type='html'>

I have three words for when it comes to this whacked-out screenplay: The Squirrel Scene. Nothing more needs to be said.

Genre: Comedy/Satire
Premise: (from Black List) A satirically dark comedy about a homicidal foreclosure victim kidnapping a real estate agent and planning to kill her in the housing development where she finagled money from customers like him.
About: This script finished tied at the bottom of the 2011 Black List with 6 votes. Del Tredici is repped by WME and managed by Mosaic. He’s written exclusively in TV up to this point, penning episodes of 30 Rock and Bored To Death (among others).
Writer: Luke Del Tredici
Details: 104 pages – 8/21/10 Fifth Draft (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

Today's script is one I'd never heard of before. And why would I have? It doesn’t even have a proper title. Which actually makes sense because when you read it, you realize it doesn’t have a proper anything. This script is about as improper as it gets. Del Tredici is clearly an insane person. I imagine him stalking Liz Lemon in his dreams with a cheese grater. Read this script and you’ll realize that’s not as weird a statement as you think it is.

But here’s the catch. Insanity can be a good thing for writers. With the right amount of focus, insanity can lead to genius! Edgar Allan Poe was insane right? And he came up with some pretty cool stuff. I don’t know if I’m ready to put Del Tredici in the same league as Poe just yet, but I can tell you this: You will not forget this script after you read it. I promise you that.

We’re in Harding, Arizona, June 2007. Harding is one of those upscale communities that investors just decided to build. It didn’t get there after years of growth. They took the Field Of Dreams mentality: “If we build a bunch of McMansions, they will come.” Will they Ray? Will they?

Cassie Francis is a real estate agent in Harding. She’s riding the wave of this booming industry, even owning one of these McMansions herself! Everything’s going swimmingly. That is until the housing market implodes.

Cut to two years later and the community is a ghost town. Nine out of every ten houses have been deserted. Cassie is one of the few remaining stragglers and it doesn’t look like she’ll be able to hold on much longer. She hasn't sold a house in six months and her boss is coming up with more reasons to fire her than keep her. That’ll end up being the least of her worries though, since when she comes into work, she inadvertently witnesses an adjustable-rate mortgage victim sort of accidentally kill the big cheese.

This once normal but now crazed home-owner, Sonny, has no choice but to do something about the lone witness, so he kidnaps Cassie and brings her back to his home, which happens to be in the same community she lives in.

At first things are light and fluffy. Sonny looks like he's going to let Cassie go as long as she promises not to tell anybody what she saw. But then his ex-wife shows up, starts pushing his buttons, and he ends up killing her too! Now that Cassie’ been a witness to TWO murders, he realizes he has to get rid of her. In order to make sure nobody's looking for Cassie though, he decides to go to her house and snatch up her teenage daughter as well.

While that’s going on, Cassie manages to escape, and while Sonny brings her daughter back, she’s able to call the police. The thing is, there’s only one cop in this hellhole. The rest had to be let go when all these rich folks who couldn’t pay their mortgages fled town.

Now Cassie and this one cop must try and find which house she was actually being held in – not an easy task since every single house looks exactly the same! Cassie eventually finds and rescues her daughter, but with a very determined Sonny on their trail, escape is anything but guaranteed.

This script is so damn weird. But weird in a deliriously awesome way!

It all starts with Sonny, who’s one of the most unpredictable villains you’ll ever meet. One second he’s cozy and comforting and telling our heroine that he’s going to let her go. The next he’s a psychotic serial killer having our poor protagonist and her daughter dig their own graves. This dude was like a giant suspense yo-yo, with no rhyme or reason to his actions. And boy did that make him terrifying.

But none of his actions compare to the best scene I’ve read in a script all year. I'm not going to spoil it because you have to read the scene yourself to believe it. I will refer to it only as…The Squirrel Scene. I have never been so terrified of squirrels in my life. This scene has made me reevaluate squirrels as animals. I'm thinking of calling the National Animal Control Center and seeing if there's a way we can get rid of all squirrels on the planet just because of this scene. It's such a great scene, in fact, that I think this movie is worth making JUST for this scene. And I realize how ridiculous that sounds but this scene is just so unexpected and so weird and so terrifying that I stand by it.

