Those of you who read the first part of this article will know that to celebrate this 150th issue of Understanding Screenwriting, I am revealing my top 8 reviews.

These are not necessarily items about the best films I have reviewed, and the last of them is one that I –  but not millions of others – thought was awful. But at the risk of sounding other than my true humble self, I have selected items I think I wrote well on, as I mention more than once in my brief introductions.

The items selected raise interesting questions about screenwriting, and show the solutions the writers did or did not come up with. As you will see, I write about films in different ways, which I’ve always thought was part of the franchise. That should help you expand how you think about movies.

Ready? OK, time to count down from 4 to 1.

#4 Trainwreck

I wanted to include one item on a romantic comedy, but rather than pick an ordinary one, I’m going with Trainwreck, since the item deals with Amy Schumer’s other writing, as well as the film, which gives you an idea of the difference between writing for sketch television and a feature.

Once or Twice in Love with Amy

I have written, either directly or indirectly, about the importance of starting a comedy with a good laugh. Listen to Tangerine’s “Merry Christmas Eve, bitch,” for an example.

Here it’s a short scene in which Gordon is explaining to his two children, Amy and Kim, that “Monogamy isn’t realistic.” That’s O.K. as a funny line when delivered to nine and five year old kids, but what makes the scene is his explanation, using Kim’s doll as an example, of how things can go wrong in a marriage. It hilariously develops the idea, and by the end of it we are willing to follow the writer anywhere she wants to take us.

For me that was a good thing, because I have not been a fan of Amy Schumer. I’ve seen bits of her television show, but the gags and sketches seem undercooked.

I liked the idea of the Last Fuckable Day (the last days actresses can play characters studio executives think guys will want to, well, you know), but the sketch seemed haphazard, as though Schumer and her team thought just putting her, Tina Fey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Patricia Arquette together was enough. It wasn’t. A lot of other material on the show seemed grossly sexual just to be grossly sexual.

The screenplay for Trainwreck is a massive leap forward for Schumer as a writer. There is a real focus on the characters. Schumer plays the adult Amy, a single woman devoted to booze and screwing around.

We get a lot of both in the early parts of the film, and while some of it could have been cut or at least condensed, it does establish the character and her attitudes towards men and sex. The adult Kim is the opposite of Amy, happily married, although the script makes clear her husband is very bland. The scenes between the two sisters really crackle with both conflict and love.

Amy is a magazine writer with no interest in sports who is sent to interview a doctor who treats big-time athletes. Aaron is a nice guy, whom Amy does not know what to do with, since she appears never to have dealt with someone like that. He likes her, and she doesn’t know how to deal with that, either. She has trouble dealing with somebody she does not feel she deserves.

Schumer’s script gets deeper into the characters and brings off late in the picture a shift to a more serious tone, first at a funeral, then in an argument between Amy and Aaron. Because we like both these characters we feel for them. Schumer then comes up with a terrific ending involving Madison Square Garden, cheerleaders (we thought they were just there for cheerleader jokes, but look how Schumer sets up something more), and a trampoline. It’s nice to see a movie ending without a courtroom scene, a chase, or somebody running to the airport to keep their love from leaving.

Schumer appears to be great at writing reactions for the characters, not only her own, but the others. I say “appears” because this film is one of those where sorting out the contributions of the writer and the director is next to impossible.

How many of the reactions were there in her first drafts, and how many were the result of the director pushing her? The director is Judd Apatow, who knows comedy, not only those he writes and directs himself (The 40 Year Old Virgin [2003]), but those he produces for others (Bridesmaids [2011]).

How much of Schumer’s improvement as a writer comes from working with Apatow, and how much of it is coming from Schumer realizing the demands of the feature form require the kind of discipline and focus she does not have on the TV show?

And how much of this being the best film Apatow has directed in a while come from the fact that he is working with some other writer’s vision, and not just indulging in the narcissistic navel-gazing we saw in Funny People (2009) and This is 40 (2011)? I hope those questions don’t keep you up at night, but you might want to think about them as you watch the film again. And again.

#3 Bridge of Spies

If Kings Row is a good look at collaboration in the olden days, Bridge of Spies is an equally good look at collaboration today.

Beautifully…Written.

As this film began to heave into view, I checked the writing credits and was gobsmacked to learn that two of the three writers on it were the kings of snark, the Coen Brothers.  But, but, the director is Steven Spielberg, who has never let even a smidgen of snark into his films.  The Coen Brothers are the anti-Spielberg.  How the hell could that possibly work?  Very well, thank you very much.

