What you’re trying to do as a friend or a manager or agent in giving notes on a script, or providing your view in any case, is to help the writer accomplish what they’re trying to accomplish. As a studio exec, you’re trying to get to the best pilot or movie. Hopefully, these two goals are basically the same. Below, I will mostly write from the point of view of an exec working with a strong writer.
The first thing is to make sure that we have a shared sense of the goals and then to tell the writer, in your opinion, where things stand. In a nice way. It is helpful to refocus on the North Star — our shared goals for the project — and hit on the ways in which this draft is living up to the dream. Hopefully, we are making good progress!
One should never feel obligated to have a lot of notes. If it’s great, feel free to have none. I disapprove of the common practice of giving many very detailed notes until such time as you’re actually going to shoot, if ever. Many of the detailed notes people give are taster’s choice and should properly be within the domain of the writer. The theory of the long notes doc (which is very typical at studios) is that there are 100 individual errors. That’s usually not the situation. Usually if there’s a problem, there is one big problem.
I don’t know what this character wants.
I am not relating to this character.
These just aren’t real people
Your theme is inconsistent because of the choices made by your lead character in the third act.
These character decisions don’t seem entirely believable.
Once you’ve discussed the big problem(s), there is no need to get into little issues. Those things will come and go along the way.
The fundamental things are of course the basics. I’m not going to go through these in detail because Robert McKee wrote a huge book about it. Aristotle's Poetics is also very helpful. But these are the fundamental story elements.
Do we believe these characters and this world?
Does the narrative obey the rules of the world?
Does your character want or need something?
Do we root for the character? (Much better than “Is the character sympathetic/likable?”)
Are there stakes?
Does the character grow and change?
Does the structure make sense?
Are there emotional turns?
Are the villain and the protagonist a match?
Does the denouement satisfy the imbalance of the first act and the implicit needs of the characters?
That’s not enough for greatness but that’s the basic architecture that will make a house stand up. But, often I find that getting to greatness means going beyond the basics and that’s what today is about.
I think there are four types of scripts: (1) bad scripts, (2) solid scripts, (3) good scripts, and (4) scripts that must be made. Our goal today is to get from (3) to (4). The trouble with execs and producers who are not very good usually is not that they can’t tell bad scripts from good, it’s that they can’t tell a 3 (good) from a 4 (great) and they don’t have any ideas about how a script might get from 3 to 4. Other than that, they’re very helpful!
Here are some things that I have found can be worth discussing that go beyond the basic architecture.
A Star
As I said here, you do well to create a memorable, starring role. You, the audience, and the actors, want someone extraordinary. They might seem ordinary in many respects but in some way they aren’t, which is why we are going to find them interesting. This could be Napoleon Dynamite. It could be Joel in Risky Business. It could be Tracy Flick in Election. But it has to be someone who is, in some way, special.
As a reader, it can be easy to overlook the latent opportunity of a too-average character. You might just put a script down and feel that you “didn’t respond” to the material. Something is just not “jumping off the page.” But what if we really pushed the character? Might you respond then?
It’s not unusual for writers to want to write about themselves or write about something “real.” Sometimes this can result in characters who are too real and whom actors aren’t yearning to play. Because it is boring.
Look at the Charlie Kaufman character in Adaptation, one of my favorite films. Is he extraordinary? Unforgettable. He says:
Do I have an original thought in my head? My bald head. Maybe if I were happier, my hair wouldn’t be falling out. Life is short. I need to make the most of it. Today is the first day of the rest of my life. I’m a walking cliché. I really need to go to the doctor and have my leg checked. There’s something wrong. A bump. The dentist called again. I’m way overdue. If I stop putting things off, I would be happier. All I do is sit on my fat ass. If my ass wasn’t fat I would be happier. I wouldn’t have to wear these shirts with the tails out all the time. Like that’s fooling anyone. Fat ass. I should start jogging again. Five miles a day. Really do it this time. Maybe rock climbing. I need to turn my life around. What do I need to do? I need to fall in love. I need to have a girlfriend. I need to read more, improve myself. What if I learned Russian or something? Or took up an instrument? I could speak Chinese. I’d be the screenwriter who speaks Chinese and plays the oboe. That would be cool. I should get my hair cut short. Stop trying to fool myself and everyone else into thinking I have a full head of hair. How pathetic is that? Just be real. Confident. Isn’t that what women are attracted to? Men don’t have to be attractive. But that’s not true. Especially these days. Almost as much pressure on men as there is on women these days. Why should I be made to feel I have to apologize for my existence? Maybe it’s my brain chemistry. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with me. Bad chemistry. All my problems and anxiety can be reduced to a chemical imbalance or some kind of misfiring synapses. I need to get help for that. But I’ll still be ugly though. Nothing’s gonna change that.
Adaptation (Charlie Kaufman)
That’s pushing the character. How neurotic is he? He’s a 10. Now what if you wrote it where he was just 6 out of 10 neurotic so he said “I felt a bit grumpy and fat, honestly.” If you read a draft with that line, you might have zipped right past it. But that line is both the problem and the opportunity. He’s mildly (uninterestingly, averagely) neurotic. That’s boring. We are trying for memorable. Can we push that?
