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Genre: Drama/Prison
Premise: When a wealthy white family man accidentally kills a driver who nearly collided with his wife and child, he’s sent to prison for manslaughter. There, he’s taken under the wing of a black gang leader who plans to control him long after his sentence ends.
About: A big sale to Amazon of Don Winslow’s short story, “Collision,” that will be available in his short story collection, “The Final Score.” Jake Gyllenhaal will be starring. Stephen King says that Winslow’s book was “the best crime fiction I’ve read in twenty years.” The Final Score will be available September 17.
Writer: Don Winslow
Details: 92 pages
Collision was a weird story to read because the level of the author’s (Don Winslow) technical know-how is off the charts. You have to understand that I read scripts all day where the writer hasn’t even gotten to the point where they can introduce a character effectively.
With Don Winslow, this is a guy who’s mastered his craft – and I’ll give you an example.
This story starts off with a fair share of setup. Winslow is setting Brad McAlister up for us, Rachel up for us, Brad and Rachel’s marriage for us, their kid. He’s setting up Brad’s job and his overall approach to life.
If that’s all you do, that’s bad writing. It’s boring to read setup. So Winslow keeps hinting at this big meeting that McAlister’s bosses are bringing him in for. Brad can’t stop obsessing over what this meeting is for. The rarity of it implies something big is coming.
What this does is it CREATES SUSPENSE during the setup portion of the story. Which makes it more dramatic. Which makes us want to turn the pages.
You see this sort of technical writing mastery throughout the story.
So then why does the story never elevate above “solid?”
It’s a question I kept asking myself because I wanted to turn the pages in each and every section. I wanted to know what happened next during that opening portion. I wanted to know what happened next in the prison. I wanted to know what happened next when he got out of prison. And I wanted to know what happened when Blanton reentered his life.
But, I kept waiting for some BIG STORY POINT (aka ‘the inciting incident’) to arrive that would kick this novella into high gear. You may say, “But Carson, isn’t him going to prison the inciting incident?” It would be if the prison portion were the main story. But it isn’t. It’s just a passage of time he has to get through.
So when that inciting incident didn’t come, I found myself asking the question, “What is this story about?” It wasn’t until Mcalister’s old prison frenemy showed up and we entered “traditional movie territory” that an “official” inciting incident occurred (frenemy wants Mcalister to kill someone). But, by that point, we’re all the way at the end of the book! So the structure is all out of whack.
Maybe I should tell you what the story is about, huh?
Brad McAlister is a white-collar white dude who runs a hotel. He has the perfect wife in Rachel. And they have a perfect five-year-old boy named Willis.
Brad is excited because corporate is flying his whole family in for dinner. Which can only mean one thing. He’s being offered a promotion. Imagine McAlister’s surprise when he learns that he isn’t just getting to run a better hotel. He’ll be the operating manager for five hotels in the region! The promotion is way bigger than he assumed.
The family goes out to celebrate afterwards and McAlister has a few drinks. Later, when they’re walking to their car, Rachel and McAlister’s son walk first and a car comes out of nowhere. McAlister pushes them out of the way and the car stops inches from him. McAlister starts yelling at the driver for almost killing his family. The driver gets out and gets in his face. McAlister levels him with a punch and the man goes down awkwardly, hitting his head, killing him.
The activist judge for the case wants to make an example out of rich white guys who think they can do whatever they want and gives Mcalister the max – 11 years for manslaughter.
McAlister goes to prison where he quickly learns that it’s populated by three dangerous gangs – the Whites, the Blacks, and the Mexicans. The Whites come to him first but he doesn’t like them. The leader of the Blacks, Blanton, sees an opportunity. As he puts it, “White people can get into places black people can’t.” So he recruits Mcalister into his gang and protects him for five years, when Mcalister gets out on parole.
Once out, McAlister is the happiest man in the world. He can finally be with his family again. As luck would have it, someone at his old job is still a big fan and gives him his job back. So he’s still going to live just as nicely as he did before all this craziness began.
That is until Blanton is waiting for him outside his work one day. Blanton says there’s a guy who’s going to be staying at his hotel who’s a major drug dealer – one who encroaches on Black drug-trading. So he needs McAlister to kill him. McAlister vehemently rejects the proposal, until Blanton tells him if he doesn’t do it, he’ll kill both his wife and kid. Turns out you never truly leave prison.
