Mystery Man’s Seven Scripts You Gotta Read!

Howdy. Sheridan here. Occasionally, I (as I’m sure most of us aspiring writers do) pickup issues of Script magazine and can usually hungrily devour/absorb/digest/ingest/read/what-have-you the short, small, inspiring and encouraging treasure troves of excellent advice and information that can be found within its pages in the span of a couple hours.

Funnily enough, I’ve never really paid much attention to who writes the articles as I’m always much more interested in what the articles are about. But recently, I read an article in the July/August issue entitled “How to Show, Don’t Tell” that gave some, what I believe to be, expert advice on how we aspiring writers need to learn the subtle art of, well… showing and not telling. The writer? Mystery Man.

Intrigued, I began to thumb through some of the past issues I had lying close at hand and began to realize that most of my favorite articles were written by said “Mystery Man.” Then, out of the blue, Mystery Man began following me on Twitter and knowing that our dear hombre misterioso was never short on (really) good advice I asked if he’d like to contribute his list of seven essential reads. Luckily, he agreed. So, without further ado or any more of my rambling digressions, I proudly present to you:

Mystery Man’s Seven Scripts You Gotta Read!

Question: why read screenplays? One could easily watch a film and recognize how the story works (or doesn’t) without having to read the screenplay. So why bother?

Let me offer three reasons:

1) You can pick up on techniques that you may want to incorporate into your own writing style.

2) Reading early drafts of the films you admire reveals great lessons behind all of the revisions that were made. This is the heart of screenwriting. How well you put together a first draft means little in terms of your abilities. It’s how well you handle revisions and shape a story into greatness that proves your worth. The art of effective rewrites is what separates the amateurs from the pros.

3) I don’t believe there’s any one formula or structure for successful stories, much less one model screenplay that all writers should follow. How ridiculous is that? Each genre has its own unique set of rules and clichés. What succeeds in one story in one genre does not necessarily mean it’ll succeed in another story in another genre. However, reasons why stories fail are universal. For example, a comedy, a spy thriller, and a drama could all suffer from a horrible mishandling of exposition. Thus, I’d suggest to you that there is great value in reading unproduced and amateur screenplays, such as those you may find on TriggerStreet. In fact, I like to swap it up. I usually read pro, amateur, pro, amateur… which is eye-opening. There is a world of difference between the two groups, particularly when it comes to energy and pacing. Beyond that, though, you should read unproduced scripts to sharpen your analytical skills. You need to be able to recognize why any story isn’t working, what its potentials are, and know the direction you would take the script to make it better.

So with all of that in mind, here are my recommended seven scripts.

1. Kubrick’s Napoleon

A new book has been released called Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made. (Get it now for the low-low price of $560! I dare you to click the link and buy it. I double dog dare you! Hehehe…) This bad boy features the complete original treatment, essays examining the screenplay in historical and dramatic contexts, transcripts of Kubrick interviews, and exclusive online access to Kubrick’s complete database of nearly 17,000 Napoleonic images.

Yet, that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of Kubrick’s obsession. The man sifted through more than 18,000 documents and books about Napoleon. He constructed a monster index file of the 50 principal characters in his movie, which were all written on 3×5 cards and organized by the dates of all the key events in Napoleon’s life from his birth all the way to his death. He had a different card for each character. That way, Kubrick could quickly determine where, during any given period in Napoleon’s life, each character was and what that character was doing. He had 25,000 index cards.

The finished result, perhaps the most famous unproduced screenplay in the history of cinema, is nothing less than one genius’s survey of the life of another genius. The story is far from perfect, epic in scope, exhilarating in places while also sleep-inducing in other places, and never fails to fascinate. We follow Napoleon’s life from his birth all the way to his death. We start with a few pages on his childhood. We move on to his quick rise to military power and then on to become head of an empire that ruled over much of Europe. And then we witness Napoleon’s stunning, heart-wrenching downfall. He loses everything that’s precious to him. In Act Three, Napoleon mounts his final comeback. He regains power, which lasts briefly, and then we observe the whole world take up arms against him and crush him.

