When you read that title, you’re probably thinking, “That sounds kind of clickbaity, Carson.” I agree. It does sound clickbaity. But, actually, the message in that title is the key to saving Hollywood. No, I’m serious.
I am speaking to producers with this article. I am speaking to studios. I am speaking to streamers. I am speaking to agents. If you want to bring good screenwriting back to this town, you need to start spending 7 figures on scripts again. And, just as importantly, you need to publicize it. As in, START CONTACTING THE TRADES AGAIN AND PUBLICIZE YOUR SALES! Let me explain why.
The other day, I saw an article announcing that someone was trying to put together a Pacific Rim prequel series.
Let me repeat that: Someone is trying to make a Pacific Rim TV show.
Pacific Rim was one of the dumbest movies I’ve ever seen. It had the intelligence quotient of Transformers and the filmmaking ability of Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour.
The fact that Hollywood is now trying to make a TV series out of this bottom feeder IP shows that they have nothing left to make. They’ve scoured through every single IP in their basements, from both the television and feature side, and, since most of those shows bombed, they don’t have anything left!
How did this happen?
It happened because there aren’t anywhere near enough talented screenwriters in town to support the amount of product being made. There are 750 scripted TV shows out there at the moment with an average of 12 episodes per season. That’s roughly 9000 episodes being written every year. The industry does not have 9000 good screenwriters.
My rough estimate is that there are about 5 great writers in the industry, i.e. someone who can write a Succession.
There are 15 or so really good writers, people capable of writing a Ted Lasso.
And there are 40-50 good writers, people who can write a Silo.
From there, there are a ton of average and, even, bad writers. People who write stuff like Secret Invasion.
That total number of good-to-great screenwriters in town equals about 1/10 of how many shows are getting made. Which means 90% of the TV shows out there are garbage.
And it doesn’t take long to figure that out on your own. How many times have you watched a pilot and thought, “This is pretty good.” You then watch the second episode and think, “This is okay.” And then you watch the third episode and notice that the show is falling apart right before your eyes. If a show manages to get me past the pilot – which is rare – that cycle happens almost every time.
Why?
Because the creator of the show obviously spends a lot of time on the pilot script, making it perfect. They then spend less time on the second episode, which is why it’s only okay. And then the third episode is usually the first time a staff writer comes in and writes an episode.
I just watched this happen on The Acolyte. When Headland was writing the first two episodes, they were, at least, decent. But the second they brought in a staff writer with virtually no writing experience to pen the third episode, the show completely fell apart. And this is for a 180 million dollar show! We’re giving below-average screenwriters with zero experience 25 million dollar episodes! Which is insane!
What does this all mean?
A couple of things. Number 1, we’ve got way more shows than we have writers with the ability to write those shows. Number 2, we have a weak overall pool of writers in town. I would say way weaker than we’ve ever had.
The reason for this is, everybody gets a bite at the apple now, even if they don’t deserve it. In the previous era, you had to scratch and claw and fight just to find the seed that would allow you to grow the apple tree, that would then take years to grow big enough to give you an apple that you could then bite into. The competition and the dedication required to get in the game were way more extensive and, as a result, only rewarded those who were willing to put in years of work.
So I gave some thought to why that was. Why are we giving shots to bad writers?
Simple. We don’t have a choice. There aren’t enough ones.
Let’s face it, screenwriting isn’t nearly as cool today as it was 30, or even 20, years ago. I can’t remember the last time I read an article about some cool new screenwriter who wrote a great script. These days, articles focus on the hot new podcaster or the hot new influencer. These are the people who are getting press in this industry. Not screenwriters.
Well, why is that?
The answer can be found by asking when did Hollywood get the biggest influx of screenwriters? It was in the 90s. Why? Because every freaking week the trade magazines were reporting a million dollar script sale. What does that do to people reading those articles? It makes them want to become screenwriters!
I don’t think Hollywood ever intended for it to do so. But all those stories were de facto advertisements to become a screenwriter. They had inadvertently infused the Hollywood pool with an endless supply of writers. If you take away the advertisements, you don’t get the aspiring screenwriters anymore.
