Let’s find out why!
So you didn’t make last week’s First Page Showdown. Wanna know why? Six of you are about to find out. I encourage everyone here to read these pages then read the official Showdown pages because sometimes it’s not easy to tell why pages work. You need to see what’s on the other side of the tracks in order to compare.
And I’m not bashing today’s writers. I’m hoping to help them. Most writers never get feedback and, as a result, keep making the same mistakes over and over again. Today’s writers are going to be getting some valuable information. That’s why I say, if you can afford me, hire me (I’ll give you $100 off if you mention this article – e-mail: carsonreeves1@gmail.com). I can definitely help you. At the very least I’ll help you identify a couple of blind spots in your writing so you can start improving.
Okay.
Are we ready to check out these six submissions that didn’t make the cut?
Let’s do it.
Okay, so there are a bunch of little issues here hurting this page and telling the reader that, if they continue, it’s going to be a clunky read. I don’t like backwards sentences. For example, I don’t like, “Ice cream moves into the mouth of John, who’s eating it.” I prefer “John eats ice cream.”
In general, screenplays work best in the active voice so, unless you’re really trying to do something unique with your voice, you should stick to that. Cause the very first sentence here was so backwards written (“A spray can in a child’s hand flits across a house front.”), I had to read it a couple of times to understand it. And that’s a death knell for a script. If a reader has to read something twice, you’re a goner. Especially if it’s the first line of the script.
The angry neighbor helping him instead of hurting him was a nice unexpected beat. But then he uses some weird word – which I understand was a joke – but it was a joke that didn’t land. It was more confusing than anything. The thing that made sure I wasn’t going to keep reading, though, was the house owner throwing a bottle at a kid and hitting him in the head and (seemingly) killing him. I suppose in a really dark comedy, beats like this are on the table. But with the glitches I mentioned above (and a few other ones I didn’t), I was reasonably sure that I didn’t need to turn the page.
Jaco in the house! Unafraid to throw his page in front of the judges. I love it. So, when it comes to this page, there really isn’t anything wrong with it. It’s not like the previous entry, where there were a handful of mistakes that painted the page in a negative light. The problem here is that there’s nothing positive to latch onto either. Two guys try to turn a wheel on a drill. That’s not exactly high drama.
I suspect Jaco might make the argument, “Well, I only have one page.” True, but the winner of the contest created a compelling dramatic scenario inside a single page so it definitely can be done. But, let’s go with that argument anyway. Even still, the scene isn’t promising any drama. Two guys are turning a wheel. There are no stakes, no urgency, no conflict (except for maybe which one of them has to turn the wheel – which is a conflict that didn’t even matter in the end since both of them try it).
I suppose we have the danger of the “spark” happening. But it’s so casually mentioned that I assumed it wasn’t a big deal.
If I were advising Jaco on the rewrite, I would encourage him to make everything harder. Don’t have it be cold. Have it be the kind of cold that, if you’re outside too long, you get frostbite and lose your hand. Their work ended two hours ago but they’ve been playing catch-up all day, and now they’re outside late, way past when it’s safe, and it’s clear they’re flirting with fate if they stay out any longer. We really get the sense that someone’s going to lose fingers if they’re out here for even a few more minutes. This could create more conflict between the pair (one’s tough and wants to keep going. The other wants to get inside).
Meanwhile, their boss is pissssssed. If this drill issue doesn’t get solved tonight, both of them are getting reprimanded, which could lead to losing their jobs. These higher stakes will create more stress and tension within the characters, which is going to play so much better than this jovial ‘who cares’ attitude each of them has now. I mean you’d think they were trying to open a coconut on the Fiji islands with how chirpy they are. I would make a few other changes as well, but this is a good starting point.
Always remember that, in screenwriting, you’re trying to pack as much as you can inside the limited amount of space that you have. Not enough was packed into this first page. We discover a Fresca. I don’t know if that’s a common occurrence or not but based on the initial reaction, it seems quite common. “Common” doesn’t get me to turn the page. Uncommon does.
From there, a father has a very on-the-nose argument with his daughter who, in over-the-top fashion, throws her iPad down and stomps away. I’m always wary of over-the-top dialogue or over-the-top actions early on as it indicates that the emotional calibration throughout the screenplay will be off.
