Conquer exposition once and for all!!!

It’s been a while since we’ve talked about exposition. The reason for that is, most writers who’ve broken into the professional ranks don’t have exposition issues. They might be struggling with other aspects of storytelling. But exposition is, for the most part, a beginner and intermediate problem. Therefore, I’m not running into tons of exposition issues in the pro scripts I review.

But when I’m reading the Last Great Screenplay Contest entries, I’m seeing exposition problems all over the place.

Why is exposition a problem? Well, the number one reason exposition is problematic is that it’s a dialogue killer. You can’t focus on the more advanced things that make dialogue work if you haven’t mastered exposition.

So what is exposition? Exposition is any information about your characters or plot that you’re trying to fit into your dialogue. So, for example, if it’s important that the reader know your character was a former karate champion (because, later in the movie, he uses karate to beat someone up), exposition would be two characters mentioning, early on in the screenplay, that this character used to be a former karate champion.

The super beginner screenwriter might formulate the conversation like this…

DOUG: Hey, how’s the karate coming along?

FRANK: Oh, I haven’t done that in years.

DOUG: But you used to be a champion, right?

FRANK: That was a long time ago.

Extremely on the nose, right? A more experienced beginner might tackle it this way…

DOUG: Guess who I ran into today? Bill Lane. He mentioned that old karate tournament you used to compete in. We were trying to remember where it was.

FRANK: Encino.

DOUG: Right. Encino. Anyway, he was telling me he just got divorced…

A teensy bit better. But still bad.

What I’m going to do today is cover two strategies you should always consider before using exposition. Then I’ll go into the two main approaches I endorse for writing exposition.

Let’s start with the strategies. The first strategy you should consider when facing exposition is not including it at all. Most of the time we THINK we need exposition when we don’t. Let’s say you’re writing a Fast and the Furious type script and you feel like you need to establish that your hero, MIKE, has an extensive history with a character who will be appearing in the story later, DERONIS. Maybe they sold drugs together, raced cars together, STOLE cars together. Whatever.

So you include a scene early on where Mike is talking to his wife and says, “I’m going to have to see Deronis this weekend.” We can tell his wife isn’t happy about this. “When was the last time you talked to him?” “Barbados. ’04. When he was running Kamikaze’s business.” “When he ratted you out.” “Yeah.”

This isn’t the worst dialogue but you have to ask yourself, do you really need it? Consider the alternative. Don’t mention any history between the two of them and then, when they meet, Deronis says, “Hey Mike.” “Hey.” “Haven’t seen you since Barbados.” Mike offers a tight smile. And that’s it. Or, you don’t even need the Barbados part. “Haven’t seen you in a while,” followed by a tight smile. That gives us all the information we need. These guys have a history and it isn’t all good. This should always be your first weapon against exposition. Cause the best exposition is no exposition.

Strategy number 2 is show us rather than tell us. If you have to use exposition, come up with a visual way to do so. And no, that does not mean cut to a karate champion trophy to convey that the character is a karate champion. Or, one of my favorites, the “series of pictures” to show what’s gone on in the family. The first picture is a happy family of four. In the second picture, placed next to it, the mother is bald and pale. And in the third picture, it’s just three family members, the mom dramatically gone (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve encountered this). Sure, these are viable ways to convey information in a pinch. But that’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about if you’re writing Star Wars and you want to convey that Darth Vader is the most feared man in the galaxy, you don’t have two characters discussing all of the awful things that Darth Vader has done in the past. You simply show Vader demanding information from a Rebel soldier and when the soldier doesn’t reply, Darth Vader lift him up off the ground and crack his neck. Showing us that is better than anything you can tell us about Vader.

But let’s say there’s information you really feel that the reader needs to know. And there isn’t any natural way you can provide the information by showing. In that case, you want to use the “Spotlight and Shadow” approach. The big mistake newbie writers make when writing exposition is that the exposition becomes the reason to write the scene. As a result, the scene feels utterly unnatural. The reader senses that the only reason the characters are talking is to give information to them. In this case, you are spotlighting the exposition.