Outside of that, there’s a nice little statement going on about the housing crisis. While I didn’t personally feel the sting of that implosion, I know people who did. And I just remember how helpless and angry they felt – like they’d been duped and there was nobody out there willing to help them. I remember them having to jump through a million hoops just to get a minor extension and how oftentimes, even when they did everything right, they’d still get screwed. In that sense, Sonny embodies everybody’s frustration. And without getting too deep, there’s a strange part of you that understands him – that understands why he’s gone nutzos. And it’s that subtext that makes this screenplay more than just a silly exercise in weird comedic choices.

I only disliked two things about the script. The first is it felt a little clunky at times. The writing wasn’t as smooth as maybe it could’ve been. And the other was the ex-husband stuff. Cassie has this ex-husband who's now dating a 24-year-old fluzie who’s quite possibly the dumbest girl in the world. He’s the only person she’s able to contact for help so he has to drive back to save her with his nagging girlfriend tagging along. It's not a terrible subplot by any means but it just gets old quickly. We keep cutting back to the car, listening to the same argument over and over again (“Why are we doing this?”). I suppose it had potential but I’d rather have stayed back where all the action was.

In the end, I think you gotta admire Del Tredici for taking so many chances. When I read scripts like The Knoll or Selfless, I’m always bummed out by how predictable they are. The writers never take a single chance! They do everything exactly by the book. This script is the opposite. And it’s really original as a result. I challenge anybody to read this script and forget about it. It's impossible. This one would get people talking if it ever became a movie. Let’s hope that that happens.

[ ] Wait for the rewrite
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: One of the easiest ways to write an original scene is to ask yourself, “What's the last thing my audience expects this character to do right now?” Everybody knows what the character would *likely* do. We've seen enough movies to be able to predict that. So put your thinking cap on and ask what it is they’d *least likely* do. When Sonny kidnaps Cassie, bringing her to his house, we think we know what's going to happen. He's going to tie her up and threaten her and blah blah blah. But the writer asks that question, “What’s the last thing the audience expects Sonny to do right now?” Why: Give Cassie a tour of the house of course! So we get this awkward but intriguing scene where Sonny gives his kidnapped captor a tour of his place. Not only is it original, but it creates the added benefit of making our villain seem even scarier. If this guy is so delusional that he's giving the girl he kidnapped a tour of his place, then how crazy can he be??

type='html'>Genre: Sci-fi/Comedy
Premise: A hapless and broken hearted barista is visited by two bad-ass soldiers from the future who tell him mankind is doomed, and he alone can save them.
About: This script from British writer Howard Overman sold in March of last year and made it onto the middle of the Black List, right next to Desperate Hours!  Overman has been a longtime British TV writer, writing such shows as "Merlin," creating the show "Vexed," and winning a 2010 BAFTA Television Award for Best Drama Series for "Misfits."
Writer: Howard Overman
Details: 116 pages - February 2011 draft

Jay Baruchel for Josh?  Why not??

Wait a minute.

Hold up here.

Are you telling me that I just read a comedy script...that was funny?  And that I liked?  Has Scriptshadow slipped into Bizarro World??

Not only that, but a good comedy that was low-brow (the longest running joke in the screenplay is literally a shit joke)??  I always complain about low-brow comedies.  Scripts that have nothing to offer other than jokes.

Aha! But Slackfi DID have more to offer.  It had a story (with unexpected twists and turns 'n stuff!) and even some character development.  By the way, what does that mean exactly?  "Character development?"  I see that phrase thrown around a lot and I'm not always convinced that the people who throw it would know how to catch it if it was thrown back.

Character "development" is any instance of your character developing into a different person.  This can be through overcoming a flaw, overcoming the past, or in the case of The Slackfi Project, overcoming a relationship.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  Which is fine, I suppose, since there's time-travel in Slackfi.  However, I don't get the nicest responses when I dislike time-travelling scripts these days.  So thank God I enjoyed this one.

20-something Josh sleepwalks his way through his coffee shop job.  The guy can whip up a mean vienttia grand-aye half-whip double-sauce cinnamon-style frappe mocha-chino (apologies to all if I'm getting the terms wrong. I'm not a coffee person) but is bored out of his gourd while doing it.  Josh is the kind of person where smiles go to die.

