I want to keep giving you inspiration and advice for The Last Great Screenwriting Contest. So here are ten things I commonly see when I’m reading a good script.

1) An unobtrusive writing style – Too many screenwriters want you to know that they’re a WRITER. They want to describe everything beautifully. They want every scene to be dense and self-important, all the things that prove how serious and strong of a writer one is. I can tell you from experience that these tend to be the hardest reads. They take a lot longer. They’re not fun to read. Good writers understand the burden of the reader and try and make the script as easy to read as possible. Sparse prose. Never adding more than is necessary. Keeping the story moving. These are the fun scripts to read. Now there will always be a difference between a script like Buried and a script like Gladiator. Gladiator obviously requires more description. Still, you always want to keep the reader in mind. When was the last time you finished reading an entire script? I’m guessing except for a couple of dozen of you, it’s been a while. Why didn’t you finish it? Because at a certain point it became more ‘work’ to get through the script than ‘fun.’ Don’t make the same mistake on your script.

2) A first scene that creates a sense of mystery – If you took everything I’ve ever written on this site about the importance of your first scene, it would probably be as long as Lord of the Rings. And yet, day in and day out, I continue to read screenplays with bad first scenes. So the message isn’t getting through. What I’ve noticed is that I often get pulled into scripts where the first scene creates a sense of mystery. There’s some question that’s been posed and I need to keep reading to find out the answer. For example, one of my favorite recent scripts is The Traveler. In that script, we start off with a man driving, and then slowly, bit by bit, his car begins to disappear, until it’s gone and he’s floating through the air all by himself, still in the driving position, then he tumbles to the ground and rolls to a stop. When I read a scene like that, I want to know what’s going on. And that gets me to keep reading.

3) Conflict in dialogue – One of the quickest ways for me to dismiss a script is when I read really on-the-nose dry dialogue. Dialogue that doesn’t have any sense of spark. The characters are speaking more to establish themselves or push the plot along than they are actually having a conversation. One of the easiest ways to up your dialogue game is to inject conflict into every dialogue scene. It doesn’t have to be over-the-top conflict. But something that forces the characters to work something out. There’s an imbalance in the moment and the only way that it’s going to re-balance is if the characters hash it out. In The Menu, one of my favorite scripts from last year, we start with two people on a mysterious date (yup, we get another first scene with a sense of mystery!). He’s freaking out because, wherever it is they’re going, it’s important to him. His date, meanwhile, is trying to relax him. And the more she tries to relax him, the more revved up he gets. Note how this isn’t some huge dramatic argument. That’s not what we’re looking for in every dialogue scene. But there’s an imbalance here that the characters are working out. There’s conflict to play with.

4) An organic conflict within your hero – Characters are always more interesting when they’re fighting an inner battle. If everything is neat and clean inside your hero, why would we be interested in them? The great thing about inner conflict is it can literally be about anything. But a trick to find it is to ask yourself, “What is the first thing my character wakes up in the morning anxious about?” That should lead you to your inner conflict. We can go as far back as Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate. The second we meet him, he’s graduated college and HE HAS NO IDEA WHAT HE WANTS TO DO WITH HIS LIFE. That’s the conflict that eats at him every day. More recently, we have Arthur from Joker. He’s trying to figure out how to connect with the world yet he has no idea how. Every day he wakes up trying to figure out that equation. Obviously, the conflicts will be lighter in lighter genres, like comedies. But a quick way to make characters stand out is to give them an interesting inner conflict.

5) A good scene writer – Recently I read a script where the first 30 pages consisted of scenes that were barely a page long. The script moved quickly but the pacing was odd. We were always moving on before anything got going. Conversely, I read another script where all of the scenes were 8-10 pages. Shockingly, they were just as incomplete, as the characters were always prattling on without a point. I know I’m reading a good writer when one of the first few scenes in the script is its own complete compelling thing. It’s got a point (characters with a goal). It has a beginning – a setup to the scene that lets us know what it’s about. It has a middle – conflict between characters and obstacles that come up. And it has an end – the scene’s own little climax. These writers understand that scenes are like mini-movies which need to entertain the readers in and unto themselves. If every scene is an entertaining little movie then it’s impossible for the reader to get bored.