Every time this story seemed to be leaning towards a “hook,” it would run away from it. Which was frustrating because I kept trying to figure out what the concept was. The closest we got was a white guy joining a black gang in prison. I thought, “Hmm, that could be interesting. We haven’t seen that before.” But McAlister does one thing for Blanton and then we get a quick montage of the next five years and McAlister is all of a sudden out of prison. And I guess we’re telling another story?
At a certain point, if you’re not going to choose a clear direction, then it becomes a character piece. The one constant is this character’s journey. So, the question becomes, is McAlister fascinating enough as a character for us to shoot by all the potential concepts we could’ve latched onto and, instead, watch him endure this?
The answer is: He’s just interesting enough that we care and nothing more. Again, Winslow is a pro. He knows how to make you like a character. So we like McAlister. But, this isn’t Arthur Dent in “Joker.” This isn’t Louis Bloom in Nightcrawler. This isn’t even Richard Williams in King Richard.
It’s just a family man who had to go to prison and, once he gets out, in the last quarter of the story, he has to kill someone. It’s compelling in a low-key way and that’s it.
For me, I wanted a hook here. I literally wanted to hook my hands into a juicy fat concept. Everything here is too vanilla for my taste. But, it’s really well-packaged vanilla. Like the kind you get at Salt & Straw. So, for that, I’d say it’s worth checking out.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: In the last, I’d say, 20 scripts I’ve read that have involved crime, the antagonist threatens to kill the protagonist’s family to get him to do what he wants him to do in 75% of those scripts. It’s a strange motivator because it works so well – as soon as the reader reads it, they understand why the hero must do this. But it’s used so consistently in storytelling that there’s an unavoidable eye-rolling quality to the choice. I encourage writers to work harder and come up with far more creative motivators for bad guys to make the good guys do something.
What I learned 2: Whenever I read a script that has a late-arriving inciting incident, I assume that it’s an early draft and the writer is still figuring out the story. This is often how stories are written. You kind of figure them out along the way, and then in the rewrites, you keep pushing the main plot beats up earlier in the story until they align with traditional structure. If you’ve been writing for 50 years, like Winslow, you can probably get away with a late-arriving inciting incident. But, for the rest of us, I’d recommend rewriting and moving plot beats up earlier in the story.
Genre: Superhero
Premise: When Lex Luthor tries to take over a country in Eastern Europe, it will be up to Superman to stop him.
About: It’s finally here, James Gunn’s Superman, the movie that will launch an entire reboot of DC. Estimates for the opening weekend box office were all over the place. In the end, Superman settled for 120 million dollars. It is currently at an 82% RT score and a 95% Audience score.
Writer: James Gunn (Superman created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster)
Details: 2 hours 9 minutes
It’s been a while since I’ve sat and stared at the blank page this long before a review.
I’m not really sure what to say about this movie.
I guess if you pushed me to give you a definitive verdict, I would say it’s good.
But the more I delve into the specifics, the more hesitant I am to endorse it.
With that said, there are some fun screenwriting discussions to emerge from this movie. So let’s get into it.
Superman has been here on earth for many years and he’s recently gotten into some controversy. He showed up on the border of Boravia and destroyed a lot of stuff to prevent a war. A lot of people around the world are wondering if he’s allowed to do that.
Including Lois Lane! Oh yeah, Clark and Lois are already together. Actually, they’re in a situationship. And she already knows he’s Superman.
A remote-controlled dude who recently beat Superman up was controlled by Lex Luthor and a bunch of his minions. They’ve developed an AI app that’s logged all of Superman’s moves from his past fights and can, therefore, predict what he’s going to do ahead of time, giving them a huge advantage over Supes in any fight.
Meanwhile, Lex is trying to gain control of half of Boravia. Once he gets Superman out of the way, it should be a cakewalk. Especially because Lex has created a “pocket universe” for his secret hideout. Lex eventually snags Superman and places him in a prison in his pocket universe, leaving it up to Lois and the Justice Gang to save him. But once they save him, will it be too late?
The first big screenwriting risk Gunn took here was starting deep into the story. This is not new to screenwriting. It’s known as “in media res.” You throw the reader into a story that’s already going on.