What you want to do instead is play exposition out IN THE SHADOWS. The thing you should be spotlighting is the ENTERTAINMENT. A character wants something in the conversation. That something has stakes attached to it so it feels important. There’s conflict. There’s drama. And for those reasons, the scene is fun to read. What the reader doesn’t realize, however, because you’ve put the spotlight on the entertainment, is that IN THE SHADOWS you’re disseminating exposition.

The example I always love to use is the scene in Ferris Bueller when he calls his sick friend, Cameron, and tries to convince him to ditch school with him. The spotlight is 100% on the entertainment. Ferris has a clear goal. Convince his friend to ditch school. His friend doesn’t want to, which creates conflict. And so all we’re focused on is whether Ferris is going to convince his friend or not. Meanwhile, we get exchanges like this: “If you’re not over here in 15 minutes, you can find a new best friend.” “Ehh! You’ve been saying that since the fifth grade.”

That line is exposition. It just told the audience that these two have been best friends at least since the fifth grade. But even the keenest moviegoer probably wouldn’t have identified that moment as exposition. It’s just a natural extension of the conversation they’re having. AND THAT’S THE POWER of the spotlight and shadow approach. The spotlight is so far over here on whether Ferris is going to achieve his goal or not that all exposition is happening in the shadows.

The beginner writer would’ve made Ferris and Cameron’s backstory the spotlight of the scene. Ferris might’ve called Cameron just to see what he was doing. And now, the beginning screenwriter thinks, I can get them talking about their past. So Badly Written Ferris says something like, “Do you remember when we first met?” Badly Written Cameron replies, “Of course. Fifth grade English class.” “Missus Baxter.” “Oh, she was the worst!” “She smelled like fungus. And what did I say to you after you failed that test?”

Is that the worst dialogue? I don’t know. I guess it’s not bad. But what is bad is that all we’re focusing on here is learning things about the characters that the writer wants us to know. That’s what you’re doing wrong. The spotlight is on the wrong thing. You need to spotlight an entertaining scene and then hide your exposition in the shadows of their conversation.

Okay, but what happens when you need to convey SO MUCH EXPOSITION that there’s no shadow big enough to hide all of it? You usually run into this problem in heavily plotted movies where you need to tell the audience a bunch of information about the plot so that they understand what’s going on.

An obvious example would be a heist movie where the group has to explain to the audience things like what time the bank closes, what the group has to do once they’re inside the bank, what each individual person’s job is. If you don’t tell us these things and just jump to this heist, we’ll likely be confused about what’s going on. You see these scenes all the time in the Mission Impossible movies.

If you’re in this situation, I want you to use a device similar to the spotlight and shadow approach. I call it the ‘balancing scale.’ You know what a balancing scale looks like. It’s got two plates, one on each side. We’re going to call the left side the ‘entertainment’ side and the right side the ‘exposition’ side. Whenever you’re writing one of these scenes, make sure that the entertainment side is always more weighed down than the exposition side.

Where writers make the mistake is that they pile too much exposition onto the right side of the scale. Writers will use the term, “exposition dump.’ It’s a term I detest. Never ever write a scene whose only purpose is to dump exposition. EVER! You can always make a scene entertaining. Even ones with lots of exposition. And the more the left side of the scale (the entertainment side) can outweigh the right side, the less people are going to realize the exposition.

Unfortunately, it’s never clear how to create the entertainment side of these scenes. You have to be creative. One trick I like to use is to see the scene as its own little movie. And how do I tell a story (that has a beginning, middle, and end) within this scene. The scene where Doc teaches Marty about his time machine could’ve easily been an exposition dump scene. A bad writer would’ve had Doc call Marty over to his garage where he very casually showed him the time machine and explained how it worked.

Instead, the writers start the scene off with a mystery component. What is Doc going to show Marty (the beginning of our mini-movie)? Then, instead of Marty being a passive participant, the writers make him active. Doc has him record the demonstration for historic purposes. Then, we do a test run. So there’s an exciting element to whether the test will be successful or not. The focus at every point is on the entertainment.