6) A sense of purpose – Good writers know that every scene is a piece of the puzzle and, therefore, must be pushing towards the puzzle’s completion. There is a noticeable focus to each scene that indicates the writer knows exactly where he or she is taking you. On the flip side, you have writers who think scripts are places to figure their story out. They might get an idea on page 20 and let that dictate where the story goes next. When you write this way, 99 times out of 100, your script will lack focus. It will read like you’re not sure what story you’re telling but, hopefully, along the way, you’ll figure it out. When you hear that a script displays confidence, it is always in reference to writers who have a deft command of their story and it’s clear, every step of the way, they know where they’re taking you. By the way, it’s perfectly okay to seek out tangents in early drafts. But not at all okay to do it in your final draft.

7) A steady stream of unexpected choices – This is something I harp on all the time on the site. But it truly is one of the easiest ways for me to tell if a script is going to be good or not. If a plot development or scene or character in the story comes up and the writer chooses to write something that 95 out of 100 writers would’ve written, I know I’m in for a long read. Good writers get into the heads of the reader, ask what they expect to happen at this moment, and then make sure not to write that. Honestly, this starts at the concept stage. If you give me an idea that I’ve seen hundreds of times before, I can promise the script will be bad within 99.9% certainty. One of the biggest level-ups for a screenwriter – and it’s something most of them don’t figure out until between their 7th and 10th script – is when they start actively seeking out unexpected choices in their screenplays. I mean, did anyone see the hidden room in Parasite coming? Did anyone see that crazy climax in the backyard coming? This is the creative bar you need to hold yourself to. Cause like I tell everyone, if you’re just going to give us what everyone else does, why do we need you? We can just go to everyone else.

8) Understanding the power of time – One of the biggest decisions you will make in a script is deciding how long the story’s timeline will be. The reason this decision is so important is because time has the biggest effect on your structure. Once you know how long your story is, you can begin to figure out how everything is going to play out. Generally speaking, the shorter the time frame, the easier it is to structure. Not long ago, I reviewed a script called 9 Days. The concept was as close as you’re going to get to experimental without being experimental. It was about a guy in some nether-not-quite-heaven reality who decides which people get to live a life down on earth. That concept could’ve been dealt with in a very messy way. Believe me, I’ve seen it before. However, the simple decision of giving our hero a 9 day deadline gave the story a firm structure. Another example is Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused. That movie followed a dozen different characters and was about the chaos of junior high and high school in a small Midwestern town. It would’ve been so easy to get lost in that world. Yet Linklater had everything take place in one day. A messy story all of a sudden became very focused.

9) A love of the second act – The second act is where most beginner and intermediate scripts go to die. It’s the biggest most expansive space in the script (50-60 pages!) and if you don’t understand how it works or have a plan to tackle it, your script will fall into this abyss as well. One of the things you learn the longer you travel this screenwriting journey, is that the second act IS YOUR MOVIE. It’s not some thing to muddle your way through until you get to the climax. It’s the place where your characters will be challenged by the things they fear the most, which will include the external journey, the other characters they interact with, and, like we discussed before, themselves. In other words, this is where your characters are going to figure themselves out. Once you embrace your second act as an opportunity to explore that, you will begin to love it.

10) A killer ending – I read a lot of scripts where you can see the writer getting tired the deeper into the script we go and so the ending feels more like something they were just happy to get to than the single biggest most memorable sequence in the film, which is what an ending should be. Remember, the ending IS WHAT WE THE READER LEAVE WITH. If you write a great ending, a reader will have this compulsion to go out and tell someone about it. They can’t keep it in because it’s the last strong memory they’ve been given. As crazy as it sounds, lots of writers take their ending for granted. They think as long as the good guy saves his girlfriend from the bad guy that we’re going to give them a big fat gold sticker. It doesn’t work like that. Outside of your opening scene, your climax should be the scene you put the most time into. And that’s not just writing. You should be thinking through 10, 20, 30 different potential climaxes to make sure you’re giving us the best one.

P.S. If you’re still deciding what script to write for The Last Screenwriting Contest, consider a logline consultation ($25). Not only will I analyze your concept’s strengths and weaknesses and write a new version of the logline for you, but I also give a 1-10 rating on the concept. As I’ve noted here before, I don’t encourage anyone to write a script for a logline that gets under a 7 out of 10. So it’s an indirect way to find out if your concept would fare well in the contest. E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com if interested.