When you do this well, it’s fun because the reader has to play catch-up, which gets their minds spinning right away. However, it’s easy to do poorly. If you’re too far ahead of the reader and you don’t give them enough information about what’s happening, they can get left behind and never catch up. Be ready for the scorn of the reader if that happens.
I know exactly what James Gunn was thinking here. He thought: the audience knows who Superman is. They know who Lex Luthor is. They know this whole mythology like the back of their hand. So he realized he COULD start the move in media res, and it would be easy for the reader to catch up.
But a bigger question emerges here. Did we start too deep into the story in general? James Gunn loves the original Superman, as do a lot of us. One of the best things about that movie was the interplay between Lois Lane and Clark Kent due to the fact that she didn’t know he was Superman and we did. There are very few opportunities as a screenwriter to play with a dynamic that powerful. And Gunn just threw that all away by having Lois already know Clark was Superman AND to already have them dating.
I think this was a really poor choice as it turned Clark and Lois’s relationship into one of the worst things about the movie. It wasn’t bad. But it was BORING. Which is way worse in my opinion. I did not care about these two AT ALL. And it clearly goes back to that choice. Think about their kiss in the movie. WHO CARES! They’ve been kissing for months. Bad decision here by Gunn.
What’s weird about screenwriting is that a bad choice can, ironically, give you good writing opportunities. We all know how challenging exposition can be. Well, by having Clark and Lois already be together, it allowed for this scene where Lois interviews Clark as Superman. It’s one of the better exposition scenes I’ve read all year because it cleverly uses Superman’s dual-identity to add details we wouldn’t have otherwise gotten. During the interview, if a question was tough, Superman would stop the recorder, transition to Clark, and talk to Lois as her boyfriend (for instance, he might say, “Hey, we talked about this with each other – you agree with me!” And she’d say, “Yeah, but I’m not talking to Clark. I’m talking to Superman.”).
I advocate for scenes like this in my dialogue book. Interview-type scenarios (or therapy scenarios) are perfect for covertly disseminating exposition.
Regardless of any reservations I had early in the script, I liked the opening act. I thought it was the best act in the script.
From there, things got sloppy. I know a lot of people have said that this story was overstuffed. I disagree. I didn’t think that was the case at all. I never once couldn’t follow what was going on. Contrast that with the last three Mission Impossible movies where I lost track of what was going on within half an hour.
The problem with this movie was not that it was overstuffed. It was that the storyline was lightweight. Maybe this is because I’m too “inside” to see this objectively. I know that this movie isn’t just a Superman movie. It’s a movie that needs to launch a 20-film franchise. And, for that reason, I was expecting way higher stakes.
Lex Luthor wants half of some tiny third rate Eastern European country? Who cares? Even if the argument is that that was a decoy move to take out Superman, it still feels small.
James Gunn must navigate a very tricky reality here. He’s trying to go back to basics and tell a great simple superhero story about the greatest superhero ever. But, unfortunately, that’s not the movie world we live in. We’ve seen every superhero imaginable over the last 15 years, many of which raised the stakes from previous films. The audience doesn’t understand going backwards on that.
Another screenwriting paradigm Gunn went up against was how strong to make your hero. This is something we’ve discussed many times on the site. Do you make your hero Robert McCall, in The Equalizer, where he’s so powerful nobody can so much as scratch him? Or do you make your hero Indiana Jones, who constantly fails and gets beaten up and has to work for every inch of what he gets?
Traditional screenwriting thinking says the latter is the better way to go. The more uncertain the reader is that the hero can survive in any moment, the more drama there’s going to be. Think about it. How much drama is there when you know your hero is going to easily win every single time?
So, technically, by making Superman so easy to beat up in this movie (heck, we meet him having been beaten up), you’re making the “right” screenwriting choice.
The problem is that Superman is different. He’s supposed to be THE MOST POWERFUL SUPERHERO OF ALL TIME! And yet he’s getting his ass whipped by predictive AI. It just feels… wrong.
And the thing is, Superman stories have always had this ace up their sleeve to counteract Superman being too powerful. Kryptonite! Kryptonite makes it so he’s got to be more clever in how he wins. But, in this movie, he’s already getting his ass kicked multiple times by the time kryptonite enters the equation.