You lookin at me?
Taxi Driver (Paul Schraeder)
Please baby, pleasebaby, please baby, baby baby please!
She’s Gotta Have It (Spike Lee)
I have a horrible feeling that I’m a greedy, perverted, selfish, apathetic, cynical, depraved, morally bankrupt woman who can’t even call herself a feminist.
Fleabag (Phoebe Waller-Bridge)
Homer: Marriage is like a coffin and each kid is another nail.
The Simpsons, How I Spent My Strummer Vacation (Mike Scully)
Dear Lord Jesus, I do not often speak with you and ask for things, but now I really must insist that you help me win the election tomorrow because I deserve it and Paul Metzler doesn't, as you well know. I realize that it was your divine hand that disqualified Tammy Metzler and now I'm asking that you go that one last mile and make sure to put me in office where I belong so that I may carry out your will on earth as it is in heaven. Amen.
Election (Tom Perrotta, Alexander Payne, Jim Taylor)
Charlie Black: The term 'bourgeois' has almost always been - been one of contempt. Yet it is precisely the - the bourgeoisie which is responsible for - well, for nearly everything good that has happened in our civilization over the past four centuries. You know the French film, "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie"? When I first heard that title I thought,
"Finally, someone's gonna tell the truth about the bourgeoisie." What a disappointment. It would be hard to imagine a less fair or accurate portrait.
Sally Fowler: Well, of course. Buñuel's a surrealist.
Despising the bourgeoisie is part of their credo.
Nick Smith: Where do they get off?
Charlie Black: But the truth is, the bourgeoisie does have a lot of charm.
Nick Smith: Of course it does. The surrealists were just a lot of social climbers.
Metropolitan (Whit Stillman)
Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.
- Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
I am a poet.
What do I do? I write.
And how do I live? I live.
In my carefree poverty
I squander rhymes
and love songs like a lord.
When it comes to dreams and visions
and castles in the air,
I’ve the soul of a millionaire.
La Boheme (Giacomo Puccini)
The question to ask is — is this character fully realized? What if he or she were even more narcissistic or neurotic or aggressive or ambitious or whatever it is? What’s the characteristic that makes this character most distinctive? Most different from other people? Can we lean into that?
Create a memorable character.
The Big Truth
Every movie reveals a secret. The story leads up to the final moment of honesty. What is, at bottom, the big truth of the situation that must be revealed?
All great stories have a dramatic question — are they going to wind up together? But beneath that is a secret: what in his past makes him unable to commit? In horror movies it’s often — what sin from the past has brought all of this upon these people?
If the movie doesn’t reveal a truth, maybe we haven’t dug deep into the characters yet.
Rosebud.
Citizen Kane (Herman Mankiewicz, Orson Welles)
I am your father.
The Empire Strikes Back (George Lucas)
She’s my sister and my daughter!
Chinatown (Robert Towne)
I wasn't even present in my own life, and now I don't have it, and I'm never going to have it.
Birdman (Alejandro Inarritu, Nicolas Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris)
I just keep losing. I mean some people just supposed to lose? For balance in the universe? I mean, like, are there just some people on Earth who supposed to be here just to make it easier for the winners? Like, really.
Atlanta, The Big Bang (Donald Glover)
You can’t handle the truth.
A Few Good Men (Aaron Sorkin)
What are we saying here?
Sometimes it can bring a story home and help make decisions to figure out why this all matters. In the end, what are we trying to say?
Philadelphia Story has a theme, which is that people are fallible and we are better off accepting that. As C.K. Dexter Haven says, “You'll never be a first-class human being or a first-class woman until you've learned to have some regard for human frailty.” One could imagine a draft of Philadelphia Story where that theme hadn’t been pulled out yet. Where Tracy Lord (Katherine Hepburn’s character) just likes this guy and then that guy and then decides to marry this one … just because she likes them. And you’d be impressed by the characterization and witty dialogue. You’d think the script was “good.” But is it missing something? A point? A theme?
Being heavy handed is a risk but being wishy washy and avoiding the obvious import of the story is a risk, too.
Make the World Textured and Real
Do these people seem real? Is this a real subculture that exists in the world? Even if it is a bit exaggerated? Do I believe this scene?
Generic families such as one often encounters on TV often don’t register as real or they can even register as false, which takes the audience out of the narrative immediately.
This is often tied to food and meals, one way in which The Godfather felt like so much more than a gangster flick.
The family in Transparent was a real family. I felt like I could drive over and have dinner with them.
We come from shtetl people. You’re grandma Rose actually ate lettuce with her bare hands.
Transparent (Joey Soloway)
Or other social rituals such as games.
All of these things can transform a character from an outline of a person with two dimensional motivations to a fully realized character that the audience invests in.