There’s a lot of talk in town about the movie business declining. About the golden era of TV being in the past. The reasons they give are that there’s more choice out there (podcast, YouTube, internet, etc). But I don’t buy that. Movies and TV are great because they’re such passive watching experiences. Which means they don’t require a lot from the viewer. It doesn’t take much to turn on your TV.
The real problem – the one the studios don’t want to admit to themselves – is that they’re giving people a subpar product. And guess what? It ain’t because of the directing. It ain’t because of the production value. The production value of TV and movies has SHOT UP EXPONENTIALLY in the past 20 years. What does that leave?
THE WRITING.
It’s the writing that’s the problem.
Good writing HOOKS PEOPLE and KEEPS THEM HOOKED.
Very few writers working in the industry have enough experience to have learned the tools that allow them to do this.
If you want better writing, you gotta advertise to those potential aspiring writers out there in Iowa and Florida and Illinois. I’m telling you – if you start publicizing stories about people making a million dollars from selling scripts again? You will get a whole new wave of people racing to Hollywood to write scripts. I don’t care if they’re doing this on the feature side or the TV pilot side but they need to do it! They need to do it if they want to survive.
Cause the more poorly written shows and poorly written movies they give us, the less we’re going to want to watch the next movie or show.
Okay, so what does this mean for you! For the writer who’s been writing for a long time and still hasn’t had their big break?
It’s AMAZING NEWS for you.
It used to be that, if you spent 10 years trying to become a screenwriter and you hadn’t made a dent, you were washed up. That’s no longer the case AT ALL. Now, you actually know how to write! All these people they’re putting on these Star Wars and Marvel shows? They don’t know how to write! You’re better than them!
But the industry isn’t going to come to you. If there’s one thing these bad writers have over you it’s that they’re hitting the ground harder. They’re putting themselves out there more, either through social media or directing their own scripts or just good old fashioned hustle. Studios choose these people because these are the people standing in front of them. You need to put on some nice clothes and stand in front of *those people* if you want a shot.
Cause the industry doesn’t know you. Or know you’re better. You have to advertise yourself for them to know. So, blanket every outlet online with your best scripts until you get that yes. Again, people don’t say “yes” often. So, if you get 10 no’s, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re screwed. What did TJ Newman, the writer of the book Falling (essentially a book-screenplay) say? That she got rejected 44 times in a row before she got that yes?
You have to fight and promote a lot harder than you think you do.
And please do!
Cause I want to have a freaking good TV show to watch!
There will be no post on Monday, as it’s Labor Day here in the U.S. But I will be sending out the newsletter over the weekend, which includes a review of a buzzy new project from one of the industry’s best directors. If you’re not already on the newsletter list, e-mail me: [email protected]
Today’s script reminds us of the power of the underdog
Genre: Comedy/Drama/Sports
Premise: A forty-three-year-old snowplow driver decides to get his high school hockey team back together to play a state championship game.
About: Today’s writer may be familiar to some. He’s a Chicago kid who wrote the script 8-Bit Christmas a few years. It was a fun little Christmas script and Kevin stays close to his bread-and-butter here: SNOW. Skydance has purchased the script for Gary Ross to rewrite and direct.
Writer: Kevin Jakubowski
Details: 111 pages
Jason Sudekis for Tommy?
This script is currently competing with Carlos Alcaraz’s match on my TV. Has a screenplay ever hit a 130mph serve? Is courier font able to handle a deep backhand? Can character development massage a drop volley over the net? We’re about to find out the answers to all of these questions… right now.
Back in 1997, Tommy Maloney was the goalie for the Fox River High School hockey team that made it to the state championship game, where they were slated to play bougie Jersey hockey mainstay, Hillstone Prep. But there was a giant snowstorm and the game had to be canceled.
Roughly 30 years later, with Tommy now 43 years old and running his father’s old snowplow business, Tommy reads an article in the paper celebrating the three state hockey championships Hillstone won in a row back in the 90s. The only problem is, Hillstone didn’t win that third one. The game was snowed out.
A day later, while reluctantly bringing his daughter, Chloe, to Hillstone for an interview, he runs into the captain of that team, JT Radzack, who he overhears telling some friends that they won 3 titles in a row. Tommy comes in to correct him and JT is unfazed. “Might as well be three,” he says. “We would’ve beaten you anyway.”