Here’s why it’s a big deal for DC Films. One of the coolest moments in Superman sequels is when Superman finally meets somebody who’s stronger than he is. We didn’t think that was possible. So when the situation arrives, we’re shocked and scared.
But with this Superman not even being able to defeat a glorified robot, you can’t make this moment happen. No matter who you bring in, it’s now embraced with a shoulder shrug (another super villain who’s going to beat Superman’s ass). It’s a controversial choice Gunn has made because, again, in a vacuum, it’s the right choice. But for a Superman movie, it’s probably the wrong choice.
I mean, there are two superheroes in this movie, Mr. Terrific and Green Lantern, who are way more powerful than Superman! Is that the smartest creative choice to make?
If you want to make it as a big-budget screenwriter, one of the things that will be required of you is great imagination. Your imagination cannot be on par with everyone else. You need to prove that you are MORE IMAGINATIVE than the average scribe.
Gunn’s big imagination play here was the pocket universe. From a writing perspective, I thought it was clever. But from a movie perspective, it was a fail. It’s a fail because superhero movies have become terrible at creating totally made-up locations. They’re all CGI vomit at this point. But the bigger problem it creates is that we (the audience) have no bearing for what we’re looking at.
It’s like the microscopic universe in Ant-Man 3. We don’t have a single constant to latch onto so it all seems like muck. And when you layer on top of that bad CGI effects, it just feels like we’re in a computer. Superman completely lost me when he was floating down a horrifically fake-looking rainbow river, holding a badly modeled CGI baby. It was the kind of CGI scene you’d expect in a film from 2003. It was just bad. And when something is that poorly constructed, it takes the audience out of the movie.
Contrast this with the fight against the dragon earlier in the film. We have actual bearings in that scene. We see buildings. We see parks. We understand the mechanics of a city. We’re familiar with enough elements in the set piece that we can play along. I wish Gunn had stayed more “real world” with this story. Because it’s Superman. It’s supposed to be pure and simple. It’s not supposed to be pocket universes.
Truth?
The new DC universe is in trouble.
I thought this movie was going to open like gangbusters at 170-180. 120 is not embarrassing but it’s definitely not the number you needed to be at to launch a 20-film franchise. When Iron Man came out, it massively overperformed, which gave Marvel the confidence to go all in with their plan. 120 is the same number as Man of Steel. May I remind you that Man of Steel never even got a sequel.
Maybe that number is just the ceiling for Superman. This is as big as it gets no matter what you do.
I still think this is a good movie. I just wish it had been better.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Playing with the sexual tension of a potential relationship is one of the more powerful scene engines out there. So, assuming all else is equal, if you have the choice between that or already placing your characters together, go with the sexual tension.
Sometimes, you have to get dirty to convey a great sceenwriting lesson.
Before I get into what I mean, let me share with you the impetus behind today’s article.
I’ve been reading a lot of scripts lately and many of them have this “tame” feel. They’re pleasantly executed stories that never push the hero beyond mild irritability.
The truth is, most scripts are tame. This is because most writers treat their main characters like friends. Cause if they do that, writing the script is like going on a journey with your best friend. And that sounds a lot more fun than going on a journey with your enemy.
Yet, that’s how you should be seeing your hero – as the enemy. Your job, as the writer, is to try and destroy them.
Now, I’ve written several articles about this. And yet I continue to receive these pleasant casual stories where the main character is never pushed far enough. So I’m obviously not doing my job.
I think I finally found a video that can effectively get my point across.
Now, if you’re afraid of flying, I STRONGLY recommend avoiding this video and the remainder of this article. Cause things get dark. There is no happy ending here.
But, if you can stomach it, it’s one of the most valuable lessons you will ever learn in regards to how to write a great screenplay. So, with that in mind, go ahead and watch it.
Now, before I get into today’s lesson, let’s take note of how perfectly this situation mimics a screenplay. It has the ultimate GSU. A problem arises (a fire), which creates the story’s goal: Get the plane back on the ground. The stakes are enormous (they will definitely die if they fail). And then you’ve got extreme urgency (Estimates are that a plane has roughly 17 minutes to get on the ground once a fire starts before the plane becomes unflyable).
