The Disturbing Truth Behind Hollywood’s Record Year

You may have heard that Hollywood set a record for total domestic box office in 2015. And that the year included the two biggest openings of all time (Jurassic World and Star Wars: The Force Awakens). The industry is going gangbusters… or so it would seem.

As I read the various year-end box office analyses, I wondered how much of the record box office for 2015 is the result of Star Wars and Jurassic World? And how would the box office stack up to previous years if it weren’t for those two gigantic movies?

Of course, it’s not fair to remove the top two movies from one year and then compare it to the full box office of another year. But with a little quick research on boxofficemojo.com, I was able to calculate the box office for each of the last five years without the top two movies of that year, and then without the top five movies of that year. You can see the results in this table:

What I discovered is that when we look at everything below the top two movies, this year’s box office ranks fourth out of the last five years. When we look at everything below the top five movies, it is the worst year of the last five years.

But what does this really mean? After all, those top movies did come out each of those years. Well, consider that there are six major Hollywood studios. Not every studio can have one of the top five films. And nobody would operate a studio to score just one big hit. The hundreds of studio movies below the top five matter for the health of the industry. And the box office for those films was not so great last year.

Another little detail about 2015: a lot of big studio movies bombed. Victor Frankenstein had the worst opening for a studio release in 2,500 or more theaters. Jem and the Holograms had the worst start of all time for a major-studio release. We Are Your Friends had the worst opening for a Warner Brothers film released in more than 2,000 theaters. Sandra Bullock had the worst opening of her career (Our Brand is Crisis) and Johnny Depp had his worst opening in a wide release movie (Mordecai). The studios lost a lot of money on those five movies, which adds a little perspective to the five big hits.

It’s been widely discussed that the movie business is becoming bifurcated into gigantic franchise hits and small independent films. The mid-budget movie is vanishing as a studio product. It looks like the studios are engaged in an increasingly high risk/high reward game.

Why China May Not Be the Savior We’ve been Waiting For

Despite the trumpeting of 2015’s record box office, most people in Hollywood are aware that the domestic business has been pretty flat for years. And many of those Hollywood people are looking to China as the market that will keep the business growing. It is certainly true that U.S. studios are making a bigger and bigger share of their revenue internationally, and China is going to be the biggest international market very soon. There are some astonishing numbers – last year Chinese box office grew 48.7%. In 2015, Chinese box office was $6.79 billion, and is predicted to surpass the North American box office ($11 billion, as discussed above) in 2017. (source: The Hollywood Reporter)

But there are two reasons to temper excitement over these numbers.

First is U.S. market share of Chinese box office. In most foreign territories, U.S. films far outpace the domestic products. There are exceptions, such as India where Bollywood films are much more popular than Hollywood films. Unfortunately, when it comes to market share, China looks more like India than, say, Europe. Chinese films took 61% of Chinese box office in 2015. Only three U.S. films landed on China’s top 10 chart for the year. And while Chinese box office increased 49% in 2015, U.S. share of that box office fell 16%. This trend is likely to continue as the Chinese government aggressively bulks up their film production industry.

Second, people often confuse box office with studio revenue, forgetting that the exhibitors take a cut. In North America, studios usually get 50%-60% of the box office. In China, they only get about 25%.

So, as we see Chinese total box office grow, it’s important to remember that Chinese films are taking most of that money, and of the box office that is attributed to U.S. films, the value is about half what it would be in North America.

All of which means, there may be some bumpy roads ahead for Hollywood.


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Conceptual Synchronicity

(Spoilers: The Martian, Gravity, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Sicario, Spy)

Today I want to coin a term: Conceptual Synchronicity. I'm using this to describe when two parts of a story heighten each other.

I often discuss this in relation to the character/plot dynamic. The question we often ask is, “Why this character for this story?” There should be a core aspect of your main character that synchs up with your plot. You should ask yourself, who is the best character to be in this situation? Best could mean many things – it may be the character best qualified for the challenge, or the character worst qualified for the challenge, or the character whose core belief would be challenged by some aspect of the story.

