Fun Size

Genre: Comedy
Premise: A high school girl getting ready for the biggest party of the year is tasked with taking her young brother on a quick trick or treating run. But when he goes missing, the entire night is thrown into disarray.
About: Fun Size made the bottom half of the 2010 Black List and is being produced and directed by Josh Schwartz, the O.C. creator and writer of a high school script I reviewed awhile back called “Providence” that wasn’t too shabby. This is Max Werner’s first feature sale. He got his break writing on The Colbert Report, on which he won an Emmy. Victoria Justice will be playing the lead character, Wren. No, not Victoria Jackson. Victoria Justice.
Writer: Max Werner
Details: 105 pages (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

Within the “collective things that happen to a bunch of people on a single day” mini-genre, I’d have to say that Dazed and Confused is the crème-de-la-crème. That film just has an energy to it that very few films have. I think a lot of that had to do with the casting at the time.  Now all anyone wants to do is cast spray-tanned glossy Hollywood actors in these roles.  Linklater wasn’t afraid to cast people that actually looked like real people (okay, except for Ben Affleck).

I guess my first thought when someone created a Dazed and Confused for Halloween was, “Hey, why didn’t I think of that?” Halloween is a great night to center a movie around because…well because it’s inherently theatrical. Everyone’s dressed up and they’re all acting like somebody they’re not. The problem with this bite sized script (besides the title – for which I suggest an immediate change), is I’m not sure what it wants to be. Does it want to be a family film? Does it want to be a raunchy teen movie? Or does it want to be Dazed and Confused meets Sixteen Candles? I’m not sure I’ll be able to answer that by the end of the review. But I’ll try.

Wren is pale and pretty and awkward and the kind of teenager who would rather crush on her really intelligent History teacher than one of the immature douchebags she shares hall space with on a daily basis. April, her best friend, is pretty much the opposite. Described as a “future girl gone wild,” (great description!) she’d rather crush on *every* douchebag she shares hall space with. If it’s cute, chances are April wants to fuck it.

Naturally, the too-mature-for-her-age Wren can’t wait to ditch this prison and head off to her dream school, NYU. Problem is she has these dreaded loans to take care of, and can’t do anything without her mother’s support. And right now, her mother’s making a very unfair demand – to take her plump annoying little brother Albert (aka, the devil), out for Halloween trick-or-treating while she goes out to her own Halloween party with her newly minted uncomfortably younger boyfriend.

Wren’s obviously furious, particularly because super-cute emo Aaron, the only boy her age who’s actually worth the effort, just invited her to his party for the evening. And taking Albert out means missing a prime time last-minute High School make-out (or more) opportunity that, if missed, she’ll end up regretting for the rest of her life.

So Wren and April formulate a plan where they’ll loop Albert around the block once, get him back home so he can gorge himself into a diabetic coma, then run over to Aaron’s party so the macking can begin. Sweet plan, except Albert, decked out in a spider-man costume, takes all of five minutes to wander off during the trick-or-treating, and DISAPPEAR. Just like that, Albert is el-gone-o.

Luckily, Wren and April run into ultra-nerd duo Roosevelt and Peng. Roosevelt plays the flute for fun and has two moms who force him to speak Latin. Peng is from Korea and immediately makes you think of Long Duck Dong (oh the days of 80s movie stereotypes). Never in a million years would April and Wren be caught with these two, but they have a car, and a car means finding her brother faster, which means hooking up with Aaron sooner, so they join forces and away we go.

Fun Size starts off really strong. If there’s one thing that Werner has going for him, it’s dialogue. I loved lines like this, when Aaron (the guy Wren likes) says in all earnestness, “I’m writing a power ballad about you. It’s called Mystery Meat.” Or when Wren, who’s always heard Roosevelt talk about his “moms,” realizes when she finally meets them that he really has 2 MOMS. Shocked, she observes, “I thought he was just talking like Ludacris.”

But sometimes the dialogue feels too clever. Wren creates these weird lists in her spare time which allow her to do these funky play on words such as: “Bullet Points on a Fluffer’s Resume: Team player, stick-to-it-ive-ness, conceive and implement strategies for sustaining growth during periods of inactivity.” I knew all the while that someone out there was laughing at this, but it was all too heady for me.

What’s strange is that the humor seems to move further down the evolutionary chain as the script goes on. Whereas we start out with a lot of clever witty dialogue – a sort of sister script to the well-loved “Easy A,” – things become considerably more low brow after we hit the mid-point. We have bully humor, car chases, my boyfriend is still in college stuff (for the mom). It’s not that I didn’t like it. It just seemed to shift in tone, and that contributed to me struggling to find out exactly what tone Fun Size was going for.

On the structural side, it passes inspection. I love the one night thing. Keeps the narrative nice and clean. We’re not questioning when it’s all supposed to end. The stakes are laid out clearly. Wren’s mom lets her know she needs to start acting more mature if she’s going to spend 40,000 a year on her. So if Wren comes home without her brother, chances are her NYU dream is kaput. Again, not mind-blowing, but that’s what you have to remember with structure. It just has to fit with the story you're telling and be believable. It doesn’t have to be the most original thing in the world. As long as it shapes the story and doesn’t draw attention to itself, you’re in good shape.

