Five Scripts I've Read Too Many Times

    (Note: A better, more detailed version of this article I wrote can now be found here.)

Cumulatively, I’ve spent about two years as a script reader in Hollywood. My job was to read scripts, provide a synopsis, and write my opinion. Coverage, we call it. I did one stint at a TV development company and the other at an international distribution and management office. Two years isn’t a lot in the grand scheme of things, and I can’t share as much wisdom with you as a veteran reader can. However, I can say that I’ve seen patterns emerge. You read a script. You read another just like it. Then another, and another, and pretty soon you can guess ninety percent of the story in the first ten or so pages. Sometimes it’s a genre. Sometimes it’s subject matter or a character type, but as soon as a reader can identify certain formulas and habits in your script, you’ve already lost half the battle.

    Now, just to be clear, I don’t want to dissuade you from writing what you want to write. Of course every writer is different, every script has its own nuances, any subject can be interesting if handled correctly, and it’s absolutely true that I’ve encountered some of these scripts more than others because of random luck of the draw. If you’re passionate about your idea, go for it.

    All I’m trying to say is that there are certain habits you might want to avoid. In a perfect world, I would have showed up to work everyday with an open mind and a stupidly large grin on my face ready to love your script. Sadly, that was not the case. My job was to weed out the good from the bad, and chances are that I was tired and stressed out. I’m not saying readers can’t be won back. I’m saying people are petty. This is the reality you live in. Act accordingly. 

1. The Slow Burn Horror Movie

    A group of people go to a place: An abandoned mental hospital, a forest, an ancient ruin, any place that screams “You’re about to watch a horror movie.” We might spend some time with them before the trek begins. They fix equipment, talk to the locals, goof around, whatever. Something’s up, but the characters don’t know it yet or don’t believe it. The trek begins, and we get to know our group a little more in-depth. Usually, the group consists of a funny one, a weird one, one the writer doesn’t give a shit about, a hot girl, maybe a couple, maybe a local guide, and our protagonist. Our protagonist recently went through a hard but relatable life event, like a divorce or a death, and said protagonist struggles to cope with it.

    They keep going. More talking. Some scripts will have a flashback right around here where we see whatever happened to the protagonist that began his/her funk. They encounter some creepiness. Dead animals or weird ritual things. Someone might want to go back, but they’re persuaded to stay. They keep going. Finally, somewhere around the sixty or seventy page mark, the monster/the crazy person/the deformed whatever whatevers attack, someone in the group gets killed, and everything from here on in is free fall. They run from X, and X kills each member of the group one by one, saving the protagonist for last. 

I'd bet that The Descent launched a million bad slow burn horror movie scripts.

    This is the script I’ve read the most, and subsequently the most disappointing to come across. It’s easy to see why the formula exists. We get to know the characters a little more intimately right before they’re all killed, thus we’re more attached to our group and we’re rooting harder for their survival. However, unless you’re Aaron Sorkin, it doesn’t work when all the characters have done in act two is walk and talk. Good stories force their characters to make decisions and actually do things and cause verbs to happen. If we’re just waiting around for our characters to finally figure out that they’re in a horror movie, we’re not engaged. We’re not going to get that visceral feeling of watching a horror movie. Instead, we’ll be bored. 

    The main reason most of these scripts don’t work is simply a lack of effort. Horror is instinctive. It deals in the most gut level emotions: Fear, dread, insecurity, revulsion, literal horror. Unfortunately, this means that the genre attracts a lot of writers who rely on basic stimuli and back it up with nothing. There’s plenty of blood and tits, but not much else because of the incorrect assumption of, “Hey, it’s horror! Nobody expects anything more from us! It’s just about the thrills, bro!” 

    No genre is exempt. Fun is an emotion just like any other. It needs to be earned. 

    Luckily, dear reader, you are not one of these writers. You put the same amount of care and hard work into your horror script that you would for any other kind of movie because you respect horror, you respect yourself, and you respect your audience. You care.

2. MMA Scripts

    A guy holds down a day job and does amateur MMA fights at night. He has some sort of flaw: He’s prone to anger, he’s too prideful, he’s a loner, etc. Sometimes he has a kid. There’s a girl. She’s usually a teacher, or really anything that’s the opposite of an MMA fighter. Something nurturing. They have a spark. Circumstances conspire, and now the guy needs money in order to save his house or pay for his father’s medical procedure. Luckily, there’s a tryout for a pro-level competition with a high cash prize. He barely makes the cut, but somebody believes in him and agrees to coach him. There’s a training montage that ends with the coach giving the fighter some really obvious metaphor about fighting. “It’s just you and your demons in the ring” or something like that. The first fight goes well. Guy and girl bond. The second fight goes even better, and now he’s going to the championship match! 

