Remember everybody, this Saturday I’m posting 5 Amateur PILOT SCRIPTS for you to vote on. If you want in, submit a PDF of your script to carsonreeves3@gmail.com with your title, genre, logline, and why you think your script should be chosen (something interesting about yourself or your script). We still haven’t found a kickass pilot script through the site. Let’s change that!
Genre: TV Pilot – Sci-fi
Premise: A terrorist group steals a time machine, forcing the government to chase them around through time.
About: This was a huge TV Pilot sale that comes from high profile producers Eric Kripke and Shawn Ryan. That team-up, from the guys who brought us the never-ending series Supernatural, and the mega-successful cop drama, The Shield, proved irresistible to buyers, who clamored to secure the high-concept pitch. NBC outbid them all, and we’ll be seeing the show later this fall. But can it survive the big-budget network curse that killed fellow big-budget wannabes Terra Nova, The Event, and Revolution? The time travel lover in me hopes so.
Writers: Eric Kripke & Shawn Ryan
Details: 63 pages – 3rd Network Draft, January 15, 2016
“Time” is one of the biggest pilot sales of the year. When you consider that AND that it’s about time travel (I love time travel!), you’d think I’d be dying to read this. But there were two things holding me back. The first is Revolution, another Kripke show. Let me first say that I respect the hell out of anyone who can get a show on the air. You’re competing against tons of talented people for those coveted slots, some of them major celebrities. To beat them out? That’s a big deal and deserves acknowledgement. But Revolution was like the dad joke of TV shows – trying to be hip but coming across oh so clumsy and awkward.
But the bigger problem here is NBC. That network is so enveloped in genericness and so clearly lacks anyone with vision, that sending a show there is like throwing cake batter in the microwave and expecting a soufflé to pop out. I’ve lost so much faith in NBC, and the big networks in general, that if this pilot sucks, I’m done reviewing network pilots for good. These guys don’t get that they’re Blockbuster if they don’t evolve. Shows don’t get 30 million viewers anymore. Catering to the middle is no longer an effective approach. You must embrace niches to survive.
30-something Lucy Preston is one of those hip professors who all the kids like but all the faculty hates (they won’t give her tenure cause she talks about how big former presidents’ penises are!).
Lucy’s minding her own business when the government shows up at her door and ubers her over to Lark Industries, a company owned by the latest screenwriting incarnation of Elon Musk. It turns own Mason Lark has created a time machine and some dangerous dude named Garcia Flynn, along with the Flynn Followers, has stolen said time machinery.
It just so happens that Lark has a backup machine, but it can only carry three people. And the government wants Lucy to be one of those people, since she knows history better than anybody, especially president penis size history. Hey, you know never know when that might come in handy. I mean shit, it would’ve been relevant in 2016.
She’ll be teamed up with Rufas Carlin, a young black genius engineer, and some mysterious dude named Wyatt, who’s so mysterious that I never even figured what he does. The government has reason to believe that Garcia is going back to the infamous 1937 Zeppelin accident to turn the event into an even larger catastrophe.
So the trio travels back to 1937 New York and starts looking for Garcia, but by the time they find him, it’s too late. He already has access to the Zeppelin. But here’s where shit gets crazy. He doesn’t create an even bigger catastrophe. He actually SAVES the Zeppelin. Huh. That throws the group for a loop. What the hell do they do now?
After a quick stint in jail, the three hypothesize that Garcia saved the Zeppelin to use it for an even more sinister plan. But what could that plan be? And will they be able to get to him in time to stop it!
One of the telltale signs of professional writing is if they can “getcha.” Yes, I’m using “getcha” as an official term today. You’ve been “gotchen” when you were sure the script was going to go this way and instead it went that way. I have to admit that when Garcia saved the Zeppelin instead of destroying it, I was “gotchened.” I didn’t see that coming.
Unfortunately, that’s about the only thing I liked here. As expected, there’s a safe network quality to the writing, right down to the robotic way in which it’s written. Sentences are very short. They’re mixed in with lots of sentence fragments (So instead of saying, “She smiles flirtatiously.” we get, “A flirtatious smile.”). There are a lot of dashes — a lot of punctuation,,,,. And what all this does is it creates too much “start-stop” reading.
I’m not saying this is the wrong way to write. You can write any way you want and there was a time when this style was quite popular. But the way you write DOES psychologically affect the reader. If you’re writing in short clips, the reader receives that information like a mathematical equation. If you write in full sentences, the reader receives the information as a single continuous thought.
Here’s a line from the book, “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.” I want you to pay attention to how the flow of the sentence makes you FEEL.
“Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.”
Now here’s the same information, but conveyed in a more clipped format.
“My bones. I feel them straining — under me. The weight of all the lives I’m not living.”
Different, right?
This morse code-like approach has led to an even bigger problem in professional writing, the need to distill everything down into packet-sized moments. The one thing professionals do a good job of is they keep the story moving. Whereas amateurs will get stuck in a scene for too long, professionals know that the goal is to get in and out quickly. But this can be taken too far. If you treat it too much like an equation, you won’t stay inside the scenes long enough to create a connection with the reader.
A perfect example is the scene where we find out Lucy’s mom has cancer. The scene reads like a checklist: “Okay, let’s establish that she’s bald. Check. See her in a hospital bed. Check. Show her too tired to respond to her daughter. Check. Got it, let’s move on.” You can’t do that with these scenes if you want the reader to be emotionally affected by them. You need more time and you need to creatively build a memorable moment. The “establish our list and get out” approach doesn’t work if you’re trying for genuine emotion.
Finally, there’s a lack of logic dictating some major plot points here. Namely, of all the people in the world to send back in time to stop terrorists, why are they choosing the local history professor who’s not even good enough to secure tenure?
There’s an argument to be made that details like this don’t matter. It’s a TV show. You’re not supposed to think too much about it. Just go with the flow. That’s fine if everything else in the pilot is perfect. But if you have the attitude where an important plot point can be overlooked, you likely have the attitude that other things can be overlooked as well. And it’s when you start amassing multiple “overlooked” moments that the viewer starts sensing something is off. They don’t even know what it is. But they FEEL that the story is taking too many shortcuts and that’s what leads to that permanent channel change.
You have to know what you’re getting into when you tackle time-travel. It’s a “can’t fuck around” genre. You get lazy for a second and people start asking questions like, “Well, if the terrorists already went back in time and destroyed the Zeppelin than why is everything still the same here in the present?” It’s a genre where you really have to be on your game. They still have time to figure it out. But going off of what I’m seeing so far, this looks like it could be a lazy exploration of the genre.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I want to reiterate that there’s no “right” style to write in. It’s even okay to use multiple styles in a screenplay. What I want to get across though is that your writing style has a psychological effect on the reader and how they’re processing information. Clipped abrasive styles feel colder and more robotic and can be harder to follow if done sloppily. Longer natural writing styles feel soft and inclusive and connect with the reader on an organic level. Keep that in mind!
What I learned 2: It’s official guys. No more incarnations of Elon Musk in your screenplays. I’ve read five versions of the character in the last two months alone.