Where I think the script falls short is in the emotional department. Near the end, we find out Wren’s father died. And it doesn’t feel natural at all, particularly because we’ve just spent the previous 60 pages drowning ourselves in wacky 80s teen humor. But as I read on, I thought, this is exactly what the script needed, only a lot sooner. We needed something to ground the craziness, and her father’s death and how that’s affected this family – had that been instituted from the get-go, I think it would’ve given this script a whole nother much-needed layer.

Dazed and Confused did this masterfully, where it had a lot of wacky moments (stealing beer and then being shot at in the car) but the story was so well grounded that instead of those moments feeling like Date Night 2, they felt like something that could’ve really happened. The trick was in how much importance Linklater placed on theme. Dazed and Confused was about “moving on,” or “moving to that next stage of your life.” Every scene was dripping with that theme, so when characters did things that they’d never normally do, it made sense, because that’s the way you act when it's the last day before the next stage of your life. Here in Fun Size, when the car chase scene happened, it felt more like a writer trying to come up with a funny scene for a movie. Had they explored the theme of the father’s death (or – ironically – “not being able to move on”) early and often, it would’ve grounded the narrative and given Fun Size the earnestness I think it was looking for.

I like the concept here. Follow a bunch of connected people around during the craziness of one Halloween night. I’d just like more emotion and theme woven into the story, as right now it’s a little too broad and messy.

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

What I learned: Someone mentioned this in the comments of Bass Champion and I thought it was a great point. Make your stakes strong by giving your hero something to gain AND something to lose. So in Bass Champion, Tate had something to gain – the audition with Nolan – but he didn’t have a lot to lose. If he lost the championships, he just went back to his show, putting him right back where he started. Here, Wren GAINS something by finding her brother (she gets to go to the party and be with Aaron) and loses something by losing her brother (she doesn’t get to go to her dream school). Stakes can work with only something gained or only something lost, but tend to work best when there’s something to both gain and lose.

Bass Champion

Genre: Comedy
Premise: A Twilight-like actor becomes the face of Bass Fishing in a desperate attempt to get an audition for Christopher Nolan's adaptation of The Old Man And The Sea.
About: Every Friday, I review a script from the readers of the site. If you’re interested in submitting your script for an Amateur Review, send it in PDF form, along with your title, genre, logline, and why I should read your script to Carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Keep in mind your script will be posted.
Writer: Gayne C. Young
Details: 105 pages (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

I got two words for you: colostomy bag.

If that doesn’t get your rotors revved up and ready to go, you might not want to “dive” into today’s amateur offering, Bass Champion. But if you choose not to take that leap, you’ll be missing out on one of the few worthy Amateur Friday screenplays I’ve read.

The first thing you gotta get right with a comedy is the premise.  The premise has to be funny.  And this premise passes the test.  I’m not sure why, but it’s probably due to the insane combination of the Twilight world and the Bass Fishing world, which just don’t go together at all. And yet our author, Gayne, finds a way to make it work, deftly poking fun at both the ridiculousness of tweenie vampires and the hickishness of bass fishing. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s talk plot.

Tate Blocker is a hot young “Robert Pattinson” like actor on a vampire TV show called “Forever Youth.” Tate takes method acting to the extreme, going to whatever lengths he needs to to become the character, including believing he’s an actual vampire. The problem is, it’s all a bag of tricks. Tate doesn’t understand what it’s really like to “get dirty” and sacrifice yourself to something.

Which is exactly why Christopher Nolan won’t even consider him for a roll in his new adaptation of The Old Man And The Sea. And it’s killing Tate. He’ll do anything to get that audition.

Halfway across the country, Bass Fishing champion and overall stupid-ass Bud Milton has made the inopportune mistake of sticking his pecker inside a fish’s mouth for a few laughs. Problem is, one of his cronies taped it, and now it’s all over Youtube, creating some really bad press for the sport, culminating in PETA swooping in and demanding nothing less than the shutdown of Bass Fishing.

Tate’s agent realizes this is the perfect opportunity to bust her client out of the TV world. If Tate can become the new face of Bass Fishing, it will refocus the media away from PETA, and in the process win over Christopher Nolan to get Tate that audition. It’s the perfect plan! Well, sorta.

If Tate is going to compete, he’s going to need a partner. And that partner comes in the form of anger-management poster child Rod Bender, a one-eyed alcoholic former Bass Fishing champion whose repeated fighting got him kicked off the tour years ago. Rod’s the only partner good enough to make up for Tate’s unsettling lack of skill.

The problem is that Bud, our oral fishing friend, is dead set on making sure Vampire Boy doesn’t win jack shit, and he’ll do anything to make him and his washed up partner disappear. And to make things worse, Hark Herald, who plays Tate’s werewolf co-star on Forever Youth, is pulling his own publicity stunt to win over the lead role in Christopher Nolan’s film. With escalating pressure from PETA, Rod’s physically abusive teaching methods, backstabbing from his female co-star at Comic-Con, and Bud’s never-ending dirty tricks, does Tate stand a chance of becoming the ultimate Bass Champion and winning the role of Santiago in The Old Man And The Sea?

So, is Bass Fishing perfect? No. Gayne is clearly still learning the craft and maybe leans a little too heavily on cheap humor (colostomy bags in two of three scripts this week!). But what I like about this week’s comedy script is that finally we have an amateur writer who’s put his story on the same priority level as his comedy.