Let’s look at some examples.

In The Martian (screenplay by Drew Goddard), Matt Watney is an accomplished scientist and an optimist. He is the only type of person who could survive being stranded on Mars with limited resources. The conceptual symmetry in this story is taking someone who is extremely competent, and then putting them in a situation that poses a challenge even to their competence.

This is somewhat the opposite approach to the one taken in Gravity (written by Alfonso & Jonas Cuaron). Though the situation is similar, in this story Ryan Stone is a neophyte astronaut who has lost purpose in her life. She is the least qualified astronaut (admittedly, still a highly qualified category of people) to survive a disaster in space. And the situation she finds herself in will challenge her to decide how badly she wants to live.

Raiders of the Lost Ark (story by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman, screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan) combines both approaches. Who is the most qualified person to race against Nazis on a hunt for the Ark of the Covenant? An archeologist who is skilled with a gun and bullwhip. But Indiana Jones also doesn’t believe in the religious/supernatural aspects of the object of the quest, making him in some ways the worst person for the job. Ultimately he will come to question his non-belief in the climax of the story.

Sicario (written by Taylor Sheridan) is about the moral grey areas in the war on drugs along the Mexican border. Who is the best character to put into that situation? Sheridan chose an ethical, by-the-book police officer. When this character is thrown into this morally ambiguous world, she will find it difficult to figure out the right thing to do.

In a completely different genre, Spy (written by Paul Feig) places a frumpy, unglamorous desk jockey into the world of espionage, getting humor from the fish-out-of-water situation. Feig has built a character completely unsuited to the James Bond-like environment (while still giving her enough skills to succeed).

Note that synchronicity doesn’t mean symmetry. Often the thing that gives you conceptual synchronicity is opposition. This can create dramatic irony (such as in Sicario) or comedic irony (such as in Spy).

The idea of conceptual synchronicity doesn’t just apply to the basic concept of your story. You should ask yourself what is the best/worst choice for every major story element. And the possibilities should be evaluated in relation to your other story elements. In Spy, they make the villain a beautiful, glamorous, sophisticated international arms dealer – the conceptual opposite of the heroine.

In The Martian, Watney’s improvisational problem solving and faith in his ability is contrasted with the bureaucrats back on Earth with their cautious risk analysis and PR concerns. The two approaches to the situation provide a conceptual synchronicity that adds thematic depth to the story.

You can apply this theory on a scene level as well. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, when Indiana Jones finds the Ark, it is in a room filled with snakes – his personal phobia. And in Sicario, when the lonely Kate finally pushes herself to try making a connection with a man, he betrays her, playing on her biggest insecurity.

In a way, the concept I’m calling conceptual synchronicity is simply asking yourself what is the most interesting choice in any situation, given the premise you’ve concocted. Making choices that resonate with other aspects of your story will increase the dramatic power of the entire script.


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“In the crowded field of scriptwriting how-to books, Doug Eboch’s The Three Stages of Screenwriting is a standout and a must-read. Why? Three solid reasons: He really, truly knows what he’s talking about. It will help everyone, from novice to pro, become a better writer. And, most impressive of all, it is entertaining as hell - as engaging and fun to read as one of Doug’s scripts.”

How I Broke In

Today I thought I would share the story of how I got my start as a professional screenwriter, along with some of the lessons I learned along the way.

When I was a kid I saw Star Wars. I was so blown away by this movie that I read everything I could get my hands on about it – which wasn’t easy back then. This was before DVD commentary tracks and shows like Extra. As my young mind was devouring articles in Time magazine and the like, I kept reading about this guy named George Lucas who had a job called director. Sounds like a fun job, I thought. Maybe that’s what I’ll do when I grow up.

