Writing a slow script that’s actually good is hard. So thank God Scriptshadow is going to show you how to do it, once and for all!

A few weeks ago I reviewed a movie (or was it a script?) that moved at the pace of a continental drift. At the end of the review, I asked if anyone wanted me to write an article explaining how to write a slow-moving story without putting the audience into a coma.

Seven of you responded with some version of, “Yes. Please do that.”

Now, if we apply the universally accepted Equation of Exponentious™, which takes actual online engagement, multiplies it by real-world silent agreement, and divides the result by The Denominator of Audience Inertia (because people never quite say what they mean), we arrive at a very conservative estimate that 18,000 people wanted this article written.

Which means I had no choice.

So here we go.

To accurately diagnose the problem, we need several slow films as reference points. Let’s start with Sentimental Value, which follows a washed-up director attempting to cast his estranged, deeply resentful daughter as the lead in his latest project. Then there’s The Ballad of Wallis Island, about a wealthy man who owns a private island and hires his favorite pop-folk duo, now long since broken up, to perform a concert just for him. Bugonia centers on two unhinged cousins who kidnap the CEO of a local company because they believe she’s an alien. And finally, After the Hunt follows a university professor forced to carefully navigate her relationship with her star student after the student accuses one of the professor’s friends of rape.

I would call all of these films slow.

I think they all work, even if each of them has issues. Still, they are exponentially better than a movie like Train Dreams, which follows a couple where the husband builds train tracks over an endless series of decades.

Now, what I’m about to describe are the tools for getting a slow story right. But not every one of these tools is present in every film I mentioned. So if you’re looking for one of them in After the Hunt and it’s not there, that doesn’t mean the idea is wrong. It means these tools give you the best chance of writing a slow movie that stays engaging. You don’t need to use all of them. But you should use as many as you can.

The real danger with slow moving screenplays is that the margin for error is thinner. Readers are far more likely to give up. You are already asking them for more patience than they are used to giving. Because of that, choosing not to use one of these tools might mean removing the very thing that would have kept your script afloat during a long stretch of quiet.

TOOL 1 – AT LEAST ONE CAPTIVATING CHARACTER

With a slow screenplay, it’s imperative that you have at least one truly captivating character. Faster paced scripts can rely on constant plot turns to keep a reader engaged. A slow story can’t. So you have to make up for that somewhere else.

The upside is that if you absolutely nail the character, you don’t need any other tools. This is where my instruction basically ends. Readers will follow interesting characters anywhere. They’ll follow them straight into the middle of the most boring plots imaginable.

That’s why Joker, with its almost nonexistent narrative, became a breakout hit. Arthur was endlessly interesting. He desperately wanted to be liked. He had a bizarre condition that made him laugh uncontrollably. He was unpredictable. He was the world’s biggest underdog. He was a stand-up comedian.  Characters like this become a plot unto themselves, to the point where the narrative almost doesn’t matter.

You see something similar in The Ballad of Wallis Island. Charles, the owner of the island, is a two time lottery winner who lost his wife, lives alone, and is unfailingly kind to everyone he meets. He has an offbeat, often awkward sense of humor, and we’re never quite sure what he’s going to say next. Readers are willing to sit through slow storylines when they get to spend time with characters like this, because hanging out with them feels no different than hanging out with a genuinely unique person in real life.

TOOL 2 – A GOAL

One of the riskiest things you can do as a writer is not tell the reader where your story is going. You send the script off on a road trip with no destination. While there are audiences willing to go on that type of aimless adventure, they are a tiny portion of the movie-watching populace. Generally speaking, readers want to know where they’re headed.

This is where you see some of the examples I used break down. Wallis Island has the clearest goal – play the concert – and, therefore, the most direction. Sentimental Value has a goal (director dad needs to get daughter to play the lead role in his film) but it’s one of the more casually explored goals you’ll see. And it’s eventually abandoned. After the cousins kidnap the CEO in Bugonia, it becomes less and less clear what the goal is (have her admit she’s an alien?). And then with After the Hunt, there is no goal. The movie is literally titled, “After The Hunt.” It’s about the fallout that happens after a sexual assault.

Therefore, if you didn’t like any of these movies, this may have been why. Because you may have been watching them and, somewhere along the way, thought, “What is this about again? What are they trying to do?” But I’ll tell you this. All of them have clearer goals than Train Dreams, which has no goal. And you can see that in its randomness. If anybody had tried to sell Train Dreams as a spec, they would’ve been laughed out of every office in Hollywood.

TOOL 3 – CARROT DANGLING

Because the plot is rarely propelling the story forward in a slow script, you need other tools to keep the reader turning the page. For that reason, the act of carrot-dangling is crucial in slower-moving screenplays. And it’s simple to use, too. You essentially say, “Hey, if you read another 5 pages (or 10 pages, or 20 pages), I’m going to let you have this carrot.” It’s a reward.

Carrot-dangling is a mix of smaller short-term carrot enticing and bigger long-term carrot enticing. One of the most common carrots you can dangle in a script is, “Will they get together?” That’s one of the primary carrots being used in Ballad of Wallis Island. We keep watching, in part, because we’re curious whether former band members Herb and Nell are going to get back together.