But, there’s a key difference in this story compared to the stories you write. In this story, which is based on a real life event, the heroes do not win. This is not Apollo 13. The two pilots flying the plane die. But not before enduring a harrowing and heroic attempt at survival.
One of the things that struck me while I was watching this story was the number of times the narrator would say something akin to, “But a new problem emerged.” Or, “But things were about to take a horrific turn for the worse.” These phrases kept coming again and again.
It started with the fire alarm. That was the first moment when the pilots realized they were in trouble.
“But things were about to take a horrific turn for the worse.”
Three minutes later is when smoke first enters the cabin, making it difficult for them to see and forcing them to put their oxygen masks on.
“But a new problem emerged.”
The captain realizes that his control column no longer controls the pitch. Which means he can’t steer the plane up or down.
“But things were about to take a horrific turn for the worse.”
The smoke in the cockpit starts getting thicker and thicker, making even small tasks overwhelmingly difficult. Because now they can barely see the control panel in front of them.
“But a new problem emerged.”
The fire has become so bad that it has eaten through the captain’s oxygen tank line, cutting off his oxygen supply. The captain has no choice but to head to the back of the cockpit to get the supplementary oxygen tank. But the toxic black smoke has gotten so thick that he can’t find it and, within seconds, he dies of smoke inhalation.
“But things were about to take a horrific turn for the worse.”
The communications go down. So, the first officer can’t talk to the Dubai control tower to find out where he is. This forces him to call another nearby plane, to relay his messages to a second control tower, which then manually calls the Dubai control tower to ask the question the first officer needs to ask. And then this whole process is reversed to get the information back to the first officer. This, for a situation where every second is precious.
“But a new problem emerged.”
The first officer can’t see out the window or see the instrumentation due to the black smoke and learns, too late, that he’s way too high up to land at Dubai. So he begins a desperate process of getting the plane lower.
“But things were about to take a horrific turn for the worse.”
When he gets the latest info from his wacky communication process, he learns that he is directly over the airport, still at 4000 feet. And he doesn’t have time to loop around and try again. Which means he’ll have to try and land at a nearby secondary airport 10 miles away. The controller gives him the coordinates to put into his plane to get to that airport.
“But a new problem emerged.”
After putting the new heading in, the co-pilot watches, horrifically, as his plane turns in the opposite direction of the second airport. In all the chaos, and because he could barely see the control panel, he accidentally put in the wrong heading, sending the plane in the wrong direction.
And then the final problem emerges. The plane gave out on him, plunging into the desert sand.
Okay, so why am I going into the gory details of this event here? Because here’s the truth of the matter. There were eight “things got worse” moments here, all of which placed our pilots in a more precarious position than they were in before.
In fictional screenplays, the average screenwriter may include ONE “things got worse” moment. The more experienced screenwriter might have TWO. But EIGHT??? Nobody includes eight. Why? Let me explain.
In this recreation, the writer/narrator knows the pilots are going to die. Because of this, he doesn’t have to worry about saving them. All he has to worry about is telling the audience what happened. This allows him to write in as many “things get worse” moments as showed up that day.
If, however, our narrator was creating a *fictional* version of this story, where the pilots had to survive at the end, he probably never would’ve went past the third “things got worse” moment because, the more dire the predicament you place your characters in, the more you have to work, as the screenwriter, to figure out how to get them out of it.
In other words, most screenwriters are terrified of painting their characters into a corner. And, therefore, they make sure to leave a big unpainted trail that allows them to walk to the exit.
What’s the lesson here?
WRITE YOUR MOMENTS LIKE YOUR CHARACTERS ARE GOING TO FAIL AS OPPOSED TO WRITING THEM LIKE THEY’RE GOING TO SUCCEED.
If you have a “characters must succeed” mindset while writing, you subconsciously place protective armor around them to make sure that they can get out of any bad situation they’re in. You mainly do this by limiting the number of bad things that happen to them, or, if there are bad things, you make sure they’re only kind of bad.
But if you write sequences like your characters are going to fail, or, in this case, die, then you’ll keep adding more and more “things get worse” moments. Which digs your characters into deeper and deeper holes. The deeper those holes get, the more captivated the reader gets. Readers are never captivated by a 10 foot hole. They figure the character is going to figure out *some way* to scale those 10 feet. But if you put them in a 100 foot hole?? Now they have NO IDEA how that character is going to succeed.