Genre: Comedy
Premise: Actor Nicolas Cage, spiraling and trapped in debt, makes an appearance at the birthday party of a Mexican billionaire. While there, he learns that the billionaire runs a drug cartel, and the CIA recruits Cage for intelligence.
About: Not only did this script finish Top 6 in the 2019 Black List, but it got Cage onboard! The movie will be made by Lionsgate. The writers created the TV series, Ghosted, which was a comedic take on The X-Files.
Writers: Kevin Etten & Tom Gormican
Details: 117 pages (but pretty much all dialogue so it reads fast)

I’ve always marveled at these famous actors who did great GREAT movies now doing a dozen sixth rate micro-indies a year. Take Bruce Willis, for example. Bruce Willis has all the money in the world. Maybe more than all of it. Yet he makes these awful 2 million dollar B-movies that nobody sees. It doesn’t make sense.

But you know what does make sense? Nicholas Cage doing a dozen sixth rate micro indies a year. Cage was a notoriously wild spender at his peak and supposedly had some big issues with the IRS at one point. You get the sense that Cage isn’t doing these movies for fun. At least not all of them. He’s doing them to pay off all the debt he’s accrued.

And the unfortunate thing about Hollywood is that when big stars start chasing these low-level movies to pay the bills, they start becoming associated with low-level movies. And it’s very hard to dig your way out from that. I don’t think any former star has dug themselves a deeper hole than Nicholas Cage.

Of course, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Cage really does love making these movies. He’s just one of those actors that always needs to be on a set. I get the feeling this script is going to shed some light on this aspect of the eccentric actor’s career. Let’s take a look.

Nicholas Cage is having dinner with Quentin Tarantino, who’s really close to giving him the starring role in his latest film. But then word comes back from Cage’s agent. Tarantino is going with someone else. Devastated and broke, Cage doubts when his next big chance is going to come, so much so that he considers QUITTING ACTING.

But then his agent calls. There’s a Nicholas Cage superfan in Mexico who’s willing to pay Cage 1 million dollars to come to his birthday party. Cage hems and haws before ultimately going and is surprised when the 45 year old man who invited him, Javi, is a cool dude. In actuality, Javi is a closet screenwriter and he’s hoping to get Cage to read his stuff.

But then Cage is approached by a mysterious man who tells him he’s working for the United States government and that Javi is responsible for 30 billion dollars worth of drug trade and that he’s killed thousands of people. They need Cage to do his best acting job yet – convince Javi that he’s interested in his screenplay, work on it together, and, in the meantime, gather intel on Javi.

Cage doesn’t know what’s going on but at this point, he doesn’t really have a choice, so both Cage and Javi start putting a script together, with both of them in starring roles. Funnily enough, Cage starts to like the script and feels like it might be his best character piece yet. So they keep working on it but run into the same problem all screenwriters run into. They don’t have an ending!

Cage’s CIA connection tells Cage to use the screenwriting suggestion of having Cage’s character’s family kidnapped in order to figure out where Javi is hiding his latest kidnapped subject. But Javi gets so into the idea of bringing a family relationship into the plot that, unbeknownst to Nick, he flies Nick’s ex-wife and daughter down to Mexico for inspiration. Of course, not long after, Javi realizes Nick is working for the government, and therefore really does kidnap Nick’s ex-wife and daughter. Nick finds himself REALLY IN one of his movies. Does he have what it takes to get out alive? We’ll find out.

I came into this one skeptical.

Nicholas Cage is one of those actors who’s been made fun of so much by this point that he may have passed his sell by date. And that’s the vibe I was getting early on in the script. Cage would have these conversations with his younger cooler self about Cage’s plummeting career and Young Cage keeps pushing him to get back on top. The scenes were okay and will definitely play better onscreen than on the page. But they felt predictable. You guys know me. Whenever I read choices that feel like a lot of different writers could’ve come up with the same thing, I lose faith in the writer.

But then the invitation to Mexico shows up (our inciting incident). Going into this, I had not read the logline so I didn’t know that was coming. I thought I was going to get some boring “Nicholas Cage tries to get back on top in Hollywood” plot. It shows you the power of a hook. You’re immediately thinking – some weirdo inviting a struggling movie star to his birthday in another country – there’s a lot of comedy to mine from that. So that kept me reading.

Then Gormican and Etten surprise me again when it turns out Javi is a normal guy. Actually, we get some scenes of Javi talking to his business partners away from Nic Cage that paint him as this normal everyday person. So I’m thinking to myself – hmmmm, he’s not going to be some weirdo freak? Where is this going? I’m intrigued.

