I was thinking back to one my top 5 ever movie scenes, the opening scene in Fargo where Jerry meets the two criminals in the bar to solidify the job he’s hired them for – kidnap his wife.

The dialogue in that scene, while not as vibrant or quote-worthy as, say, a Tarantino scene, is still great. And the reason it’s awesome is because there’s so much tension in the interaction. Jerry wants something. The two kidnappers don’t like the way it’s being handled and are, therefore, putting up resistance. “Shep said you’d have the 40 thousand for us now.” “No,” Jerry says. “See, I’m going to give it to you later, in the ransom.”

More recently, I was watching a scene in the Amazon show, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Midge’s mother had left the family to start a new life in Paris. Midge and her father go there to bring her back. They find her in a run-down apartment she rented. Similar to the scene in Fargo, the dialogue doesn’t have any lines the college crowd is going to be quoting. But the dialogue throughout the scene is strong because they’re trying to get her to come back with them and she’s having none of it.

Around this point I had a minor revelation. One of the keys to writing a good dialogue scene isn’t just establishing a character objective. Yes, that helps. If you *don’t* give your character an objective, the scene will feel pointless and your characters will prattle on like a couple of homeless people discussing the CIA. The key is that in addition to establishing the objective, YOU MUST THEN MAKE YOUR CHARACTER WORK FOR IT.

I used to make this mistake all the time without realizing it. I would put two characters in a scene. One (usually my hero) would have an objective. Technically, the scene should’ve worked. But so many of my scenes were still dull. Every once in a while one would work and I’d wonder, “Why is this one good and all the others suck?” I could never figure it out and began to chalk it up to luck.

I finally realized that I was never making my character work for their objective. Instead, my “objectives” were “objectives in name only.” I inserted them because the screenwriting books said it’s something I had to do. But I never saw any of these as “real” objectives. They were thrown in there to make things interesting, to give the scene some extra pop.

That’s actually one of the biggest violations I see writers make. They write what can technically be described as “resistance” to an objective. But it’s not true resistance. The reader doesn’t doubt for a second that the hero is going to get what he wants. This “false resistance” is why scenes that technically should work do not.

It happened in Tenet a lot, which is probably why so many people found the film boring. There’s a scene about 30 minutes into the movie that highlights one of the better attempts Nolan makes at true resistance to the hero’s objective.

It occurs when the Protagonist (that’s his name in the film) has to impress a woman named Kat in order to get an audience with the Russian oligarch he’s trying to take down (Kat is the Russian’s wife). Kat is an art connoisseur so he brings her a famous painting, parlaying that into a dinner where he makes his pitch to meet her husband.

Kat tells the Protagonist it ain’t going to happen (resistance!). Her husband is too big time and his men are going to beat the hell out of you just for meeting with me so… sorry. There is resistance here, obviously. But I didn’t doubt for a second that the Protagonist wasn’t going to meet the Russian.

That’s the difference between true resistance and false resistance. With true resistance, the reader will have legitimate doubt that the hero will be able to achieve his objective.

One of the better examples of this occurs in Return of the Jedi. Luke Skywalker comes in to retrieve his old buddy, Han Solo, from Jabba the Hut. Even though Luke is a freaking Master Jedi, we still doubt that he’s going to succeed. The pivotal moment when that doubt sets in is when Luke waves his hand to Jedi mind-trick Jabba into giving him his friends and Jabba LAUGHS. He doesn’t fall for Jedi nonsense.

If you think about it, that’s one of the more memorable scenes from the film and I believe that’s why. They conveyed genuine doubt that the hero was going to achieve his objective. And think about how much Luke had to do to eventually save his friends and escape Jabba. It was a huge ordeal. The resistance was real.

Which brings us back to topic of the article.

If you want a scene to shine, you must not only introduce a character objective. You must make them earn the objective. Or else what are we doing here? We’re just handing out lollipops to our hero whenever he needs one. Where’s the drama in that?

You should not only incorporate this tool into the entirety of the scene but within the scene, all the way down to individual questions. If your hero is a detective investigating a murder and he meets a person of interest and asks them the question he needs answered – Who do you think killed Frankie? – do not, under any circumstances, have that character answer the question right away.

MAKE YOUR HERO EARN IT.

“I’m going to cut straight to the chase. Who do you think killed Frankie?” “I just started a pot of coffee. Would you like some?” “No. I want to know who killed Frankie.” “Be back in a second. Sit down. Make yourself at home.” She disappears into the kitchen.

