGES OF SCREENPLAYS over the weekend to find my contest semifinalists. These crying eyes needed a break. And they found a couple in the sweet simplicity of slasher horror and romantic comedy. Tons of dialogue. The action paragraphs never extend beyond two lines. It’s sweet screenplay-reading nirvana, I tell you.

Haley is a relationship-phobic producer at a daytime talk show where today’s topic is the new hit dating app, MEET CUTE. Meet Cute’s founder, Keaton, explains that Meet Cute takes all your information, matches you up with the perfect person, and then looks for opportunities when you’re in the same area to send you a push notification to “go to the grocery store” or “take a walk in the park.” You then, hopefully, bump into your significant other in that perfect movie-like way.

We then meet Russ, a coder at Meet Cute, and also a user! On Thanksgiving, Russ gets a notification to “go to the grocery store” and, wouldn’t you know it, he meets none other than Haley there. The two have a canned cranberry-sauce inspired “meet cute” and meet again a few days later at the movies, where they officially enter into the first stage of a relationship.

OR DO THEY!?

Out of nowhere, Haley gets the relationship jitters and pulls out.

OR DOES SHE!?!?

No, because Russ tells her, you can’t do that. We’re a great match.

BUT ARE THEY!?!?!?

No! Because guess what? Russ goes into the Haley’s profile to learn that she was not told to go to the grocery store that night. She was supposed to go to the park! Which means they aren’t really each other’s “meet cute.” Russ decides not to tell Haley this so that their relationship can grow. But then, via circumstances that felt suspiciously like ESP sent from the writers themselves, Haley starts suspecting something is off. She charges to Keaton’s place and demands to know their “meet cute” details. Her suspicions turn out to be correct as Keaton confirms they weren’t supposed to meet each other.

Convinced that there’s no reason to continue this sham of a relationship (because she was told by an app that she didn’t like a guy???), Haley bails. Russ bombards Haley with texts but Haley is having none of it. Will Russ figure out a way to convince our app-influenced rom-com princess to change her mind? Or was their “meet cute” destined to become a “separate ugly?”

Wow.

Where do I begin with this one? Well, the dialogue was pretty good. It wasn’t great. But it was better than the dialogue I read in most amateur romantic comedy scripts. One thing I want to point out with rom-com dialogue is that too many newbie writers write the “falling in love” part of the main couple’s dialogue with a lot of agreeing. “I love this.” “I love it too.” “We were at Pepe’s Pizza last night.” “Oh my god! Did you order the Sicilian crust?” “Yes!” “I love the Sicilian Crust!” “Tell me about it!” Don’t do that. Good dialogue comes from the disagreements. It comes from the no’s. The resistance. The conflict.

Here’s simple exchange between Russ and Haley. RUSS: “My dream is to make a pie that’s half pumpkin and half apple. Like a pizza with split toppings.” HALEY: “That’s disgusting.”

This might seem insignificant. But it’s important to note that a lot of newbie writers would’ve had Haley respond, “Oh my God. That’s genius!”

The bigger point is, the dialogue is solid in this script. And I have a feeling that that’s the reason it made the Black List.

Unfortunately, the rest of the script isn’t up to par. The thing that frustrated me most was loading a huge plotline on top of a very weak plot point. A little past the midpoint, we learn that these two aren’t each other’s “meet cute.” And it’s framed as this devastating development. Haley immediately breaks up with Russ over it.

There are two types of ways you can go in your story. There’s MOVIE LOGIC. And there’s THE TRUTH. You want to use the truth as much as possible. You want to stay away from movie logic as much as possible. Haley breaking up with Russ because they aren’t truly each other’s “meet cute” is one of the most movie logic things I’ve ever read. It is the opposite of what would truthfully happen. Haley doesn’t even believe in dating apps. Why does she all of a sudden think their word is bond?

But the bigger issue is that the writers then build the rest of the script on top of this weak plot development. It’s one thing to introduce a weak plot point. You can spot these in any movie. But you don’t want to make a bad thing worse. Try to isolate the weak plot point because if you use it as a foundation for more story, every additional development is going to feel weaker than the last one. And this was a big enough issue that it affected my enjoyment of the second half of the script.

But I actually have a bigger issue with this script. It doesn’t take advantage of its concept at all. When you have a fun concept inside of a fun genre, the only thing you should be thinking about is exploiting that genre. And, to me, the best way to exploit this concept is obvious. Once we learned that Russ was a coder for the app, he should’ve been using it to meet and have sex with as many girls as possible. He should’ve been the complex main character – the one doing something bad, who finally meets a girl he likes.