Tommy goes home fuming and later ends up at the bar, where he shares the exchange with his old hockey buddies. They get mad and one of them goes on Twitter and challenges JT and his team to a make-up game. A 30 year old make-up game. Twitter loves it and everyone starts retweeting the social media battle that ensues. Tommy wakes up thinking it was all drunken nonsense but then learns that JD has set a date for the game.
Now Tommy and his buddies have to get the band back together. This includes the Chan defensive twins, who fight with each other all the time. The cousins, who sit in their backyard and shoot things all day. And then everyone else who’s not dead already, they put in a call in for. They’re going to be up against a tough opponent since JD and his teammates still play three times a week. JD even played in the NHL for a year. Can our ragtag crew somehow defeat them? Or are they about to learn that hockey games aren’t the best venues for a midlife crisis?
There’s a trick to getting these scripts right.
Because they *are* tricky.
You see, when you’re writing a small-town story that doesn’t have murder in it, the script is going to live or die on its PERSONAL STAKES.
Personal stakes are different from EXTERNAL STAKES. External stakes are things like: end of the world, your daughter gets murdered if you don’t find her in time, if the heist goes bad, you’ll be in prison for the rest of your life.
Scripts like this don’t have that. In order to compete with that, we must feel strongly about the personal stakes. In other words, we must feel strongly about Tommy winning this game. Because if we don’t care about that, the script doesn’t work.
And the writer does a good job of handling that with some basic screenwriting tools. One, he makes the bad guys huge jerks. They’re elitist. They look down on Tommy and his team. They make his, and his family, out to be failures. The more we dislike the bad guys, the more personally invested we become in the story.
The other way the writer does it is by having Tommy face the disappointment of his life. He plows snow for a living. He always thought he was going to be something bigger but somehow ended up in this crappy existence. That’s highlighted, very cleverly, by the fact that his daughter wants to go to Hillstone, the very school that symbolizes who he isn’t. People who go to Hillstone lead successful lives.
It’s important to get that right. Cause when you’re only dealing with personal stakes, you can’t casually commit to your hero’s flaws. You have to fully commit to them. When we’re with our protagonist, we have to *feel* their pain. Cause if you treat their flaw like an Adam Sandler movie would – a passing funny scene in the first act that shows they’re frustrated with life – it’s not going to linger deep inside the reader. And, therefore, your personal stakes-driven story will fail.
I always want to give credit to scripts for the scene that drew me in. You’re reading along. You’re half-interested. You’re not sure if you’re going to like the script. And then a scene comes along that makes you go, “How bout that. I care now.”
What never fails to surprise me is that these scenes are usually basic, as was the case here. Tommy is taking his daughter to Hillstone for her big school interview. While waiting for her in the school’s entrance hall, a group of good-looking well-off dudes his age are taking a picture in front of the trophy case.
It turns out these are the guys from the Hillstone hockey team that Tommy’s team never played. Because Tommy is kind of in the way, one of them says, “Hey, you mind stepping aside for a second? Trying to get a photo of our hall of famers here.” Tommy moves aside. “You mind moving your bucket too.” He points to a janitor’s mop and bucket nearby. “That’s not mine,” Tommy said. “Well, I don’t care if it’s your’s or a coworker’s, just move it.”
That moment, right there, made me hate these guys. And now I wanted Tommy and his team to defeat them at all costs. Isn’t it funny how one simple moment can create such emotion within the reader?
It takes courage to write a script like this because, let’s be honest, these types of scripts aren’t in favor these days. This is the kind of movie that you could imagine getting made in 2001. But they don’t greenlight stuff like this anymore. With that said, I’m constantly telling you guys to write AGAINST the grain, not with it. Because, if you do so, you’re going to stand out from the pack. That’s what Jakubowski did and guess what? Someone bought the script.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The underdog storyline is about as good of an “invested reader” guarantee as you can get, especially in sports scripts. But today’s script taught me that you can supercharge the underdog storyline by making it a “rich vs. poor” battle. The fact that the villains are rich and elitists makes us want Tommy and crew to beat them so much worse!