When I was growing up I didn’t know anybody in the movie business. In fact, I was so far removed from Hollywood that when I told friends, family, and guidance counselors that I wanted to be a movie director, they all thought that sounded pretty great. Nobody knew how insanely competitive the field was or how many very talented people utterly failed in the business. I pursued directing the same way a high school student in Juneau, Alaska (where I lived) would pursue engineering. I researched what colleges were the best in the field and sent off my applications. I ended up at George Lucas’s alma mater: The University of Southern California.

As an undergrad I was in the production program. That is essentially a program to teach directing, though most people unofficially emphasized one technical area or another. I emphasized cinematography. When I graduated I worked back-breaking, low paying jobs doing such high tech tasks as coiling cable and hauling gear on music video shoots, or holding the boom on public service announcement shoots.

“At least you’re working on film sets,” people would say. It didn’t make me feel better. Turns out, having any job in film wasn’t enough for me. I had been working on screenplays on those days when I wasn’t working on set (there were a lot of those days), and I’d completed three of them. None were very good, but I enjoyed writing and at least one of my ideas felt like it could maybe be a movie if it was better.

So I decided to go back to USC to study screenwriting in their graduate program. Fortunately, they let me. The program taught me an enormous amount about the craft of screenwriting, and once I’d learned those skills, I discovered I was actually a pretty good writer. For my thesis, I wrote a romantic comedy script called “Melanie’s Getting Married” about a sophisticated woman from New York who must return to her small hometown to convince her estranged white trash husband to give her a divorce so she can marry someone else. It was very loosely based on one of the scripts I’d written before going to school.

Lesson 1: Learn your craft.

When I graduated, USC sent out a list of all the graduating students’ thesis script log lines to producers and studios around town. From that I got a few dozen calls requesting to read the script. I guess that was a little unusual – the power of a good log line. From there, I met with half a dozen producers who liked the script. Half of those were actually real producers with offices and everything.

Lesson 2: Create a good log line.

One of the companies I met with was MBST. The intern, a woman named Emily, had read my script – because interns are the people who read film student scripts – and recommended it to her boss. The boss liked it and they brought me in for a very nice meeting. “Send us your next script,” they said. Which is pretty much what everyone said.

So I started temping. And at night, I worked on another script, one I’d started in school, an action adventure called “Undertow.” I didn’t know at the time you were supposed to stick with one genre early in your career. (Note: “Undertow” has not been produced yet, though another movie with a similar title has since been released.)

I sent “Undertow” to the people who liked “Melanie.” When I called MBST, I discovered Emily was now head of development. She really liked “Undertow,” but the company didn’t do action movies (thus the advantage of sticking to one genre). However she thought I should have an agent and offered to make some recommendations for me.

Her assistant, Aghi, had a friend who had just been made an agent at a large boutique literary agency. She asked if she could send the script to him. “Of course,” I said. That turned out to be the agent I signed with. (And Aghi became head of development at MBST a short time later.)

Lesson 3: Be nice to the interns and assistants. They control your fate.

The agent sent out “Undertow” and Neal Moritz at Original Films liked it. We let him take it to three studios, all of whom also liked it. But all of them decided it was just too expensive. The project died, but Neal was pleased with the reaction and asked me to come in for a meeting. They asked what else I had and I gave them “Melanie’s Getting Married.” Neal didn’t go for it - not his genre - but a protégé producer named Stokely Chaffin really liked it.

Stokely gave me some feedback on the script and I did a rewrite, but she was not able to get Original to buy it at the time. I went on to other spec scripts and got a permanent job at Disney Feature Animation to pay the bills. I won a screenwriting contest with a science fiction thriller script called “Overload” (also still unproduced) but otherwise wasn’t having much success. Eventually I parted ways with my agent.

Then one day my phone rang. It was Stokely. I hadn’t spoken to her in nearly two years but it turns out she’d been pushing my “Melanie’s Getting Married” script the whole time and finally convinced Original to option it. We did the deal and I took the small option payment and bought a brand new china hutch to replace the cheap shelving that held my liquor supply (hey, I’m a writer). And then I went back to the day job.