But this tool is versatile. You can dangle all sorts of carrots. In After The Hunt, when Maggie tells Alma that Hank raped her, it manifests as an “anticipation carrot” for Maggie’s talk with Hank. We want to hear Hank’s side of it. From the moment the cousins in Bugonia reveal that their plan is to kidnap the CEO, that’s a big fat juicy carrot that will effortlessly take us to the point where they try and do it.

TOOL 4 – SUSPENSE

This is arguably the most powerful tool you have available in your shed. Because suspense has an amazing ability to condense the reader’s perception of time. If we write a meeting scene in a boardroom and tell the reader there’s a bomb under the table and that it’s going to go off at some point, you can literally extend that scene out to 20 pages and it would feel like 3 pages to us. Because we’re anticipating the bomb going off.

Where so many slow scripts go wrong is they never look to add a bomb under the table. And yet they’re perfectly fine with writing that same 20 page boardroom scene. But that’s, ironically, where time distorts in the opposite direction. 20 pages now feels like 40 pages. You should be looking for elements to introduce into the script that signal something destabilizing is coming, and then force the reader to live inside that anticipation. That’s the power of suspense.

In Bugonia, we introduce this electrosis machine that Teddy has built for Michelle to get answers out of her. It sends excessive electricity into the body. The whole sequence leading up to the use of the machine is pure suspense. Once we see the machine, we know what she’s in for. And once he starts using it on her, the suspense continues because we know he has the “max power” option, which could potentially kill her.

TOOL 5 – SCENES WITH GOALS

In most slow-moving screenplays, the narrative is weak. Like Train Dreams. What is that narrative really about? Existing? That’s not a plot. Once you take the fun of a plot away from the reader, you have to make up for it in other places. You do that by making sure the reader’s moment-to-moment experience is engaging.

Therefore, create clear scene goals. Once a character is trying to achieve something, you can put another character in their way, and suddenly the scene has tension. We want to see whether the character overcomes the obstacle and gets what they want. And because someone is actively blocking them, we know they’ll have to rely on cleverness, intelligence, or persistence to succeed. That uncertainty is what keeps us reading.

These goals don’t all have to be gigantic. They can be as simple as a high school kid asking a girl to the school dance. As long as a character has a goal in the scene, you’re creating scenes with more purpose than 75% of the screenwriters out there. Even if you only used this one tool in your slow script, and you executed each scene well, it may be all you need. Because if we’re always entertained in the moment, we’re not as demanding in regards to the overall story.

TOOL 6 – UNRESOLVED

In slow movies, you want to build a series of unresolved elements that pull the audience forward.

Start with your hero’s flaw. If your protagonist is insanely stubborn and lives by the creed, “my way or the highway,” and that trait is actively ruining their life, we want to see how that gets resolved. Now compare that to a protagonist with no real flaws. Why would we keep watching them? They’ve already figured everything out.

Unresolved relationships work in the same way. Two sisters who can’t get along no matter how hard they try, like in the Netflix show Sirens, create an ongoing question that keeps us engaged. We keep watching to find out whether that relationship ever heals.

Unresolved actions matter too. If we know the hero’s dream is to move to Hawaii and he’s been saving toward it for years, we’ll stay with the story to see whether he follows through.

What all this comes down to is that you’re making a series of promises. You’re saying: this character is broken, and if you keep watching, I’ll show you whether he gets fixed or not. You’re saying: these characters are trying to build a time machine (in Safety Not Guaranteed) and if you stick around, I’ll show you whether they succeed or not.

Most writers don’t use enough of these tools. And when that happens, the reader drifts away. That’s why I strongly recommend erring on the side of using too many rather than too few. Rarely will a script feel too engaging. More often, it’s the opposite: too flat, too slow, too putdownable.

These tools aren’t just for slow scripts either. They can be applied to any screenplay. But in a slow-moving story, the stakes are higher. You’re asking your audience for patience, for attention, for a willingness to linger. Using these tools is how you repay that patience.

So think of them as a toolkit. Captivating characters, clear goals, dangling carrots, suspense, scene-level objectives, unresolved threads. Each one is a lever you can pull to keep your audience invested. Use as many as you can, mix them creatively, and be deliberate about where you deploy them.

A slow-moving screenplay shouldn’t be a shot in the dark. It should be a choice. You’re keeping things slow because you like the way a slower pace bakes in the reader’s head. But this choice requires some serious know-how. You can’t stumble into a slow-moving story as an amateur and expect it to work. You need to master these tools if you have a shot. But the good news is, when you *do* master those tools? Your storytelling is literally unstoppable.

Spec sale alert!

Genre: Thriller
Premise: A young teacher gets kidnapped and tossed into a car trunk but when the car finally stops and she gets out, there is nobody around. This begins a year long investigation into what happened to her.
About: This script was part of a heated bidding war won by Searchlight. The writer, William Gillies, has another recent film on his resume: Hollow Road, about parents trying to help their daughter after she hits someone with her car.
Writer: William Gillies
Details: 118 pages

Nicola Peltz for Val?

I have a lot of confidence in this one. For starters, it’s my kind of concept. I like these character-driven mysteries. It also had 11 production houses bidding on it before selling to Fox Searchlight. And it’s repped by Kaplan Perrone, who has some of the highest standards in the business. I know because whenever I send Aaron one of the scripts I find here, he’s tough!

Val is a school teacher who wakes up in the trunk of a moving car one day. Naturally, she’s terrified. And when the car finally stops, she braces for the worst. But when all she hears is silence, she eventually opens the trunk herself, only to find herself in a Boise, Idaho field. And THERE’S NO ONE IN THE CAR. She was simply… left here.