    However, it’s around here where his flaw gets the better of him and he alienates the girl and the coach. After some introspection, he meets with the coach again. He may cry out “Fighting’s all I got!” or “I’ve been fighting all my life!” Either way, he wins the coach back. In the championship fight, our guy must fight some giant dick with a mean reputation. (We’ve had an encounter or two with him before. We hate him.) The fight doesn’t go well at first, but the coach reminds the fighter of his greatness. He lands a punch, then a kick, and soon enough he’s won the fight! The crowd goes wild, the girl inexplicably forgives him, and there’s a kiss. If the guy has a kid, he’s earned his status as the kid’s role model. The end. Everyone’s happy, you leave the theater smiling, and a few months later someone you love dies. 

Warrior did it. Now, for some reason, they're still trying to do it.

    I think it’s absolutely possible to write an interesting MMA script. I have yet to read one. It’s another case of torpor. Take the above paragraphs. Change the word “MMA” to “boxing.” Sound familiar? That’s because a lot of writers seem to think that if you repeat the boxing movie formula, but set it in the world of MMA, then you’ve done enough and you can call it a day. You have not. If you want your MMA script to stand out, you either have to find something new in the formula or leave it behind entirely.

    Most people try the former, because weirdly enough, I’ve read a lot of MMA scripts with bizarre variations and settings. I’ve read post-apocalyptic MMA scripts. I’ve read science fiction MMA scripts. One time, I even read a fantasy MMA script. (Don’t ask.) Sometimes the writer will call it something other than MMA, but even when that happens, the script usually goes incredibly far out of its way to make sure you know what it’s going for. Most of the time, they still fight in an octagon. 

    Even with the apparent dormant mental illness of their writers, these scripts don’t stand out because they still repeat the same basic story steps. Breaking free of the formula means more than just changing the circumstances. It doesn’t matter where or when your MMA story takes place. As long as your repeating the template, you’re never going to stand out. Or at least not in a good way.

3. Trio of Female Friends Have a Crazy Night Out

    I’m not coming out of this one without sounding like an asshole, and for that, I apologize ahead of time. Of all the repetitive screenplays I have read, this one has the ugliest implications and demonstrates how little progress we’ve made when it comes to writing women. In my (sort of) defense, I didn’t write these scripts. A lot of them were written by men, but plenty were written by women as well. That said, I’m going to try as hard as I can not to sound insensitive. I’m probably going to fail. I’m sorry.

    The script establishes our three friends. One of them has a gender neutral name, like Riley or Sam or Blake. Usually all three are white, but in some cases there’s a heavily tokenized minority. Either way, they all have different hair colors. The first friend we meet is the "hot mess." She has a ton of meaningless sex, drinks whiskey instead of vodka, and by golly, she just can’t grow up. Something traumatic in her past made her this way, and the other two friends have to tiptoe around it until it gets brought up at the big fight in the end of act two. The second friend is the uptight professional “woman who is obsessed with her career and is no fun at all.” (Shout out to Mindy Kaling.) She wears her business suit out, she’s always responding to an email on her phone, and she just doesn’t know how to cut loose like she used to. Finally, there’s the friend who’s about to get married or just got divorced. This is usually the only thing that defines her in any serious way, and she’s also the reason they’re going out because it’s time to celebrate!

    The night starts slow but picks up soon after the hot mess gets bored and decides to kick things up a notch. This usually involves drugs. Shenanigans ensue. The professional friend goes wild. The friend who’s about to get married or just got divorced makes out with someone. Finally, things get a little too out of hand and there’s a fight. The professional friend will call out the hot mess for not growing up. The hot mess will imply that the professional friend has transformed into a boring drone. The third friend will just sort of... be there. Things will get personal and for the first time, the horrible thing that happened in the hot mess’s past will come to light. They spend some time apart, but eventually they apologize and their friendship grows stronger than ever as they go to the wedding or whatever. 

    There are plenty of “trio’s night out” scripts about men, and they’re just as bad. However, I think the clichés about female trios are more specifically trite, and thus more egregious. This is a rant that’s been written many times, but it’s always worth repeating: Female characters deserve more. They shouldn’t be supplicants, they shouldn’t be tropes, and the struggles women endure shouldn’t feel cliché. Remember the hot mess’s horrible event from her past? Nine times out of ten, it’s an abortion. (That number’s probably gone down since Bachelorette.) 

    The worst feeling I’ve ever had as a reader was once again reaching the abortion reveal and feeling absolutely nothing. I don’t know what it’s like to get an abortion. I never will. I have to imagine though that the experience leaves some sort of emotional scar, even if only a tiny one. If I read it in a script, it should mean something. I shouldn’t be thinking, “Great. Another one.”

    In the end, this is an article about laziness. Though there aren’t a whole lot of cases in screenwriting where laziness can be offensive, this is definitely one of them. Readers do not read your scripts in a vacuum. If you turned in an uninspired script, that’s what I told my boss. If you turned in an uninspired script that’s also offensive, that’s also what I told my boss but in a much more vitriolic fashion. However, if you gave me something that didn’t make me feel like I was contributing to the sexist attitude of Hollywood, that’s when I’d go to bat for you. Comport yourselves with a bit of dignity and grace, my fellow writers. It goes a long way.