Make no mistake. There is a point and a reason for every creative choice and for every single detail in Kubrick’s screenplay – from the young Napoleon cradling a “well worn teddy bear” (perhaps symbolic of his desire to possess Russia, aka, “the Russian Bear”), to the two bullies Napoleon fights as a kid (foreshadowing, I suspect, his final battles against Wellington and Blucher), to his encounter with a prostitute revealing Napoleon’s extraordinary naïveté about women and sex.

But what fascinates me most is the way Stanley attempts to show us one thing on the screen but make us hear something very different that undercut the meaning of what we are seeing. For example, while we see the happy wedding of Napoleon and Josephine, we hear in voice over Josephine reveal her true feelings of lukewarm indifference to Napoleon. Later, we would hear Napoleon pour his heart out in love letters to Josephine as we watch her have an affair with Captain Hippolyte Charles. During the Italian campaign, we hear the Narrator tell us about all the glories and victories of Napoleon while we see French troops pillage small Italian towns and take away food and livestock from poor farmers. We hear Napoleon tell his party guests about how “authority’s main job is to keep man from being at his worst,” but we see Napoleon behaving at his worst by conspiring to have an affair with another woman right in front of Josephine. We hear Josephine read her statement declaring how she feels pleasure giving Napoleon “the greatest proof of attachment and devotedness that was ever given on earth,” that is, a divorce, but yet, we also see her sobbing uncontrollably.

In one of the last scenes in which we would see Napoleon still in Tuileries Palace, Stanley shifts poetic gears once again. We see Napoleon sitting at a large table eating alone, and we hear the Narrator tell us that all of the allies had refused to have any diplomatic dealings with Napoleon. You see, in a stark contrast to all of the previous scenes in which we saw one thing but heard something different, this, my friends, THIS is one of the only scenes in which we see and hear something that has the very same meaning – that is, Napoleon has become completely and hopelessly alone.

2. Richard Donner’s Superman II

You thought you loved Superman II as a kid, just as I did, but you have no idea how much more superior Richard Donner’s vision of that story would have been. As I’m sure many of you know, Donner had been famously fired before he was given a chance to complete his second film, and what we saw in Richard Lester’s version was a mere shadow of Donner’s impeccable vision.

Let it be said, first of all, that Marlon Brando is all over Donner’s version. The presence of Jor-El makes all the difference in the world. Cutting Brando out of SII has to be one of the most criminal creative acts in Hollywood history because the story between father and son was not yet over! You may recall that the first movie ended with Superman defying Jor-El by “interfering in human history” and turning back time to save the life of a woman he loved so very much. Hello? Their story was not over.

SII brought this conflict between Jor-El and Kal-El over Superman’s love of a woman to its inevitable climax. Those scenes are electric! Superman stands before Jor-El completely committed to being with Lois the rest of his life, and in doing so, Jor-El tells him that he must give up his powers, which was to avoid creating a new race on earth. He says, “If you will not be Kal-El – if you will live as one of them… love their kind as one of them, then it follows that you must become… one of them.”

Queue up the villains and Superman’s need to restore his powers.

In Lester’s version, the powerless Kal-El returns to the Fortress of Solitude, cries out for his father, and finds the green crystal. Then we cut to the reborn Superman outside Perry’s office politely asking General Zod to “step outside.” Ever since the first time I watched that movie, I always wondered what the hell happened after he found that green crystal. (Except without the cursing. I was just a kid.)

You see exactly what happens in Donner’s version. The storyline and the huge conflict between father and son finally gets resolved. The powerless Kal-El returns to the Fortress of Solitude, cries out for his father, and reunites with him after finding that green crystal. Our boy, Kal-El, falls before his father a humbled failure, feeling truly human for the first time. He’s willing to acknowledge and accept the ways of his father. And he is saved by the grace and mercy of Jor-El.

However, Jor-El says, “Listen carefully, my son, for we shall never speak again…”

I will say no more, but it’s the stuff of myths and legends. The father becomes the son and the son becomes the father. He now lives in his father and his father lives in him.

And then Superman destroys the Fortress of Solitude.

Now here’s the big question – how do you fix the storyline about Lois knowing that Clark is Superman? I’ve always had one big reservation about Donner’s version and that was his ending, which was identical to the first film. Superman spins the world back in time, yet again, only now it was to fix this storyline with Lois. That really pissed me off. I thought it was lazy writing. How many times are you guys going to fall back on this cheap gimmick just to fix a story problem you created for yourselves? What’s the point of sitting through this entire movie if Superman could simply turn back time to fix what’s happened?