Val hurries to the nearest road, finds help, gets home, and temporarily moves back in with her Christian Fundamentalist mother. The local cops, lead by female detective, Delgado, can’t find any evidence that this kidnapping actually happened. Frustrated, Val goes back to her life, only to wake up with a man in her room two months later, who drugs her and puts her in the same trunk again. Except this time when she wakes up (again with no one in the car), it’s in a forest in Montana!

Val heads back home and, after talking to Delgado and her partner, decides to go into witness protection and heads to the West Coast. Val starts a life there, however, three months later… she gets kindnapped again! And this time she’s left out in the desert! Hey, at least each kindnapping has a little theme to it!

Val is done playing the victim and moves back home, determined to figure out who’s doing this. Her prime suspect is Elliot Luthe, the twin brother of an old friend of Val’s, who later committed suicide, which Luthe blamed her for. Val thinks he’s on some sort of revenge trip and is fucking with her.

But Delgado isn’t so sure, and starts looking into some traveling salesman dude and his partner. The two were in Boise and Montana at the same times Val was dumped in those states. Val finally gets sick of the nonsense and kidnaps Luthe! She takes him into the middle of nowhere, just like he did to her, and demands answers. Except Luthe swears he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. What happens next puts Val in a position she won’t be able to come back from. So let’s hope she got rid of the right guy.

Noooooooooo!

Why do you destroy my dreams Script Gods!!??

I thought we had a good one here.

I’ll say this about Incidents: It’s different.

And I’m guessing that’s what got it attention.

But this script is very wonky and weird. It starts. It stops. It starts again. It stops again. It builds up its mystery every time it resets, which is a lot. But around the midpoint of the script, I started to get the feeling that the writer didn’t know where he was headed. I didn’t feel like he knew who was doing this. And the ending confirmed that. We get a muddy explanation with no real closure.

Here’s the thing about ambiguous endings. They can work. Even though I don’t like them, I admit there are times where they can work. But this is not one of those times. And it’s explicitly because the mystery at the center of the story is so unique. When you hook us with such a strange mystery, we’re going to want a legit explanation. You absolutely must give us an answer.

Especially with a script THIS LONG that has SO MANY TIME JUMPS. That’s a bigger investment than normal (you’re asking us to start investing in a brand new story every time she moves after a kindnapping). And when the reader really invests, they want a payoff worthy of that investment.

But there’s a bigger issue here and it’s something I haven’t seen for a while. But it used to be quite common in scripts I read. Which is that you can feel the writer trying to figure out the mystery while they’re writing. They’re just as clueless about who did it as you. And that creates a narrative that feels like it’s on roller skates. There’s never a moment where the direction feels solid, like the writer has a plan.

This script also taught me that suspense, as a writing tool, has its limits. I was 100% engaged initially. The use of suspense after that first kidnapping was excellent. Because the circumstances behind the kidnapping were so strange. And we knew that the guy was still out there. That’s what created the suspense. So I’m reading to both figure out the answer to this mystery but also because I know it’s only a matter of time before they come for Val again.

But once we hit the second kidnapping, some sort of “interest switch” turned off. In mysteries, you want your story to evolve. If it doesn’t evolve, then we feel like we’re reading the same beats over and over again. Taking us to a forest as opposed to a field just wasn’t different enough. And now, the suspense that was working so well after the first kindnapping, had its power cut in half. Because not only is the kindnapping identical but now we’re emphasizing that Val isn’t in danger. She’s just being messed with.

And, finally, there’s so much waiting in this script. Val’s endlessly waiting around for the next kidnapping to happen. You guys know how I feel about “waiting around” narratives. They’re the opposite of what movies do well. Movies kick ass when the hero is active and going after things. Val eventually does that. But it takes forever. More than half this movie is Val waiting.

I’m trying to figure out why this got so much attention. I suppose that having such a unique take on the “kidnapping-murder” genre was enough to get studios excited. But I’m surprised they read the whole thing and felt like it was worthy of a big sale. I will say this. It has a very similar vibe to Prisoners, which was also a big spec sale. So, if you liked that script, you may enjoy this one. Especially because both scripts have underwhelming climaxes.

We’re deep in the screenwriting darkness, guys. I have to find a good script soon or I’ll go insane!

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

What I learned: If you can come up with a twist on a missing woman story, that’s the equivalent of finding a goldmine in Hollywood. And even though the execution proved problematic here, this was a legitimately unique take on the girl-kidnapped subgenre.

“Am I, like, getting executed or a root canal?”

You may have glanced at the weekend’s box office, saw that some low-budget Chris Pratt movie miraculously climbed its way to the top of the heap, a la Alex Honnold in Taipei, before going back to your TikTok scrolling.

But if you’re a screenwriter, you should be paying more attention. Because this is great news! A spec screenplay just finished number 1 at the box office. That NEVER happens. So let’s take a closer look at why it did.

It starts by asking a crucial question. What kind of spec screenplay can attract an actor with enough star power to not only get a movie made, but to help push it all the way to number one at the box office?

You need a concept where the main character is featured prominently. And I mean VERY PROMINENTLY. The more prominent, the better. Sure, actors want challenging roles. But you know what they really want? They want to be propped up on a pedestal as THE GUY in a film. You can’t spell “actor” without “ego.”