For the first page, I would’ve nixed the daddy-daughter setup and, instead, focused on the team unearthing something unexpected. That would’ve gotten me to turn the page.
This isn’t a bad scene. Death is about as high stakes as things get, which is why we like a lot of death in our movies. So the scene does possess a level of weightiness that at least has me curious to finish the page.
I also liked the observation about the casualness in which we act after death. How strange it is that we turn to something as mundane as potato salad after something as monumental as the end of a life. Coming up with thoughtful observations about life isn’t easy and that sentence grabbed me just as I was ready to jump off the ‘done with this page’ cliff.
But after that line, everything else was just… I hate to say it but boring. I got the impression that if I kept reading, I was going to read this low-energy small-town story about 20-somethings trying to figure out life and that’s not a movie to me. That’s a scene in a TV show or a chapter in a book. I need the promise of something bigger, something larger than life, in a movie. And this page wasn’t giving me that.
This page left me bewildered. We’re introducing something that’s never been seen before yet it’s dealt with with the same level of casualness as a stray dog. Oh yeah, that’s just the abnormally giant bird that hangs out in the forest and sometimes comes out and pesters humans.
No. If you’re introducing something extraordinary, you should slow down, linger on the details, and capture the awe it inspires in those witnessing it. This girl is encountering something Jurassic—something that shouldn’t even exist—yet her reaction betrays none of that astonishment. The brother’s reaction is also strange. He’s already seen this thing seven years ago? Does that mean we’re in a fantasy world and most people are aware of these things? Is this a shocking event? A common one? I’m so confused.
I get the feeling that the writer felt pressured to have something big happen on the first page so he decided to introduce his script’s big anomaly right away. But if you’re going to introduce something big and exotic, something that should not exist, you need time to set that up, to build up to it. Jurassic Park built up for a full 30 minutes before its scientists first laid eyes on dinosaurs. And remember how that scene played out. There was a good five minutes of characters standing there with their jaws on the ground. Cause that’s how shocking what they were looking at was.
Jurassic Park is also a good example of how to write an opening page. Don’t let the cat (or the dinosaur) out of the bag right away. Hide the cat in shadows within its cage as the guards transfer it. Show scientists poking and prodding it, as we hear the carnal noises it makes from within its cage. And then have someone make a mistake and the cat grabs them, pulls them in and eats them up, all in shadows. Note how much more dramatic that scenario is than a bird just hopping out of the forest on page one, saying hi, and then we’re onto the next beat.
This page isn’t bad but here’s the problem. It’s all very linear. All very obvious. A pirate boards a Roman ship and rounds everyone up. There’s nothing unique about the scene or the moment. And the pirate leader makes a very weak speech. “I board your ship and your men… try to kill me?” Uh, why would he be confused about that? YOU’RE PIRATES TAKING OVER THEIR SHIP! OF COURSE THEY’RE GOING TO TRY AND KILL YOU!
I’m going to make a weird analogy but stay with me. Have you ever said to a stranger, “Hey, how’s it going?” Or given them a compliment? “I like your shoes.” Because these statements/questions are uttered millions of times a day all over the world, they will be met by auto-responses. “Good, thanks.” “Oh, thank you.”
In other words, your inquiry was so generic that the other party didn’t have to use their brains. They instead depended on “auto-response” mode, a low-energy process happening in the back of their brain that allowed them to not have to think.
Sometimes I feel like these scripts are written in such an expected manner that the readers are in auto-response mode. They don’t have to think. Even when pirates are raiding Roman ships, you have to give us something different, something unique, something that’s going to make a reader tell his boss, “This script had an AMAZING first scene. It grabbed me and never let go.”
Instead of saying, “I like your shoes,” say, “I love these shoes but they look like they’re murdering your feet.” That subtle change takes the person out of auto-response mode and gets them to think a little. Same thing here. Instead of a basic linear “pirates raid a boat” scene and pirate captain acts mad, have these pirates be unlike any pirates we’ve seen before! Have them raid a fellow pirate ship! Or make them unorthodox. Remember that, before Pirates of the Caribbean, pirate movies had been bombing in Hollywood for two decades. So they did something different. They made the pirates ghosts. Turn something – ANYTHING – on its head so we know we’re not reading yet another script that’s going to play it safe and give us a story we’ve seen a million times already.
