Wait a minute. You’re telling me that the creator of Breaking Bad had Max Landis’s cop-monster idea 10 years before Max Landis???
Genre: TV Pilot – Half-Hour Drama? (didn’t know they made half-hour dramas)
Premise: In a near-future Los Angeles, LAPD is dealing with a new epidemic — people are mutating into monsters, and wreaking havoc all across the city.
About: This 2006 pilot hails from Breaking Bad creator, Vince Gilligan, and his fellow former X-Files writer Frank Spotnitz. However, because this was the pre-Breaking Bad days, the pilot never gained traction. I believe they shot it but it never made it to air. Let’s find out why.
Writers: Vince Gilligan and Frank Spotnitz
Details: 22 pages (edit: full 1 hour pilot, pages cut out)
Hey guys. I’ve just been informed that this draft I read was missing half its pages. So I’m going to take my original analysis down. However, I’m leaving up the What I Learned section, as I still think it’s helpful.
What I learned: I want to challenge you today. Open your current script and randomly go to a scene. Read that scene. Ask yourself, “Is this the best I can do with this scene?” It doesn’t matter what your answer is. Cause you’re going to try to write something better. Can you add more conflict somewhere? More suspense? Can you throw an unexpected twist into the middle of the scene? Can you increase the stakes? Can you tell the scene from a different, unexpected, point of view? Can you use dramatic irony, cluing in the audience, but not the characters, that something bad is about to happen? Can you change the location to the last place we’d expect? Can you bring in a new character? Can you be brave and throw a curveball into the scene that you didn’t originally plan for? If you manage to write something better, feel free to post how you improved your scene. It might end up helping someone else with their script.