4. Formula One Racing/The Grand Prix

    The final two categories focus less on overly formulaic storytelling and more about my tastes. I firmly believe that as long as you tell an effective story, the subject of your script doesn’t really matter. I didn’t think the rise of McDonald’s would be interesting, then I read the script for the upcoming movie The Founder and loved it. (We’ll see how the movie turns out, but for the record, it’s a great script.) However, there are some subjects I can’t seem to connect with, and one such example is Formula One racing.         

    Generally speaking, these scripts take place in the late 1960s and mid-1970s. The details of the stories themselves differ, but normally involve people like Enzo Ferrari, Mario Andretti, Jackie Stewart, and other famous racers and managers. During my tenure as a reader, I’ve read about eight Formula One scripts, and I didn’t like any of them. It took me a while to figure out why. After all, Formula One racing is incredibly dangerous and involves a lot of people crashing and dying in spectacular wrecks and fireballs.

    I think the problem is all the stuff between the crashing and the racing. First of all, these scripts tend to get bogged down in the minutia of Formula One racing and car maintenance. As someone who once spent multiple hours trying to find the perfect amount of water pressure in my kitchen faucet, I understand the joy of digging deep into something only you seem to care about. I actually like it when writers go into detail, but it’s always better to move the story forward than spend time discussing the fine points. Consider your audience: I may want to find a water pressure high enough to quickly fill my Brita filter and remove grease from my plates, but low enough so that the water doesn’t splash against my unfortunately shallow sink and soak my t-shirt. That doesn’t mean you want to hear about it, or look at a picture.

Awwww yeeeaaaah.

    If that weren’t enough, the characters in these scripts never really stand out. The drivers are often these upper crust ladies’ men driven by arrogance, ego, and pride who spend a lot of time antagonizing each other for no apparent reason. I live in Los Angeles. I can throw a pebble out of my apartment and hit ten ego driven white dudes without even aiming. I can only mine so much from characters whose only purpose in racing is to chase an adrenaline rush or feel the momentary gratification of winning before rubbing it in somebody’s face.

    However, I think the biggest problem is that these movies are basically biopics with standard biopic story problems. The worst biopics don’t have stories. They have a sequence of events in chronological order. Formula One movies often fall for the same traps. “Billy told his dying father that he wanted to race Formula One cars, so he claws his way to the top, but then he’s stripped of his title for cheating, so therefore he re-evaluates his goals and wins the championship race fair and square” is a story. It’s not a particularly interesting story, but it’s a story nonetheless. “Billy was a pompous Formula One driver who had a long career and won lots of races, then died one day” is not.  

     I’d be willing to bet that a Formula One script can work. There just needs to be more to it, or at the very least, there needs to be more to it than some chiseled dudes driving fast and taunting each other.

5. EDM/DJ Movies

    God fucking damn it. 

    Ok.

    Older generations of Hollywood businessmen discovered that EDM is a thing. EDM may be a little past its prime, but they know it’s not really going away. They say something to themselves along the lines of “Hey. People like EDM. We make EDM movie. EDM people pay money.” Shortly after they’re done beating a rival tribesman with a club, they hire some suicidally depressed writer to write them a script, and it’s always some hilarious mess. (Or at least it would be a hilarious mess if I wasn’t the one who had to read them.) I’ve encountered these scripts at both of my reading gigs, and while these are the ones I’ve read the least, quality wise, they are by far the worst. (Note: “Least” still means over five times.)

    First of all, there’s a fundamental misunderstanding that EDM and DJ’ing are the same thing. They are not. EDM is composed music expressed by an artist. DJs are professionals who are able to select particular music for a crowd and control the atmosphere of a room. To you and me, this may seem obvious. However, these writers and producers don’t seem to know the difference, so they often market their scripts as “EDM musicals” or “electronic operas” when in reality, their scripts are about regular DJ’ing.

    Secondly, as much as producers try to say otherwise, these are not musicals. Whenever these scripts write the music into the scenes, the songs themselves don’t drive the story forward in the same way they do in an actual musical. The songs just play over montages and club scenes just like any normal movie score.

    (That said, I think it would be pretty funny to write a traditional musical, them cut out the songs and replace them with douchey club music. Imagine: Cornelius looks into Irene’s eye, they hold hands, and THAT’S WHEN THE FUCKING BASS DROPS MOTHERFUCKER!)

    I said I wasn’t going to discourage you from writing whatever it is you want to write, but I might have to go back on that and say don’t write an EDM movie or a DJ movie. If you want to do a traditional musical and put some EDM into the soundtrack, that could work. I just don’t see a movie that’s specifically about composing EDM or becoming a DJ actually being successful, at least from a narrative standpoint. Even if composing EDM weren’t just sitting at a computer, or watching someone DJ in a narrative context was interesting, or We Are Your Friends didn’t bomb spectacularly, or EDM fans would consider seeing it which they probably won’t, it’s still just…just…

    …Listen. Please don't do it. Do not write that screenplay. Seriously, don't write that script. Just don't.