What I learned 2: You need set pieces before the final game! In a script like this, you can’t wait until the final act to give the reader fun hockey play. And no, montages of them practicing don’t count. You need at least one fun hockey set piece because that’s why we’re here. We’re here to watch these guys play hockey. So Jakubowski wisely includes a fun scene in the latter part of the second act where they play a scrimmage against a local top-tier 16 year old girls hockey team. It’s a really funny sequence.
Is today’s genre really the most efficient way to break into Hollywood as a screenwriter?
Genre: True Story
Premise: On November 1, 2022, FTX was valued at $32 billion. On November 11, 2022, it filed for bankruptcy. This is the incredible true story of the meteoric rise and catastrophic fall of FTX and its enigmatic founder, Sam Bankman-Fried.
About: This script finished on last year’s Black List. Jake Disch graduated from Northwestern’s Writing for Screen & Stage program. He was a top-ten finalist in the 2022 Nicholl Fellowship contest. He also had another script on the 2018 Black List called “Gunfight.”
Writer: Jake Disch
Details: 116 pages
If you were a betting man and you somehow found yourself inside a brand new Las Vegas casino called “The Screenwriter’s Casino,” where you could only bet on one thing: What kind of script is most likely to lead the writer to money and success – which type of script would you bet on?
Because I think today’s script represents the best odds at winning that lottery. Hollywood loves true stories, they love stories about tons of money, and they love stories about scandal. Today’s script hits all three of those beats.
Now, you may counter that your odds are better writing a music biopic. But the big difference there is that music biopics require music rights. True stories, like today’s script, don’t require the rights to anything.
So then why do I always review these scripts begrudgingly? If they are a screenwriter’s best shot at breaking into the business, shouldn’t I be promoting them?
I’ll tell you. Because these stories have already been told. I could kind of see the appeal if this was the 1980s and there was no other way to experience the story of something without the movie being made. But these days, if you want to learn about Sam Bankman-Fried, there are 50 Youtube documentaries about him. You don’t NEED to make a movie about him to tell his story.
But let’s find out if the script is able to overcome that.
It’s 2017 and Nishad Singh, a young engineer, meets a guy named Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), a young stock trader and obsessive player of the game, League of Legends. They’re both young. They’re both fresh out of the Ivy League. And they’re really into this thing called “EA,” which means every dollar you make from your company, you give it to helping the world. Buying mosquito nets for children in third world countries so they don’t get malaria – that sort of thing.
But Sam is consumed with this idea that they can’t TRULY change the world unless they make a TON of money. As in, a trillion dollars. And he thinks he’s found a way to do it. Basically, Sam wants to buy bitcoins in Japan and sell them in the US for a huge profit. Nobody else has caught onto this opportunity because the bitcoin trading industry is so new.
The plan works so well and they start making so much money that SBF is already thinking bigger. He wants to create an entire platform to trade Bitcoin. So he splits his company in two (to Alameda and FTX) and quickly becomes one of the top two trading platforms in the world for Bitcoin. Things are going well.
They’re going so well, in fact, that Sam buys a mansion in the Bahamas for the team and he and one of the employees, Caroline, start hooking up. Soon, they’re boyfriend-girlfriend. And oh yeah, now everyone wants a part of SBF.
But then the pandemic hits and some highly-specific weird Bitcoin regulatory stuff happens and they’re struggling. SBF makes the difficult choice to use the money in Alameda to save the floundering FTX. Which is illegal (I think) because Alameda is propped up by a Bitcoin stock that SBF decides the value of (I think). So he basically borrows 8 billion dollars that he made up (I think).
Originally, nobody understood Bitcoin trading, making the Bitcoin stock market the Wild West. But now, people are getting hipper to what’s going on and the Feds start moving in. In one shocking day, the company collapses while SBF plays League of Legends, reminiscent of the band playing while the Titanic sinks. To the very end, SBF thinks he can save the company. But he’s about to learn that the game’s over and it’s time to let the adults in the room.
One of the reasons I wanted to read this script was to understand how the heck Sam Bankman-Fried made so much money so fast. Unfortunately, I still don’t know the answer to that.
It’s one of the trickiest components of writing a script like this. How do you convey complex subject matter to the reader? Cause if we don’t understand what’s going on, it’s hard to feel the drama.