You see what’s going on here? We’re making the hero earn the answer to their question. And you better believe when this woman comes back with three cups of coffee that she’s going to bring up anything but Frankie. Which is exactly what you want. You want your hero to have to steer her on course and get the answer to that question. The more doubt you can inject into the scene that your hero is going to get his answer, the better.

Remember, if characters are constantly conversing freely, that’s not going to read well. Because all they’re doing, then, is exchanging information. “This is what I think.” “This is what I think.” “That’s an interesting perspective.” “So is your perspective.” There’s no drama in that type of exchange. There’s no uncertainty. And while there are situations where you can get away with it (in a comedy with two funny characters, for example) it’s usually a recipe for boredom.

One final point. Boring dialogue is rarely about the words themselves. Sure, interesting words, clever phrasing, strong anecdotes – these things can help dialogue. But the main reason a scene of dialogue doesn’t work is because you didn’t set up a scenario that allowed your characters to talk to each other in a way that’s entertaining to a third party. And that’s what “Make’em Earn It” is. You’re ensuring that every time your hero goes into a conversation, they’re going to have to earn the outcome they want. It’s never going to be handed to them. That alone is going to improve your dialogue dramatically.

Give it a shot in your latest script and let me know how it goes in the comments!

Genre: Spy/Thriller
Premise: Two CIA operative former lovers meet for dinner and try to figure out what happened five years ago with a complicated hostage plane takeover in Vienna they were involved in.
About: Olen Steinhauer adapted this script from his own novel. The script just sold to Netflix with Chris Pine and Thandie Newton attached to star. Steinhauer has been writing novels since 2003. In 2011, he sold the rights to his “Tourist” novels to Sony.
Writer: Olen Steinhauer
Details: 124 pages

I knew absolutely nothing about this one other than when I saw “knives” in the title I wondered if Netflix was jumping on the Rian Johnson “Knives Out” trend. You know Netflix. They have all that behind-the-scenes algorithmining going on so it wouldn’t surprise me if they greenlit something based on the title’s similarity to another successful title.

More optimistically, I am a Chris Pine enthusiast. I love the guy. I think we would be best friends if we ever met. And check out this curiosity. Who would’ve thought, ten years after the Star Trek reboot, that it would be Pine with the big career and Zachary Quinto struggling?

Not me! I’ve heard some stuff about Quinto having an ego the size of the sun which he uses to club people he works with into submission so maybe that has something to do with it. It’s a reminder for when you hit it big to always be nice to people! Cause unless you’re kicking box office ass, Hollywood has no issue kicking you to the curb.

No idea what to expect from this, which is kinda exciting. Can Netflix totally redeem itself after The Devil Hates Your Pajamas? God, I hope so.

It’s 2009. We’re in a plane parked on a runway in Vienna. A raging lunatic Pakastani terrorist is taking a cell phone video demanding that prisoners from his country be freed. If they don’t, he’s going to kill the people behind him. Pan back to see an entire first class filled with children. The terrorists have brought them up here and told the adults back in coach that for every one of them who tries something funny, a child will be killed.

Cut to the American Embassy in Vienna where we meet Henry Pelham and Celia Harrison. They’re both horrified by the video of the terrorist they’re watching. But before we see the rest of this play out, we cut back a few days ago to see the two in bed together. They’re lovers. What they don’t know yet is that how this terrorist attack ends will split them apart forever.

Well, maybe forever is an exaggeration. More like five years (by the way, this script was written in 2014, so five years puts them in “present day”). Celia has since retired, marrying an older gentleman and spitting out two kids. Henry still works for the CIA and he’s looking to finally close the book on that attack. But first, he wants to ask Celia a couple of questions regarding what happened that have never been answered.

So the two meet at a restaurant near Celia’s home, in Carmel, California. There’s clearly still a spark between the two. But Henry isn’t here for sparks. Or, at least, he doesn’t think he is. There were a number of choices made that day that escalated a manageable situation into a catastrophe.

The main question is it’s suspected someone in that Embassy was feeding the terrorists information. Who might it have been? Where “All The Old Knives” gets interesting is that when each person talks about the past, we cut to the past and see it. However, what we see isn’t always what the two former lovers say to one another.