Consider what this new plot point would do for the aforementioned problem I brought up. Now, instead of Haley finding out that Russ isn’t her “meet cute,” Haley finds out that he’d been specifically writing code to hook up with as many girls as possible through the app. You see, when an obstacle enters your character’s path, you want that obstacle to be as difficult to overcome as possible. That’s why the reader keeps reading. Because they don’t know if the character can actually succeed. If this happened with Russ, we’d genuinely wonder if these two were ending up together. That’s how difficult that realization would’ve been to overcome.

I don’t know why they didn’t do this because it’s so much better than the script we got but I have a theory. Writers are so paranoid about writing “unlikable” characters that everybody has to be perfect! Even the characters with flaws, like Haley and her commitment phobia, are perky and fun and funny. Nobody has any darkness. Nobody has any complexity. We’re all shiny happy people here.

I’m sorry. But shiny and happy is boring. You gotta inject a little darkness into these happier genres to make them pop.

I don’t know. Maybe that’s just me. But this was way too generic for my taste. A great comp to show how to do it right is Voicemails For Isabelle. That script wasn’t afraid to get a little dirty.

Anyway, this is a no for me guys. Hopefully we’ll find a winner next week!

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

What I learned: People, “let’s” means “let us.” Otherwise, it’s “lets.” I can’t tell you how often I run into this mistake.

Good news! It looks like I’ll be posting all scripts that made it into the next round in The Last Great Screenplay Contest THIS MONDAY. Mark your calendars!

I was perusing Youtube as I am wont to do when I’m in Procrastination Mode, which is pretty much all the time. And I came across a video with the title – “What Did Darth Vader Do In His Free Time?”

I found myself fascinated by the question. We know Vader reluctantly attends meetings with regional generals. We know he stays updated on rumors of where Luke Skywalker might be. We know he meditates in that egg-shaped cryo-chamber of his.

But that only accounts for what? 30% of his day? Okay, let’s be generous and say 50%. What does he do with the rest of his day? I don’t think they have internet in Star Wars so he can’t sit around and waste time. He possibly has a few more meetings to go to than the ones they show. I could see him seeking updates on the performances of all his generals, since he doesn’t have time for a shred of ineffectiveness.

What else, though? If you were to chart Darth Vader’s day from 6 in the morning to 12 midnight, what would each hour look like? Does he shower? Does he read? Does he eat lunch? Come to think of it, I’ve never seen Darth Vader eat. How does he eat? Is it all intravenous? And does Darth Vader do anything for fun? Actually, “fun” is a misleading word. Does he do anything for enjoyment?

I am asking these questions because I’m genuinely fascinated with the subject matter. But I’m also bringing your attention to a lesser-known strategy for writing strong characters, and that is to know them beyond the scenes they’re in.

I came to the conclusion a couple of years ago that the most important part of a screenplay is character. A script can survive a bland concept. A script can survive an average plot. But a script cannot, under any circumstances, survive weak characters.

Now normally when we discuss strong characters, we go to the staples. Character flaw. Unresolved relationships with other characters. Addictions. Unresolved conflict with the past (trauma, death). But you can still do all of that stuff and your character feel bland. There’s a reason for this. You may know the psychological makeup of your CHARACTER when you apply these things. But you don’t yet know the PERSON. To find the person, you have to figure what their life is like beyond the page.

Now, there are a few ways to do this. The most common way is to write out a biography for your character. I like character bios but it doesn’t always give you what you want because the directive is vague. Covering 20-30 years of a character’s life in 5-10 pages can be daunting. What do you focus on? What do you leave out? And since your summarization is spanning so much time, are you at risk of resting on cliche (her parents died in a car crash, for example – a backstory I see in about 1 out of every 5 scripts).

The most helpful option I’ve found is to chart out an average day with your character. I’m talking about a day BEFORE your movie started. Start from the top. 7 am. They wake up. What’s the first thing they do? From there, assuming they have a job, what’s their pre-work ritual? Do they make breakfast or does their spouse make breakfast? If they make breakfast, do they go the fast and processed route – Pop-Tarts? Or do they take their time and cook a fluffy healthy omelette?

This may seem like overkill but think about it. How much can you learn about a person through what they eat? My experience is that you can learn a lot. Let me prove it to you. Here are two breakfast meals for two different people. Our first character gets their meal on the way to work. He goes to McDonald’s and gets a Hotcakes meal with two extra sausages, along with a Bacon, Egg, and Cheese McGriddle, along with a large Diet Coke. Our second character makes a green smoothie along with some steel cut oatmeal with a chopped up banana and a drizzle of peanut butter. Along with two hard boiled eggs.

You tell me you can’t envision these two people from these two meals. And had you never had a breakfast scene in your script, you never would’ve known this. Talk about an effective exercise! You’re already learning things about your character and you haven’t even gotten to work yet!