In the meantime, the writers are slipping exposition into the crevices of the scene. One of the most important pieces of exposition in the movie is how the time traveling works, from the three separate timing displays to the 88 miles per hour. Again, the scene is designed so that Doc is making Marty tape all of this for prosperity’s sake. The reason he’s showing him these displays is not because he wants to. It’s because he has to. The time travel needs to be documented.

That scene has more exposition in it than any scene you will ever write. So if they can do it, you can do it too. It just takes work. Believe me, I know it’s easier to sit two characters down in a chair and have one reel off the 20 time traveling rules to the other. It takes zero thought. But if you want the reader to actually enjoy themselves, you need to do the hard work of entertaining them as opposed to educating them.

Now get back into your screenplays and banish all that exposition!

Good luck!

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: Period/50s
Premise: The controversial relationship between Sammy Davis Jr. and movie star Kim Novak, an interracial celebrity pairing at a time when interracial relationships were outlawed in half of America.
About: This script won the Austin Film Festival screenplay contest. It also finished in the finals of the Nicholl Fellowship (but was not one of the winners). This draft of the script (which was in the contests) was written by Matthew Fantaci but is currently being rewritten by Janet Mock, who wrote on “Pose,” the Ryan Murphy show that chronicles the downtown social and literary scene in 1987 New York.
Writer: Matthew Fantaci
Details: 95 pages

I’ve always seen Sammy Davis Jr. as a curiosity. He was so unique that at times, he appeared cartoonish. Maybe that’s why I was never into him. But there’s no denying that the Rat Pack days were unlike anything we’ve seen before or since in Hollywood. Here in the 21st century, you get more of the Entourage approach. One famous guy and a lot of Turtles.

So I popped this one open with a doubtful click, hoping it would win me over.

It’s 1950s Vegas. Sammy Davis Jr. is one of the most popular entertainers on the planet. Black, Jewish, and Puerto-Rican, he was truly one of a kind. And boy could he light up a room. Ironically, back then, Sammy couldn’t even stay at the hotels he performed at. Black people weren’t allowed rooms.

Meanwhile, Kim Novak had become one of the biggest movie stars in the world. But unlike other stars, Novak was rebellious. You see, back then, everything about your person was crafted by studio heads. Novak was known by the world as “The Lavender Girl.” Yet she hated lavender. And the fact that she openly rejected the label infuriated her handlers.

One day, after a Sammy performance, he bumps into an exhausted Kim, who’s just finished a long photo shoot. Kim doesn’t have the strength to bullshit and falls into a natural friendly conversation with Sammy. It goes so well that the two start hanging out regularly. And then sleeping together. Which normally would be great. Except that in 1950s America, nobody accepted interracial relationships, especially one between a black man and a white woman.

When Columbia studio head and evil bully Harry Cohn gets word of this, he calls Kim in and tells her that if she doesn’t end this before the gossip columnists get hold of it, he’s going to ruin her life. Although I have not wikipedia searched Harry Cohn, the script paints him as some combination of Harvey Weinstein and Hitler. So when he says he’s going to ruin someone’s life, you get the impression he means it.

Despite that, Sammy and Kim decide to take their romance semi-public, appearing at friends’ parties together. There’s only one step left to go and that’s to date in public. The two discuss what this step means and concede that there’s no coming back from it. So if they’re going to do this, they have to make sure they REALLY want to do it.

The pressure eventually overwhelms them, however, and they give in to the threats (even coming from Sammy’s friend Frank Sinatra), splitting up. It’s a decision that will leave both sides wondering “what if” for the rest of their lives.

If you’re going to make a commentary on a hot button social issue, I think this is the way to go. You don’t give us a non-fiction retelling of whatever’s been popping up on our news feeds for the last 83 days. You explore a story that has similar themes and overlap with the hot button issue, but because it’s not the exact same, it forces the reader to think to make the connections. It makes the audience feel like they’ve solved a puzzle, which is more fun than having someone place a Rubik’s Cube in front of your face that’s already completed.