I knew absolutely nothing about Matt Charman when I saw the film early in its run, so naturally I begin to dig up information about him.  The IMDb is not much help, since most of his credits are in British television, but he is also a British playwright who has had several plays produced in London. As the film has opened, there have been several interviews with Charman (imagine that, interviewing the screenwriter who is not even the “name” one).   Two of the best are at Awardsdaily (which was actually done a year ago) and of course here at CS. 

Charman had always been fascinated by America in the Sixties and came across a reference to James Donovan in a book on President Kennedy.  The reference was that Kennedy had sent Donovan, a lawyer, to negotiate a prisoner release with Fidel Castro, but there was a footnote that mentioned Donovan had defended accused Russian spy Rudolf Abel in the Fifties, and then later helped arrange the swap of Abel in Berlin for Francis Gary Powers, the pilot of a U-2 spy plane the Russians had shot down. 

Charman decided that story about Donovan would make a better film, so he researched it extensively, talking to Donovan’s family, although he does not mention, nor does the film include in its credits, Donovan’s 1964 book Strangers on a Bridge.  Well, maybe Charman just wanted to go for an award for original rather than adapted screenplay.

He eventually worked up a 20-minute pitch.  His agents got him a round of meetings in Hollywood, probably because of his television work.  You don’t get pitch meetings unless you have shown you can write a script. 

The pitch was obviously great, and hooked the interest of several studios; the executive at DreamWorks not only liked it, but felt Spielberg would love it.  So he had Spielberg call Charman, who was back in London by then, and had Charman tell him the story.  Spielberg asked him how long it was take him to write it.  According to one interview in 2014 Charman says he wrote it in eight weeks, but in a later 2015 one he says five weeks.  Writers tend to make stories better the more they work on them. 

Spielberg gave him notes, and the second draft of the screenplay got them Tom Hanks to play Donovan and Mark Rylance to play Abel.  So when critics go on and on about it being a Coen Brothers script, remember that Charman’s drafts got the big guns interested.  Charman provided the structure (a two act structure, not a three: the first act is the trial, the second the prisoner swap), and the characters of Donovan and Abel.  So what are the Coens’ contributions to the script?

The Coens had heard about the project and thought it was just at the pitch stage.  They have started to move from just doing scripts for themselves to direct to writing for others, although last year’s Unbroken is not one of their career highlights. 

So they talked to Spielberg, who had been one of the producers on their 2010 film True Grit, and Spielberg thought they could help with the dialogue. They came in, made a pass or two at the script, which then went back to Charman for a final draft.  Charman was delighted to be working with the Coens as well as the other big kids on the film, calling it a great film school. 

Mark Rylance is quoted in an article in Den of Geek about the Coens’ work, “It was absolutely fascinating to then see what the Coen Brothers’ imagination does to a script, and I expect Steven’s as well in working hand-in-hand with them. My image for it is going to a very great masseur and feeling all of the blood and energy is going right to their fingertips… It wasn’t a different story. What mattered creatively was Matt’s body [of the story]. But they just really got the spine in place and massaged it, and clipped a few things. And it felt even more alive and whole.”

Hanks felt similarly about the Coens’ version of his first scene, where Donaldson is negotiating with another insurance lawyer and gets the better of him. 

It is the tone that the Coens bring not only to the dialogue, but the way it tells us about the characters.  Early in his career Spielberg was less interested in character than he was in actors, but he has matured and become more interested in people, as in 2012’s Lincoln. 

Spielberg has never been particularly good at comedy (1941 [1979] anyone?), although Catch Me If You Can (2002) is an exception.  Here he seems to work well with the Coens’ dialogue and characterization, playing it as a counterpoint to the dramatic intensity of the story.

One interesting aspect of the script, and I can only conclude it is deliberate on the part of all the creators, is that while Donovan, Abel, some of the American lawyers (look at the private meeting of Donovan and the judge on the question of sentencing), the East Germans, and the Russians are all vividly portrayed, the CIA and FBI people are almost totally emotionally blank. 

I think that is a comment by the filmmakers on how that kind of work can damage your humanity.  It reminded me how Welles and Mankiewicz in Citizen Kane (1941) keep the new journalists of News on the March in the shadows, but showed the older print journalists are a more vivid and human bunch.