From there, what time do they go to work? And where is work? Is it an hour commute in heavy traffic or is it the 12 feet between the bed and the couch, like the commute your friend Scriptshadow enjoys? If it is an hour commute, what do they do during that hour? Do they listen to music, podcasts, sports radio? Note how each choice further shapes your character. A guy who listens to NPR segments about water shortages in Africa is a different beast than one who’s obsessed with whether his Dodgers picked up a new pitcher by the trade deadline.

Or what if they drive in complete silence? Good god, how creepy is that? This would be the choice I’d come up with for a serial killer.

Once they get to work, what’s the first thing they do? Do they say hi to others at the office or do they avoid everyone? Is there someone at work they like to flirt with? Do they seek her out and say hi?

This is going to be a grandiose statement but I’m going to say it anyway. If you don’t know what your hero does at work on an hour by hour basis, you don’t know character well. I can feel your resistance already. But trust me. You don’t. I have 7000-8000 screenplays in my rearview mirror as evidence. Most people spend more hours at work than they do at home. So if you don’t understand that part of their life, do you really understand them? Me says no.

Really figure this out. Know what they do. I know it’s annoying because we’re often writing about jobs we have no experience in. But that’s exactly why you’re avoiding it. Because researching it is too difficult. Well guess what. That bored audience member doesn’t have any sympathy for you. They’re not going to give you a break because figuring out what a regional manager does all day is “weally weally hard.”

Where do they go to lunch? What do they eat (again)? You can learn so much about a character from these moments in their day. For example, you might realize that your hero is trying to eat better. So they bring a healthy bagged lunch. Then they have to eat with everyone else in the break room who have all ordered pizza. Just the way your character stares at that delicious pizza they’re not allowed to have tells you so much about them.

Do they check in with their spouse during the day? When they get out of work, do they go straight home? Do they pick up the kids from their practice or activities? Or do they leave that duty for their spouse? These choices matter. They give us further insight into who your character is. Maybe your character *could* do that but they’re selfish so they leave it up to their overworked spouse.

Or maybe your hero usually stays late at work because they hate their home life. They’re bummed when they run out of work to do and everyone else has left because now they actually have to go home. Or maybe they’re the opposite. They hate work more than anything. Or love their kids more than anything and therefore leave the second the clock strikes 5pm.

Once they’re home for the night, is it a family dinner where they all sit at the table and talk about their day? Or does everyone scatter off and do their own thing? Does their rebellious teenage daughter secretly order Doordash every night, compounding an insane food bill that infuriates both parents? Do you see how much we’re learning about this person’s life through these questions?

And all we’ve done is gone through their day. So I implore you to RIGHT NOW drop whatever you’re doing and write out an average daily schedule for the hero in your current screenplay. Come back to these comments and I promise you – PROMISE YOU – you will happily concede that you learned a few new things about your character. And once you’re finished, do it for the next three biggest characters in your script.

It doesn’t take long. What do you have to lose? Besides your lightsaber-wielding son.

A case study in how to create a sympathetic protagonist.

Genre: True Story/Sports
Premise: Set in the 50s, a young orphan girl must rise out of the confines of her orphanage to realize her unparalleled talent in the sport of chess.
About: If we are all looking at the best case scenario for what our proposed screenwriting career looks like, Scott Frank is a great comp. He wrote Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Minority Report, and, most recently, Logan. He’s now teamed up with Allan Scott to adapt the 1984 Walter Tevis novel, The Queen’s Gambit, for Netflix.
Writer (pilot episode): Scott Frank
Details: 60 minutes

Here’s the rule.

If there is a Netflix show or movie that makes it to #1, which then gets dethroned due to some other new Netflix entry, but then makes it BACK to #1? It’s always a great show or movie.

This rule stands until it can be disproven!

That’s exactly what we have today. We have The Queen’s Gambit shooting up to #1 early, getting dethroned by some new Netflix drivel, then charging back to take the top spot again. Check mate, my dear.

Check. Mate.

I didn’t have a lot of interest in this show until I found out Scott Frank was involved (and heard a few of you championing it in the comments section). Frank is a hell of a writer. And now that I’ve seen the pilot, you get a really clear look at what good writing does for a show. Cause everything else at Netflix is so far down the ladder, Queen’s Gambit is looking like Chinatown. If you’re a writer, you’ll definitely want to check it out. Especially if you struggle with writing compelling characters that readers root for.

Beth Harmon is 9 years old when her parents die in a car crash. Beth was in the car too but miraculously survived without a scratch. It’s not clear whether that’s a blessing or a curse. The next thing she knows, she’s thrust into an orphanage that has a pretty good vibe going. Oh, except for the fact that they force their girls to take tranquilizers every day. 1950s America had some radical ideas on how to raise our youth, that’s for sure.

Because Beth is high all the time, she stumbles around the grounds in a spaced out state. But she eventually finds her way to the basement where the janitor, an introspective sad man named Mr. Shaibel, plays chess games against himself. Beth asks him to teach her and while he’s reluctant at first, he soon realizes she has a generational talent for the game.