“Mercy” featured its actor more than any other spec I read in 2024. And when actors see that, they want to be a part of it.

Next, the script had a high concept. There’s a lot of discussion about what exactly “high concept” means. It can be quite unclear. So, let me give you a fun way to measure it. When someone asks you what your script is about, are you unapologetically excited to pitch it to them? If so, you’ve probably got a high concept.

What I’ve realized over the years is that any script grounded in real life, whether it’s a coming-of-age story, a period drama, or a dark comedy, almost always has to be sold with qualifiers.

“It’s about a marriage that slowly dissolves. The husband takes it so hard he ends up losing his job. The wife retreats into this book club because it’s the only real connection she has left.” (pause, noticing the light leave the other person’s eyes) “But it’s really sharp. Like, the scenes are great. And the husband is actually a super interesting character. There’s a lot of tension. It’s not depressing or anything.”

That’s the typical pitch of a non-high-concept idea. You feel like you have to apologize for it when you pitch it.

Contrast that with a pitch like Mercy. “It’s set in the future where accused murderers are put on trial immediately. They have 90 minutes to prove their innocence or they’re executed on the spot.”

That’s the kind of pitch you would not be apologetic in giving.

And finally, you’ve got GSU in spades, baby! You’ve got your goal – PROVE YOUR INNOCENCE. You’ve got your stakes – IF YOU DON’T, YOU DIE. You’ve got your urgency – YOU’VE ONLY GOT 90 MINUTES!

If you have these three things – a giant featured role for an actor, a high concept, and GSU – then you can definitely do what they did here. This formula worked in the 90s and this proves it still works today.

So then wait a minute, Carson. Why is it that the movie got a 20% on Rotten Tomatoes?

Now hold on there, cowboys. I never said anything about the quality of the story. That’s a different skillset entirely. This is a point too many screenwriters miss. If you check all the boxes I just laid out, the bar for execution drops dramatically. Why? Because a studio’s first priority is simple: can we market it? If you hand them something that markets itself, they’ll overlook A TON, mostly because they’re convinced they can fix the script later (even though they never do).

So, yeah, Mercy is a pretty awful screenplay. I read it. It’s bad. But if anything, this should make you thrilled as a screenwriter. It means you don’t have to be perfect to get something made. Just don’t show up with some busted ass boring concept and expect great things.

Moving on.

I saw something quite good this weekend – the new Game of Thrones show, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. I wasn’t just wowed by the writing here – which was good. I was wowed by the choice to take a giant property and go small with it. So much so that I realized how valuable the choice was.

In discussing the fall of Star Wars the other day, I was fascinated by the fact that no matter which way they went with their shows/movies, it always seemed to be the wrong direction. And when I watched Knight, it occurred to me that they may have finally found the formula for expanding a giant franchise.

Don’t go bigger. Go smaller.

Now, “go smaller” always sounds great. Especially in cinema nerd circles. A bunch of film dorks get to proudly say they’re doing the opposite of what Hollywood wants. But it’s important to understand what “go smaller” actually means. It means build the story around the characters.

What this does is it forces writers to put everything possible into their characters. Because they know the story isn’t big enough to keep people hooked, especially under the weight of a franchise that’s gone big before.

And when you put all your focus on creating great characters, guess what happens? You suddenly have a much better shot at creating great characters! Funny how that works.

Knight is smart in exactly this way. It knows everything is going to live or die on the characters, so it reaches for the most battle-tested character type in storytelling history: the underdog. But this is Game of Thrones. One underdog isn’t going to cut it. Not with those expectations. So it gives us two.

Dunk, a giant, lumbering, slightly clumsy wannabe knight. And Egg, a strange little orphan kid with way more going on than he lets on.

Honestly, that alone would probably be enough to keep most people watching past the first episode. We love underdogs. We root for them. We want to see them beat the odds.

But the writers of Knight didn’t stop there. They actually built a plot into the pilot, which happens far less often than you’d think (at least in the pilots I read). Dunk has come to this town to compete in the Knight Tournament. It’s not a massive plot. But it has something incredibly important.

It has purpose.

A goal provides your hero, and by association, your story, with purpose.

And because we’ve already established Dunk as a lovable underdog who wants nothing more than to be a knight, the mere announcement of a Knight Tournament is enough. We’re in. Of course we’re going to keep watching. We have to see how he does!

The writers then do all the right things to hold our attention. Other knights openly taunt Dunk, daring him to bring it on. And what does Dunk do? He backs down. Every time.  This isn’t John Wick, where the moment someone steps up, they get flattened in a blur of violence. Knight plays it smarter. It withholds. It builds suspense. It makes us lean forward, begging for the moment Dunk finally stops backing down.

So today’s two screenwriting takeaways are, ironically, complete opposites.

Number one: if you come up with a giant, high-concept idea, you don’t have to nail the execution. The concept is doing a lot of the heavy lifting for you.

Number two: if you want to write truly great characters, strip the big concept away entirely. Force yourself to hold the reader’s attention with nothing but character.

That kind of pressure is a gift. It’s what pushes you to write the strongest characters you’re capable of.

Here’s my old Mercy screenplay review, which had previously only been available in the newsletter.