This will create more work for you on the back end to get them out of that hole. But I promise you, it’ll be more dramatically captivating for the audience.
From now on, when you write your characters into tough situations, which you should be doing many times throughout your screenplay, I want you to remember this video. And ask yourself, “How can I make things even worse for my hero here?” Smoke in the cabin? Let’s make that smoke so thick he can’t see three inches in front of his face. Need to get the plane down? Let’s take his controls away from him. Needs oxygen? Let’s have the fire burn through his oxygen mask.
The more peril you put your hero through, the more captivated we’ll be. :)
Carson gives notes on just about everything related to screenwriting – feature scripts, pilot scripts, first acts, first ten pages, first scenes, loglines, outlines, and e-mail queries. If you’re interested in getting some help with your writing, shoot him an e-mail at [email protected]
One of the more fascinating scripts I’ve read all year!
Genre: Thriller
Premise: A CIA agent must impersonate himself in order to fend off the most daring Russian double-agent plan in espionage history.
About: This was a big 7 figure spec sale that went to Ryan Coogler’s team and Skydance. Writer Aneesh Chaganty is one half of the “Searching” team and a graduate of the Scriptshadow approach to screenwriting (he and his writing partner used to read the site all the time and, to my knowledge, still pop by) so it should be no surprise that I was very into this one.
Writers: Aneesh Chaganty & Dan Frey
Details: 113 pages
Hey, Superman might as well parlay all his buzz into as many sexy projects as possible
Note: This is definitely one of those scripts that you’ll want to read FIRST before reading the review as it has a lot of twists and turns. Someone in the comments may be able to help you find it.
I’ve been reading a ton of scripts lately.
And what I become very sensitive to when I’m reading a lot of scripts is originality.
Is the writer giving you exactly what’s expected? Or are they going above and beyond to outthink you?
Cause that’s part of the job description of being a good writer. You have to outthink the reader.
As one of you just pointed out in the comments yesterday, Jon Watts got lazy writing Spider-Man: No Way Home. He had to come up with a way to bring in the other two Spider-Mans (Toby and Andrew) and he thought it would be a cool idea right after Aunt May’s death to do it right on the top of a building in the middle of New York.
But then he was reading Spider-Man subreddits and saw that someone already came up with that exact assumption of how they would be introduced. The poster even generated an image of it. Jon Watts said, “Well I can’t do that anymore.” And he changed it to what we eventually saw in the movie.
None of us are fortunate enough to be guiding franchises that have subreddits where commenters can keep us honest. But we can keep ourselves honest if we’re honest with ourselves.
There’s a version of today’s concept that 99 out of 100 writers would’ve gone with. Today’s writers would be the 1 out of 100 that pushed the idea a step further. Which is why the script sold. I’ll talk about that in a second. First, let me summarize the plot for you.
Veer Miller is a CIA agent who has a wife and two kids. Although we don’t get to see him a whole lot with his family, we get the sense that he might not be the best husband or father. He also may not be very good at recognizing that.
One day Veer is shocked to be brought into the CIA Director’s office, who tells him that he’s been picked for a very unique mission. The Russians have located a man in Brazil, Pedro Barbosa, who looks identical to him. Their plan is to get Pedro and teach him to be Veer. They will then kill Veer and replace him with doppelgänger Pedro so that they have a mole inside the CIA.
The CIA’s counter-plan is to send Veer to Brazil to secure doppelgänger Pedro, then take his place, pretending to be Pedro. This way, the Russians will recruit him instead, and replace Veer with… Veer. This will mean that Veer will be in constant contact with the Russians, who think he’s Pedro, and the U.S. will be able to manipulate Russia by having Veer tell them false information.
So, Veer is sent to Brazil. Pedro is secured and sent back to America, where he’ll be forced to play Veer while Veer is gone. Veer then meets up with the Russians, who pose the first big snag to Veer’s mission. There are three other doppelgängers!!! That was not part of the intel. The Russians want to make sure that they send the perfect double-agent. So this is a six-month competition to become the most convincing Veer. Whoever wins, goes to America.