Then they hit us with the second big hook, which is that Javi is a drug kingpin. I feel a little stupid that I didn’t see that coming but, again, I hadn’t read the logline and the writers did a good job making him look like a normal guy. I thought maybe he’d brought Cage here to convince him to be in his movie. This new plot point, however, was much juicier. Now we’re putting Cage in a bunch of dramatic irony scenes – we know he’s trying to incriminate Javi but Javi doesn’t.

But probably the best thing about this script is that it’s about a broken family. Pretty much the entire first act sets up Cage’s problems with his ex-wife and his 16 year old daughter. It’s rare that writers do this these days. Most people think there’s no need to “waste” pages on character development in the first act of a comedy or an action film because people go to those movies to laugh and see things get blown up.

But it’s a smart move because it pays dividends in the third act. I still contend a big reason Taken worked was because its entire first act was character development. People don’t care about a daughter being taken from your hero when you’ve only known her for two minutes. They needed to be around that relationship between the father and the daughter to care about it. Same thing here.

And it wasn’t just that. The writers did this really cleverly. Javi had kidnapped a big rival’s daughter. The CIA wanted to know where he was hiding her. So they told Cage to add a kidnapping plot to the script Cage and Javi were working on and then innocently ask Javi, “Where would we keep the daughter character if the bad guy kidnapped her?” This then led to Javi flying the ex-wife and daughter in for inspiration, and now you have a way to really kidnap these two without it seeming forced.

That’s the problem with every script where the bad guy kidnaps the girl in distress. It’s added in a blunt and cliche manner. This script, however, used its unique setup to bring them in organically. For me, that’s what made this script more than a garden variety “worth the read.” It’s a fun script but it’s also cleverly plotted. Props to the writing team!

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

What I learned: One of the best places to find comedy ideas is “Ripped from the headlines” articles that aren’t comedic. This concept was clearly inspired by the Sean Penn – El Chapo incident. The writers then asked, “What actor could we put in Penn’s role that would make it hilarious?” And they wisely came up with Nicholas Cage.

I have one question for you before I get to today’s article. Is the key to getting an original script turned into a wide release movie one single shot? I know it’s a small sample size but after 1917 made a shocking 36 million this weekend (when was the last time a World War 1 movie made 36 million in a weekend???), we have to ask the question. Cause there was that OTHER original idea – a little movie called Gravity – that was a single-shot film (for the most part) and that became a surprise hit also. Coincidence?

I’m asking the question half-jokingly but it’s an intriguing discussion. It’s so hard to get any original movie released these days. So if you can find any trend out there, you run with it. Now both these movies were writer directors. But I think a spec writer could do an even better job because they wouldn’t be worried about pulling off certain shots and whether something would be too difficult or not. They could write whatever came to mind.

Why does the single shot movie work? Well, obviously, it’s hard to pull off so it’s easy to build buzz around a one-shot movie. But from a screenwriting perspective, if you’re doing something in one shot, you have to create a sense of urgency or else there’ll be a bunch of slow spots in the movie. So, in a way, it forces you to create a really tight exciting story. Might we now get a few single-shot spec scripts in The Last Great Screenwriting Contest? Maybe a single shot social horror thriller even? We’ll see!

Moving on, I’m going to talk about producing today because that’s where my mind is at. This past week, I stumbled onto a movie called “Sweetheart” on Netflix. The film is about a shipwrecked girl who wakes up on an island only to learn that a monster lives on it as well. The movie follows her journey both trying to survive on an island and trying not to get killed by this monster.

The main reason I watched this movie is because it’s a movie I would’ve made. You’ve got a contained thriller. You’ve got a supernatural threat. That combination has been responsible for a lot of movies that have made a lot of money. You’ve also got a hot young director coming off a hit movie at Sundance. I would’ve seen all these elements and thought, “Slam dunk.”

Unfortunately, as I hit the 30 minute mark of the movie, I was struggling to stay invested. I kept asking myself, “Why? This is a movie you would make. Why isn’t it working!?” As if being able to answer the question would ensure that every future movie I made wouldn’t suffer the same fate. Gradually, after I was able to take my emotion out of it, I realized it came back to script problems. More specifically, it reminded me that contained thrillers are incredibly hard to pull off. And Sweetheart shows you why.

When we come with a contained idea, the first thing we think about is the cool moments. For example, in the big spec contained thriller, “Shut In,” you would think of the moment where the main character nailed the bad guy’s hand into the floor to keep him there. Or, with this movie, you might imagine the first time our heroine sees the monster. These moments are the moments that get us excited to write a script.