For example, we’ll see a flashback of Celia being told by one of her bosses that her handler that day, Bill, is selling secrets to the terrorists. But Celia doesn’t tell this to Henry at the table. This initiates a series of dual-but-opposing-clues that leave us wondering who’s telling the truth. Or why one of the parties is withholding the information that they are.

(spoiler) But things get real crusty when we realize these two didn’t come here to get back together. They came here to kill each other. Each of them believes that the other one is responsible for what happened that day. The only question left is which one of them is right. Oh, and will they be able to go on with their life knowing that there’s a chance, however slim, that their belief that the other did it is wrong?

This one did not start well. We begin with the dreaded bulk intro page (that’s when you introduce five or more characters on a single page – it’s literally impossible for a reader to remember who’s who) and followed that up with the triple time jump. 2009, now 2008, now 2014 – all within two pages!

But once I realized what the script was trying to do, I settled in and enjoyed myself.

That’s because Steinhauer makes the clever choice of using the dinner as a framing device around which everything else orbits. This decision grounds the story and makes, what is normally, a hard to follow spy narrative with lots of characters and reveals, a simple “Which one of them is lying?” plot.

All of a sudden jumping back in time worked great because we knew why we were jumping and that we were always coming back to that restaurant.

I love when sophisticated storylines like this one wrap things around a simple construct. Sure, we could run all over the world like a James Bond movie. But this is so much more interesting.

Another thing I loved was that, while it’s one long conversation between two people, the flashbacks keep injecting new information into that conversation. For example, we’ll flash back to Celia talking with her handler, Bill, who warns her about Henry, who is up to something.

Or Henry goes to the bathroom where we reveal that he’s secretly recording this conversation. Then, later still, we learn that Bill was the one communicating with the terrorists. This ensures that what is, basically, a two hour long dialogue scene, never gets tiring. Things are always changing.

It’s like this giant pot of dramatic irony soup. We know something about Henry that Celia doesn’t know. Then we know something about Celia that Henry doesn’t know.

And all of this is wrapped around two additional elements that keep the read really exciting. The first is that these two are clearly still in love with each other. So we have this additional layer of complexity running underneath their terrorist conversation.

Then, on top of that, Steinhauer makes a really good decision not to give away what happened on the plane til the very end. We know something terrible happened. But we don’t know what or how bad it was. So, of course, we want to read til the end to find out.

The only reason this doesn’t rate as an “impressive” is the final reveal. It *does work.*. The script holds together. But for all the secrets and double-crossing we experience, I was hoping for something a little craftier or a little more exciting.

That’s the danger with having any twisty narrative. It’s great to have all these twists in the moment because they keep the reader entertained. But, whether you know it or not, you’re setting up an expectation for an all-time great shocking final twist. And, of course, how many times in history have we had one of those? Ten? Fifteen? In other words, the odds are not in your favor that you’re going to win the twist ending lottery.

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

What I learned: There’s dramatic irony – the act of telling us, the reader, something that our hero does not know. And then there’s dramatic irony with high stakes, which is a whole different ballgame. If we know that Celia cheated on Henry but he doesn’t, that’s fun dramatic irony. But fun dramatic irony doesn’t write memorable scenes. It’s just fun. But if we know that Celia plans to kill Henry and he doesn’t know this, now we have dramatic irony with some real stakes. That tends to lead to great scenes.

What I learned 2: This is, maybe, the best example of how influential information is to a conversation. A conversation where two people are having a straight-forward conversation with each other is boring 99% of the time. It’s the information the reader takes into each conversation that makes said conversation entertaining. You have control of that information so use it. Before Ray talks to Stan, tell us that Stan has owed Ray money for over a year that he still hasn’t paid back. You can then have them talk about anything you want and I guarantee you their conversation will be more interesting than had you not revealed that information to us.

Million dollar spec Tuesday! wooooooo-heeeeee!

Genre: Spy Thriller/Period
Premise: The origin story of MI:6, Britain’s secret intelligence service, that came about out of necessity after the horrors of World War 1.
About: I’d forgotten about this script, which sold for a million bucks back in 2013. I was reminded about it recently when I saw that the writer, Aaron Berg, was in the news for his Atlantis project that sold to Netflix and is teaming him up with Batman director, Matthew Reeves. The reason Section 6 hasn’t been made yet is said to be that the Bond franchise is prickly about the similarities between the project and its own famous spy character. The two were going to go to court over the matter but Bond got cold feet when they realized that, by going to court, they would have to define exactly what makes James Bond “James Bond,” potentially offering a blueprint for other studios to “write around” those tenets and create a bunch of James Bond clones. We’ll see what ultimately happens but with the movement on this other Berg project, expect Section 6 to gain new life.
Writer: Aaron Berg
Details: 122 pages

Aaron Taylor-Johnson for Duncan?