You can see that in how deftly he’s structured his script. We have a main character with a clear goal (get an audition with Christopher Nolan). We have high stakes (Bass Fishing gets shut down and Tate loses the role of a lifetime if he loses). We have a ticking time bomb (Nolan choosing Santiago soon). We have a great central relationship in Rod and Tate, two completely opposite characters who must learn to work together to achieve their ultimate goal. Every character here is properly motivated. Rod wants back on the tour. Bud has to win or his career will be over. Tate’s agent wants to leave behind her soul-sucking child-actor agency. Everything that happens in this comedy has a reason for happening. Structurally, this is one of the best amateur Friday screenplays we’ve had.

Another thing Gayne’s got going for him is he understands his material. He gets these two competing worlds (the vain-ness of Hollywood and the trashiness of the South) so well that when he brings them together, you feel like you’re reading a script that you haven’t read before. True there are some familiar elements, but who the hell places a Twilight actor in the middle of the deep south?? I just haven’t seen anything close to that idea explored before. And everything here is like that – existing in that coveted “familiar but different” bullseye territory that every screenwriter should be aiming for.

I also loved the little touches in the story like Hark and Tate going after the same role. And the Comic-Con stuff had me dying (guys wearing “I’m a Tate-o-Sexual” shirts and Rod beating the shit out of a girl in a wheelchair after being mistaken for a homeless person from one of Tate’s Forever Youth episodes). Tate’s dedication to researching his roles, like going to a castle and living with roaches for a week. I really felt like Gayne pushed the comedy limits and never got bogged down in the obvious (well, almost never).

On the downside, I can tell he’s still learning some things. The opening of the script doesn’t move us into the story as smoothly as I would like. Setting up a story is deceptively hard because it’s when you introduce all the artificial elements (the goal, the ticking time bomb, etc.) that make the car go. Introducing these elements in a manner that’s not herky jerky and doesn’t draw attention to itself isn’t easy to do. If you’re too lazy about it, the reader quickly becomes aware that he's reading a script. For instance, when Rod is being recruited from Outdoor Empire, we’re very aware that this is the “recruit the crazy partner” scene. It doesn’t “flow.” It doesn’t just “happen.” You have to keep writing these scenes to death until they feel effortless, until they feel like a natural extension of everything around them, because if the audience doesn’t believe your setup, it’s going to be hard for them to believe everything that follows.

The other stuff I wasn’t so hot on was the crass-ness of the humor. But I’m torn about it. On the one hand, a lot of it stemmed from the characters. The word “fuck” is used in Hollywood and the South a lot, so it makes sense that it’s used a lot here (and I mean A LOT). As for the shit jokes. Well…hmmm. This seems to divide audiences. But for me, now that I’m no longer in high school, it doesn’t really make me laugh anymore, so when we basically extend a 15 second scene to 3 minutes so we can draw out a shit joke where the wheelbound president of Bass Champions dumps his colostomy bag into a urinal, I’m inclined to say, “Lose it and move on.” Then again, one of the funniest jokes ever onscreen was a shit joke, that being the blanket flinging scene in Trainspotting. I think the lesson here is that you do have to listen to other people when they say you’ve gone too far with a joke. But in the end, because humor is so subjective and comes down to personal taste, you gotta stick with something if you believe it’s funny. So in that sense I respect Gayne’s choices.

In the end, I just love this premise (Did I mention I love this premise?). And the fact that Gayne actually built a story around it as opposed to stringing together a bunch of one-off sketches, puts him in a league above other aspiring comedy scriptwriters. Bass Champion still needs some work. I’d like the setup to be smoother and it gets a teensy bit repetitive in the middle. But concept wise, story wise, and execution of the premise wise, it does a really solid job. I’m thinking Gayne has a shot in this crazy business.

Script link: Bass Champion 

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

What I learned: All of your characters – not just your main character – should have something at stake. So here, the central stakes are for Tate to get an audition for Santiago. But his agent also has something at stake. If her client doesn’t get the role, she’s stuck in a shitty agency forever. For Rod, this is his last shot to get back into the sport he loves. For Bud, losing to Tate means he’ll lose the only thing he cares about, his fame. Even the sport itself has stakes attached to it. If Tate doesn’t win and squash PETA’s media attention, then the entire sport could close down. So add stakes wherever you can in your script, not just to your main character.

Source Code - From Script To Screen

Am I upset that Source Code only made 15 million dollars on opening weekend and finished behind an irritating poorly animated bunny? Of course! I wanted the movie to make a bajillion dollars and prove to Hollywood that spec scripts can make good movies too, especially spec scripts as good as this one. It didn’t happen but I can still take comfort in the fact that critics enjoyed it, which is by no means a guarantee with sci-fi.

But that’s not why I’m writing today’s article. I’m writing today’s article because you guys have said you want more script-to-screen comparisons, an examination of the changes made from the original spec to the final shooting script, so we can try and discern what happens during the development process and if that process ends up helping the script or hurting it. Since there’s no script I know better than this one, I thought it’d be a great script to start with.

Before I get into the specific changes, however, let me give you my general reaction to the film. I liked it. Quite a bit actually. I thought Jake was solid. He has a strange quality as a leading man in that he definitely FEELS like a movie star but is missing that – I don’t know what it is – but I guess “swagger” describes it – the thing that separates guys like DiCaprio from the rest of the pack. You want to hang out with Jake. I’m not sure you want him to save the world for you. Still, I thought he worked. As for Jeffrey Wright – look - I know he totally overplayed the part. But I loved it. I love him as an actor and think he has such an interesting delivery that even when he’s hamming it up, I still believe it.