Here’s the problem though. There are only about four of five of these big exciting moments in your head when you’re putting an idea together. In the best case scenario, these moments take up fifteen minutes of screen time. In addition to this, you’re likely going to have a big climax, so we can add another 10-15 minutes of screen time on top of that. This means you have 30 minutes figured out. Which means you still have 70 MORE MINUTES TO FILL.

Now filling up 70 minutes in a Star Wars or James Bond movie isn’t that difficult. You just go to a new planet or a new country and throw in a car chase. But 70 minutes in a CONTAINED THRILLER??? Even screenwriting aces have trouble making those minutes interesting. Usually, all you have is a few characters and a small space. What do you do with 70 minutes of that?

That’s clearly where Sweetheart fell apart. It didn’t have a plan for those 70 minutes. It made the fatal mistake of assuming the concept alone was going to do the work for it. That we’d be so excited in the moments between the monster attacks to see it again that we’d wait through anything. Watching a character washed up on an island try to survive on page 10 is interesting. Not so much on page 60, when we’re bored of it.

It’s the writer’s job, then, to come up with plot beats that keep the story moving. And, to their credit, they try. For example, a couple of other shipwrecked characters (from her ship) show up about 50 minutes in. And that, at least, gives us some new scenarios, like characters being able to have a conversation. However, the plot beats were lazy. In fact, there’s another girl washed up on a deserted island with a monster spec that was written at the same time as Sweetheart. What happens at the 50 page mark of that script? A couple of shipwrecked characters show up. In other words, your story choice was so predictable that the only other person writing this idea came up with the same plot beat.

It is IMPERATIVE as a screenwriter to always check yourself on these things. When you come up with a plot development, one of the first things you should ask yourself is, “Would someone else come up with this as well?” And if the answer is yes, don’t write it. Come up with something else. The counter-argument to this is, “Well how many plot options are there in this scenario? Bringing in new characters is one of the only things you can do.” There’s never a situation where there’s only one thing to do. There are always options. It’s definitely harder to come up with the options that nobody’s thought of yet. But those are the ones that are going to make your script great.

Another issue was that there was no sense of danger in a script about a woman stuck on an island with a monster. She and the monster routinely see each other and nothing happens. She’s easily able to hide under a log or behind a tree. It gets to the point where you’re wondering if the monster is even interested in killing her. If the only person in your thriller script isn’t in danger, you don’t have a thriller.

In retrospect, I think I know why they did this. If the monster is too aggressive and powerful, the movie’s over in five minutes. The only way to make the movie last was to make him passive. But then where’s the movie? The last time I checked, the alien in “Alien” doesn’t occasionally walk by the characters, uninterested in them. It aggressively hunts them down one by one. And I’m not bashing Sweetheart for not living up to the greatest sci-fi horror film ever. I get that these are tough script problems to figure out. But if the audience isn’t feeling fear for your hero, we don’t have anything to work with.

I bring this up in the hopes that those of you writing contained thrillers for The Last Great Screenwriting Contest approach these dangerous 70 minutes strategically. You might want to watch Sweetheart and read Shut In back-to-back. In Shut In, we have two children in danger outside the room our hero is stuck in the entire movie. That alone adds a sense of urgency and tension that Sweetheart never had. It ensured that we were always rooting for our hero to escape the room so she could rescue her kids.

And that’s probably the best lesson to learn for a contained thriller – personal character-driven stories give you the best chance at surviving those big gaps of screen time where you don’t have a set-piece. I’m still on the edge of my seat for the Shut In heroine when all the noise died down because I still want her to save her kids. I’m not scared for the Sweetheart heroine at all because, from what I can tell, this monster isn’t interested in killing her.

Did you guys see Sweetheart? If so, what did you think?

Genre: Action
Premise: When a talented hacker is recruited by the mysterious Cicada 3301, she gets wrapped up in a plot that threatens to destroy the entire world. Based on the real organization.
About: This script finished number 4 on the 2019 Black List. The writer of the script, Lillian Yu, made last year’s Hit List with her script, Singles Day.
Writer: Lillian Yu
Details: 108 pages

One of the reasons it’s so hard to make hacker movies work is because there aren’t a lot of ways to make typing on a computer interesting. Even with the fancy graphics, it’s a bit like chronicling the life of a famous writer. The act of writing is boring to watch, just as the act of hacking is boring to watch. I found this out the hard way a long time ago when I wrote a hacker script. No matter how cool I tried to make the hacking process, it always came back to my hero sitting in front of a screen pounding buttons. I could never figure it out.