Scripts like Section 6 aren’t easy reads. They’re sort of like mini-novels with the more extensive world-building, lots of history, and longer descriptive paragraphs. Outside of readers who love the subject matter, these scripts are often met with a groan because the reader knows the read is going to take twice as long.

Why?

Well-written spec scripts have a lot of white space. A lot of dialogue. This means your eyes fly down the page. There’s nothing anyone who reads scripts for a living loves more than their eyes flying down the page.

So what do you do if you’re a writer who likes to write this sort of stuff? How do you overcome this reader bias? Six simple words: Make sure your script is good.

We open on the British Embassy in Russia in 1918. World War 1 has recently ended. It’s a different world we’re told by many a character in Section 6. Ain’t that the truth. A Russian officer charges into the British Embassy being trailed by a bunch of mean Russian soldiers. Those Russians not only kill the officer, they kill all the British workers as well!

Not long after this, a British spy named Thomas Hawthorne heads to the Embassy to retrieve a secret piece of paper that’s been hidden. As soon as he gets it, though, the lights come on and standing there is this meanie named Ivan Vostok. Ivan grabs him to take him back to his torture den to get him to decode the message on the secret coded piece of paper.

Back in Britain, we meet Mansfield Cumming, a former soldier (who now uses a cane) who directs MI-1, the British Foreign Intelligence Service. Cumming is informed by a then spry Winston Churchill that the secret piece of paper Russia now has is a list of Russian politicians to assassinate for Russian revolutionaries (that’s what the opening Russian soldier was running from – he’d just assassinated a high up Russian politician)! If they figure that out, Russia will most assuredly attack Britain.

Cumming’s job is to find someone to infiltrate the Russians and get that piece of paper back before they decode it! There’s only one problem. Britain’s spies at this time were all spineless rich wimps. They were good at hiding and sneakily exchanging information. But they couldn’t do the dirty work. Cumming needs someone who can do the dirty work.

Enter 23 year old Alec Duncan, a soldier who’d been smack dab in the middle of World War 1. If there’s anyone who saw dirty, it was this guy. Currently making his living pickpocketing pedestrians and cheating at poker, Cumming collects Duncan from jail after he’s caught by a local policeman.

You know what happens next. That’s right: training! Cumming helps Duncan ditch his soldier impulses and approach things like a spy would. You have to be sneakier. You have to be faster. You have to be strong under pressure. The only thing Cumming is worried about is whether Duncan, a brute at heart, can hang with high society types. So he sets up a test at a local upper crust function that ends with Duncan crashing two 1918 subway train cars. I’d say that’s a success, wouldn’t you?

After his training, Duncan is sent by boat to Helsinki (this is around page 72) where he meets up with another spy, a beautiful woman named Nightengale, and they sneak down into Russia, find a badly tortured Hawthorne, and get him out. But the Russians don’t give up easily, pursuing them all the way to the sea. Will our tiny team be caught resulting in World War 2? Or will Section 6 be born?

Section 6 is a solid script.

I’m not the biggest spy film fan. But when I do like spy films, it tends to be when they’re doing something differently. I like this angle of a time before spies could be spies. And this was the transition to get them from these polite hoity-toity wusses who got mad if they spilled wine on their shoesies to dudes with a license to kill.

This is always a good thing to keep in mind when it comes to concept creation. You don’t want to just look for subjects. You want to look for subjects in transition. For example, you could make a story about the train industry in the U.S.. Or you could make a story about the train industry during the birth of the American highway system. Because the highway system is going to make the train industry irrelevant, you’ve got a much more conflict-heavy playground to play in.

Disruptive forces are entertaining. Polite spies don’t work in the post World War 1 era where hundreds of thousands of soldiers’ lips have been seared off from exposure to chemical weapons. You need a dirtier spy, someone with a more varied, nastier, skillset.

The reason the script doesn’t get higher marks with me is because of the structure. We don’t send our hero out on his mission until page 72. This creates a second half of the script that feels rushed. For example, we’re meeting this primary character in Nightengale on page 75. Considering how well we know everyone else by this point, she feels paper thin and never quite makes sense for the mission.