As for director Duncan Jones, I thought he made some good choices and some not so good choices. Someone else pointed out that the movie starts with sweeping shots of Chicago and the train Colter wakes up in. These shots are beautiful to look at but they were totally wrong for the opening, which is supposed to be our character waking up in a strange place with no idea how he got there. If we’re to feel the same way, shouldn’t that be our first shot? Him waking up? Not a $50,000 helicopter shot? It would be like in Buried if we showed sweeping shots of Iraq for three minutes before cutting to Ryan Reynolds in a coffin. Also, I’m not sure I liked the bright bubbly feel of the train sequences and was hoping for more of a cold steely tint, like that of Inception. I understand Jones wanted to clash the train scenes with the dark dreary feel of the source code chamber but that vibrant look just didn’t mesh with the tone of the story.

Having said that, Jones really kept the story moving and, even with the script changes, was dedicated to the spirit of the script. This was close to what I read on the page. And that doesn’t happen all the time. Anyway, here are five key script changes made from the spec script to the shooting draft and how I feel they affected the final product.

CHANGE #1 – 17 MINUTES TO 8 MINUTES
In the script Colter has 17 minutes on the train. In the movie he has 8. At first I didn’t like this change. It felt like too tight of a time-crunch. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. On the page, 17 minutes can be fudged to seem like it’s going a lot faster. You just cut out the boring parts. Onscreen, in this particular situation where we’re staying with Jake the whole time, that’s harder to do. Therefore, 17 minutes would’ve felt like a lifetime. 8 minutes is still a little too short for me. 11 minutes would have been perfect. But overall, I think the change worked.

CHANGE # 2 – THE GIRL
By far, the biggest change in the script was making Christina someone Colter knew of ahead of time, as opposed to someone he’d never talked to before. When I first read this change in Billy Ray’s rewrite, I was so pissed off I actually threw the script down and stopped reading. I feared that they’d completely ruined the story with this needless change. Here’s my problem with it. I’m of the belief that you want to make things as difficult as possible for your main character. If things are easy, you don’t have a movie. So for her to just be in his back pocket from the second he wakes up….it’s too easy. I got the feeling that if he’d asked her to marry him right then and there, she would’ve said yes. And how interesting of a relationship is that? That said, I think I know why they did it. And it goes back to the aforementioned time change. In the script, when he had 17 minutes, winning over a girl who doesn’t know you is somewhat conceivable. In the film, when he had 8 minutes, that conceit becomes infinitely harder to believe. He would’ve had to use every single second of those eight minutes before she trusted him enough to do the things he needed her to do. Therefore their only choice was to make it so that she already knew him, so he doesn’t have to use that time to convince her who he is every time he goes back into the train. He can just jump straight into the action. I don’t like it as much as the way the script handled it, but I understand the change.

CHANGE #3 – 120 pages to 90 pages
(note: I don’t know the actual page length of the shooting draft. I’m just going by the 1 page = 1 minute of screen time rule). Now you know me. I’m Mister “Keep your script to 110 pages MAX” Guy. The reason the 120 pages in Source Code never bothered me though was because each section of Source Code is its own ticking time bomb. It’s always a race. So you never feel time dragging. That said, there are a lot of advantages to cutting the script down to 90 pages. The most obvious is that less pages equals a lower budget. Each day you shoot is tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars. So cutting even a single page saves a lot of money. Yet another reason to keep your screenplay lean. Also, thrillers just play better at shorter lengths, especially contained thrillers like this one. Finally, this particular format of movie, where you’re repeating actions, can grate on the viewer if not done right. Go watch the movie “Vantage Point” to see what I mean. People don’t like to go backwards in a story so it’s best to err on the side of caution and keep things as lean as possible. This movie is supposed to move so they made sure it moved. So overall, I think it was a good change.

CHANGE #4 – MORE UPBEAT
I heard Duncan Jones talk about this in an interview – how he wanted to add more humor and a generally upbeat tone to Source Code. I’m usually okay with this. Too many writers drown their scripts in hopelessness and despair, squeezing the life out of their story page by endlessly depressing page. But Source Code’s thriller elements were all perfectly plotted, keeping our focus away from the fact that this was, indeed, a dark story, and instead on the main character’s tasks, which were to find the bomber and find out who Beleagured Castle was. Also, the relationship between him and the girl provided that necessary spark to offset the darkness. That was our “upbeat” storyline. Where I really had an issue with this “happier” approach was the “Here’s ten bucks now go do your comedy routine” scene at the end. You can always tell when an idea hasn’t been fully integrated into a script. The writer tries to squeeze a thin setup for it in early (“You know that guy. He’s a comedian!”) then a full 90 minutes later with no other insight into that character or that situation, we get his Last Comic Standing climax. It’s a total cheat and it felt forced as hell. I’m not saying it couldn’t have worked. It just needed a lot more setup. Overall, I would’ve preferred a darker feel on the train, like the script, so I wasn’t thrilled by this choice.