The more interesting approach is probably to have your hero be operating in the real world and your villain be the one who’s the hacker. That way, they’re controlling the elements around you and you have to constantly adjust. I think The Net, with Sandra Bullock, took this approach. Enemy of the State as well. And probably some recent movies that I’m forgetting. So how does Yu solve this problem? Let’s find out.

Jane is a computer genius, so much so that she got a full-ride to Harvard. Jane is also a bit of a social justice warrior, and when she tries to expose one of Harvard’s premiere fraternities for covering up sexual assault, she finds out that Harvard is more interested in keeping up its pristine image than being Ronan Farrow’s next expose. So Jane is kicked out of school.

She eventually gets a crappy job at an insurance company where she secretly retroactively adjusts policies so that poor people don’t get screwed over. This catches the eye of a secret organization known as Cicada who recruits Jane to be a member. She’s flown to Paris via a remotely controlled airplane, passes a bunch of a tests, then meets the team, which is basically a techno-savvy version of the Mission Impossible group.

The leader, Adam, explains that Cicada is an organization whose sole job is to do right in the world. For example, there’s a guy running a Ponzi scheme 10x worse than Madoff. Cicada digitally transfers all that money back to its rightful owners. All in the background.

The problem is there’s another organization called Zero whose mission is the same as Cicada’s. To save the world. Except their business plan has gone awry recently and their current plan is to infuse North Korea with trillions of dollars so it can launch a nuclear war against the world. All of this is happening at the end of the month, so they need to act now.

There’s a major gathering of the most influential people in the world at a castle and the head of Zero is going to be there. They need to get there and kill the guy. Unfortunately, hacking isn’t going to be enough to do the job. So Jane must go through action training to get her up to speed in hand to hand combat and shooting peeps in the face. She barely passes and off they go.

Everything at the castle goes cleanly at first, but then Jane runs into a Zero member, who informs her that Cicada is lying to her. That she was recruited specifically to be the fall guy when all of this hits the press. Unsure of who to believe, Jane must decide who to align herself with, the company who recruited her, or the apparent enemy.

One of the best ways to convey a script read is to take people inside the mind of the reader as they were reading. Which is what I’m going to do here. The first thing I noticed about this script was that the writing was strong. There was a vibrancy and energy to it that was exciting. The description, in particular, was a cut above what I usually see.

So I was excited. However, I then ran into my first issue with the script. The main character was really angry at the world. And angry main characters rarely work. It’s hard to root for them, plain and simple. Whenever you’re unsure of what you can get away with with your main character, just imagine them in real life. Do you like angry people in real life? I don’t. Most people don’t. So that’s probably not going to work as a main character. It can work with a side character since they don’t need our emotional investment. But it’s a major risk when you’re doing it with the hero.

I think Yu sensed this and, therefore, gave Jane a couple of save the cat moments. Her mom dies. And she helps a wronged insurance customer get their money back. This can sometimes work to balance the character out. But only if the implementation is invisible. I saw these moments for what they were – attempts to get us to like the character. Once we see the hand of the writer writing, we know we’re being manipulated.

Regarding the problem I brought up in the intro, Yu made the wise decision to train Jane in more than computer hacking. She’s taught how to kill and fight and drive which allows her to get into more interesting situations in the big set pieces. The issue there was that it wasn’t believable. She’s trained to be an action star in a week.

This is a common problem in these “ordinary hero thrust into extraordinary situation” movies and writers have developed all sorts of tricks to make the leap passable. For example, in the movie Wanted, didn’t James McAvoy’s character have a father who was special and therefore he’d inherited special abilities as well? He just needed someone to open them up?

To this day, the best movie that’s ever done this is The Matrix. It was instantly believable that a nobody who doesn’t know how to fight could fight like a master since when you’re in a computer system, any skill can be uploaded into you. It’s one of the many reasons that movie was a classic (Matrix 4 coming, baby!).

But the biggest problem with this script is that 75 pages into it, I stopped and thought to myself, “I know I’ve read this somewhere before.” I went into my archives, did some research, but eventually realized that, no, I hadn’t read it before. It was that the script’s beats were so familiar, it just FELT like something I’d read before. And that’s where I mentally gave up on the script.