But I can never discuss these scripts without going back to my frustrations with the biopic format. While I like that this isn’t a cradle to grave Sammy Davis Jr. story and that, instead, we’re seeing this specific charged section of his life, I still spent half the read wondering, “What is the point of this? Where are we going? Where’s the goal?”

The only thing pushing the story along is “Will they or won’t they?” And while it’s certainly more charged than the storylines we typically get in “will they or won’t they?” (romantic comedies), I still felt a slow narrative that left me wanting more. I need that character goal. I needed Sammy to be going after something.

Since he’s not going after anything, all his scenes are some variation of waiting for when he’s going to see Kim next.

And don’t get me wrong. It’s possible to make these narratives work. The script is packed with conflict. And it has one of the better villains I’ve read in a while in Harry Cohn. But it’s still anchored down by that dull rickety story engine known as “Will they or won’t they?”

Getting back to Sammy, he’s a real tough guy to take seriously. He was such a character in real life that I found myself struggling to see him as a romantic man trying to engage in a relationship. It’s like trying to imagine Charlie Chaplin in a relationship after watching Modern Times. Or David Blaine confessing his love without eating a live frog and then having it jump out of his ear.

But if you’re into this era, into old Hollywood, into the Rat Pack, you’ll probably love this. It even feels like an old fashioned movie, with the quick witty dialogue banter between Sammy and Kim that was popular in movies at the time. The combination of an era I was never a huge fan of with the evil genre known as “biopic” prevented me from ever getting into this.

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

What I learned: One plotline too few. Sometimes a screenplay feels thin. One of the reasons may be that you’re one plotline too thin. You needed an extra plot engine going on, possibly with work/career. Or you needed an extra relationship to explore, something that gave you five more scenes throughout the script. That’s what Scandalous felt like to me. It needeed one more plotline to fill it out. Even the main relationship here didn’t have as many scenes as you’d expect it to have. And that left the storyline feeling thin.

Genre: Sci-Fi/Drama
Premise: A lone researcher at a remote Arctic station waits to die after a cataclysmic planet-wide event kills everyone. But plans change when he finds an 8 year old girl hiding within the base.
About: This is a big project that came together a couple of years ago when George Clooney (who will play the lead) purchased the rights to the relatively unknown 2016 novel. He hired Mark L. Smith (The Revenant) to write the screenplay. Netflix won the rights to the project.
Writer: Mark L Smith (based on the novel by Lily Brooks-Dalton)
Details: 111 pages

It’s going to be an interesting review today. For starters, I love Mark L. Smith. I think he’s a great writer. There are a lot of writers out there who’ve got Hollywood fooled. They may have been given more credit than was due for a certain script (because some other writer came in and saved them) and have been living off that lie ever since. Smith is one of those guys who you know is going to deliver on whatever potential the concept has.

On the other hand, you have George Clooney. Clooney has some of the worst taste in Hollywood. The guy is consistently involved in terrible ideas and terrible projects. I mean let’s look at his last five major projects. Catch-22. Money Monster. Hail, Caesar. Tomorrowland. The Monuments Men. It’s pretty hard to be of George Clooney’s caliber and miss this badly this consistently. Remember, the guys at the top get pitched all the best projects. It’s not like he’s Stephen Dorff who doesn’t get to sniff a project until after it’s been turned down by 70 actors. Clooney gets the pick of the litter and still screws it up.

For that reason, I have no idea what to expect. I like when sci-fi delves into dramatic places IN THEORY. But as I’ll talk about in today’s “What I Learned,” it’s a dangerous sandbox to play in.

70 year old Augustine resides at a large Arctic base that is currently being cleared out. People are running over to a fleet of helicopters that are taking them home. We learn that an awful cataclysmic “event” has just happened on the planet and people want to get back to their families, even if it’s just to spend a few final days with them.

But not Augustine! The crotchety old man is taking it easy, Mr. Cheesy, staying up here all by his lonesome. Of course, it helps that he doesn’t have any family and that he’s infected with late-stage cancer. So why bother, right? Up here he can hang out in safety until he dies, probably outlasting everyone on the planet. The irony!