The reason Dumb Money worked was because they kept things dumb: Keep buying GameStop stock to bankrupt the big rich bad guys. Then the big rich bad guys rig the system to get their money back. It was beautifully simple.
But here, we get multiple companies under the same umbrella moving money back and forth and, for some reason, that’s not legal, though it’s never clear why it’s not legal, especially when your brainpower is being mortgaged by some new crypto term every two pages.
The thing I tell writers in these scripts is that analogies are your friend. It’s a major tip in my dialogue book. And not just any analogy. It has to be a good one. There’s a point early in this script where the writer uses an analogy to explain what a “blockchain” is and he says it’s like “lines on a notebook.” I’m sorry but that doesn’t help me understand blockchains at all. You need to dig deeper and find the BEST ANALOGY you can come up with. Cause this stuff is not easy to understand.
You can offset this weakness if you have great characters. But you don’t have that here. SBF is an INTERESTING character. But he’s very thin. He plays League of Legends. He wants to grow the company so he can help the world. That’s it. That’s his character. Even his romantic relationship with Caroline is paper-thin. It’s not even clear if he likes her or not.
This is where true stories always frustrate me because you had the opportunity to create an AMAZING character in SBF. Here’s a guy who only cares about helping the world. That’s the only reason he wants to make billions.
Well obviously, then, you want to evolve that character into someone who’s greedy and materialistic. That’s the logical path to expose the hypocrisy of the character and make him more complex. Instead, Sam only dabbles in hypocrisy. He gets a big fancy house in the Bahamas and it’s definitely a splurge. But did I believe he’d gone full capitalist? No, not at all. Cause, in writing, you can’t just give one example. There has to be a repeating pattern.
There’s even this moment late in the script where Nishad says to Sam, “Did you ever even believe in EA?” It’s supposed to be this gigantic character reveal moment. But, in screenwriting, the reader believes with their eyes not their ears. Show don’t tell. You’ve SHOWN us this guy is way more into saving the world than being some greedy corporate type. So of course I believe he always wanted to save the world (for the record, he doesn’t answer Nishad’s question. He, instead, deflects).
I do think Disch made the right choice in regard to who leads the story. It’s hard to make Sam Bankman-Fried a main character when he’s ultimately going to screw so many people over. So Disch, instead, placed Nishad in the protagonist role. Nishad is more sympathetic as he’s constantly questioning Sam’s decision-making throughout the story. It also allowed Disch to include all this commentary on Sam through the eyes of Nishad. Which was smart because Sam was so easy to make fun of. The guy can’t stop playing League of Legends even as his company is crumbling around him. I don’t think you can show that effectively if you’re telling the story through Sam’s eyes.
In the end, with this script, I wanted to go deeper. I wanted to know a lot more about the FTX team. I felt like I knew Sam sort of. I felt like I knew Nishad pretty well. I felt like I knew Caroline a *little bit*. But that was it. I needed more.
There’s this moment late in the script when Caroline screws up, stupidly posting what FTX would settle for as a valuation of the company. It’s the nail in the coffin for the company. And Sam calls her and just rips into her. Tells her she’s stupid. She’s a horrible human being. And that she destroyed everything.
This had the potential to be a giant moment. But because I didn’t even know what Sam felt about Caroline, or what Caroline felt about him (were they in love with each other or just having fun??), it’s only a good moment. Which speaks to how much more powerful this script would’ve been had you written a draft ONLY focusing on improving all the characters and defining their relationships better.
Adults in the Room is not a bad script but it could’ve been so much more.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Get inventive with these screenplays. These scripts can get lost in their technicalities if you’re not careful so it’s important to have fun with them. Disch used this really fun device where we’d be in the past, hanging out with the SBF crew. Then this stuffy old lawyer would appear out of nowhere and say something like, “Wait a minute, what this the heck is a bitcoin?” And then we’d cut to present-day, in the courtroom, and see that the old man is a lawyer. So Disch would physically blend the courtroom scenes into the FTX journey. I found that really clever and enjoyable. He probably could’ve done it even more.
I have never started Mish-Mash Monday talking about a movie starring Blake Lively before but I guess there’s a first time for everything!