A few of you have indicated I should add a “Is this produceable” section to my reviews since I’m moving into producing. It’s a great question with this script. Because it feels like a movie. But if I’m going to produce something, I’m looking for some element that’s unique enough to make the film stand out amongst the crowd. And I didn’t feel that here. This is very much Mission Impossible meets James Bond. A few years ago, the female lead might’ve helped it stand out. But now everyone’s writing female action leads.

Then again, who knows. John Wick was the most generic action movie plot ever. A retired assassin comes back to kill a bunch of bad Russians. And after the Action Showdown Contest, one of the conclusions we came to was that it’s really hard to make an original action movie. So I suppose the answer to this question is in the eye of the beholder. We’ll have to see what happens.

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

What I learned: When writing hacking scenes, avoid a bunch of character + computer screen gobbledy-gook that sounds like hacking. Stuff like, “Did you close down the firewall?” “I’m still trying to find out if he’s using a password sniffer!” In my experience, that stuff never works. Instead, you need to create a situation – preferably something visual – that the reader can understand. Maybe this isn’t the best example, but in The Social Network, instead of Mark Zuckerberg writing some weird techy hacky program in real time, Sorkin had him competing against six other people in a circle of computers in the midst of a drinking contest. That’s always going to work better than literal lines of code.

Genre: Sci-fi/Rom-Com/Drama
Premise: Teddy thinks he’s the only living person left in a world where humanity is frozen in time… until his ex-girlfriend, Leyna, shows up at his doorstep. Together, they must go on a journey to find the cause behind the freeze and in the process, confront the issues that plagued their relationship before it’s too late.
About: This is the number 1 script on the 2019 Black List. The writer, Ken Kobayashi, graduated from USC Film School. This project is set up at Sony with Will Gluck producing. Gluck is no stranger to championing breakout scripts. He directed Easy A, one of the biggest spec scripts of 2009.
Writer: Ken Kobayashi
Details: 104 pages

Nat Wolff for Teddy?

Late last night, someone posted a comment regarding the low vote count for this year’s Black List. Writers don’t have agents this year, they reminded me. Duh! How could I forget?? And agents are the ones doing the heavy lobbying to get their clients on the Black List.

But it goes deeper than that. Yesterday, I championed the death of the biopic, as the dreaded genre was practically absent from the 2019 Black List. But now I realize that was almost certainly because the big agencies weren’t involved. Agencies promote projects for their talent arms, and biopics are actor favorites, since the actors get to play famous flawed figures and those movies always get Oscar noms. Once you remove the main people incentivized to promote that genre, however, you’re not going to have as many of them on list.

Which means maybe biopics aren’t dead after all. :(

This would also explain the uptick of original concepts in this year’s list. Managers are more willing to take chances on and develop original projects and they’re now the primary lobbyers. It’s a reminder that these things are never black and white. You take away one variable for a list and there might be 20 scripts out and 20 new scripts in. I suppose we’re going to find out if this change results in a better list or not. And it starts today with the top screenplay, Move On.

28 year-old Teddy has just asked his girlfriend, Leyna, to marry him. Leyna doesn’t mince words with her response. “No,” she says, and walks out the door. Teddy is devastated, lamenting to his best bud, Squid, who came to cheerlead, that nothing matters anymore. On his drive home, he tries to call Leyla but gets clipped by a truck, nearly dying. But it gets worse. A few minutes later, the entire world freezes.

Cut to three months later and Teddy is biking around a frozen world. Some things still work, like hot water and all the food stays fresh (since it’s frozen in the moment) but other than that, being alone in the world blows. But on his way home from biking, Teddy sees an impossible sight. It’s Leyna! She’s unfrozen as well!

She pops into his place and the two lament the situation they’re in. For some reason, they don’t discuss her marriage rejection. They hang out and the next morning Teddy shows her a google map of this giant black line off the west coast. He saw a black wall in person off the east coast and he wants to see if this other black line is also a wall. So the two go on a road trip together to find out.

During the trip, we occasionally cut back in time to the two meeting, getting to know each other, and starting their adult lives — all the things that led up to the proposal. What we learn is that Ted’s a moron. He took a job in Japan without clearing it with Leyla and then tried to save face by proposing to her. It turns out that rejection is the least of his worries, though, as Ted is about to find out the shocking reason why the world is frozen.