But right after everyone leaves, Augustine finds a little girl hiding in one of the closets. In all the madness, she was forgotten. Augustine is furious because this is not a situation where they can send someone back to pick her up. She’s stuck up here with him. And, oh yeah, the girl never talks.

Meanwhile, we cut to a spaceship called Aether, which is coming back from its failed mission, a mission that Augustine himself created. He thought he found a livable exo-planet right here in our solar system – a previously unknown moon orbiting Jupiter. So the Aether team went out there to see if we could live on it. Long story short: We can’t. And now the crew of Aether is confused because for the last 97 hours, they haven’t been able to make contact with earth.

Cut back to Augustine and the girl (who he’s named “Iris”). Augustine is getting readings that the unsafe air from the “event” has made its way up here. If they’re going to survive, they’ll have to head north to the big station. So they pack up, get on a snowmobile, and away they go. Of course, not everything goes according to plan. And Augustine begins to realize that while he may not be able to save himself and Iris, he can save the crew on Aether. Maybe.

You know the big voice guy at the beginning of every boxing fight? The guy that screams at the top of his lungs, “Let’s get ready to rummmmmmbblllllle.”

Well, imagine that guy is standing next to you as you open this script. But instead of that, he screams, “Let’s get ready to voluntarily go into a depression cooooooomaaaaaa!”

Man this was a depressing read.

Depressing depressing depressing. Oh, and more depressing.

I guess the positive way to pitch this movie would be: “The Road but in the Arctic.” I know a lot of people love that book and some even love the movie.

But here’s my issue with Good Morning – movies without hope are pointless to me. Stories that exist only to make you feel sad or depressed… I don’t get them. I guess there’s the occasional exception. Maybe if it’s a true story chronicling an important moment in history. But if you’re smart, even those movies should have a tinge of hope built into the end.

This doesn’t mean you can’t have depressing things happen in your movie. All good movies have elements of sadness or heartbreak or pain or depression. It’s when those things become the point of the movie and the main emotion the audience is left with that it becomes an issue. At least for me.

All of the plot elements in Good Morning Midnight are working against a good story. You’ve got earth, which has just been incinerated and 7 billion people are dead. Cut over to Augustine, who’s got terminal cancer, coughing blood into napkins every ten minutes. We’ve got this ship heading back to earth with all these astronauts who don’t yet know what we’ve already figured out. They’re flying corpses. And the more we get to know those astronauts, the sadder their lives are (one astronaut tells us their child drowned when they were 3 years old! – yes, we even get a dead child backstory thrown into the mix).

I mean give me one smile at least?

The one dramatic component that gives the story energy is the girl. Because, before her, this dude’s only purpose was to die. But now that there’s a girl involved, Augustine dying means she’s on her own. So there’s a bit of interest in seeing how Augustine is going to deal with that.

[major spoiler]
The problem is, everything about the girl is so suspicious that we know the writer’s up to something. Never saying a word protects the girl from having to be a “real” character, which turns out to be the point. She isn’t a real character. She was a figment of Augustine’s imagination. And because we always knew something was up, the biggest surprise in the script isn’t much of a surprise.

I’d be interested to know if the book kept the characters at the first Arctic station the whole time. I’m guessing it did. But Smith is such a good writer that he knew keeping them at that station was script suicide. To not only base your story around billions of dead people and a handful of soon-to-be-dead people – but, in addition to that – having your main characters, one of whom doesn’t even speak, waiting around inside a base for 120 minutes. I’ve seen traffic signs with more uplifting storylines. At least with those you see a person walking across the road. You know he’s going to get there as long as you don’t hit him.

So the stuff where they’re “on the road” is the best stuff in the script. I liked the wolves. I liked the ice cracking, cutting them off from their vehicle and forcing them to walk the rest of the way. That’s the only time where the story had momentum.

As for the spaceship, I struggled to figure out why we were following Aether other than it gave us the occasional break from Grandpa Depressing and Little Margie Mute. There is an almost-there twist involving the ship that could probably work with a few more drafts. But that twist was the only value brought from the ship storyline. Otherwise it was five people talking about how much of a bummer it was that everyone they knew was probably dead.