But at least he has a reason for it.  His girlfriend, Zoe, dumped his stupid ass a few months ago and now toys with him.  She wants to hang out, but then she doesn't.  She wants to go on dates, but then she cancels.  She wants to have sex, but then the next morning thinks it was a bad idea.  God was not a nice dude for creating people like this but they'll be around for as long as people don't have the balls to walk away from them, and unfortunately, Josh's testicles haven't grown to "walk away" proportion yet.

So how does one deal with devil-chicks like this in the meantime?  By playing video games with one's apartment-mate of course!  Josh and his buddy, Apollo, are quite a team, getting high while ridding the alien planet Tressor of the dangerous race: Plekisaurians.  But when Apollo says he's grown up and wants to do more adult things with his life, poor Josh finds himself with only one friend left, his overweight guinea pig, Mr. Tibbs!

Until one night when he's visited by the duo of Wolf and Tiger, a badass male-female team who claim to be from the future! They tell Josh the world is a week away from a pandemic that will kill 6 billion people.  Josh is the only one who can save them because he delivers sandwiches to the lab where they test guinea pigs, who are responsible for the virus.  "Deliver sandwiches?" Josh responds.  But he's a barista.  Wolf and Tiger look at each other, then double-check the address.  Oops, they're in the wrong apartment.  They meant to go to Apollo's apartment!

"Sorry," they say, and leave.  Bummed beyond all reasonable definitions of the word, Josh happens to run into Wolf, Tiger and Apollo the next day, when they're attacked by micro-chipped bad guys from the future called Replicants.  Apollo is killed, leaving Wolf and Tiger with no choice but to go with Plan B, Josh!

Unfortunately, while gearing up for the big attack on the lab, the police get a hold of Josh and explain to him that Wolf and Tiger are a couple of whack-jobs who escaped from the nuthouse.  They made up this whole thing about the future based on their obsession with the Terminator and Matrix franchises, and right now, they're being escorted back to Crazy City.

At this point, Josh doesn't know what to believe.  Are these two really crazy, in which case he should move on with his life?  Or in doing so, is he killing six billion people?  It isn't until Josh confirms that his own guinea pig - MR. TIBBS - is a secret spy for the replicants, that he shifts into high gear!  He must find a way to break Wolf and Tiger out of the nuthouse, come up with a plan to get into the lab, and then....well and then massacre hundreds of guinea pigs so they can't spread the disease.  All while his annoying ex-girlfriend keeps trying to ruin his life!

Okay, so let's get back to that character development thing I was talking about.  When you write a script, you want to ask yourself, "How is my main character going to develop?  How are they going to change?"  If they're not developing into anything new or different, that means they're staying stagnant.  And for the most part, stagnant is boring.

Overman uses a relationship to develop his hero, Josh, coupled with a flaw.  The relationship is obviously his one with Zoe.  He allows her to treat him like shit and is afraid to move on.  Overman cleverly creates a scenario at the end of the script, then, where Josh is at the lab with Zoe outside the contamination door.  He has a choice of either letting her in, which saves her but kills 6 billion people, or leaving her out there to die and moving on with his life.

Remember, this is one of the best ways of conveying development in your character.  You give them a choice near the end of the story that basically asks: "Have you overcome your flaw or what?"  (Spoiler) In this case, Josh leaves Zoe out there (thank God!) and he's officially developed into a better person.

BUT, I have a suspicion some of you don't care.  Why?  Because I know how a large reading contingent HATES loser wimpy main characters.  That's an issue that's long escaped me - how to straddle that line.  In order to develop  your character into a strong person, he must first be a weak person.  So how do you make someone weak but still likable?  I have to admit Josh was a little too much of a loser for my liking, but the rest of the story was so clever and funny that I still rooted for him.

That's the other thing I liked here - the story.  Most comedies I read have a VERY thin premise that's stretched to the gills.  A joke that should've ended on page 7 has been beaten to death for 110 never-ending pages.  Slackfi actually had a story that was carefully plotted.

Which reminds me - one of the telltale signs of a good writer is what they do with their midpoint.  The midpoint should shift things around a bit, turn what was essentially one story into a slightly different story.  I always use the example of Star Wars.  It starts out being about some people delivering a message, but then turns into those same people trying to destroy a huge base.  In the midpoint of Slackfi, we find out everything Josh has been told is a lie, and that Wolf and Tiger are in the nuthouse.  It changes from Josh following along to Josh having to come up with a plan to break out Wolf and Tiger and then save the world.