But there’s a story about that ending. In the early, early planning stages, spinning the world back in time was always intended to be the ending for SII simply because it was, at the time, the biggest special effects sequence they could muster. But when they got behind on SI, they stole the ending from II and added it to I just to finish it. They told themselves they would eventually fix the ending for II with something different. Of course, they never got the chance to do that, and what we see on the script and in Donner’s recut Superman II does not reflect what the ending would have actually been.

So how do you fix the storyline with Lois knowing that Clark is Superman without spinning time back? How do you turn everything back to status quo? Lester had a “mystery kiss,” which I don’t mind so much, but I think he should’ve set up that kiss somewhere else.

How would you have resolved that storyline?

Personally, I would’ve never resolved it. I would’ve made it a bittersweet ending with Lois knowing very well that Clark is Superman. And I would’ve had fun playing with that storyline in III and IV.

God, I love Superman.

3. Hampton Fancher’s early draft of Blade Runner

Story aside, I admired the way Hampton Fancher directed the mind’s eye through his action lines in his early version of Blade Runner. In fact, I’m going to share a scene to illustrate a point.

In his first scene, which is below, Fancher implies via the Secondary Heading of “THE EYE” that the scene will be opening with an extreme close-up of an eye, which is essential to the story. Fancher never uses “we see” or camera angles. His descriptions help visualize (without taking you out of the story with technical jargon) that the camera would pan back to reveal that the eye is just an image on a screen. As we pan and see more of the mechanism, we learn an important detail by seeing the VOIGHT-KAMPFF words. The camera would keep panning back to reveal the desk and then pan around or perhaps cut to Leon. We first see his nametag and the folded, pudgy hands in his lap before we move up to his face. I love the way he carefully leads your mind’s eye around the room through his simple descriptions. He goes from the extreme close-up of the eye to the mechanism on the table and over to Leon. Then there’s a cut to Holden, the man facing him, which reads like a medium shot. It’s not until after that cut that we’re even given a description of the room.

How many aspiring writers would start with just a general description of the room and try to use dialogue to get out the VOIGHT-KAMPFF information as well as the names of the two characters in the room? This is such a great, writing-the-shots example of cinematic storytelling. It’s the way Fancher is thinking like a filmmaker that’s impressive to me.

The result in the finished film (if you can ever call Blade Runner a “finished film”) is slightly different. The shots are all there, as described in the script, but Ridley Scott would open the film with a shot of the city and an approaching vehicle that’s flying toward the Tyrell building so that you could see Holden pacing in a window as he waits for Leon to show up. Then he cuts to the interior of the room. Leon walks in, and for some reason, Ridley uses a VOICE OVER to introduce him. A computerized female voice says something like: “Next subject: Kowalski, Leon.” Ugh, makes me cringe every time. Ridley should’ve listened to his screenwriter. It was far better on the page.

Go here for more examples of Cinematic Storytelling.

4. Alan Ball’s early draft of American Beauty

While I was doing research for a big article on self-editing, which you will find in the next issue of Script Magazine (Nov/Dec 2009 edition), I discovered that Alan Ball’s early drafts of American Beauty (compared to his final draft) is a model of effective rewrites.

Little changes stand out. I’m reminded of a point Carol Phiniotis made in her column, “The Art of the Rewrite,” in the July/August 2009 issue of Script Mag:

“Scene transitions are often overlooked. A simple line of dialogue at a scene’s conclusion can greatly affect the flow of your story. In an early draft of American Beauty, a scene transition between Jane and her soon-to-be boyfriend Ricky played out as follows:

“By the shooting script, Ball revised the line:

“While the first transition is functional, it falls flat. However, the second transition not only engages Jane, it also engages the audience. We’re invited to participate in the mini-mystery Ricky has woven.”