It Ends With Us just passed 120 million dollars domestically. If there’s anyone scoffing at that number, note that it’s probably going to end up with more money than 50 year old franchise offering, Alien: Romulus. Blake Lively beating aliens at the box office?? Gossip girl power right there.
But most of the talk surrounding It Ends With Us is focusing on what’s going on off-screen. The world is learning that Blake Lively is a really bad person. And while, normally, this wouldn’t be a topic of conversation on Scriptshadow, the reason I’m noting it is because her husband, Ryan Reynolds, is universally known as the nicest person in Hollywood! So why would he be with such a bad person? Opposites attract maybe?
Of course, the more relevant conversation (at least on this site) in regards to It Ends With Us is why the story has connected so strongly with audiences (female audiences in particular). Why is it that the original story (in book form) became the best-selling novel of the year? Colleen Hoover has been writing books for a while and none of them came anywhere close to breaking out like this one.
I think the answer is similar to the reason why Baby Reindeer became such a sensation earlier in the year. The writer wrote HONESTLY. Richard Gadd didn’t just write the obvious version of a stalker story, a la Fatal Attraction, where you only focus on how crazy the stalker is.
Instead, he wrote about his own flaws and the ways in which he, himself, screwed up. He showed that it takes two to tango and that commitment to honesty is what elevated simple subject matter (a stalker) into something infinitely more powerful.
Similarly, Colleen Hoover did not just say, “Man abusive, man bad, man taken down, The End.” That’s the obvious version of the story. And while that take can certainly connect with readers, it’s not truthful. The truth of domestic abuse is way more complicated than that. It involves the man, or woman, sometimes being loving, sometimes being a great partner. And it was that that Hoover tapped into, allowing a lot more readers who have been in those kinds of relationships to connect with the story on a deeper level. Because it was sharing a story that they, themselves, had experienced. That’s what writing is. It’s sharing experiences that are relatable.
And look, that’s not to say you can’t write on-the-nose versions of these stories. Big Little Lies leaned into the 100% evil abuser route and that book (and series) did great. But if you want to truly connect with readers, you have to include the things that are uncomfortable and provide nuance to the story, and not just the over-the-top obvious stuff. Over-the-top and obvious will only get you so far.
There has been a lot of talk about how Zoe Kravitz’s directorial debut, Blink Twice, barely mustered a fourth-place finish at the box office this weekend with 7.5 million dollars.
I believe I’m the test case for why the film didn’t perform well because I love any idea that involves being stuck on an island. It’s one of the best plot devices there is. A trapped character is instant conflict, instant tension, and instant suspense. Plus, setups like this, where you go to the island in a positive mindset create a ticking clock in the reader where they know it’s only a matter of time before things go wrong and they all love turning the pages to get to the “wrong.”
Yet I had zero interest in seeing this movie. So, if we figure out why I didn’t want to see it, we can conclude why others didn’t as well. It’s called math.
It comes down to a problem Hollywood has had since the 80s. You cast who can get you the money rather than casting who’s right. Channing Tatum as a billionaire? Don’t buy it. Channing Tatum as someone smart enough to become a billionaire? Don’t buy it. Channing Tatum as someone who can justify a 20 million dollar budget? BUY IT!
Channing Tatum looks evil THE SECOND WE MEET HIM. He looks evil in the opening interview of this trailer. So there’s no evolution to the story. He acts evil. We know he’s evil. So why is everyone on this island so surprised when he’s evil?? You followed an evil person to a location where they have total control over you! Bad things are probably going to happen.
What they needed to do was cast someone to play more of an Elon Musk type. An autistic character maybe, socially uncomfortable, awkward. Someone who you’d never suspect in a million years would be evil. That way, when he becomes evil, it’s more of a shock.
Kravitz did a bad job casting the two lead girls as well. Both of them seemed like normal smart people. You needed to cast a couple of girls you could imagine going to Burning Man – the kind of influencer types who make stupid mistakes like this and, for the first time in their lives, are going to learn what repercussions are. I’d rather see them in this scenario than two normal everyday people.