While Beth struggles to feel emotion after the loss of her parents, it’s clear she enjoys learning the game. Every night before bed, she takes a couple of the tranquilizers she hid, gets high, and envisions a chess board on her ceiling so she can go through all the possible game scenarios. It isn’t long before she’s easily beating Mr. Shaibel. This leads to Shaibel connecting Beth with a chess club friend who works at the high school. That friend asks Beth if she’d like to come play against some new competition. Sure, she says, and promptly beats the school’s ten best players… all at the same time.

Meanwhile, the state suddenly decommissions the use of tranquilizers on children, and Beth is besides herself. She’s come to depend on those pills and now she’s forced to be stone cold sober. Determined to keep her high going, Beth sneaks into the back room where the pills are kept, and jams a large handful of them down her throat. Just as the headmaster reaches the room, Beth OD’s. End of episode.

If there is a super-hack to screenwriting – a singular element that ensures screenplay success – it is a sympathetic protagonist, someone we care about and who we want to see succeed.

If you do that right, it feels to the reader like they know the person. Which means you’ve broken the 4th wall. Of course we want to see them succeed. We feel like we know them!

Unfortunately, the formula for writing that character is elusive. Making your hero funny and giving them a ‘save the cat’ moment will make us care about them, yes. But it’s the degree to which we care about them that matters. If we only “kind of” care, then we’re only “kind of” interested in what happens to them.

And since we’re all so movie savvy, we don’t react well to cliche versions of these constructions. For example, everybody can tell you the reasons why Indiana Jones is [arguably] the most popular movie hero ever. Yet every time someone tries to clone those aspects of his character (charismatic, sarcastic, rebellious, roguish), it doesn’t work.

So how do we create a hero that audiences truly care about? The Queen’s Gambit is a great example of how to pull it off. First, Scott Frank creates a sympathetic situation. Beth loses both of her parents in a car crash. I’m going to come back to that car crash in a minute because I find car crash backstories to be cliche. But Frank does something to make it work which I’ll explain.

In regards to the sympathetic situation of losing your parents, there’s one extra thing you need to do if you want us to really care about that character. Which is this: SHE DOESN’T FEEL SORRY FOR HERSELF. That is so pivotal, I can’t emphasize it enough. Where so many writers get it wrong is they create a character who has experienced trauma or loss… and then they double down and have them feel sorry for themselves. The secret ingredient to creating a sympathetic protagonist through trauma/loss is making sure they don’t lean into that loss and play the victim. We don’t root for those people. I don’t know the science behind it but we just don’t.

And it doesn’t have to be exactly like Beth. Beth isn’t the most joyous person. She’s pretty even keel. But you can have your character be more joyous, depending on the genre and story. The main thing is don’t allow them to be sorry for themselves. We like people who fall down but keep getting up and trying. Not people who fall down and start crying and say they can’t do it anymore.

There’s one more thing you need to do to really kick your character into high gear. It’s not easy to define but I’ll try. You need to introduce one (although more than one is fine) extra element into your character that is offbeat in some way – that takes the character further away from the generic version that everybody else writes. Cause I’ve read a ton of “prodigy” scripts and, trust me, 99% of the time, everybody writes the same prodigy character. You need a mutation if they’re going to feel real.

That comes in The Queen’s Gambit when a fellow orphan asks Beth what the last words her mom said to her were. We then do a brief flashback from within the car, right before it crashes, and the mom says to Beth in a sad defeated tone, “Close your eyes.” Right then we realize the crash wasn’t an accident. It was a full blown murder-suicide attempt.

Before this revelation, it was just another “parents die in a car accident” backstory. But when we see that the mom was actually trying to kill them all, then it becomes a lot more sinister, and creates feelings from the daughter that are way more complicated. A single feeling (sadness) is often boring. But two conflicting feelings (sadness and anger) can ignite a character, since it places them in a constant state of conflict. This was the thing that elevated the character, in my eyes. She truly felt different after that.

In addition to that, Frank does what I tell you guys to do all the time – make unconventional choices throughout your story. Turning your 9 year old heroine into a full-blown drug addict was very much an unexpected choice. And even the orphanage itself – which was a safe and loving place, for the most part – was an unconventional choice, seeing as 9 out of 10 writers would’ve turned the headmistress into Miss Hannigan.

My only issue with the show so far is that it isn’t clear if the drugs help her play chess better or she’s just hooked on them and needs them to feel good. I’ll be disappointed if she needs them in order to play well.

But regardless, I thought this was strong! Nice to see a good show on Netflix again!

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

What I learned: Is there better actor catnip than the tortured genius? There isn’t an actor in the world who doesn’t want to play that role. So if you’ve got an idea with a tortured genius in it? Go ahead and write it. You’ll have WME, CAA, and UTA kicking down your door to get their client attached.