A couple years passed. Other writers were hired to rewrite my script. Actors and directors came and went on the project. I would get phone calls from Stokely telling me the good or bad news and learned not to invest too much emotion into any of it. But they kept renewing the option and I kept cashing the checks and buying myself little presents. I also kept writing and got a new agent based on another script, this one a broad comedy (I still hadn’t learned to stick with one genre).

Lesson 4: Always keep writing.

Then one day Disney and Original actually made the movie. Nobody was as surprised as me. It had been re-titled Sweet Home Alabama and starred Reese Witherspoon. It resembled my original script more than I might have guessed after all that time, and I was awarded “Story by” credit after a brutal Writers Guild arbitration process. The movie set a record for biggest September opening ($38 million) and went on to earn over $100 million domestically. I made enough to pay off my student loans and quit my day job.

People called me an overnight success.

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LetsSchmooze on #OscarSoWhite

Today I want to share my thoughts on the controversy surrounding the all-white Academy Award acting nominees. (For those expecting my “breaking in” story, I’ll do that next week.)

The Academy has made changes to its rules and policies to try to increase diversity in its membership, which is overwhelmingly white, male, and old. I think this is great. I also think it’s not going to make much difference in future nominations.

Why? Because I don’t think the Academy membership composition is really the reason the acting nominees the last two years have been entirely white. There are plenty of reasons unrelated to race that many of the allegedly “snubbed” actors might not have been nominated this year. Let’s briefly look at them in turn:

Will Smith in “Concussion” – The big problem here is that this movie was released late and didn’t send out screeners widely. I was having dinner with a group of screenwriters a couple days before the nominations and the conversation turned to award season movies, as it tends to do in such groups this time of year. Someone brought up “Concussion” and not one person had seen it (and before you accuse us of bias in our viewing choices, almost everyone had seen “Straight Outta Compton”). There are a lot of movies to see this time of year and many voters are still very busy working professionals. If the studios don’t make it easy to see the movies, they don’t get seen (“Selma” had this problem last year). It’s also worth noting that neither the white writer-director nor any of the white supporting cast nor any of the crew got nominations for "Concussion." And Smith has been nominated twice before, so the Academy is clearly willing to nominate him – when they’ve seen and liked his performance.

“Straight Outta Compton” – This is a different case because it was widely seen and widely liked. And it looks bad that the only nomination was for the screenplay, which was written by white writers (it may be worth noting that nominations are voted on by the individual branches, so the people selecting screenplay nominees are completely different than the people selecting acting nominees). However, this is an ensemble film and it's difficult for ensemble films to get acting awards. “Spotlight” is one of the Best Picture favorites and its only acting nom is for the sole female character – all of its incredibly talented cast of male actors got nothing. The other ensemble Best Picture nominee, “The Big Short,” also only had one acting nomination.

Samuel L. Jackson for “Hateful Eight” – This, too, is an ensemble movie. Yes, Jennifer Jason Leigh was nominated, but she had the only major female role in a large male cast. This looks an awful lot like “Spotlight” – too many good male performances to choose from for the movie’s fans in the Academy. And Jackson has also been nominated before, so it’s hard to make the case he was snubbed because of race.

Idris Elba in “Beasts of No Nation” – This one’s tricky. On the one hand, it made less than $100,000 at the box office, so it might not have been seen by many voters. (Of course it was also available on Netflix, but Netflix doesn’t release viewing figures, so we don't know how many people saw it there.) On the other hand, Idris Elba got a SAG nomination, so he was hardly under the radar. The subject matter is a hard sell, and there may also have been a resistance to nominate a movie that was widely seen as non-theatrical. It’s worth noting the film was not nominated in any other category either. Let's call this a possible snub.

Michael B. Jordan in “Creed” – This would certainly be a potential snub. The movie was widely seen and liked and Sylvester Stallone got nominated. But the film got few other nominations, suggesting it was considered a good movie, not a great movie.