These things matter in screenwriting. You need to think long and hard about the archetypes you’re placing in the major roles. Cause a nerdy archetype is going to play differently against a rogue archetype than a black widow archetype will. It changes the story. Especially in ensemble pieces like this.
With all that said, I don’t think a more “sinister” version of Knives Out is a bad script idea. I actually think there’s potential in the idea. But you need good writing to flesh that idea out. And it looks like these two writers (Kravitz and Feigenbaum) didn’t have the experience necessary to wring all the potential out of this concept.
Finally, let’s talk about Alien: Romulus. Alien: Romulus made 16 million bucks this weekend, putting it in second place on its second weekend, which isn’t bad at first glance. However, it dropped 61% from its opening weekend.
The reason that’s relevant is because percentage drops from first to second weekend are almost ENTIRELY due to screenwriting. Remember, when someone goes into a movie, they’ve only seen the trailer. They don’t know how the story plays out. Therefore, if the story is told well, they’ll tell their friends, they’ll talk about it online, and the movie will have a respectable second-weekend drop.
For example, Deadpool and Wolverine only dropped 54%. Which is amazing when you consider how gigantic its opening weekend was ($211 million).
Which is weird because Alien: Romulus was a pretty good movie. It’s getting decent reviews. So what happened here? It’s a simple explanation, folks. And it’s something that every screenwriter in the world should take note of: The reason for the 61% drop was AN ENDING THAT FELL APART.
It may be unfair, but even if you write two good acts, IF that third act is bad, THAT’S THE ACT THE READER (OR THE AUDIENCE MEMBER) LEAVES WITH. So everybody left that Alien: Romulus ending saying, “That was dumb.” Which prevented them from recommending it to friends and prevented them from talking about it online.
Your. Ending. Matters.
It’s a tale as old as time. We tend to write from the top down.
Therefore, we go over and rewrite our first acts a lot more than we go over and rewrite our second acts. We go over and rewrite our second acts more than we go over and rewrite our third acts.
The truth is, the third act gets the least amount of love from the screenwriter. And if you want to write a good script, that needs to change. Because there’s nothing worse, as a reader, than excitedly racing through a script, and then everything gets messy at the end. It’s not even that it gets bad. It’s that you can tell the writing isn’t as tight, that things weren’t as thought-through as earlier in the script.
So, instead of writing that first act of yours for the 30th time, spend that time on your third act! Make it great. Because the flip side of ending with a bad third act, is ending with a great one. And that’s when you get ALL THE LOVE. EVERYONE talks about your script. Everyone who hears about it wants to read it. There’s a reason that The Sixth Sense and Titanic had ZERO DROPOFF in their box office from weekend to weekend. It’s because they had great third acts. Neither had giant poorly designed white CGI monsters. :)
So, when I first started consulting on screenplays, I thought I had this revolutionary idea. I would create a real-time chart that would show the writer EXACTLY how interested I was at each point in their screenplay. Every 5 pages, I would mark on the chart, from 1-10, what my current interest level was.
The idea was that the writer could visually pinpoint the exact moments in the story that needed work. This is how I imagined a typical screenplay might look…
But I very quickly learned that that’s not how consultation scripts charted. The large majority of them would start out at around 6 or 7, sometimes 8. Then around page 15, we’d be down to 6. Page 20, down to 5. Page 30, we’re at 3. And then, the rest of the script would hover around 3 or 2. In other words, the majority of the consultation scripts I read looked like this…
I won’t even get into how demoralizing this was for a writer to receive feedback like this. Who’s going to be excited to jump into a rewrite with feedback that not only cognitively tells you your script is a disaster but VISUALLY throws it in your face as well!
So I dropped the visual consultation method.
But important lessons were learned. Two actually. 1) Most scripts go downhill quickly. 2) When a script falters, it rarely recovers.
If you know these things – which you now do! – you can work to make sure they don’t happen to you. You see, what these disastrous chart results kept reinforcing to me was how important the first act was. The first act is the foundation of your entire story. The more solid that foundation, the more likely you’re going to be scoring 8s and 9s the rest of the script as opposed to 2s and 3s.
So we have to then ask: What does a strong foundation look like?
In the world of screenwriting, it comes down to nailing five key things.
- Create a goal that propels the story through the second act.