Don’t get me wrong. I understand the writer’s dilemma. This is essentially an origin story. With origin stories, you need to lean into the whole learning process. When Spider-Man first gets his powers, you don’t send him after Octopus Guy five minutes later. Spider-Man must first learn how to use his powers, as well as balance out how these newfound abilities affect other parts of his life. That takes time.

I guess it comes down to if you’re an origin-story guy or not. Some people like getting into the nitty gritty of the origin. I just found it hard to reconcile that time was “of the essence” with the Russians getting closer and closer to cracking Hawthorne, and yet we’re taking weeks to train Duncan here. I understand it’s 1918 but still. The whole timing of the separate plotlines didn’t organically mesh.

I did like, however, that by making this a period piece, we got a more interesting McGuffin. These days, the spy film Mcguffins are all the same. They’re some variation of “the nuclear launch codes.” I liked that this was a list of assassinations to be made.

You have to understand, as a reader, we’re experiencing what you experience at the theaters, times 20. So every time you see “nuclear launch codes” in a movie, I’ll read 20 scripts with “nuclear launch codes.” Which means I’m easily turned off by any highly used trope. In contrast, I value writers who change these tropes up. And one of the easiest ways to change tropes is to do it at the concept level. Take us to places we don’t normally go. Naturally, when you do this, you’re going to find things you don’t normally find.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens with this because it’s one of the better scripts I’ve read in the genre in a while. But it does seem to have this giant hurdle to leap in the looming Bond Producer Brigade who are at the bridge, 24/7, shouting, “Though Shall Not Pass.”

And yes, I’m thinking the same thing all of you are thinking. Which is that I should’ve had Scott review this. :)

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

What I learned: Section 6 has one of the more interesting Save The Cat examples. It’s “Befriend the Cripple.” Duncan is friends with a fellow soldier who got half his face blown off in the war and now wears a Phantom of the Opera type mask. It’s a bit cheap. But the love Duncan has for him is very effective in making us like him, especially because he’s a pretty harsh guy that isn’t the easiest to root for.

The word on the street is that Pascal is out. Gone. No longer a part of The Mandalorian. He left mid-season because they refused to give him scenes with his helmet off. Ya gotta give it to Star Wars. This franchise loves drama.

How weird is this development? Well, it comes after learning, in the first season, that Pascal wasn’t even around for the show. They had John Wayne’s son in the Mandalorian suit instead (this is real! Look it up!).

So you’ve managed to make someone quit… who wasn’t even officially on the show. Only Star Wars, man. Only Kathleen Kennedy.

But let’s get to the trailer for season 2. Was it any good? It was pretty good. The Mandalorian is the closest thing so far to the original trilogy so it’s got that going for it. I love Baby Yoda putting up his “stroller shield.” That was fantabulously cute. I like the opening shot of a damaged ship. Not sure I’ve ever seen that before in a Star Wars property (not done like that, anyway). There isn’t a money shot but the trailer is solid. All Star Wars trailers are solid.

If you remember, I soured on The Mandalorian for two reasons. The lack of story connectivity was frustrating. Making this a pseudo anthology series goes against the connective tissue that helps make Star Wars so great.

But more frustrating was this choice to recruit second-tier Star Wars concepts from such shows as the animated “Star Wars: Rebels.” You’ve got our series villain now wielding something called the “dark sabre” which is such a dumb weapon concept I refuse to beleive it came from anyone over the age of eight.

The Mandalorian didn’t market itself that way. This is the series that started off with storm trooper helments on stakes. This is the series that opened up with a decapitation scene in a bar. Now we’re importing ideas from shows where every other character chimes in with a “I’ve got a bad feeling about this” before commercial break?

Star Wars is better than that.

And yes, I realize this is the franchise with little booping robots, characters named “Dooku,” and a giant slug for a villain. How is the dark sabre any different? I don’t know. I just know it is. This is why Star Wars has been so hard for so many creators to nail down. There are these indefinable variables that each fan has worked into their own “This is what Star Wars is” equations.

I will probably watch the series because the episodes are short and there’s bound to be one or two good episodes in the mix. Oh, and since Pascal is no longer around and there’s a rumor that Boba Fett is back from the dead, it might be fun to have Boba Fett kill the Mandalorian and slip into his armor moving forward. Talk about dramatic irony! We know this is Boba. But nobody else does.