So maybe a case could be made that if the Academy was more diverse, Michael B. Jordan or Idris Elba might have gotten nominated. I still have my doubts. White actors Robert Redford, Michael Keaton, Tom Hanks, Mark Rylance, Mark Ruffalo, Liev Schreiber, Bradley Cooper, Johnny Depp, Michael Caine, Michael Shannon, Paul Dano, Kurt Russell, Tim Roth, Jake Gyllenhal, Nick Nolte, and Ryan Gosling all did excellent performances in well regarded movies and were not nominated. Five nominations are not many, so plenty of worthy performances get left out every year. The preferential balloting system also complicates any discussion of who “deserved” to get nominated.

If I’m right that racial bias didn’t play much role in the alleged snubs, it means all of the changes the Academy is making in response to this crisis will do nothing to solve the problem that the nominees do not reflect the diversity of America. But if the problem is not with the Academy voters, where is it?

It’s with the people who greenlight movies.

The Academy can only nominate performances from movies that get made. In my list of white actors who didn’t get nominations, I could have included Emily Blunt, Lily Tomlin, and Helen Mirren, but they aren’t competing for the same awards as the allegedly snubbed actors. There are no actresses of color that people are claiming were snubbed. That’s because there were no major roles in prestige films for actresses of color this year.

There will be more diverse nominees when there is more diversity in casting in prestige movies. The big question is how to achieve that. The solutions are not going to be easy and the changes will not come quickly.

There are many things needed to improve diversity in Hollywood. I teach at a film school where applicants from American students trend overwhelmingly white and male. I suspect this is true at most film schools. Academic institutions need to make an effort not just to bring in diverse students, but to support them with scholarships and job placement. And many colleges, including mine, are doing just that. I also think the industry needs some more diverse role models to inspire minority kids to look to film as a viable dream.

But ultimately the only change that will really transform the business needs to come within the ranks of the executives who choose what films get made. And these executives are overwhelmingly white and male. According to the Bunch Report on Diversity in Hollywood, film CEOs are 94% white (and 100% male). Senior management at studios is 92% white (and 83% male). Unit heads at studios are 96% white (and 61% male). When we talk about movies not reflecting the world around us, we should understand that for these executives, all-white casts DO reflect the world around them!

Of course it’s not as easy as simply plugging minorities into executive jobs. Those jobs are complicated and challenging and rely a lot on talent relationships. The only way to be successful is to work your way up through the ranks, building knowledge, experience, and relationships along the way. So it’s important to have strong programs to recruit diverse talent into entry-level studio positions, but it’s probably going to take years before meaningful change hits the executive levels. Hopefully, though, if current executives are surrounded by more diverse employees, the executives’ world view will expand accordingly.

What’s particularly annoying about all this is that all evidence points to diversity in casting being good for the business. According to the Bunch Report, 51% of frequent moviegoers are minorities. And many of the box office hits from last year – movies like “Straight Outta Compton,” “Furious 7,” and “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” – show that diverse casts won’t hold a good movie back.

But Hollywood is a place ruled by fear. Executive turnover is high and there are many uncontrollable variables to success. Risk taking is not rewarded. So executives rely on “conventional wisdom” that is decades old. Conventional wisdom like: women will go see a movie with a male lead, but men won’t go see a movie with a female lead – a piece of “wisdom” blown out of the water by The Hunger Games movies, yet still clung to by many executives because it’s safer than suggesting a new way of thinking.

What will it take to break executives out of their entrenched misconceptions? That’s a good question. I don’t know if I have a good answer.

I am not an Academy member and don’t vote for the Oscars. I do vote for the WGA Awards and Spirit Awards. Over the holidays, I watched several screeners with my family. My Mom asked me how I judged screenplays. I said I considered many things – my enjoyment of the movie, the craft elements like structure and dialogue, how much the scripting contributed to the movie’s success, and the degree of difficulty the screenwriter faced from the subject matter.