CHANGE #5 – THE ENDING
Personally, I thought the ending in the original draft was perfect. There’s a couple of reasons for that. First, the images that Colter keeps seeing between the train and the chamber are discussed in the dialogue so as to cue the reader in that they’re an important plot point. Colter asks Goodwin “What am I seeing? I’m seeing something after the train blows up.” This “middle time” is what helps us buy into the ending where they walk into the real world. But in the movie, we only SEE these images. We’re never informed that they’re supposed to be important. As a result, they just come off as a cool visual thing. Second, the ending in the spec draft was simple. They walk off the train, he checks his watch, it’s past 8 minutes, and he’s still alive. In this new ending, there was too much going on, four endings to be precise. We have the comedy freeze, which I admit would’ve been a dark cool way to end the film. Then we have the post freeze, where they realize they’re still alive. Then we have the real world text, where Colter informs Goodwin that he’s still alive in the Source Code. Then we have the “fate” finale, where Colter and Christina go to Grant Park and look at the mirror bubble exhibit. The thing is, I thought each of these endings worked in their own way. I enjoyed all of them. I just didn’t think they worked together. It had a bit of a Steven Spielberg “too many endings” effect that gave you that uncomfortable, “Shouldn’t this be over already?” feeling. So for that reason, I don’t think the ending in the movie worked as well as the ending in the spec script.

So what can we take from all this? Well, changes are going to happen in any script. But you know, they really didn’t change that much in Source Code. And that’s a testament to how well the script was written. This was more “rearranging the deck chairs” than “building a new ship.” And I think that’s why it ultimately worked - because the core elements of the script were always in place. Guy must keep going back in time to find a terrorist bomber before he sets off a much bigger attack. Complications ensue when he starts falling for the girl who helps him. The pace moved. The acting was good. Yeah I liked Goth Christina (from the spec) better than Peppy Christina but Michelle Monaghan is so beautiful that I quickly forgot about her. I really liked the added scene where they go out to the van and (spoiler) Derek kills them. Made him so much more evil and his downfall so much more satisfying. Is it the movie that the original script promised? No. But it was close enough.

What I learned: Whenever you rewrite a script, you’re adding new elements to each draft. Remember though, that while you may be on the 7th or 8th draft of your script, that new element you just added? It’s only on its 1st draft. If you don’t rewrite the script a few more times to get that element into its 4th or 5th draft, it’s going to stick out like a sore thumb. And that’s what happened here with the “Last Comic Standing” ending. It needed a few more beats during the story to really sell it. But they squeezed the element in at the last second and were unable to put it through any drafts. Hence the forced feeling of that ending.

Head Injury

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Atlas

Genre: Fantasy/Procedural/Action
Premise: A hunter named Atlas must figure out why a human is being targeted by creatures from a parallel world.
About: Ben Magid is the writer of the dark serial killer fantasy “Pan,” which I reviewed a few weeks ago. He has a few other projects in development including Hack-Slash at Rogue and Invasion at Summit. Atlas originally went out on the town in 2009, but despite some initial interest, it didn’t sell. I’ve been told more than a few times, “Carson, you gotta read Ben Magid’s Atlas. It’s awwwesome.” And they say it like Jack Black but without the irony. Hey, I’ll admit it. I think fairies are for girls. So I wasn’t down with strapping my wings on. But if you want to expand your horizons, you gotta take some chances right?
Writer: Ben Magid
Details: 114 pages – 2/19/09 (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

The people have spoken. You wanted more Ben Magid. I’m bringing you more Ben Magid. To be honest, I always thought this script was the script for Atlas Shrugged, so I stuffed it in my “never read this for the rest of your life” pile. I mean, did you see the trailer for that abomination? If you can watch that trailer and tell me what that movie’s about, apply to Harvard now cause you’re a certified genius.

Okay now you’re going to have to excuse me if I don’t get this right. I’m not a fairy expert. I don’t build troll replicas. The only witch I know is my ex-girlfriend. The parallel fairy worlds are confusing so take my description with a grain of pixie sand. Or dust. Or whatever it’s called.

We start on a 16 year old girl named Willa running from a creature. She’s not too sure why a creature is chasing her and quite frankly neither are we. But her big mistake is turning into an alley. Rule number 1 when anything is chasing you. Never EVER turn into an alley! You ESPECIALLY want to abide by this rule if any sort of creature is chasing you.

Lucky for Willa, Atlas Goodfellow, Creature-killer extraordinaire, has experience with people making the dumb decision to turn into alleys and decides to end this creature’s comfort, dragging a confused Willa back to the hideout afterwards to figure out what’s going on.

See, we’re in the human world. And creatures aren’t supposed to come into the human world due to some pact we made with them back in the olden days. Atlas is a hunter. He hunts down any of these things that come into our world and sends them back – if sends them back means killing they asses.

Atlas figures this girl must be pretty darn special if she has creatures risking their lives to come into the human world to execute her. And he wants to get to the bottom of it. Now here’s where things got a little confusing. I couldn’t figure out if the human world was our world as we know it now, or a heightened version of our world where fairy creatures co-exist with us. Because sometimes our heroes would, say, go to a club, and there’d be trolls and fairies hanging out. I’ve been to a fair share of nightclubs and I haven’t ever seen a fairy except for when girls dress up in slutty fairy costumes on Halloween. I suppose they could be real fairies PRETENDING to be slutty Halloween fairies but I doubt it. Anyway, I couldn’t figure that out.

But getting back on track, Atlas eventually realizes that Willa is special. Verrrrry special. And that’s why the people from the creature world want her. In the end, the two will have to team up to stop the baddies from getting their hands on her. Cause if they don’t, the human world and the creature world will collide in one giant world jumbolya and if that happens we’re all going to become human stew.

