One of the interesting things about reading all those scripts in a row for my contest was seeing so many scripts fall apart in real time. Which was frustrating. You want every script to be good. And with all these scripts passing the “First 10 Pages Test,” your expectations are already high.
So why is it, then, that so many scripts start off strong, then fall apart?
I remember reading semi-finalist script, Wish List. In case you forgot, here’s the logline: “An Amazon delivery man is ambushed in Mexico by a group of gangsters who mistake him for a drug mule, and must survive using only the packages inside his van.” The opening teaser followed an Amazon delivery guy (not the main character) who’s attacked by a crooked Mexican cop. He doesn’t get out alive, establishing the stakes for when we meet *our* Amazon delivery driver.
It didn’t take long for me to lose some of that early confidence in the script. The main character was a bit too goofy for my taste. He reminded me of someone Kevin James might play. Which is fine if you’re writing a comedy. But this wasn’t a comedy. The driver is soon trapped by a Mexican cartel and his situation is anything comedic.
A great concept is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because it gets you more reads. It’s a curse because you now have to live up to that great concept. That means you have to be as clever as your logline implies. And this is where the edges of Wish List started to fray.
Let me be clear about something first, though. Wish List doesn’t make any big mistakes. The mistakes it makes are actually quite average. Unfortunately, that’s all it takes for a reader to lose interest. You guys know this. You read scripts from the site all the time. The second an even mildly questionable writing choice is made, you raise an eyebrow, and by the time a second one arrives, you’re out.
Wish List already had one strike against it because I didn’t feel the tone of the hero matched the tone of his predicament. Then, once the driver started using his packages, that’s where my interest dropped for good. When you have an idea like this, you’re looking for interesting packages the driver uses in clever ways.
The first package we open is an iPad, which the driver uses to translate what the bad guys are saying outside, which was okay. But the only reason he had to do that was because he didn’t have his phone. A phone could’ve done that as well. So we’re not using things in a clever way yet.
Now the driver has to find a phone to call for help. So he starts opening packages until he finds one. However, the only phone he finds turns out to be a kid’s phone, which doesn’t have all the adult features. Which is sort of clever. You always want to make things hard for you hero. Not giving him a fully-featured phone does make things harder than if he had an iPhone. But that’s two packages so far where I’m not seeing much ingenuity. I’m not seeing anything clever. And that’s the whole reason I picked this script.
So even though I would continue to read, my heart wasn’t in it anymore. And that’s how quickly a script can fall apart.
In the case of Wish List, I don’t think the writer made any giant mistakes. I just think he underestimated what the bar is for a good script. Scripts like this are all about the choices you make. It’s how imaginative you can be with those items. If I were the writer, one of the first things I would’ve done was google, “Top 100 things ordered on Amazon” and obsessively combed through the list. You’d probably come up with 50 fun ideas to play with.
But the bigger lesson here is: Don’t assume the movies you see made are the bar you must hurdle. The bar is actually a lot higher than that for any spec screenwriter. You have to write something great to get people interested. It’s only later that over-development and bad notes from studios execs and maybe a director who doesn’t know how to write will ruin your script. But to get to that place, it first has to be great.
Another script whose first ten pages I loved was Honey Mustard. We meet this woman, Stella, who’s married to this utterly awful excuse for a human being. A guy who’s pure evil. The first ten pages is all about her reaching her breaking point and killing him. It’s a really intense first ten pages so I had high hopes for this one.
We then meet this other character, Buford, who’s having a really tough time of it. He’s out of a job. He’s got a family to support. We see him get coldly rejected after an interview. So he’s having a lousy day too.
What happens next is we follow Stella to her workplace. She’s a waitress at a diner. And her first customer is, guess who? Buford. Clearly, neither of these two are in a good place and we can feel that undercurrent of tension in their interaction. Which is credit to the writer who did a wonderful job of setting up the immediate backstory of these two characters to create this charged moment.
Buford gets annoyed when Stella keeps forgetting to bring him honey-mustard sauce for his order. He keeps reminding her and reminding her and reminding her. But she’s dealing with her sexually harassing boss and a handful of other impatient customers and she just killed her husband, so yeah, she’s a little distracted.
So Buford does something really mean. In order to get her back, he doesn’t tip her (he puts “Honey Mustard” on the tip line, lol). And off he goes.
We then follow Buford home where he gets some good financial news. And maybe, just maybe, his family is going to be okay. Meanwhile, we cut back to the diner…. AND EVERYONE IN IT IS DEAD. They’ve all been shot and killed. The cops are trying to figure this out. Stella is not there so she’s their first suspect.
We then cut back to nighttime at Buford’s house. Buford starts seeing a car drive past his place repeatedly. He gets worried. Then he sees the words “HONEY MUSTARD” finger-written through fog on the window. And he realizes that the waitress is here to kill him and his family.
So where did everything go so wrong so fast? Simple. There should not have been a mass-killing at the diner. Literally, the second that happened, I said to myself, “This script is done.” And every subsequent page further supported that. The reason this script was so strong early on was because everything was character-based. It was all about setting up the characters’ lives and then watching what happens when those lives collide.
The second you turn it into a mass-killing, it becomes a whole other movie. And not the movie that you set up, by they way. This isn’t “Unhinged.” However, a part of me understands why the writer, Michael, made these choices. He’s been told time and time again, by people like myself, that THINGS NEED TO KEEP HAPPENING in a screenplay or else the reader will get bored.
Fearing that his script was TOO character-driven, he went all in on taking things to Mach 10. But here’s the thing. When you write good characters, you don’t need a bunch of fireworks. This script could’ve survived as a slow-building character piece. You could even add 3-4 other characters, whose lives we follow, and then have all of them collide in the ending. But turning Stella into this (potentially) mass-killing house-invader was the least interesting choice you could’ve made after that setup, in my opinion. You started with believable and switched to unbelievable in a heartbeat.
So what can we learn from these two scripts? First, deliver on the promise of your premise. And start to do so early. You have to prove to your reader that you’re going to give him what he paid for. Jurassic Park does a great job of this with the whole mosquito-blood scene. I remember watching that and thinking, “Wow, that totally makes sense for how they’d be able to create dinosaurs in modern day.” It was clever and it hooked me.
Next, don’t feel like you’re serving a stadium full of ADD-riddled idiots when you write a script. The problem with that mindset is you think you have to have a car-chase (or a “car chase equivalent”) every scene. So you end up writing these great big plot developments when the script doesn’t need them. It’s hard to be patient as a writer. But just remember that, if you write great characters who are involved in interesting situations, readers are going to want to keep turning the pages.
Finally, have a plan for your second act. This is where most scripts fall apart because it’s the moment where the writer has to actually write the story. The first act is just setting up the concept you came up with. But the second act is where we need to feel like there’s a plan in place. We need to feel like the characters have goals or a clear direction. If it helps, break your second act into four sequences of, between, 12-15 pages. Doing so is automatically going to give your act more structure.
If you go into the second act with only a vague sense of what you’re going to do? It’s going to show on the page. You can’t hide it. A reader senses when the person telling the story isn’t quite sure where he’s going. If you hate outlines, that’s fine. But it means you’re going to have to do a lot more rewriting on your second act to get it to a place where it feels purposeful. If you do these three things, you should be good to go!
By the way, I’m curious what your thoughts are on Honey Mustard and Wish List. I still think both these scripts have potential. So, what are your fixes?