- Create a character who we want to root for.
- Create a character who’s battling something internal that they must overcome by the end of the story.
- Establish stakes that feel important.
- Have a real plan for your story.
Let’s look at these five things individually.
Create a goal that propels the story through the second act.
A lot of writers don’t set their story up to succeed because they head into their second acts with barely any steam. A good goal THRUSTS us into the second act. The more robust the goal is, the longer it’s going to carry us through that act. Goals are usually born out of problems. Take the most recent box office king, Alien: Romulus. The main character, Rain, is desperate to get to a planet with a sun. But she’s stuck here due to her work contract. That’s the PROBLEM. When her friends offer her a chance at a cryo bay to help her get there, she joins them to go and retrieve it (GOAL).
Create a character who we want to root for
If we don’t want to root for your heroes, it doesn’t matter what else you do. Your script will almost immediately plummet to 2s and 3s the whole way through EVEN IF your plot is decent. The best ways to make us root for someone are by making them likable or sympathetic. And you can supercharge characters by making them likable AND sympathetic. A recent movie that showed us how effective this is is Deadpool and Wolverine. Deadpool is both likable (he’s funny) and sympathetic (he’s lost his purpose in the world and needs to get it back). Wolverine maybe isn’t the most likable guy. But he’s definitely sympathetic (he’s responsible for destroying his entire team back in his world).
Create a character who’s battling something internal that they must overcome by the end of the story
This is pivotal once you get to the second act. Because if you only give us a likable character and a goal in your movie, you get an Adam Sandler flick. Adam Sandler movies are fine. But there’s a reason they feel like empty calories. There’s no depth to them. This rule gives you that depth. Either give your hero a conflict they’re dealing with internally (maybe the death of a loved one that they haven’t properly gotten over) or a flaw (selfishness, stubbornness, arrogance). You do this because, throughout the second act, you need to be putting your hero into scenarios that challenge these things that they’re internally battling. For example, the hero might come face to face with the person who’s responsible for the death of the family member they’re mourning. By having these internal battles, the scenes will have more depth to them.
Establish stakes that feel important
Have you ever been watching a movie where you’re about 45 minutes into it and you think to yourself, “I do not care about ANYTHING that’s going on right now.” This often means the stakes that were set up in the story are too low. I read this consultation script once where a 20-something guy came back to his hometown for a weekend and went around and talked to a bunch of old friends. I got into a spirited discussion with the writer about how low the stakes were. There was one storyline in particular that drove me crazy. The main girl in the story… he didn’t even like her. She was the ONLY thing the story could’ve built stakes around – if he had always loved this girl and this was his only chance to get her, at least you have SOMETHING going on. But the writer was adamant about making the script feel “real” and I was trying to explain to him that true reality is boring. Movies are about the bigger moments in our lives. Movies, ideally, are covering the single most important moment in your hero’s life up until this point. That requires high stakes. So whether you’re writing a big Hollywood movie or an indie flick, make the stakes as high as you can relative to the situation.
Have a real plan for your story
This is the most important tip of them all. You need to go into your script with a plan. Not just a plan for how to get through the first ten pages. Or the first act. But a plan to get through the ENTIRE SCREENPLAY. The main reason scripts fall apart in the second act is because the writer never had a plan. They knew how it was going to start and they *hoped* they would figure things out along the way. That is a deadly strategy if you’re a screenwriter and almost surely will lead to failure unless you’re committed to writing 20 drafts, giving you ample time to clean up the weak foundation you built your story on. If you don’t know how to plan, go to Amazon and order a copy of The Sequence Method. It’s the best screenwriting book for how to plan out an entire screenplay.
One screenwriting tip I’ve heard a ton over the years is that the key to a great third act is a great first act. But the truth is, the key to a great second act AND third act is a great first act. That first act REALLY has to be solid in setting those key things up. And it goes without saying that you come into your screenplay with a good concept. Cause if your concept is weak, these five tips won’t help you much!
I consult on first acts. So if you want me to check out your first act and tell you if it’s working, I can do that for $150. And if you want a full-on script consultation, I can give you a $100 discount (I’m offering 3 of these). Just mention the “Real-Time” article in your e-mail. [email protected]