SCREENPLAY REVIEW – MERCY

Genre: Sci-Fi Thriller
Premise: In the future, Capital Punishment has been expedited with those being accused of murder having 90 minutes to prove their innocence.
About: We’ve got a big one. This is the package Amazon just picked up starring Chris Pratt. It is a spec sale from an unknown writer, which is rare these days. Nobody knows anything about Marco van Belle other than he wrote and directed a version of King Arthur a decade ago that nobody saw.
Writer: Marco van Belle
Details: 108 pages

In the future, this is where the spec sales are going to happen. They’re going to happen on streamers. Which is fine. Cause streamers have just as much money as studios. Probably more. Which means the paycheck will still be hefty. And, if enough of these spec scripts go on to become hits for the streamers, the studios will get back into the original spec screenplay market. Which means we want movies like Mercy to do well.

Will Mercy do well?

It’s some time in the near future. Chris Raven is a homicide detective in a different world than the one we live in now. Capital punishment, which cost Americans an untold amount of money for every prisoner placed on Death Row, has been thrown out for a much cheeper version. The “Mercy” Program.

Ironically, Chris wakes up in the Mercy chair. The Mercy system locks you down in a chair, gives you one AI robot judge, in this case, Maddox, and you have 90 minutes to prove your innocence. To do so, you must bring your percentage of likelihood that you are innocent down below 92%. If you are unable to do that within 90 minutes, your brain is injected with some electrical wave that immediately kills you.

Chris’s wife, Nicole, is murdered. She was found in her home. And the only person anywhere near her, according to street cameras and phone signal locations, and a bunch of other evidence, is Chris. It is virtually impossible that anybody else killed Nicole. Judge Maddox is so sure of this, she tells Chris that he may as well wait the 90 minutes out and say goodbye.

Obviously, Chris isn’t going to go down that easy. He knows he didn’t kill his wife but has no leads as to who else would kill her. However, the Mercy program allows you to use your judge to access any phone records or video records or databases you want to help prove your innocence. So Chris goes to work.

What Chris quickly realizes is that his wife may have had an affair. That’s the first lead he follows. He’s also interested in a party that happened the night before at his home. Could one of the party members be the killer? Nicole also worked for a shipping company that has some dicey employees, guys who may be shipping suspicious cargo.

As Chris’s frantic investigation continues, there is a secondary battle going on between him and Maddox. Maddox is an AI judge deemed perfect for this Mercy system because she cannot feel anything. She only goes on facts. But as the investigation continues, Maddox learns that not every aspect of a case can be explained with facts. There are times when you have to make judgments based on your gut. Maddox grapples with this as well as with the duty of a job where she’s forced to kill. In the end, the two will have to team up to take down a bigger enemy.

“Mercy” is what I call a “bulletproof concept.”

Let me explain what this means.

When you send a script like Nyad or Maestro out to the town, you’ll hear the phrase, “execution dependent.” In other words, the idea is so unmarketable that the execution of the idea has to be amazing for the movie to succeed.

Bulletproof concepts are the opposite of this. The concept and story setup are so marketable and ideal for an audience experience that you don’t need to nail the execution to sell the script. The movie will work regardless of how well you write it.
Which sounds insane but it’s true. There are certain ideas that write themselves. Mercy is one of those ideas.

We’ve got a flashy genre, in sci-fi. We’ve got timely subject matter, in AI. We’ve got a gigantic goal – prove innocence. We’ve got gigantic stakes – if you fail, you’re executed. We’ve got insane urgency – you’ve only got 90 minutes to prove your innocence. You’ve got a movie star. You’ve got a robot. You’ve got a mystery.

Let’s be honest. This script has it all. This script is everything I tell you to do when you write a spec. Cause when you nail all these things, this is what happens. Big movie stars want to star in your movie. Big producers want to produce your movie.

Oh, and on top of all that, it’s going to be a fun ride.

But here’s why the bulletproof concept really matters…

Mercy isn’t a very well-written script.

It’s okay in places. But every ten pages, I would notice something that didn’t make sense. For example, at a certain point, a SWAT team is working for Maddox and Chris on the outside. But this team seems to have been brought onto the case by pure happenstance. They weren’t doing anything so they happened to have some extra time. And now Maddox and Chris are able to direct them around the city wherever they want.

It would seem to me that a system based on proving your innocence or dying in 90 minutes would have a clearer rule-set than hoping a SWAT had some free time to help save your life.

Or there were times when Chris would call people he knew and the people would be annoyed, insisting that they had to get back to work. Is that how people really act when someone they know is 60 minutes away from electrocution? There were a lot of clunky moments like that.

But.

BUT.

When the major pillars of your movie idea are in place like this one, a script can withstand these miscues. I was still curious who killed Chris’s wife! I still wanted to see if Maddox had any humanity. I was still under the spell of the story’s intense GSU.

Just to be clear – these things do not mean the finished movie is going to be good. I don’t care about that nor should you. You should care about getting your script to the finish line. That’s it. Yes, if you want a great movie, you need to fix a lot of these problems in the script. But if you want to get something made, the bulletproof concept is your biggest asset.

I will never hold Mercy up as an example of good writing. It’s way too uneven for that. But the strength of the concept as well as the setup of the story, make this a surprisingly compelling read. I hope they bring in a good screenwriter to clean it up.

Because if they can fix all the weak world-building and max out the character interplay between Chris and Maddox, which has the potential to be moving, this goes from a decent script to a really good movie.

We’ll see!