At the end of the film titles tell us what happened to Abel, Powers, and Donovan.  I can see why Charman tells us the story he does, but the titles mention that because of his success at this mission, President Kennedy asked Donovan to go to Cuba. 

Donovan was to try to get 1,100 prisoners released.  Donovan got 9,700 released.  I can easily imagine a Bridge of Spies II: The Cuban Years.

#2 San Andreas

As I cheerfully admit in the item, San Andreas is by no means a good movie, but it is a lot of fun. It was also a lot of fun to write about, which is not always true of much, much better movies.

Last Year’s Regularly Scheduled Earthquake Movie

According to the IMDb, there have been 658 movies that deal with, in some way, earthquakes. Looking over at least part of the list, I think in many cases the earthquake material is relatively minor. In some, it’s a big part of the movie. San Andreas is one of the latter. In both Old San Francisco (1927) and the better known San Francisco (1936), the 1906 quake is simply used as a big climax to the more personal stories of the characters.

Earthquake (1974) is, as the title suggests, about an earthquake. The first drafts of the script were written by Mario Puzo between the first two Godfather movies and the later ones by George Fox.

Fox wrote the “making of” book on the film. He said that Puzo came up with marvelous characters but with a lot of unfilmable stuff. Fox came on the picture and worked with Mark Robson, the director, who had lived in Los Angeles for years and knew what he wanted to destroy in the film.

One of Robson’s chief targets was the Hollywood dam. But when do you destroy it? For that matter, where do you put the earthquake?

Fox’s solution was to put the earthquake in the middle and the dam bursting at the end after being weakened by the quake. It was a smart way to go: Fox starts with some foreshocks, then hits you with the big one in the middle, then watches everybody deal with it until the dam breaks. The film is like many of the big disaster movies of the seventies with a whole group of diverse characters involved.

Cuse’s screenplay for San Andreas splits the difference between San Francisco and Earthquake. Like the earlier film, he focuses on a limited number of characters. The script gives us a great introductory scene for its hero, Ray Gaines. He is a rescue helicopter pilot for Los Angeles County, and in the opener, he almost single-handedly saves a young girl whose car has gone over a cliff. We know Ray is going to be great in a crisis.

Then we get into the earthquake world. Whereas in Earthquake, you only had foreshocks, here we are dealing with seismologist Dr. Lawrence Hayes of Cal Tech. He has worked out a method that may work to predict quakes, which is about where we are in reality.

His system is showing some seismic activity around Hoover Dam outside Las Vegas. He and his team get there in time for the dam to break, undoubtedly a tribute to Earthquake. What the filmmakers are saying to those in the audience who remember the earlier film is: the dam was the big finish then, it’s just the opening number here.

We get scenes that establish Ray is going to take his daughter Blake back to college. She’s been living with her mom Emma, who is about to move in with her new boyfriend, the rich developer Daniel. Well, you know what kind of character he is. When Ray gets the call to go help at the dam, Daniel flies Blake up to San Francisco in his private jet.

Hayes meanwhile is explaining about his system to a TV news reporter. Hayes is played by Paul Giamatti, who can make all that seismo-babble interesting. The reporter is Archie Panjabi, late of The Good Wife, here in a thankless part and Daniel is played by Ioan Gruffudd, wasted as well. While Hayes and the reporter are talking, the signs in his system show that, yes, here it comes, the Big One.

One advantage that Cuse has is that CGI effects can show anything. Nothing is unfilmable anymore. So the effects all the way through the film are much more impressive than in the earlier films.

And there are a lot more of them, maybe more than you need, but a movie like this is about excess. Sometimes you have to give the audience what they want, but it’s always smart to give them a little more than they want. Especially in a movie like this, which is not a serious film.

I did not see this last year when it came out in theatres because I did not want to spend $10 or more to see it, but I was perfectly happy to DVR it off HBO and have some fun of an afternoon.

So LA gets it. Big time. Ray gets to rescue Emma from a high rise as the city falls apart. And we are not that far into the movie. They’ve already used up the collapsing dam and the destruction of LA and we’re not quite half way through the film.

Well, as Hayes reminds us, the San Andreas fault runs up through the central valley and close to…San Francisco. And who’s in San Francisco? Daniel and Blake. So we get more city destruction, and Daniel’s building collapses. He runs away (don’t worry, he gets a great comeuppance later; he’s a rich developer after all), leaving Blake trapped with Ben, a Brit who was interviewing for a job in Daniel’s company, and his younger brother, the smart ass Ollie.