In the future, I think I will also pay more attention to how well the film reflects the reality of the world it portrays. This doesn’t mean I’ll reject a film with all white characters – if you’re doing a story about the 15th century British monarchy, naturally all of the characters will be white. But if I’m watching a movie set in a contemporary American city and all the characters are white men, well, that’s just not good writing.

EDITED: In my initial post I had overlooked Christian Bale's supporting actor nomination from "The Big Short." I corrected that above.

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Check out my brand new book: The Three Stages of Screenwriting.

The Three Stages of Screenwriting

Hello, dear LetsSchmooze readers. I alerted you it would be coming a few weeks ago, and now it’s here. My book on screenwriting, The Three Stages of Screenwriting is now available in print (from Amazon) and ebook (from Smashwords). More retailers should be carrying it shortly. I have spent more than two years working on this book, and I’m very proud of it.

If you’d like to read an excerpt of the book, one is available here. If you’d like to find out more about the book, please visit the ScreenMaster Books website.

I divided the book into three parts to reflect the three stages of the screenwriting process (hence the title). The sections cover the following topics:

Stage One – Developing the Story covers choosing a viable feature film idea, developing that idea into the best version, structuring the plot, developing the characters, crafting a step outline, and using various narrative devices.

Stage Two – Writing the First Draft covers scene construction, writing action and description, writing dialogue, the opening of the script, maintaining forward momentum, and using suspense, surprise, mystery.

Stage Three – Rewriting covers techniques for structural revisions, techniques for character revisions, troubleshooting tips for common problems, revising scenes, and polishing.

I hope you’ll consider giving it a look. And if you have any thoughts or questions, feel free to drop me a line here. I’ll likely cover some of them in a “Mailbag” post in a few weeks.

I need to thank several people who gave me feedback and suggestions on The Three Stages of Screenwriting: Cindy Davis, Paul Guay, Ken Aguado, Pavan Ojha, Bill Gladstone, Lisa Kors, Robert Watson, and Kat Smith. They helped me improve it immeasurably.

I also want to say thank you at this point for all of you who have offered kind words, questions, or suggestions about this blog. It’s very gratifying to hear how useful people find it.
I hope you'll forgive me that this week's post is a little short (and self-serving!) I've been rather busy with the book release, as you might imagine. Over the next few weeks, I plan to do two or three posts about how I broke into the industry, how I sold the Sweet Home Alabama spec screenplay, and maybe some of my experiences seeing the film made. I'm also considering doing a series of analyses of the WGA's top 10 screenplay list (two of which – The Godfather and Some Like It Hot I use as examples in the book).

Doug

Best Written Movies of 2015

It’s time for my list of the twelve best-written movies of last year! Yes, normally I do ten, but I was having a really hard time narrowing down my top twelve, so I decided to just include them all.

Keep in mind, this is a list of the best written movies, not necessarily the best movies or my favorite movies. This year provides a great example of this principle: Mad Max: Fury Road (written by George Miller and Brendan McCarthy and Nico Lathouris), which was one of my top three favorite movies of the year but didn’t make this list.

It’s not that Mad Max: Fury Road wasn’t “written” as some of the press has suggested. It may not have had a traditionally formatted screenplay, but there was a plot, dialogue, and distinct scenes that were written down in some form. And those elements were all competently done. However, they were not the reason the movie was such a wonderful experience. This was not a movie driven by the screenplay.

My other usual disclaimers apply: I see a lot of movies, but I haven’t seen everything. I haven’t yet seen The Revenant or Room, though I very much want to and expect them to be good. And I may in the future discover other movies from 2015 that would bump some of my selections off the list.

Also, some movies age better than others, and because many of these are awards season movies, I’ve seen most of them pretty recently. My opinions could cool over time. Looking back at last year’s list, all the movies hold up pretty well, though I would probably move Whiplash higher on the list. And though I’m happy to hear your opinions in the comments, this is my list. If you don’t like it, you’re welcome to make your own!