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

What I learned: Two underrated things that screenwriters overlook are vanity roles and budget, two things that this script nails. This script is a total vanity project. The camera is on our trapped hero the entire movie. It’s hard not to find an actor who will be excited by that idea. And, also, the entire movie takes place in a room with two characters (cheap to make!). Sure, we get some outside stuff via the video feeds and those will need to be shot. But it’s easier to create those on a small screen than go out and shoot them like Christopher McQuarrie does with Mission Impossible. This makes a big idea cheap to produce.

How slop started with special effects and eventually crept its way into screenwriting.  And how you can inoculate yourself against the virus.

I was muscling through a particularly successful spate of procrastination the other day when I stumbled upon this tweet: “You can go back and observe that Season 1 of Stranger Things actually had kinda decent, dark brooding True Detective vibes. Then each subsequent season, it basically morphed into Marvel Avengers Universe slop.”

I don’t know why that statement landed so hard, but it did. I’ve been hearing the word “slop” everywhere, but it largely registered as background noise. This time was different. It stuck in a way that felt clarifying. It wasn’t just a trendy term people like tossing around, like “mid.” It felt like a diagnosis. A real problem in an industry that’s losing ground to other forms of media every day.

I stopped watching Stranger Things somewhere around Season 3 or 4. Not because of any specific creative decision. More because I’ve learned that TV series built around a story meant to conclude in a single season lose their footing once they push past that point.  With each new episode, I could feel the writers struggling to justify the story’s existence.  I understood why others stayed with it (the characters).  But I need a good plot to keep me entertained.  And this plot was deader than Barb.

So what is “slop?”

The easy answer is: “slop” is short for “sloppy.” And you could certainly end the definition there. But it feels like there’s so much more to it. In my assessment of the birth of slop, ground zero is the Marvel franchise.

I know some of you might not remember this but Marvel actually used to put a lot of time and care into their movies. In those early days, regardless of whatever bumps and bruises a Marvel movie had, you could tell that a lot of love and care had been put into films like Iron Man, Spider-Man, and Captain America. Even as the sequels rolled out, with the occasional exception, I always wanted to see what Marvel came out with next because I felt like the people working on those movies cared.

But I remember the exact Marvel moviegoing experience where everything shifted. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. I walked out of that theater with a clear, unsettling thought: some Rubicon had been crossed. That movie didn’t feel made with care. It felt assembled. Like something stitched together with popsicle sticks, bobby pins, and scotch tape. The end result was a Frankenstein-like contraption that played less like a film and more like a sideshow attraction at a circus.

It was also the first time you could feel the internal attitude toward the visual effects shift from, “let’s do the best job possible” to, “fuck it, this’ll do.” Gone was the obsessive attention to detail that had turned Marvel into the most dominant force in Hollywood history. Overnight, slop was born.

For a while, none of it seemed to matter. Box office expectations were still being met. But that success turned out to be bad news. It told Kevin Feige that what they were doing was okay. It got logged, somewhere on a spreadsheet, as “the audience will tolerate this.”

What they didn’t realize was that they’d just locked in the main ingredient of the meal. From that point forward, if anything went wrong, weak or careless visual effects would never be considered the problem.

Which brings us back to Stranger Things. Even though I wasn’t watching anymore, it was impossible to miss the endless promotions for the final season, or the final part two of the final season, or the final part three of the second part of the final season. That kind of slicing alone feels like its own strain of slop. And then I saw the image of Eleven flying up and leaping straight into the dragon’s mouth. In that moment, I knew exactly what that tweeter had been talking about. Stranger Things hadn’t just drifted off course. It had fully, unmistakably become slop.

What began as special-effects slop didn’t stay contained, however. It evolved. Once Marvel realized we would still show up for superhero movies made with fewer effects artists and less experienced labor, they began to test the boundaries. Consciously or not, they started asking where else they could cut corners. It didn’t take long to find the next place to skimp.

The writing.

And once they made that decision, they were doomed. Because audiences will forgive a lot of crappy things going on on screen if the story is good and the characters rock. But the second you get sloppy in the writing, the rose colored sunglasses get torn off. Watch as every fan you so carefully pulled in turns on you. And not because the audience is “toxic” or whatever other coping mechanism you want to use. They have turned on you because you have gone full slop. There isn’t a single part of your movie that you are giving 100% to.

And that’s why reining in slop is so elusive for studios. Slop isn’t a total collapse of effort. It isn’t the moment a project falls apart entirely.  It’s a small, steady loosening of standards that quietly becomes the default.

The real problem with slop, and why studios don’t seem to be in a rush to eliminate it, is that slop lives in the average. It lives in the absence of total commitment. You can work on a script and a movie and feel like you’re consistently giving 80% to the plot, the characters, the scenes, the dialogue. And that feels like a lot.  But what you’re actually doing is stacking small percentages of missing effort, and when you add them all up, you end up with a product that feels lazy. And laziness is slop’s main source of fuel.

Which I believe is the best definition of slop. It is: A LACK OF EFFORT. Because there is nothing that audiences can spot from further away than a lack of effort. And once they see it, they no longer trust you. That slop is the reason they then start checking their phones, the reason they watch your movie in patches. Because you’ve said to them. “We haven’t committed everything to this. So why should you?”

And where this has truly become alarming is that the industry is changing, and Hollywood is losing more and more ground to other forms of entertainment every day. This is the time, more than ever, that we can’t afford to embrace a “slop” mindset. If anything, we should be giving more of ourselves, pushing harder, and laying even more of our soul on the page.