Naturally, you would think that Veer has a leg up on everyone. But as the training begins, he constantly fails all of the tests, many of which amount to seeing what he would do in a specific situation. Veer gradually realizes that he has always viewed himself as an idealized version rather than his true self.
In order to win, he must see who he really is and become that person. And who Veer really is, is the person Veer least wants to be.
This is one of the more clever setups to a movie I’ve read in a while. Going back to what I was talking about earlier, I receive spy ideas a lot. But the version of this story that I receive (99 out of 100 times) has the US using our protagonist CIA agent, who they realize looks similar to a Russian KGB agent, to replace that agent in order to accumulate intelligence. In other words, it’s the straight-forward version of a doppelgänger idea.
Chagantry and Frey ask themselves, “What’s the next iteration up from this idea?” And that’s how they come with this really clever version of a spy concept.
I can already hear some of you chirping about the believability of the doppelgänger conceit. But these guys actually do a perfect job of setting that up. They play footage of a real Russian theorist who had this obsession with how many people in the world look exactly like each other, and that’s the basis for how the Russians came up with this idea.
One of the things that all good writers do is they take risks. These writers could’ve written “Salt,” here. “Salt” was a gangbusters spec script from Kurt Wimmer that was just a good old fashioned fun spy thriller. And we could’ve gone that same route with Doppelgänger.
But Changantry and Frey took this giant risk and decided to make this a character piece. This story is more about who Veer is and how we, as human beings, see ourselves, versus how the world sees us.
And there’s some good stuff in here. There’s an actress playing Veer’s wife in the training and he has to have deep conversations with her about their relationship and the specific circumstances help him realize that he’s the world’s worst husband and has been terrible to her.
There’s a lot of that.
I’m not going to lie – I wasn’t 100% onboard with this decision. I understood why they did it. But I assumed, at some point, we were going to go back to the US and see some cool spy shit. We never did, though, and I had some FOMO about that. Or, since we didn’t go, maybe it’s the opposite of FOMO. Cause FOMO is when you’re missing out on something. Or maybe that is the appropriate way to say it—
—ANYWAY!
It doesn’t upset me that much because I SO respect the risk the writers took because it made this script different from any script that’s been written in the past three years. It’s unique. And how often do we get unique scripts? We don’t. If we would’ve gone back to the US and had some US-Russian spy set pieces, then it’s just like John Wick. It’s just like Mission Impossible. We think we want those things until we get to the theater and we watch the film and we say, “That was just like every other action movie I’ve seen.”
Also, if you have a movie idea that allows a director to cast the same actor in multiple roles, SEND IT TO RYAN COOGLER. This is clearly his thing now. And this has even more roles than Sinners. The actor gets to play 4 roles!
This is an imperfect script. It becomes a character-driven story and I’m not convinced they nailed the character-driven parts. But it’s such a fresh premise with a fresh execution – two things you RARELY SEE TOGETHER in scripts these days (I see fresh concepts with standard executions and standard concepts with fresh executions, but I never see fresh concepts with fresh executions) and, for that reason, I have to recommend this script.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Double up interesting plot beats and exposition delivery devices. Doppelgänger has an early scene where they need to test Veer so they can make sure that, when he returns, he’s the real Veer. So they ask him all these questions (i.e. what was your happiest memory, what was your saddest memory). This allows us a quick and easy way to deliver exposition (Veer’s backstory) via an entertaining, and necessary, scene. That’s good writing!
Genre: Horror
Premise: Two sisters come back to their hometown after their mentally ill mother dies, and are dragged back into the mystery of what happened to their third sister, who drowned when they were children.
About: Universal preemptively purchased this short story. Janelle Monáe will star and produce. Akela Cooper (M3GAN, Malignant) will adapt the screenplay, which is based on the short story of one of the highest-concept writers in Hollywood, Colin Bannon, who’s made the Black List a record 7 times.
Writer: Colin Bannon
Details: 27 pages
I don’t have a lot of time today so I have to speed through this one. Apologies in advance for any grammatical errors. And I encourage everyone to read the short story first because it’s a spoiler type read. And if you know the spoiler ahead of time, the story’s no fun. With that said, the only way to talk about this story is to talk about the spoiler, so you’ve been warned.