So I have a question for the readership here because I felt the exact same way after watching The Road. I thought that was the world’s most depressing boring movie ever. Everyone I talked to would point me to the book. “Read the book! It’s so much better!” So I’ve tried to read the book five times now and each time I can barely get through a few pages without being depressed out of my mind.

My question is, for people who like this stuff, why do you like it? Why do you like to watch movies (or read books) that make you feel depressed and hopeless? Cause maybe this is a good novel, just like a lot of people thought The Road was a good novel, and I just don’t get this stuff. It’s not my thing. However, I’d love to learn why it works for others.

Couldn’t get into this one, guys. :(

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

What I learned: Sci-fi and Drama is a friendship that’s hard to make work. It can succeed, yes. But sci-fi fans like the imagination and the fun places you can go within science-fiction concepts. The heaviness of drama often works to neutralize those fun components. Look at Ad Astra, another sci-fi drama. The two best moments in that film were the opening space elevator accident and the moon buggy chase. Exciting imaginative science-fiction scenes. Everything else was pretty freaking boring. And I suspect it had to do with the drama constantly neutralizing the fun stuff.

The big announcement for the next Amateur Showdown is here. And it comes with a twist!! A true GAME-CHANGER!!!

This is a quick reminder that NEXT THURSDAY by 8pm Pacific Time, your Character Piece Showdown entry needs to be in! If you’re going to enter, send me your title, logline, genre, why we should read your script, and a PDF of the screenplay to carsonreeves3@gmail.com.

But now, it’s time for the announcement you’ve all been waiting for.

The next Amateur Showdown genre.

What will it be? Any ideas?

Here’s a clue. Entries need to be received by Thursday, October 15th, 8pm Pacific Time.

That is right, my friends. It’s happening in the month of October. And that can only mean one thing.

Time for the Official Announcement Cue

**ANNOUNCEMENT** **ANNOUNCEMENT** **ANNOUNCEMENT**

The next Amateur Showdown will be……. Horror Showdown.

I’m assuming all of you are dancing in your living rooms, calling your friends, busting out that Joseph Phelps Insignia 2016 wine you’ve been saving for the perfect occasion. I’m sure the media will go crazy once they get a hold of this info so who knows how many entries we’re going to receive. Is tens of thousands out of the realm of possibility?

BUT WAIT! THERE’S A TWIST!!!

Wait, what Carson? Are you trying to give us a heart attack?? How can you add anything more exciting than this?

Are you ready for the twist?

I don’t think you’re ready.

Maybe I should just cancel the twist.

Just kidding!

TWIST: You can submit either a horror screenplay or A HORROR SHORT STORY.

That’s right.

We can’t ignore reality anymore. Short horror stories are getting bought up for 7 figures routinely. So why not jump on that bandwagon?

I know some of you are going to hate this. I can actually see the hate flowing through the internet into my computer screen right now. It has arrived in the form of the ‘Update Now?’ pop-up alert that only allows me to delay the return of said alert for 1 day. I’m sorry, though. The bus has left the station. It’s too late to stop it.

Here’s why this will be fun. A script is 24,000 words. A short story can be 2000 words. It can be 1000 words. That means anyone here can get something written by the deadline. Which means we should have more competition. And more competition leads to a better winner. Game on, my friends.

Same entry process. Send me your title, logline, genre (horror or horror adjacent), why we should read your script/story, and a PDF of the screenplay/story to carsonreeves3@gmail.com any time before Thursday, October 15th, 8pm Pacific Time.

If you want to know how to write a good short story, I’m sure many of you will have suggestions in the comments for what to read. I’m actually interested in hearing about some good short story destinations myself. If you want to get started, buy any of Stephen King’s short story collections. He’s the best.

Outside of that, have fun.

I think this is going to be a blast. You’ve got two months. Time to get started!

Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: In a dystopian society, a government worker recovering from a traumatic accident is rescued by a group of rebels who insist that he’s the leader of their movement.
About: I have to give it to Mattson Tomlin. He’s been scrapping away for a while, occasionally getting scripts on the Black List. I’ve reviewed a couple of his scripts before, a Jason Bourne parody script and a different sci-fi entry. I didn’t dislike either script. But neither one had that extra something that puts a script over the top. Well, apparently, Warner Brothers doesn’t agree with me. As they gave Mattson the most coveted job in town – the latest Batman movie that Matthew Reeves is making. I’m not sure if he dropped 2084 before or after he got this job, but I’m assuming just the mention of him being up for the job helped Paramount snatch up 2084. I heard it was pitched as 1984 by way of The Matrix and Inception. That is a lofty pitch! Let’s see if the script lives up to the hype.
Writer: Mattson Tomlin
Details: 116 pages

You guys know me!

There isn’t a big sci-fi spec I won’t read.

So when I heard Mattson Tomlin was taking on one of the granddaddies of sci-fi literature, writing an unofficial 100-years-later spiritual sequel to 1984, I needed to get my hands on it. Especially since Tomlin’s screenwriting star is rising quickly.

Question to the class before we get started. Has anybody here read 1984 cover to cover? I feel like we’ve all STARTED to read it. But I’m not sure anyone’s ever finished it. Extra points for those of you who did so on your own and not because your high school English teacher told you to.

Malcom Ferrel doesn’t know what’s going on. He’s just woken up in a dentist-type chair. A dude with a Hazmut suit is standing over him. He’s asking Malcom what his name is and if he remembers his “trauma” or not. Malcom does not remember his trauma. Good. Then we can get you back into society, the guy says.

Malcom enters suburbia, which looks like the 1950s for some reason. Except for the fact that everybody has to wear an elaborate super suit that protects them from the air. It’s like Covid on steroids I guess. Malcom is told by his driver that he works for the government and to stop trying to remember the trauma he experienced. It’s better if he moves on.

Once he gets home, there’s a party going on in the backyard, and then WAM BAM POW a van smashes through the fence. A bunch of black clad SWAT like dudes bust out and start slaughtering everyone. Malcom’s buddy Stan confirms to home base that he has “the package” and the next thing we know… Malcom wakes up in the chair again where he must start the process all over again.

This time, he goes to meet with his wife, who, like the last batch of people, tell him to stop thinking of his past trauma. It will only make things worse. Then those SWAT DUDES show up AGAIN and there’s a firefight between the people protecting Malcom and the people trying to steal him. The SWAT guys finally get him, escape, and take him back to a secret base.

At the base, Malcom meets his real wife, Rachel, who informs him that he used to work for the government until he started this rebellion. But the government then stole him back, erased his memories, and tried to reintegrate him back into society. But they kidnapped him back. And then the government kidnapped him back. And then they kidnapped him back. And sometimes, if they can’t get him, they kidnap HER. Which is what happens next!

The government BUSTS into the underground base and while Malcom escapes, they get Rachel. We now follow Rachel in the dentist chair. Her memory has been erased. And we follow her as she’s cluelessly integrated into society. She even marries a dude. Will Malcom come save her. That’s their thing, Rachel told him back at the base. They always save each other. So now Malcom, who still isn’t even sure who he is, must save a woman he sort of is maybe sure is his wife.

I’m not going to beat around the bush. This didn’t work for me.

The number one thing you have to get right when you’re writing a big sci-fi script is sell the mythology. If we don’t buy the rules or the backstory or how your characters interact with this world, nothing else matters because we’re going to be so focused on how weak the framework is. 1950s town? Protection suits? Trauma elimination? There was something incohesive about the variables.

The idea of changing the main character and creating a dramatically ironic situation in that we know Rachel is being tricked but she doesn’t isn’t a bad choice on an idea level. The problem is that we got to know Rachel for two seconds before she’s thrust into this situation. So we don’t care about her. Or, at least, I didn’t. And, to be honest, I never got the best feel for Malcom either. Nothing we learned about him was real remember. It’s a bunch of fake memories taped over fake memories. In other words, even the person we’re hoping will save our damsel in distress is someone we don’t know. So we’re cheering on someone we don’t know to save someone else we don’t know.