Atlas was a neat script if you like this kind of thing. Did you see that movie with Nicolas Cage? The one with the dragons in New York? The Sorcerer’s Apprentice! That’s the one. This is kind of like that movie, but more clever, more inventive, and a little better.

Specially on the inventive part. Ben Magid’s really created his own world here. And that’s not easy to do WHILE keeping us entertained. You know how easy it would be to get bogged down in fairy names and troll guild descriptions? I see it happen all the time in fantasy scripts and it makes me want to claw my eyes out. “The Lisp Fairies are an ancient fairy tribe that once warred with the Carmine fairies, who would eventually give their allegiance to the Naksor King, who ruled the land of Falsettosoon before being consumed by the great Jigsaw plague, eventually reemerging as the Genky fairies, who were a combination of the original two factions, but who now only answer to Queen Xafulfa.”

Like I said. Ben doesn’t do that here. He tells us only what we need to know about the world and then keeps things moving so we can focus on the characters and the story. ALWAYS follow this rule when you write a fantasy movie. Know your world inside out, but don’t tell every single detail about it.

The thing is, the few times Ben does get into detail, it’s pretty cool. Like when Atlas whips out some strange bio-duo-loaded steam gun that shoots huge bullets. Except when we move in close, we see that these are not bullets at all, but rather fairies, who then burrow into their target’s skin, and suck the life out of them from the inside. Fairy bullets? Okay, I admit, haven’t seen that in a script before.

On the problem side, though, are a few things. Starting with the dialogue. It’s either too plain or too “summer action movie’ish,” and the reason it stands out is because everything else is so imaginative. For example, when Willa asks Atlas about a witch they have to see, Atlas replies, “More bitch than witch. It’s too risky. And there’s a price. No. We’ll find another way.” I don’t know. It’s not bad. It just never feels like people are *really* communicating with each other. Rather, they’re just shooting movie lines back and forth.

I also thought Atlas’ motivation was kind of wishy-washy for the majority of the story. He risks life and limb (literally death at every corner) because he’s “curious” about why the baddies are after this girl? Later on it starts to make more sense when he realizes that the world he’s protecting is in danger. But at first his obsession with protecting her at all costs didn’t have merit.

Likewise, I wouldn’t have minded a little more urgency, a ticking time bomb of sorts. They are getting chased a lot, which keeps the pace upbeat, but for the longest time there was no looming problem, allowing a leisurely pace through some of the second act, such as when they had unlimited time to visit Black Annis the Witch.

Atlas is unique. It’s a procedural that happens inside a hybrid human/fairy world. And I have to admit, I hadn’t seen that before (still haven’t read Killing On Carnival Row – is that script the same thing?). Would I have liked the relationships to be better explored and the backstories a little less clichéd (My parents were murdered right in front of my eyes!)? Yeah, probably. But none of these things are so bad that they’re story killers. The main reason I can’t personally recommend Atlas is because I’m just not into this kind of thing. But I have a feeling that those of you, men and women, who like to dress up as slutty fairies on Halloween, will like this quite a bit. So if you’re in that camp, read it and tell me what you think.

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

What I learned: Be careful when you’re writing a “summer type” movie, that your characters aren’t all speaking in trailer lines. Those lines have their time in the sun, such as the climactic moment of a speech or during an action scene where your characters are in danger, but for all the lines in between, have your characters talk to each other like real people.

Gay Dude

Genre: High School Comedy
Premise: A teenage friendship is tested when one of the friends informs the other that he’s gay.
About: Gay Dude was on the 2008 Black List. It subsequently disappeared into the Hollywood ether before popping up as one of the projects on Lionsgate’s new “microbudget initiative,” a new production initiative stemming from the success of movies like Paranormal Activity. The group of movies will be shot for around 2 million dollars. The writer of Gay Dude, Alan Yang, has been quite successful since Gay Dude got him noticed. He’s worked on Parks & Recreation, sold a bromance pitch to Summit called “We Love You,” sold a spec “White Dad,” to Sony. He also has a script called “Jackpot” set up at Fox about a group of high school friends who win the lottery.
Writer: Alan Yang
Details: 108 pages – undated (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

Here’s the shitty reality about readers. They don’t always give you a fair shot. It just happens that sometimes your script hits a reader at the wrong time. They’ve read five terrible scripts in a row and are assuming yours will be the sixth. It’s been a bad day. It’s been a bad week. They just got dumped. Their boss is an asshole who deluges them with the worst of the worst screenplays to cover. Sometimes a reader is just ready to hate your script. And it’s unfair and it sucks but life is unfair and sucks so…that’s reality baby.

Gay Dude is a perfect example of that. I remember reading it during a period where I was reading seven scripts a day (due to a contest) and I’d just read four really terrible comedies whose collective awfulness had actually managed to destroy humor for 47 minutes in the world. So within fifteen pages of the sophomoric humor of Gay Dude, I had already hit “skim-mode.” (this is the dreaded mode readers get into when they’ve given up on your script).

This is the real reason I preach all this advice about keeping your writing concise, being clear with your descriptions, not writing scenes that don’t push the story forward, not adding characters you don’t need. So that you don’t lose your reader in those crucial first 10 pages. Because many readers are looking to disqualify you as soon as possible so they can skip through your screenplay and be done with work an hour early. Again, it’s unfair, but a 9 to 1 bad script to good script ratio will do that to a person.