The quick and dirty plot breakdown is that a young girl named Sam lives in the South with her sisters, Riley, and Maddie. Maddie is the youngest. One day, when their mother was at the lake watching Maddie swim, she looked down at her book, looked back at the lake and Maddie was gone.
After that, both the mother and father went crazy. The dad just upped and hightailed it out of there without ever saying goodbye. And the mom was so mentally diseased that she poured bleach into her eyes, blinding herself forever. Social services came in, ripped away Sam and Riley, and the two lived the rest of their youth in foster care before heading out and trying to make it in the real world.
Sam would move to New York and become an addict and a dealer. Then, one day, she got word that her mom had died so she and Riley went back to their hometown to bury their mother. They hadn’t been in the house since they’d been taken away, and the first thing they were greeted with was a snake. Welcome home!
At the funeral, some real estate dude offers 800 grand to buy the house. Sam didn’t have to be told twice and invites the man to stop by the next day. But, on that day, as Sam and Riley clean up the house for his visit, they go downstairs and find a secret passageway, a la Barbarian.
They walk down a hallway and find an exact recreation of Maddie’s bedroom. Even freakier, they also find Maddie!!!! But Maddie is now 30 years old and wears a hood that keeps her face in shadow. She then screams, “DON’T LOOK!”
The girls run upstairs where they see the real estate agent. But it’s not just the real estate agent. It’s the real estate agent WITH A CHAINSAW!!!!!! WTF??????? He starts screaming to let him have her head or something. And then he’s attacking the girls. And then Maddie appears, lowers her hood, and we see her hair. Which is all snakes. The agent looks at her and, seconds later, he’s stone.
Yes, it appears that Maddie is Medusa. And that’s why all of this needed to happen like it did. And poor dad? Didn’t leave. Accidentally found her secret room one day, looked her in the eyes, and turned to stone. The problem now is that others are coming. Maddie can’t hide here anymore. Which means the girls will all have to leave together. And once they’re out in the real world, they’ll have to learn to live under these new supernatural circumstances. The end.
For the Win burger
All in all, this story was kinda clever.
It presents itself as a haunted house movie. The focus is on the girls coming back to their home and the home being freaky. And then, like I say you gotta do with all ideas, the author introduces a fresh unexpected angle. This isn’t your traditional haunted house movie at all. It’s a Medusa movie.
Bannon did a great job with his setup. There are about a dozen setups (the mother got into making sculptures – which actually turned out to be Maddie’s victims, there are snakes everywhere in the house, the mom bleached her eyes so she didn’t risk turning to stone herself, they find old stories about how their great grandmother decapitated one of her daughters, etc.) in this movie so that when the payoff finally comes (she’s Medusa), it makes sense immediately. Also, unlike most stories, the writer never tips his hand with any setup because we don’t even know this is a Medusa story.
So that reveal was fun.
I will say that it’s always a risk when you do the genre change-up. With this movie, you have no option other than to promote it as a haunted house movie. Which means that the type of audience that likes ghosts, maybe even monsters, are the ones who are going to show up. Unfortunately, that’s not always the same audience that likes Greek mythology. So when the Greek mythology payoff comes, you’re going to have some disappointed people.
I secretly like the genre change-up because it’s so challenging to pull off. You want to see if you can be one of the few authors to do it. Can you start a song with rap and end it with country? So I’m curious how people will react to this.
One more thing I want to point out to anyone who’s thinking about writing a script or a short story in this same vein. You’re probably looking at this and thinking, “I just gotta go high concept and that solves all my problems!” And you’re kind of right. It makes things easier for sure. But if that’s all you do, you won’t sell the script. I guarantee that the reason this sold to Janelle Monae is because of the sisters’ relationship.
Most of the smart successful people in Hollywood need to have an emotional connection to the story for them to pull the trigger. So, draw them in with the highest concept you can think of then grab onto their hearts with the best character story you’re capable of writing.
I’m proud of Bannon here. This is his most focused story yet. And, for that reason, it’s probably his best.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Genre change-ups MUST BE SET UP BETTER THAN SINGLE GENRE STORIES. Remember, you’re bringing people in who may not like what your story is going to turn into later. However, if you have a ton of setups, like Bannon does here, then when we switch over to that second genre, we’re at least not surprised by it. It makes sense to us. That, to me, is what saved this story.