I saw a lot of people commenting on “Move On” in the comments yesterday and the consensus seemed to be that nobody made it past the first 20 pages. I can see why. The writing here doesn’t crackle loud enough to inspire that page-turning tick all writers strive for.

So what would’ve happened had you kept reading? Well, the script has a nice twist. There’s no doubt about it. And that led to an interesting final act. But before we get to that, let’s talk about everything else.

There were too many small but frustrating miscalculations in Move On to buy into it. For example, we get hit with the most gigantic story development ever. THE WORLD IS FROZEN. That’s something you need to sit in for a while. It’s not something you flippantly throw in before sprinting to the next plot point. But that’s exactly what happens. Less than ONE PAGE after the world freezes, Teddy sees Leyla. I knew at that moment the script was in trouble.

Understanding time and pacing and when to draw things out and when to move things along is an essential skill in screenwriting. Some writers do it naturally. For others, it takes time to learn. But, I mean, one page of Frozenville and we’re already throwing the girlfriend back in there?

Then, our lead characters aren’t acting like real people would. If two people lived in a frozen world for three months then ran into each other, it doesn’t matter who they are, they would spend the next 48 hours talking about this bizarre event and how it’s changed their lives and how scared they were and everything they saw and experienced. Instead, we get a brief conversation between Teddy and Leyla before she says, “We’ll continue this conversation tomorrow.”

The trifecta for me was when Teddy says he’s found this black line on the West Coast on Google Maps. He’s already been to the East Coast and seen a black wall off the beach. So he wants to “check to see” if this line is also a black wall. Here’s your answer, Teddy. Yes. Yes it is. What else would it possibly be? Yet that’s the goal we use to drive the story. At that point, I mentally gave up on the script and only read on because I was going to review it.

To the writer’s credit, we do get that twist. —SPOILERS— It turns out that on his way home that day, Teddy didn’t get clipped by a truck. He got flat-out T-boned and was killed. This is a simulation (both the world and Teddy) for people who need to find closure with those who they’ve lost. Leyla was devastated because she never got to discuss what happened and why she did what she did. So, five years later, she’s finally gotten a chance to get that closure.

I’ve read a lot of scripts where people are in simulations. I’ve even read a good number of scripts where people create simulations to connect with dead loved ones. But I’ve never read a script where we take the point of view of the simulated dead person inside the simulation.

It just goes to show how powerful POV can be in story creation. If you’ve been doing this long enough, you’ve come up with a hundred concepts, many of them discarded because they were too similar to other movies. But what if you changed the obvious POV to a non-obvious one? For example, everyone’s come up with a Die Hard idea. But what if you wrote a Die Hard idea from the point of view of Hans? The villain? It would be a completely different movie (I’m not saying it would be good – I’m talking off the top of my head here – but it would be different). So I give credit to Kobayashi for finding a cool angle that no one else thought of. I’m guessing that’s why he made this year’s list.

Unfortunately, the script wasn’t up to snuff in many other areas. I loved the twist. And I even liked the dark tone the script shifted to in those last 20 pages. But then you have stuff like Teddy learning he’s a simulation and, within one scene, being okay with it, and then, in the next scene, cheerfully ready to be turned off for good. There were so many story beats like this one that lacked genuine human reactions that I was constantly being pulled out of the script.

But it does show you how powerful a big concept and a big twist can be. If you’re a young writer who’s a long ways away from mastering this skill, those two things can act as turbo boosters. Because both of them are memorable. You remember the concept. You remember the twist. In most cases of reading screenplays, you don’t remember anything about a script after a couple of weeks.

Move On is a fun screenplay when viewed in totality. But it’s an uphill battle getting to the twist that saves it. It wasn’t enough for me to recommend the screenplay.

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

What I learned: Screenplays where a character acts bizarre for reasons that aren’t revealed until late in the story are hard to pull off. Once we hit the twist on page 70, we get a better understanding of why Leyla is acting so strangely (why she just conveniently appeared out of nowhere and why she’s so laid back in spite of the outrageous circumstances). This is her simulation. She doesn’t have to talk or answer anything from Teddy if she doesn’t want to. She just wants to spend time with him to get closure. Think about what you’re doing to the reader here, though. You’re having a character act unlike any rational human being would for 70 pages before you tell them why. It’s not that you can’t pull this off. But you have to creatively find ways to make the character feel real in the meantime. Or else the reader sees this character who’s doing all these things that no normal person would do and they give up on the script before they get to the great twist. So travel down this road cautiously.