So, what’s the formula for combating slop, then?

It’s two-fold.

Part 1: SLOP IS WHAT OCCURS WHEN YOU LOOK FOR SHORTCUTS

When you say, “I don’t need 200 special effects guys. I only need 100.” Guess what? There’s going to be a cost for that. And this is true in writing as well. If you write one draft of a key scene and say, “That’s it, I’m done.” That scene will be slop.  So never take shortcuts.

Part 2: SLOP IS WHAT OCCURS WHEN YOU EMBRACE CLICHE

Writing is the act of respecting the past while refusing to copy it. The single biggest image that screams “slop” in that Stranger Things trailer is Eleven jumping into the dragon. Why? Because 7 million 3 hundred thousand Marvel movies have had that exact same image in their films. The second we see that you are not trying to be you. That you are, instead, embracing the easiest route, then we see you as slop.

I would go so far as to say that effort is the last wall standing between the movie industry and irrelevance. I’m specifically talking about studios. I know that in the indie space, where you’re scratching and clawing every day, a lot of writers are pouring their entire lives onto the page. But indie movies don’t prop up the movie business. Studio movies do. So it’s there where they need to hold themselves to a higher standard.

And the great thing you can do is show them what their product could look like if you were writing it. Show them what real effort and real blood on the page looks like. They need a reality check, and you’re the only ones who can give it to them.

Genre: Action Thriller
Premise: When a group of cops get a tip that 150k of drug money is stashed at a house, they go to pick up the “rip.” But once they find out that it’s actually 20 million dollars, a series of events that include a cartel coming to take them down and secrets within their division that mean no one can trust each other, put their lives in jeopardy.
About: The script was written in 5 weeks. The movie came together within 24 hours. Carnahan sent the script to Damon. It got to Affleck quickly, who called the next day. Just like that the movie was a go. 4 quadrants? Fuck 4 quadrants. Affleck and Damon wanted to make a “one-quadrant” movie, targeting the “film bro” crowd, which explains why they promoted the movie on podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience.
Writer: Joe Carnahan & Michael McGrale
Details: 105 minutes

When I heard that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were signing up for a Joe Carnahan movie, my first thought was, “Does Joe Carnahan have secret videos of Matt and Ben engaged in lurid activities with kangaroos or something?”

No shade on Carnahan but Joe’s very openly embraced a career that includes directing low-budget straight-to-streaming action movies. Meanwhile, Matt Damon is getting a major part in Christopher Nolan’s latest movie. Even Ben is still clinging to A-minus status. I don’t know how these two worlds came together but I’m not complaining.

Carnahan, for those who don’t remember, was once considered the hottest action director in town. The guy was about to direct Tom Cruise in a Mission Impossible sequel before he, according to industry outlets, lost his mind (and subsequently lost the job).

But Carnahan can deliver a solid action movie when need be. So I’m glad Matt and Ben gave him a shot.

The Rip is a great example of how to write an action script that will sell. I would even go so far as to say, this would be the best action script on the market of the past 3 years. And that’s specifically because all action movies feel the same. Guy with gun. Guy shoots a lot. Lots of people get shot and die. The End.

This script actually has some thought put into it. I’ll explain what that looks like in a sec. But, first, if you haven’t seen the film, here’s the plot.

Cops Dane (Damon) and J.D. (Affleck) are the head of a special Miami drug unit. On this day, Dane gets a tip. There’s a house where drug runners have stashed 150k. It’s their job to go secure it. Dane and J.D. take their team, which include Mike Ro (the blandest actor in Hollywood, Steven Yeun), Numa (One Battle After Another’s Teyana Taylor), and Lolo.

The crew heads to the house, which is at the end of a cul de sac. A young woman named Desi allows them in and the crew immediately checks the attic, which is suspiciously clean. They break down the walls and find barrels miraculously filled with, what looks to be, 20 million bucks.

The rules of a rip are that you must count it on location. So Numa and Lolo get to counting. Meanwhile, a call comes in. It’s from a bad-sounding man who says they have 30 minutes to leave the house or they all die.

J.D. doesn’t seem rattled for some reason. He’s more concerned about his partner, who hasn’t called the rip in to the boss. Whispers between the rest of the team indicate that Dane is thinking of keeping the money for all of them. But that’s not exactly like trading in your tickets at the arcade for a giant teddy bear. This is likely cartel money, and they’ll want it back. And if anyone at the precinct finds out, they’d go to prison for sure. So what do they do?

If that wasn’t bad enough, Mike Ro, who’s been put on guard in front of the house, notices that there are no cars on this block. No people. And once it gets dark, all those house lights start flickering in what seems like… a pattern? Are the people in the houses talking to each other? If so, is Dane’s team about to be ambushed? That may be just the beginning of their problems as Dane and J.D.’s team have bitten off way more than they can chew.

The first thing The Rip does well is create a dangerous, contained scenario. We are in a house at the end of a cul de sac, tasked with securing a large sum of money. This may seem like a small or obvious creative choice, but it is actually critical. By establishing a contained environment with a clear objective (count the rip and get it to the station) the story immediately becomes legible. The reader understands the situation, the rules, and what success and failure look like.

This is where many writers, especially in action scripts, go wrong. They jump from location to location, constantly resetting the geography. The result is that the story never takes shape. There is motion, but no form. A plot needs boundaries in order to solidify.