That’s not how writing works.

You have to establish strong characters who we care about before you toss them into the mixer that is their screenplay journey. Both Neo in The Matrix and the character Leonardo DiCaprio plays in Inception have extensive introductions where we get to know the characters well before the shit hits the fan.

This does lead to an interesting screenwriting debate, which is that I always tell you to hook the reader right away. Make something happen immediately. Grab us and don’t let us go. Tomlin does that more than any of the scripts I’ve read so far in The Last Great Screenplay Contest. So then what’s the deal? The guy does what you say, Carson, and you’re still complaining?

Well, here’s the catch – and this is why screenwriting is so difficult – if you’re telling your story in a way where we’re meeting your characters “in media res,” you need to figure out quick ways to help us identify with them and like them. Your “save the cat” moments need to be lightning quick. Your glimpses into their humanity and what makes them sympathetic and empathetic need to be tightly executed.

This is where the best writers make their money. They can get you to fall in love with a character in ten lines. Good Time, the Safdie Bros movie they made before Uncut Gems, has a despicable lead character in Connie, who does some terrible things in the film. But we meet him coming to the rescue of his mentally challenged brother while a heartless social worker demeans him by making him take an uncomfortable test. Instantly, after that scene, we’re rooting for Connie.

And then I just didn’t get what Tomlin was going for here. We’re told that Malcom has been stolen by the Fortification dozens of times and that the Rebellion keeps having to steal him back. Malcom asks the same question we’re wondering. “Why don’t they just kill me?” Rachel explains that if the Fortification kills him, society will know their Trauma-Erasure system doesn’t work. To prove they have everything under control, they must erase his Rebellion memories and reintegrate him back into society every time.

I’m sorry but if I was a citizen in this society and I found out one of our main guys had been kidnapped by the Rebellion two dozen times??? I’m probably thinking the system doesn’t work. And just from an objective storytelling perspective, once someone gets stolen back and forth five times, doesn’t it get a little silly? Once or twice, I get. But 20? 30 times? It’s clumsy storytelling.

Another problem with big sci-fi ideas is over-development of the mythology in ways that hurt the story more than help it. Everyone wears these over-the-top super suits to keep them from transmitting diseases to each other (supposedly). But wouldn’t this movie have been better without this component?

Cause it’s hard enough to buy into this memory impregnating slash memory restoring tug-o-war as it is. When you throw in, “and oh yeah, everyone wears big cumbersome bubble suits,” it draws attention to the very lie the Fortification is trying to hide. Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to trick someone into thinking everything was normal if everyone WASN’T wearing a big weird suit? It’s even one of the first things Malcom notices after the Fortification procedure. Why is everybody dressed so weird? They might as well have given him a handbook that listed all the other suspicious things he shouldn’t pay attention to.

The thing is, once the script hits the midpoint, it actually starts to get interesting. We go back into the memory of Malcom as all the memories he forgot are implanted in him by the Rebellion. And we’re experiencing them as he is. So we see when him and Rachel first meet and fall in love and what goes wrong afterwards that leads to the Rebellion. I wish we would’ve started with that. It was so much cleaner and more interesting than giving us 60 pages of exposition and setup.

Unfortunately, it was too little, too late. My suspension of disbelief had been broken so many times that I couldn’t get back into the story bubble I needed to be in to enjoy the screenplay. Which is too bad. Cause the end scene with the Counselor where he’s explaining everything was quite good.

There’s a kernel of a story in here. But I don’t think Tomlin’s found it in this draft.

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

What I learned: Make sure the bad guy has a good point. One of the easiest ways to add depth to your bad guys is to give their ideology legitimacy. When Rachel finally meets the big bad guy and he explains why they do what they do, he makes strong points. Their system has resulted in zero poverty, zero crime, zero wealth disparagement, zero war. Yeah, they do some bad things. But wouldn’t any society kill to have those numbers? You want to make your hero’s choices DIFFICULT, not easy. You automatically do that whenever your villain has a strong argument.