So without further ado, here is my list of the 12 Best Written Movies of 2015:

1. Ex Machina (written by Alex Garland) – This is an amazing achievement. A tense, entertaining and thought provoking thriller with only four characters and a single house as a location. The writing is incredibly smart with great twists. The characters are particularly complex and interesting. This is easily the best-written movie of the year in my opinion.

2. Sicario (written by Taylor Sheridan) – Impressive on several fronts. First, the plot is genuinely unpredictable, creating tremendous tension. The characters are interesting and dimensional. The dialogue crackles with voice and subtext. There’s great scene work and masterful suspense. And it’s all elevated by the thematic depth and complexity of the story.

3. Spotlight (written by Josh Singer & Tom McCarthy) – The movie and the screenplay aren’t flashy, but they’re so absorbing I felt like I didn’t want the film to end. The characters and characterizations are particularly strong. And parts of the story were challenging to dramatize – much of the investigation involved research in books and files. Kudos to the writers for finding ways to keep things tense and compelling.

4. The Hateful Eight (written by Quentin Tarantino) – He may not be to everyone’s taste, but it’s hard to argue that Tarantino isn’t one of the most original writers working today. This film has his usual vivid dialogue and interesting characters, and also avoids some of the traps he tends to fall into by sticking with a fairly straightforward plot. And it feels like a movie event, something you don’t get to see every day, something worth leaving the house to go to the theater.

5. Bridge of Spies (written by Matt Charman and Ethan & Joel Coen) – This is an excellently crafted screenplay. The characters are well drawn; the scenes are interesting; the plot is tense. The writers find great opportunities for humor and thematic pondering without slowing down the action. Plus, the bifurcated nature of the story made this screenplay a challenge – one the writers overcame quite nicely. My only quibble is that it felt just a bit too long.


6. Shaun the Sheep Movie (written by Mark Burton & Richard Starzak from characters created by Nick Park) – This movie is a pure delight. There’s so much warmth and clever humor here, and with very little dialogue. They make it look easy… it’s not.

7. Trainwreck (written by Amy Schumer) – I don’t know if I’ve ever seen someone use the tropes and clichés of a genre so effectively to tell a specific, personal story. It achieves a difficult balance between humor (sometimes to the point of silliness) and grief, loss and love. The characters feel like real people and that makes all the clichés emotionally effective.

8. Star Wars: The Force Awakens (written by Lawrence Kasdan & J.J. Abrams and Michael Arndt based on character created by George Lucas) – This is a tough one for me to rank because Star Wars has such an outsized importance in my life and the franchise carries such enormous baggage for the writers to deal with. I think they did an admirable job capturing the spirit of Star Wars and managed to tell an entertaining story with some new great characters. Yes, it may be a little derivative of earlier Star Wars movies, but that was probably the only way to successfully restart the film series. Could it have been better? Probably. Was it a great time at the theater? Absolutely.

9. Steve Jobs (screenplay by Aaron Sorkin) – I will admit I didn’t expect to like the film. Not only had I heard negative reviews, I had ethical qualms about the liberties taken with the facts of Steve Jobs’ life. But as it turned out, this screenplay is pretty great. Sorkin writes excellent dialogue for smart people, and all of these characters are very smart. He also managed to give all the characters in this screenplay unique voices, something Sorkin is not usually known for. And he does a fantastic job here, as always, finding ways to dramatize internal thought processes and character perspectives. The movie packs surprising tension and a solid emotional punch.

10. The Big Short (screenplay by Charles Randolph and Adam McKay) – I didn’t love this movie quite as much as the critics, but it is a surprisingly entertaining film about a pretty boring (but important) subject. The writers achieved this by creating interesting and unusual characters and with some clever breaking of the fourth wall. An impressive achievement considering the degree of difficulty.

11. The Martian (screenplay by Drew Goddard) – This is an excellent screenplay from challenging material. Not only is much of the story about a single character by himself, the conflict is of a scientific/intellectual nature. Goddard found a way to make this all visual, and also managed to capture much of the humor from the book. My complaints were mostly related to the ending, which strained the hard-won scientific credibility of the rest of the movie.