Reach for the Stars
The trouble with good stories is that they’re good. But good doesn’t win awards or make a lot of money. We are looking for great. You are looking to be Mozart not Salieri. Imagine the stories taken to their limit. Imagine the conflict taken to its maximum revelation.
Jesus is regarded by many as the son of God but the authorities oppose him. He is betrayed by a follower and after much wrangling amongst authorities in the city, it is decided that he will be crucified. On the cross, he says “God why have you forsaken me?” And he dies.
Good story.
Three days later he rises from the dead and dines with his apostles.
Great story.
Catherine Earnshaw lives in the Yorkshire moors and loves Heathcliff, an orphan. Whatever our souls are made out of, his and mine are the same. When it becomes clear she will have to marry Edgar Linton, Heathcliff runs away saying If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn’t love as much in eighty years as I could in a day. Years later, Heathcliff returns, having made a fortune. Seeing that Catherine is married, he unhappily marries Catherine’s husband’s sister. Catherine becomes ill with grief and dies. Her husband dies later and Heathcliff takes over Wuthering Heights.
Interesting story.
Heathcliff digs up Catherine’s grave when she dies, wishing her ghost to haunt him. Heathcliff says he is haunted by Catherine. He dies in her room. We frame the story with a visit from Catherine Earnshaw’s ghost. The locals say they see the ghosts of Heathcliff and Catherine on the moors — together at last.
Whoa!
So thinking about the script you’re giving notes on, is there something about this story that is merely solid? Let me ask it another way. Is there a scene you actually love? That you know can’t lose? That you just want to send into the Oscar voters right now?
Sometimes everything is correct, but it just isn’t singing. It isn’t burning with the fire of a thousand suns. It might need an inspired twist, a heightened confrontation, to take it to the next level.
I usually won’t pitch the actual twist or the heightened conflict. But sometimes you can say — I feel like Catherine and Heathcliff have an epic love story for the ages. Is there something we can add that would shine a light on that more for the audience and bring out more of the emotion?
Bring out the Knives
This is related to Reach for the Stars but is more tactical. Sometimes you have emotion but somehow the script is too held back, embarrassed or polite to really become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds. You must have the final conflict and it must be total. It must lay everything on the line.
Manchester by the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan)
Louise: Then get out, go anywhere you want, go to a hotel, go live with her, and don't come back. Because, after 25 years of building a home and raising a family and all the senseless pain that we have inflicted on each other, I'm damned if I'm going to stand here and have you tell me you're in love with somebody else. Because this isn't a convention weekend with your secretary, is it? Or - or some broad that you picked up after three belts of booze. This is your great winter romance, isn't it? Your last roar of passion before you settle into your emeritus years. Is that what's left for me? Is that my share? She gets the winter passion, and I get the dotage? What am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to sit at home knitting and purling while you slink back like some penitent drunk? I'm your wife, damn it. And, if you can't work up a winter passion for me, the least I require is respect and allegiance. I hurt. Don't you understand that? I hurt badly.
Network (Paddy Chayefsky)
Sometimes, in a draft, you have a lot of implicit conflict but it is expressed with a whimper not with a bang. It’s worth discussing whether there should be a bigger bang.
Focus
This is kind of an easy one and could be filed under “basics.” Sometimes a script is fat and all over the place. It’s got everybody’s life story and all the backstory and a few side quests and a really long discourse on whales. But it has a beautiful succinct core inside festooned with all of this other stuff. Sometimes the key is to just cut it down to the core story that matters.
Energy, Style, Scope and Chaos
We want our real lives to be orderly. But this is a movie (or a TV show). The audience wants it to be big and surprising. Things are happening. Quickly. Outside. Can you have a confined and contemplative film? Of course. But, on average, it is fair to wonder whether we are going big enough and moving with enough spontaneity and surprise. This can mean explosions or it can mean surprising and funny juxtapositions, but what it probably doesn’t mean is a long series of realistic, indoor one on one conversations.
Birdman (Alejandro Inarritu, Nicolas Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris)
Along similar lines, it is best to cultivate a vision for a unique style for the film. This tends to be more of an issue with writer-directors.
8 Sequence Structure
At one point at USC, the “eight sequence” model for screenplay structure was quite popular. I think it can be helpful to think of a larger story in terms of eight or so reels or mini-movies because it helps make act two seem like less of an interminable slog and it serves as a reminder that it is not enough to have an interesting premise and an interesting conclusion. One must have, essentially, a series of great sequences, each with its little dramatic question, revelation and climax.
I love you but can you become totally different?
OK sometimes you read a script and you think it could be great but only if it becomes very, very different. The classic examples are Beverly Hills Cop (originally a straight actioner, rewritten for Eddie Murphy) and Pretty Woman (originally dark, also rewritten as a comedy). This is a pretty severe conversation and I would only have it if you’re pretty sure and either the studio or a friend and you believe the writer is pretty open minded! But when it works, it works!
What’s not Helpful?
Don’t say things that amount to “can the writing be better?” Anything that is vague or general and just asks for betterness is not helpful. People can respond to particular ideas.
Good luck
RP
Great read! Thanks.