Anyway, this was a funny little script, and evidence of what I was saying Friday about storytelling being more important than writing.  The writing in Slackfi is nothing to write home about.  Many of the sentences are stilted and simplistic.  Overman also has a bad habit of doubling up on beats, making many moments redundant (i.e. we'll see Josh get rejected by Zoe and Overman will follow the action by writing something like, "Josh is stung by getting rejected by Zoe" - an unnecessary sentence).  But the STORY ITSELF for Slackfi is fun and keeps you reading.

So I recommend this script.  It's a cool little sci-fi project that's marketable enough to be brought to the big screen.  And I couldn't help but think it would be a perfect double-feature with amateur favorite Keeping Time!

[ ] what the hell did I just read?

[ ] wasn't for me

[x] worth the read

[ ] impressive

[ ] genius

What I learned: The midpoint is a great place for passive characters to become active.  -- Preferably, your hero will be active from the outset (like Indiana Jones).  That's because movies like active characters.  But some stories necessitate that the hero start off passive.  Starting off passive is fine.  What you don't want is for your hero to be passive for the entire script.  At some point, you want them to start driving the story.  Through Slackfi and Star Wars, I realized that the midpoint is a great place to do this.  Luke doesn't start taking charge until the midpoint (when he comes up with an idea for how to save Princess Leia) and Josh doesn't start taking charge until the midpoint (when he has to rescue Wolf and Tiger and come up with a plan to save the world).  So consider this option the next time you write a story that begins with a passive hero.

type='html'>Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: A geneticist who specializes in cloning risks his reputation and life's work to save his sick daughter.
About: The Keeper Project is a 2009 PAGE Award Bronze Prize winner in the Sci-Fi category. That makes it Top 31 out of 6300 entries. --- Every Friday, I review a script from the readers of the site. If you’re interested in submitting your script for an Amateur Review, send it in PDF form, along with your title, genre, logline, and why I should read your script to Carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Keep in mind your script will be posted in the review (feel free to keep your identity and script title private by providing an alias and fake title).
Writer: Michael Coleman Jr.
Details: 108 pages

You guys wanted Amateur Friday scripts with a little more luster behind them? Well I aim to please, senorita. But not without reservations. Someone asked me the other day what my favorite genre is, and I told them sci-fi. And then it hit me. Outside of Passengers, I don’t have a single sci-fi script in my Top 25. Wow, what’s up with that sci-fi writers? I dug deeper. There have been like zero good sci-fi specs in the market this year. Black Lister What Happened To Monday was the last sci-fi script that was actually ambitious AND had potential. But otherwise we’re getting a lot of “I Am Number 4” clones. Yuck. So let’s start bringing some game sci-fi writers. Send me your damn good sci-fi screenplays for Amateur Friday. In the meantime, let’s review this one.

Baltimore, 2027. Dr. Abraham Keeper, 53, treats his sickly 11 year old daughter, Abigail, at their home. Despite her fast-approaching expiration date, Abigail seems to be in high spirits. Maybe that’s because her father is a fantastic doctor, and he’s been doing cloning and stem cell research around the clock to save her life.

Keeper’s lab seems to be a hotbed for activity. The cloning councils and the government aren’t exactly in support of what he’s doing, and it seems like there’s a new angry group outside every day protesting his practice. He even has junkies hanging around for who knows what reason. One of those junkies, 25 year old Erica Blue, has a unique connection with Keeper. We know this because whenever she passes by, she gives him a really intense look.

Later on, when Erica takes off her shirt at home, we see that she has a SECOND MOUTH on the back of her neck. What the! That can’t be good. This country already has an obesity problem. Imagine if you had a second mouth. We don’t have to be math majors to figure out that one mouth plus another mouth means Erica used to be a patient of Keeper’s. Maybe even a daughter of sorts. But because of her deformity, he cast her away like a cheap tube of toothpaste.

Back at the labs, Keeper takes on a new assistant and the two push harder than ever to iron out the cloning process in time to save his poor Abigail. But with the boards and the government and the protestors squeezing him from every side, time is running out to do the saving.