12. Straight Outta Compton (story by S. Leigh Savidge & Alan Wenkus and Andrea Berloff, screenplay by Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff) – There were probably three movies worth of material in this screenplay, which is an impressive feat but also resulted in a film that felt a little overstuffed and overlong. Still, it was very entertaining with well-drawn characters and an interesting and well-dramatized social commentary aspect. Not your typical music biopic – and that's a good thing.

I also want to give honorable mentions to Spy (written by Paul Feig) and Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (story by Christopher McQuarrie and Drew Pearce, screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie) as two movies that were much better than expected thanks to some excellent scripting. Both were strong candidates for this list.

I also typically pick a movie as worst-written every year. I don't actually mean the worst screenplay, but rather a movie that should have been much better written than it was. This year the (dis)honor goes to San Andreas (story by Andre Fabrizio & Jeremy Passmore, screenplay by Carlton Cuse). The movie is rife with implausible, cardboard characters, ridiculously clichéd dialogue, and wildly unbelievable plotting. There is some enjoyment to be had from the visual effects spectacle and attractive casting, but none of that comes from the screenplay.


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It's coming soon... my book on screenwriting, The Three Stages of Screenwriting.

Three Current Trends in Screenwriting

Happy New Year!

The film business is in a period of fast and radical change. I want to kick off 2016 by looking at some trends that have been developing in Hollywood that effect screenwriters.

1. Simultaneous Development. With so much at stake on big franchise movies, recently some studios have begun hiring multiple writers to work on screenplays at the same time. These writers are not working together, they are each writing an individual script. The studio will then decide which it likes best (and probably cannibalize good ideas from the others). It seems to me this is the evolution of the “pitch off” when multiple writers are brought in to pitch their take on a piece of intellectual property, although with simultaneous development, at least every writer gets paid. This has been done on the upcoming Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and the 21 Jump Street spinoff.

2. Shared Universes. It's no secret studios love franchises. Successful franchises like The Fast and the Furious series, Hunger Games series, or Harry Potter series can keep studios financially sound for years. The new trend is franchises built around shared universes – story worlds that can support films about multiple characters and stories, thus creating a "brand" that draws audiences even when the movies are not traditional sequels. Marvel kicked off the trend with their shared universe of superheroes. Star Wars has had a shared universe of ancillary products (books, video games, animated shows, etc.), and Disney is now applying the idea to the Star Wars movies with standalone films like the upcoming Rogue One and Han Solo origin movie. Warner Brothers is trying to turn the world of Harry Potter into a shared universe with Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. And Universal is attempting to create a shared universe around their classic monsters, while Sony is working on a Robin Hood shared universe. It seems this is the future of a lot of screenwriting jobs, so effectively playing in someone else's sandbox will be a useful skill to hone.

3. Feature Writers’ Rooms. This is related to the “shared universe” trend. With studios making multiple movies set in the same world, the feature films occasionally resemble television series – coming this summer, episode twelve of Marvel’s superheroes! And the feature world has started borrowing another television practice: writers’ rooms. Teams of writers have been formed to shepherd the development of stories in the Transformers world, Star Wars world, and the upcoming series of movies featuring Universal’s monsters. The teams develop stories and treatments for various films in the franchise that are then handed off to writers to turn into the individual screenplay.

Savvy writers will be keeping an eye on how these trends develop.

Before I sign off this week, I thought I’d reveal the five most popular LetsSchmooze posts from 2015. They are:

1. Three Traps to Avoid in Love Stories.

2. My Interview with Khalil Sullins.

3. Seven Questions for Better Scenes.

4. How to Know if Your Idea is Marketable.

5. My 10 Best Written Films of 2014 list

And, since that last one is maybe not the most useful, in sixth place was 5 Questions About Your Story to Answer Before You Start Writing - also, I think, one of my best posts.

I'll plan to have my 10 Best Written Films of 2015 list next week!

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Check out my new book: The Three Stages of Screenwriting