That could get me back permanently. :)

Genre: Drama/Sort of Supernatural
Premise: When the sequel to a fringe graphic novel masterpiece unexpectedly emerges, the lone copy draws a group of superfans from different walks of life to buy it in a one-day only auction.
About: We have some weird connections to yesterday’s World War Z 2 review. This show is based on a British show written by Dennis Kelly. Who wrote yesterday’s script? Dennis Kelly. This script is written by Gillian Flynn. Gillian Flynn adapted her own book, Gone Girl, for David Fincher, the man who was supposed to direct Dennis Kelly’s script for World War Z 2. Did you follow all that? The show has recruited John Cusack, Rainn Wilson, and Happy Death Day star, Jessica Rothe. It will premiere on Amazon Prime.
Writer: Gillian Flynn (based on the original show created by Dennis Kelly)
Details: 65 pages

When it comes to TV shows that have the potential to be great, HBO has re-taken the pole position. You may remember when AMC and FX had some really great shows. And even Netflix, for a while, until they went algorithm crazy, favoring wackadoodle experiments such as The Floor is Lava, over the next House of Cards. So when they put something into production, I pay attention.

And yet, somewhere along the way, HBO gave up on Utopia. This happens quite a bit. HBO has a TON of shows in development and only lets the cream of the crop into the on-air lineup. Which leaves us to wonder if Amazon Prime is receiving a 1998 Chevy Impala with a bad transmission or a 2020 Tesla with some of them bulletproof windows. Let’s all hope it’s the latter. Cause I need a new show to watch!

After inheriting her grandfather’s cabin, Olivia and her hubby, Ethan, find a dark disturbing graphic novel in his home titled “Utopia.” Ethan looks it up online and realizes that it’s a sequel to the small but fiercely loyal fanbase of a graphic novel titled “Dystopia.” Figuring this might mean some *ka-ching*, Ethan posts online that he’ll be selling Utopia to the highest bidder at FringeCon this weekend.

Over the next 30 pages, we meet all the players. There’s hot Samantha, who’s a super hardcore Dystopia nut. There’s Wilson Wilson, an intense private guy who thinks the whole world is after him. There’s Grant, a 10-year-old kid. There’s Becky, who has a rare disease but is in a relationship with fellow Dystopia obsessive, Ian, who lives with his grandma.

All of these people know each other online due to their intense love for Dystopia. But none of them have met in real life. They don’t even know that Grant is 10. They think he’s a photographer for supermodels. That’s about to change since they agree to all get together at FringeCon and bid on Utopia.

On to FringeCon we go, where Olivia and Ethan have set up a hotel room where bidders come in one at a time, get to look at a single page from the book, then make a bid. Highest bid wins. By the way, this is where I should tell you that everyone in the group believes Dystopia predicts the future. It’s predicted numerous pandemics since it came out. And the sequel is said to have bigger, more dire, predictions.

Everybody makes their bid but no one here is rich. The highest bid doesn’t even crack 1k. So it sucks for them when the well off Carson (as far as I know, no relation) shows up and says he wants to take the comic off the market… for 20 grand! Ethan and Olivia say, “Ka-Ching” and sell it, thinking they just made out like bandits.

Except that a couple of hours later, two sketchy-looking dudes, Arby and Rod, show up demanding to know where the graphic novel is. They inform them Carson bought it. He’s in the penthouse. That’s not enough for them. They want to know everybody who looked at it. (spoilers) Ethan and Olivia get the sense that these aren’t a couple of angry buyers. These are dangerous people. Their sense is correct, cause Arby and Rod kill them. They then head up to the penthouse, where they learn of a disturbing development. Grant, the 10-year-old kid, has stolen it. And he’s getting away. To be continued…

Utopia makes a bold choice here in deviating from the original. In the original, we start out with a gruesome murder. Flynn, however, uses the first 45 pages to set up characters. There’s barely any story or plot. It’s us meeting character after character.

Now you may say, wait a minute Carson. You told us never to do this. Why does Gillian Flynn get to do it? Well, here’s the thing. You don’t have to add any plot to the first 40 minutes of your pilot script either. But if you’re going to go down that road, you better…

a) be really good at character creation.
b) be really good with dialogue.