So is Ben going to be a knight in shining armor and save Blake? If you read my column on a regular basis, you will know that I was delighted to see that Blake, being the daughter of a rescue pilot, knows a lot of stuff the guys don’t: radio frequencies, what supplies fire trucks carry, etc. Blake does most of the rescuing.

What about Mom and Dad? After all, they are played by the two biggest stars in the movie, Carla Gugino and Dwayne Johnson. Blake had gotten a message out to them before the phones went out that she was trapped. So Mom and Dad take off to save her.

But they are in LA and she is in SF. Ah, but Ray still has his helicopter, so he says they are going to fly to SF. I doubt if the copter has that much fuel in it. At this point, if you were taking the movie seriously, you would get up and leave. But if you are caught up in it, even in its silly way, you stick around.

At least Cuse finds a way for the copter to malfunction over…Bakersfield. It lands, and Dad steals a truck. Don’t worry, it was already stolen by looters, so it’s not like he’s really stealing it.

Then they come across a big gash where the San Andreas fault has split. They manage to find an airplane, and I am thinking this is turning into It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963; one of my favorite guilty pleasures) with all its means of transportation. But where can they land in a destroyed SF? When they get on the plane, notice what’s written on the side of the plane.

So, we’ve had a dam burst, a couple of big cities destroyed. What can they have for a big finish? Well, by now we all know that earthquakes can cause tsunamis, i.e. giant waves. So a tsunami is headed for San Francisco. Uh, wait a minute. Earthquakes send waves out from the epicenter, and here the earthquake was in Central California, not out in the Pacific. So the waves should be going away from SF rather than into it. Do you care? Not if you are into the movie.

We have had some dramatic scenes between Ray and Emma about how their marriage broke up because Ray could not deal with the guilt of having their other daughter drown on a trip with Ray. We get a couple of quick flashbacks of that, which is enough so that when Ray has to rescue Blake, who is in danger of drowning, we know how much it means to Ray. Needless to say, it all comes right for our characters in the end.

But then we get shots of the military and FEMA helping the victims of the quake. It takes us out of the movie because we have been living in the fantasy world of the film (Dwayne Johnson rescuing people, tsunamis that go backwards, etc.). It makes the ending something of a downer to be reminded of the real world.

I am not the only viewer to enjoy the preposterousness of the movie. When it was released, local TV stations interviewed Dr. Lucy Jones, the best known seismologist in Southern California.

She laughed her way through the interview, pointing out in a good-natured way the ridiculousness of the film while making a case for earthquake preparation. That’s our “seismo-mom,” as she became known when she talked to the press after the 1992 Joshua Tree earthquake, holding her sleeping baby in her arms.

OMG! A chasm? If the fault could open up, there'd be no friction. With no friction, there'd be no earthquake

— Dr. Lucy Jones (@DrLucyJones) May 27, 2015

The film was a commercial success, and the IMDb tells us that San Andreas 2 has been announced. I am not sure what they have left to destroy, at least in California. Petaluma?

#1 Zoozopia

I’ve always been disappointed that the comments on the columns is very sparse, but in the category of be careful what you wish for, there was at least one comment on Zootopia that raked me over the coals. Needless to say, I could not help including the item on the film here. You can check the coal-raking in US #143. The other reason I include it here is that it suggests ways to think about rewriting to improve that, or any screenplay.

Astonishingly Uninventive

While Pixar has had a great run of wonderfully inventive animated features, the output of its sister organization the Walt Disney Animation Studios has been uneven. I liked Tangled (2010) because of its freshness and fun. You can see in my comments on it that it did a lot of things well: story, character, slapstick and a great takedown of the Blonde Industry. I was not quite as taken with Frozen (2013) as you can see here, but it had its moments. Zootopia doesn’t even have those.

I liked how Pixar’s 2009 Up and last year’s Inside Out got off to really great starts, setting up the worlds of those films. The writers try to do that here and they fall flat. We are watching a grade school play in which the animals, led by our leading lady, uh, bunny, are explaining how there used to be violent conflict between predators and prey. Now the predators and prey live happily together. Unlike the openings of Up and Inside Out, there is no wit or texture to this scene. The scene and the dialogue are very flat, conventional exposition.

Then our heroine Judy tells her parents she wants to be a police officer. Her parents give her a very conventional lecture on how you cannot always attain your dreams and in real life you have to settle for an ordinary life. Since nearly every American animation film of modern times has the “reach for the sky” message, I would have thought the writers would realize we could not take that seriously and give it a witty twist or two. They don’t.