Long story short, I felt like Gay Dude needed another shot. I hadn’t read ANY scripts on the day that I picked it up this time, so I could be sure that I was giving it the best chance to succeed. I’m not going to lie and say it blew me away or anything. But it was a lot deeper than I originally gave it credit for.

Eager Michael and chubby Matty have been friends for as long as they can remember. Now in high school, they’re only a couple of months away from prom. And they’ve decided to make an American Pie like pact to get laid before the big day is over. That’s why they…um…break up with their girlfriends?

Yeah, these two aren’t the brightest string lights at the prom dance but Michael seems to think they can do better. Except a little problem pops up before better can make his presence known. Matty informs Michael that he’s, like, gay dude.

Michael thinks he’s joking but he’s not joking. Matty likes the scrotum. Michael’s a little weirded out by this. This is, remember, a person he’s been best friends with since he was two. So he retreats into “what the hell is going on” mode before finally strapping on his support cap and refocusing on their goal – to get laid before prom. It’s just that now half of their search will include…men.

The problem is Michael becomes TOO supportive, forcing Matty to visit places like the only gay bar in town, which consists of a bunch of old dirty gay guys. Since Michael figures “gay is gay,” he assumes it’s what Matty wants. But Michael’s off-target assessment begins to grate on Matty, who eventually finds a guy his own way, and that guy becomes, well, sort of a replacement Michael.

The lack of communication feeds the downward spiral of their friendship until there’s no friendship left, leaving both friends to wonder how those two words could have changed so much.

Gay Dude made a couple of really good choices that elevated it above normal teenage script fare. The dialogue was good and Yang actually explored the friendship on a real level. Let’s start with the dialogue. The back and forth between these two was organic, witty, and popped off the page. We’d get exchanges like this one, where Michael talks about his prudish girlfriend, “It was like a sexual brick wall with Ava. The last couple of dates we were moving so slowly that we were actually going backwards. Three dates from now we would’ve been bowing to each other and speaking in formal, turn-of-the century English.” “Good morrow to you, sir.” “Good day to you, madam. Shall we wait another fifteen years to commence the fucking?”

Or this exchange, where Michael tries to find out when Matty knew he was gay. “When did you first realize this? Like, is this a recent development?” “Fuck no. Remember that guy, like when we were like seven, he used to come around the school and we would slip him half our sandwiches through the chain link fence?” “That guy was a homeless guy.” “Yeah, well, I sort of had a crush on him.” There’s a lot of fun back and forth like this throughout the script.

But what really sets Gay Dude apart is that it actually explores its characters (and their relationship) on a real level. And this is where so many amateur comedy screenplays fail. They think it’s about packing as many jokes as they can inside 100 pages. Laughs will only get you so far. Sooner or later, you need to connect with the audience. And Gay Dude isn’t afraid to tackle those confusing and frustrating feelings that come with finding out your best friend is gay at a time in your life when you’re not emotionally capable of dealing with it. Late in the script, it’s clear that if the two just sat down and talked, they’d get past this. But they don’t know how to do that. So instead they lash out each other (Michael tells Matty’s homophobic father that he’s gay) and everything gets a lot worse before it gets better.

The problem Gay Dude runs into is that it does feel a little one-note. There isn’t enough variety in here to last an entire film. I felt like the characters were having the same conversations (“It’s not easy to find out you’re gay!”) over and over again. In addition, there wasn’t enough variety in the set pieces. For example, we go to a gay bar. And then after that doesn’t work, we go to a gay rave. It’s important, especially with a concept like this which has the potential to be “one-note,” that you really try to differentiate your set pieces.

There’s also a story thread where Michael starts suspecting Matty is faking being gay that doesn’t go anywhere and actually ends up confusing the story as opposed to helping it (if he isn’t gay, why does this story matter?). It’s not a huge deal, but again, I think this stemmed from the fact that the story was one-note, and SOME sort of complexity needed to be added. I just didn’t think it was the right complexity.

Anyway, I do think Gay Dude is worth the read. It digs deeper than most comedies, which in turn makes us care about the characters, which should be priority number 1 in any genre you write. By no means perfect but a breezy 90 minutes nonetheless.

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

What I learned: Story over shenanigans people. If you’re trying to decide between a scene in your comedy where you’re adding yet ANOTHER silly situation, or getting into the meat of your characters issues, pick the issues. Strive for a balance overall, but don’t be afraid to get into your characters real problems. Remember, we’ll laugh a lot more if we actually care about these people. Gay Dude proves that.

Amateur Friday - The Sleep Of Reason

Genre: Drama /Horror
Premise: After his wife goes missing, a man heads to the darkest reaches of Transylvania to find her.
About: Every Friday, I review a script from the readers of the site. If you’re interested in submitting your script for an Amateur Review, send it in PDF form, along with your title, genre, logline, and why I should read your script to Carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Keep in mind your script will be posted.
Writer: Lee Matthias
Details: 107 pages (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

What if your wife got kidnapped? And what if you found out the man who took her was the most notorious blood-sucking vampire in history? How far would you go to try and get her back? Those are the questions posed in the mysteriously titled, “The Sleep Of Reason,” the first amateur script I’ve read in forever that I believe is worthy of your time. And a big reason for that is, I’ve never seen a “Dracula” story taken this seriously before. This is one part Dracula, seven parts character study. That’s what makes The Sleep Of Reason so unique. It doesn’t rest on the laurels of its famous character. It’s more about the man who must overcome him.