This is exactly why Die Hard is considered one of the greatest action movies ever made. It is a clear contained scenario. The moment John McClane is trapped in Nakatomi Plaza, the rules are clear and the tension locks in. Contrast that with Die Hard 4, where McClane is bouncing between countless locations. Most people can barely recall the plot. That is what a non-contained scenario does. It dilutes the plot instead of strengthening it.

The second thing The Rip does exceptionally well is build sustained suspense. I am continually surprised by how many screenwriters do not understand how suspense works. At its most basic level, the formula is simple: Tell the audience that something bad is coming then make them wait for it.

Once we learn the rip is twenty million dollars, the story fundamentally changes. That number implies bigger players, more powerful interests, and far greater danger than the cops initially expect. The stakes escalate instantly. Not long after Dane and J.D. discover the cash, the house phone rings. A man delivers a clear ultimatum. If they are not out of the house in thirty minutes, they will all be dead.

At that point, the script has done the hard part. A bad thing is coming. All that remains is to create time between now and when it arrives. Suspense lives in between that space. And the beauty of suspense is that it does not require constant action to function. The simple knowledge that something terrible is inevitable is enough to keep the reader turning pages. What reader would not want to see what happens when the big bad wolf finally shows up?

What makes this script even stronger is that it does not rely on that single engine. It layers in additional reasons to stay engaged. Most notably, a series of mysteries. Dale clearly knows more about the rip than he’s letting on. What is he hiding? Mike Ro keeps sending texts to unknown contacts when the other cops aren’t watching. What’s he really doing? These unanswered questions deepen the suspense and ensure that momentum never lets up.

The Rip was a big reminder to me that B-movie scenarios are perfect for screenplays. I’m going to say something pretty controversial here but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. Screenplays aren’t good at handling character depth. They’re good at handling thrills and suspense. But character depth eludes them.

The reason why boils down to movies only being two hours long and the inability to get inside a character’s head in the movie format. This is why movies use “show don’t tell,” because, unlike books, you can’t read about what’s going on in the protagonist’s head between all the action. If you’re only showing us who a character is through their actions, there’s only so much you can tell us about them.

Yes yes, I know. There are movies with great characters. I’m just saying it’s hard to do in this format. Movies do a better job with setups like The Rip. Tell us a little bit about each person in a group, put that group in peril, load up the stakes so they’re as high as possible, and let your plot cook. That simple formula will get you far in screenwriting.

My issue with The Rip is that it accepts its “B-Movie” status and uses it as a reason not to work as hard. It’s like everyone working on the movie said, “We’re going to make a B-movie here and we’re never going to try to do anything more than that.”

There’s a moment later in the film where the house catches on fire and it isn’t clear whether they purposefully set it on fire or it happened by accident. Carnahan seemed to want a plot development that forced the team out of the house and came up with the fire at the last second yet never had a conversation about whether the fire was purposeful or accidental. Even the actors seemed confused by it. “We’ll grab the rest of the money in a sec,” J.D. says, as he and the others carry the bags of cash outside. Uhhhh, the house is literally burning down. You don’t have another sec. Seconds later, they just seem to forget about the rest of the money.

Plenty of writers out there embody the “NFL Receiver” approach to scriptwriting – occasionally they’ll run a half-ass route. But there are B movies out there that demonstrate what can happen when you try and ace the test. John Wick is a great example. That was developed as a B movie. But everybody cared so much about every detail in it that it became an A+ B movie, and spawned a billion dollar franchise as a result.

I wonder what this movie would’ve looked like if Matt and Ben put just as much effort into it as they did Good Will Hunting, when they were starving writer-actors living in West Hollywood. I suspect they would’ve plugged up the holes and made it great. With that said, this was still a solid entry into the B-movie market and one of the better movies Netflix has made.

[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Matt and Ben have had a lot of press around Matt’s reveal that Netflix asked them to clarify the plot 4 times throughout the movie because people who watch their movies are constantly checking their phones. It caused a lot of gasps by cinephiles online but, you know what? I don’t think it’s bad advice at all. And not even because it’s a Netflix film we’re talking about. There’s actually a TON going on in this script. You’ve got the mystery of the money, the mystery of each individual character, you’ve got people lying to each other, you’ve got new information constantly coming in that changes the group dynamic. This is a perfect candidate for constant plot updates. I can’t tell you how many scripts I read with heavy plots where the writer just assumes I know what’s going on. But I have no idea because they only told me once!  If you have a complex script, don’t hesitate to remind the reader what’s happening in your plot. Otherwise, they’re going to have no idea.

What I learned 2: Whatever the coolest idea in your script is, keep working on the script until you get the most out of it as possible. The best thing about this script was the reveal that the entire block looked to be cartel members and that our crew was trapped at the end of the block. I got tingles when the lights in each house started passing messages in morse code. Amazing idea. But because Carnahan “speed-wrote” his script, he barely got anything out of that amazing idea. Which is screenwriting negligence as far as I’m concerned. Great ideas come along rarely. If you get one, take it to the freaking finish line!

What I learned 3: You cannot speed-write a script with this much mystery and this many reveals.  Mysteries and reveals create lots of potential plot holes.  For that reason, it’s impossible to do so without the script being sloppy.  You can speed-write a rom-com.  You can speed-write John Wick. You can’t speed-write a script like this nor should you try.