Judy goes off to the police academy, but being rather small, she flunks out. What is the most obvious scene the writers could put in here? Yep, you guessed it, a training montage as she prepares herself to try again. The montage has nothing in it we have not seen many, many times before. Think about what you could write with a small bunny doing workouts.

Part of what may be the appeal of Zootopia is the anthropomorphism of a wide range of animals. But we have had anthropomorphized animals since well before we had animated movies, but with great characters. Just drawing a bunny behaving like a person is not enough.

Judy has no texture as a character, and neither does Nick Wilde, a fox who is a con man. His “baby” does, but that character disappears after a couple of scenes. Judy eventually graduates, but is assigned to parking detail, where she deals with Nick. Ginnifer Goodwin voices Judy, and the usually wonderful Jason Bateman voices Nick, but the writers have given nothing that makes use of their vocal ranges.

Judy’s boss, Chief Bogo, is voiced by the great Idris Elba, but the writers make him just a cliché cop supervisor. Just imagine what sort of animated character that you could create that would make great use of his Elba’s vocal talents.

The police department does not support Judy as she tries to find a missing person, uh, mammal. She gets a license number of a car, but cannot access police files, so Nick takes her to his friend at the Department of Mammal Vehicles. Can you see the joke coming a couple of miles away?

The animals at the DMV are all sloths, and they are as slow as sloths tend to be. You may have seen this scene in the trailer. In fact, it was the only scene in the trailer. For good reason: it is the only scene that the audience I saw the movie with and I laughed at. The character work is sharper and the timing is better than any other scene in the movie. You see what the movie could have been.

Eventually Judy and Nick track down the missing mammals (there are fourteen), we learn the mayor has put them in a secret prison), all is well, and the movie is over. Except it’s not. We are only an hour and twenty minutes into the movie. So the movie has to start all over again with Judy and Nick trying to figure out why the major put them in prison. They could just ask, and we would have a ninety minute movie. No such luck.

So we get more chases, which arrive regularly, like clockwork, in this movie. Eventually Judy and Nick discover the real villain is the… assistant mayor. She has now become mayor. Talk about an anti-climax.

Some reviewers have indicated they think there is some social comment in the film about discrimination, but it’s just as bland as anything else in the film. Yes, some creatures are discriminated against, but we know that already.

One thing to be thankful for: since this is not a DreamWorks Animation film, it is not swamped with pop culture jokes. I only caught one. A drug distributor refers to two of his supplies as Walter and Jesse, I assume a reference to Breaking Bad.

Zootopia has been a huge success at the box office, and we have to wrestle with the question: why? Maybe it just came out at the right time, after all the heavy award-bait movies at the end of the year. I suspect for audiences it may also be a relief to get a simple animation film after the complexities of Pixar films like Inside Out, Toy Story 3 (2010), and Up, although there have been a lot of other simple, even simple-minded, animated films in the last five years that were not as successful as Zootopia.

Sometimes you just don’t want to work that hard at watching a movie, although the enormous success of the Pixar films makes the case that most times we do. Zootopia is what I call a hollow shell of the movie that has a good outside appearance but nothing much inside. Sometimes audiences just love a film like that. Picky people like me may not, but in this case millions have.

When I wrote the Understanding Screenwriting book, I deliberately chose several box offices successes to put into the Bad Screenplay category. There are pictures with bad screenplays, like Titanic (1997), that connect in some ways with audiences.

What drives critics, and Hollywood as well, batty is that sometimes audiences are not “right.” But they are still the audience and they see and like what they want. So what can you learn about screenwriting from this?

I hope you are not learning that you can go ahead and write a bad script and pray for luck. Most films with bad scripts are flops, and the exceptions are few. You will get much better odds if you write a good script. But it’s worth it to look at the films with bad scripts that succeed to try to figure why the films worked.

When I was trying to get the book Understanding Screenwriting published, one publisher turned it down on the grounds that I should only write about good scripts. I said I was writing about bad scripts for the same reason medical schools study disease and business schools study product disasters like Edsel and New Coke. If you see what can go wrong, maybe, just maybe, it will make you a better writer.

So, there you have it, a selection of my favorite reviews. I hope you enjoyed them. And as ever, don’t forget to send in your comments about this and future columns.

Missed the First Part?

[addtoany]