Sleep of Reason didn’t start off well for me. There’s a big difference between complex openings and confusing openings. Complex openings create interesting questions the reader wants answers to. Confusing openings leave readers frustrated and trying to keep up. These openings are usually the result of a writer trying to cram too much into their setup. Because they’re so familiar with the elements in their story, they wrongly assume you’re familiar with them too.

We start off Reason on a boat (for seemingly no reason), then jump to an insane asylum, then jump to a man in that asylum interviewing a crazy person, then jump to that interviewer’s predecessor at the asylum from a few years back, who then helps us jump back 35 years prior to understand why this man went crazy. It was just so many elements coming at us so fast and in such a disjointed fashion, I had to reread it a couple of times to understand what was going on. You never never never want your reader to have to go BACKWARDS to check something in a script. It takes them out of the story (literally) and screws up the rhythm of the read.

Luckily, once we move out of the present day storyline, things pick up considerably. Renfield (our crazy character and hero) is the son of a wealthy entrepreneur on a trip to America to explore some business opportunities, when he meets and falls in love with Elsbeth, a poor but beautiful young woman.

Unfortunately, because Elsbeth is a woman of simple means, Renfield’s father doesn’t approve of their union, cutting the two off from the family. This forces Renfield to pursue a career on his own, and their first option is a contact he knows in the furthest reaches of Eastern Europe. It is there, in a small town, that Renfield leaves his hotel for just a moment, before coming back and finding his wife gone. Her disappearance is particularly upsetting because…it’s impossible. He was outside the hotel for just a few minutes and never saw her leave. It’s as if she just…vaporized.

Naturally, Renfield becomes consumed with finding his wife, and after experiencing many roads that lead nowhere, he finally gets a clue about a mysterious resident who lives up in the mountains in a castle. Against the advice of the townspeople, he heads up to that castle, and finds it occupied by a curious group of people who welcome him with open arms.

After a couple of nights of wandering through the cavernous castle walls, Renfield befriends the irresistibly sexy Elizabeth, who informs Renfield that his wife is here in the castle. There’s a problem though. Vlad, the owner of the mansion, has become enamored with her. Soonafter we realize that Elizabeth is just as heartbroken about the chain of events as Renfield, as it used to be her who was the apple of Vlad’s eye.

The two must work together, then, to create a mutually desirable outcome. But it won’t be easy. When Vlad finds out what they’re up to, he plots to make things very difficult for Renfield.

After getting through that tough opening, I realized something quickly. Lee was a really good writer. I can’t remember the last time I came upon an amateur writer who had such command of language and story. And it gave me an immense amount of confidence in the script. I immediately felt like I was in good hands.

Indeed I was rewarded when Renfield got to the castle as that’s when everything really began to pick up. The conflict Lee creates and the clashing motivations of all the characters make for some really great tension. You have Renfield, who wants to get his wife back. You have Elizabeth, who wants Vlad back. You have Vlad, who wants to keep Elsbeth. And you have Elsbeth, who wants Renfield, but is too deep under Vlad’s spell to do anything about it. Complicating things even more is the vampire angle. Even if Renfield is able to get his wife back, how does he get around the fact that she’s now a vampire?

I also loved the tone here, and Lee achieves this quite cleverly. In order to protect himself from all of the vampires in the castle, Renfield keeps with him a special case of garlic-laced brandy. He must keep drinking the brandy to keep the garlic in his blood. The side effect of this, however, is that Renfield is always slightly drunk, which gives his actions and his experiences a dream-like quality, and puts into question everything he’s doing. Is he really here? Is this really going on? Are these people really who he believes them to be? Does he want his wife so badly that he’s merely creating this story in his head? It felt a lot like Black Swan in that sense, where we’re constantly questioning reality.

That’s not to say The Sleep Of Reason didn’t have some hiccups. I wasn’t entirely clear on why Vlad didn’t just kill Renfield and get it over with. Possibly establishing that Elsbeth would’ve never forgiven Vlad if he’d done such a thing would’ve helped.

Also, the pace is a little slow. I’m afraid some readers are going to be like, “Let’s get on with it already!” And I guess I’d understand that argument.

But the reason I think the slow pace works here where it didn’t work in, say, Tripoli, is because Reason has something Tripoli did not: Personal stakes for its protagonist. At stake here is Renfield’s wife – the woman he loves more than anything. So even though it takes awhile to get to things, we’re willing to wait because the goal is so strong.

The Sleep of Reason is a thousand times better than most Amateur scripts I read. The attention to detail alone proves how much Lee cares about this story and how much he respects the craft. It’s slow-going in places and the writing is a little thick at times, but there’s enough conflict and a strong enough character goal driving the story, that it all works out. Granted I’m not a Dracula fan, but this is the best Dracula story I’ve read easily.

Updated Script Link (with changes): The Sleep Of Reason

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

What I learned: One of the mistakes I see intermediate to even advanced writers make is trying to cram too many elements into the opening of their scripts (voice overs and flashbacks and jumping back and forth between unrelated scenes). I think these writers are simply trying to create complex multi-faceted openings. But they forget that the reader is entering their world for the first time and needs to be oriented before they can handle all the craziness. You can’t throw me into the middle of the world Crickett Championships if I don’t know the rules to the sport. So just take a step back when you’re writing that opening and say, “Am I trying to do too much here? Am I asking too much of the reader?” Because if you lose your reader within those first ten pages, your screenplay is screwed.