The Keeper Project is thinking man’s sci-fi with a healthy dose of character development. This is definitely stronger than most of the sci-fi amateur scripts I read. And I can see why it finished high at Page. It’s actually similar in many ways to another high profile script that came out of Page, Maggie, which if you remember I reviewed awhile back.

However, there’s something missing here for me. Michael knows how to create a hook. He knows how to explore characters. He knows how to create tension and suspense and conflict. But the script lacked that elusive “wow factor.” That thing that makes a reader readjust the way he’s sitting so he can lean in a little closer and ingest that story even faster.

What is the “wow factor” exactly? Is Simon Cowell involved? The wow factor is a lot like love. You don’t know it until you feel it. But if I were referencing other sci-fi films, the wow factor would be the kung-fu in The Matrix. It would be the unexpected twists and turns in Moon. It would be the documentary angle that makes everything so real in District 9. It would be the tripiness of the dreams within dreams of Inception. It would be the “what the fuck is going on right now” feeling you got when you first read Source Code. It’s an edge. Something that separates your script from every other script out there. And while The Keeper Project is always strong, I kept waiting for it burst out of its shell and become great. But the lack of a wow factor kept it from happening.

The problem? I think it’s too safe of a story. I preach following the rules a lot here on this site. And I stick by that. You need to know the rules. But you also need to step off the beaten path every once in awhile and take chances. Break some of those damn rules. Because those deviations are what’s going to make your movie unlike any other movie out there. It’s your own personal edge. I was watching Stand By Me the other day, and in that movie, somewhere around the midpoint, the entire movie stops so that the main character can tell a story about a pie-eating contest where the hero barfs on everybody. It’s ten minutes long. It has no effect on the plot. There is no information in it that sets up later story developments. It’s just a random story. No screenwriting book would allow you to make that choice. But it worked. Because it wasn’t safe. Because we’re not expecting it.

The point I’m getting at is that The Keeper Project played things too safe. Human cloning has been explored a lot in sci-fi over the last 20 years. The “Clone Wars” were even mentioned in the original Star Wars, back in 1977. So if you’re going to write a story about human cloning, you gotta push the envelope. You gotta give us something new. Having a second mouth on the back of your character’s neck is a little freaky, sure. But I think audiences want more.

That’s not to say I didn’t appreciate the story. Like I said, there’s some actual character development here. That’s rare in sci-fi. I love that Michael actually dug into these characters. Also, while I wouldn’t call the surprise ending mind-blowing – it was telegraphed throughout most of the second act – it was pretty darn good.

I just think sci-fi comes with certain expectations. Audiences want to connect with interesting characters, sure. But they also want to leave that theater talking about that cool scene or that moment that wowed them. The Keeper Project too often pulls its punches.

There were some smaller issues I had as well. I didn’t understand why Erica Blue didn’t go to the press or the police once she was discarded by Keeper. Wouldn’t that have been the logical thing to do? Expose him? I thought Veronica (the assistant) was a messy character. Once she realized that this guy was cloning human beings, I wasn’t buying that she just went with it. Maybe if she’d been with him for ten years. But she just started like a week ago. I would’ve been like “fuck this,” and walked out. And finally, the one setback for using the stem cells from the clones to save his daughter seemed to be the physical deformities. Did that mean he wasn’t saving his daughter because she might have a little mouth on the back of her neck? Wouldn’t a 4 hour operation with Dr. Hollywood take care of that? I just couldn’t figure out why a tiny deformity took precedence over a daughter’s life.

Now despite these issues, this was way better than most of the scripts I review on Amateur Friday. I want to make that clear. I’m just being hard on it because I demand so much from my sci-fi. But I liked this better than Maggie, which won the Page competition. I’d just like to see a draft with a little more teeth, no pun intended. Anyway, read it and decide for yourself.

Script link: The Keeper Project

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

What I learned: Most of the time, you’ll want to use as few words as possible to describe a room or a space. Therefore you might describe a barbershop like this: “This barbershop is straight out of the 50s. Even the TV is black and white.” You want to convey the essence of the space in as few words as possible then move on. But the one time you do want to get into more detail, is when you describe your main character’s home. Why? Because a home tells us A LOT about a character. Is the place dirty? Clean? Modern? Old-fashioned? Filled with art? Bare? Big? Small? I think it’s okay to take a couple of paragraphs to describe a home. Just make sure that what you’re describing tells us about the character who lives there.