Gillian Flynn is good at both. Plus, she has an advantage. She’s working with established material which already did some of the heavy lifting for her. It was a character-centric show, so she has the baseline for her characters set. Also, any character who didn’t work in the previous show, she can get rid of and replace with a character she thinks up. That’s a nice luxury to have when you’re writing something. Because, in my opinion, character creation is the hardest part of writing.

The point is, if you’re not using plot to hook us, you need to have been told numerous times that your character writing is strong and/or that your dialogue is strong too. Because they’re what’s going to be front and center without plot. And even if they’re “kind of good,” readers are going to tune out. The characters need to be “really good” or better.

Now what I found interesting about Flynn’s Utopia was that it took the opposite approach to Kelly’s pilot. Kelly put the first kill scene in the pilot’s teaser. Flynn puts her first kill scene all the way at the end of the pilot.

Which of these is the better choice? Do you kill right away? Or do you LEAD UP to the kill?

Each has a different effect on the audience. If you kill in the opener, it immediately grabs our attention. But then it’s gone. We can’t use it again. Or, if we do, it’s not as surprising anymore and, therefore, less impactful.

When you lead up to a kill, it gives the reader something to look forward to. If we establish that Arby and Rod are bad guys looking to do bad things and they’re on their way to FringeCon, we the reader are pulled along by a powerful line of suspense. We know that these two bad guys are going to collide with our heroes, which means we’re going to keep reading to find out what happens.

The downside of this choice is, not a lot of exciting things are going to happen prior to this collision. This means the reader is mainly reading setup and exposition. Not exactly the most riveting story experience.

Still, I would say that the second option is better because you get much more out of it. You get all that ongoing suspense. Whereas, if you kill right away, you suck up some of the story’s air. We’ve already seen the worst. It’s like that bad movie, U.S. Marshalls, the unofficial sequel to The Fugitive. They had that amazing plane crash scene in the opener and then nothing else in the script came close to it.

The problem is Flynn’s Utopia doesn’t take advantage of the second option. It never implies that the kill is coming. It doesn’t even imply the bad guys are bad. So we don’t get any build-up of that suspense, of that anticipation. Which means the kill is a surprise.

In screenwriting, you want to get the most bang for your buck out of every plot development. If the only entertainment we get from a scene happens within the scene itself, you’re leaving a ton of entertainment on the table. The right move would’ve been to heavily imply that Arby and Rod were going to do very bad things, which would’ve gotten so much more out of this plot point. As it stands, we get that surprising kill and— then it’s done.

But like I said, the characters are all really strong here. So I still enjoyed the experience. I still want to see what happens next.

Oh, and I wanted to give you guys a THIRD VARIABLE example from Utopia since I talked about that last Thursday. When Olivia and Ethan first find the book, they need to figure out what the book is. So they go on the internet on his phone. Now, we could’ve stopped there. He checks Google. Google tells them. Exposition handled. Scene over. But because they’re out in the middle of nowhere, Ethan keeps losing the connection in the middle of a Youtube explanation of what Utopia is. This is the THIRD VARIABLE that makes the scene more interesting. The explanation keeps stalling, forcing them to keep moving, creating more suspense, and making what could’ve been a boring straight-exposition scene into something a little more dramatic.

This show could be good assuming episodes 4-10 don’t devolve into “running around with your heads cut off” storytelling. I hope Flynn has a plan for that!

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

What I learned: “Olivia, hair now pulled pragmatically back in a bandana…”. This is an early description in the script. The funny thing is that I read it as “dramatically” instead of “pragmatically,” which created a different image in my head. Like she really went all out on putting her hair back. But when I realized it was “pragmatically,” I thought, “Oh, that’s more straight-forward,” and my image of the visual changed. This reminded me how much words matter when describing things, particularly adverbs. And how you can use them to change the tenor of the image. Note how all of these adverb substitutions create different images in your head, as well as make you think of Olivia differently.

“Olivia, hair now pulled lazily back in a bandana…”.

“Olivia, hair now pulled carefully back in a bandana…”.

“Olivia, hair now pulled defiantly back in a bandana…”.

“Olivia, hair now pulled playfully back in a bandana…”.

“Olivia, hair now pulled sharply back in a bandana…”.

“Olivia, hair now pulled joylessly back in a bandana…”.

“Olivia, hair now pulled painfully back in a bandana…”.

I read so many scripts where I never get any sense of the characters at all. Little things such as including the perfect adverb can help solve that problem. Not to mention, it’s a lot of fun trying to find the right adverb.