Here’s another example in which Ball made a change to support better his theme. In fact, this comes from what I wrote in the new self-editing article that’ll be in next month’s Script Mag issue:

*Stay focused on theme. Before you ever sit down to write your script, I should hope that you know what your theme is because that is essential in determining what goes and what stays. Theme is not a tired cliché, like “time heals all wounds.” Theme is an engaging question: “If your brother slept with your wife, could you forgive him? Ever?” (As Julie Gray wrote in her great article.) Thus, theme is how you know you’re bird-walking too far away from your story. With the brother-sleeping-with-your-wife-scenario, you know that a subplot involving a mother fulfilling her dreams to open her own cookie dough store is probably fat that should be cut. Why? This does not support your theme of forgiveness. If you’re having to asking yourself a question that sounds like, “I know this is kinda off the track, but it’s funny/entertaining/interesting,” that means you must cut it. The question you should be asking is “how best can I support my theme in the context of this story?”

Here’s a lovely example of a revised scene in Alan Ball’s American Beauty. This comes early in the script when everyone leaves for work and school.

This discussion about music, while okay as dialogue goes, plays no part anywhere else in the narrative. This is a setup without a payoff. We will know that Carolyn loves Bobby Darin simply by the fact that we will see her listening to him later. We don’t need to have those feelings verbalized to us. The scene is just a bit too long for what should be a quick transition to new locations. And, for me, the biggest reason for change here is that the conversation between Carolyn and Jane took us a bit too far away from the focus on Lester and the bigger point of his voice overs throughout the beginning, which was to punctuate theme.

Thus, Alan Ball shortened his scene to the beautiful simplicity of this final version:

Editor’s Note: American Beauty was a casualty of the Universal DMCA Request, so it is not currently available here. Apologies.

5. The Dark Knight

Yes, The Dark Knight was all that. This is the script I usually mention to amateurs who spend too much time in their action lines describing incidentals, aka, the most minor gestures of characters. Hey, the Nolan brothers didn’t have time to dilly-dally with incidentals in their little Dark Knight script and neither should you. With the Nolans, only the most essential details were incorporated into the script. They never had time to write about slight gestures of characters or room descriptions. They kept it moving. And there’s something to be said about explaining EVERYTHING in the action lines vs. explaining JUST ENOUGH to spark the imagination of your readers.

The Dark Knight is 167 pages, all of which flies by just as quickly as the 2 ½ hour film. Everything that’s great about the film is evident on the page. The Nolan brothers are entirely focused on their story. They’re relentless about the tension, suspense, and inner conflicts, while also being thoroughly professional about the script’s presentation. There are no distractions on the page, like bad grammar or bad format. It’s so polished that once you’re sucked into the story, they keep you there without letting your mind get kicked offline with hiccups like poor grammar, which only reminds you that you’re reading a screenplay. When you read DK, you are in that world and you will stay there until the story’s over. Chris Nolan reminds me of Anthony Minghella in the sense that he’s a writer-director that refuses to inject into his scripts all kinds of technical details like camera angles and transitions.

On the page, it’s ALL about story.

So let me ask a question. How would you write the opening shot of the film? You may recall the glorious Imax-inspired view of the city and the slow zoom in on one building, then one window, which shatters. How do you write that without camera angles or “we see?” Here you go:

I love it! “Moving over the towers of downtown Gotham… Closing in on an office building… On a large window… which shatters…” I’ll take that. The camera directions are implied. No technical details like “zoom in” and “angle on.” No “we see.” The ellipsis implies the time that goes by as we slowly move toward the window in one take. And the words inspire the imagination with a visual vocabulary that places the mind’s eye over the city of Gotham flying toward a window. You’re immediately sucked in because you know something not so nice is about to happen in the city of Gotham led by the Joker.

Three other thoughts:

1) The Joker wasn’t crazy for the sake of being crazy. They gave him a clear philosophical world view that defined who he was and why he did what he did, which found its origins in The Killing Joke. Plus, the dialogue for the Joker is such a great reminder to new writers that you have to give actors a chance to really act through the dialogue.

2) The Nolans have a kind of magician’s approach to holding our attention in a story, like the pencil trick. You ask yourself, “What’s he talking about? How is he going to make the pencil disappear?” Then, payoff. Or that scene in the Pool Hall where Gambol was told they have the Joker’s dead body. You know perfectly well the Joker’s not dead, but you keep watching because you have questions. “Who’s in the bag? What’s the trick? How is the Joker going to act? What’s going to happen?” Of course, you ask that with just about any evil scenario the Joker created, too, because you’re curious about how it’s going to play out. Creating questions in the minds of your readers makes them want to continue reading. It’s the oldest trick in writing.

3) The tension and suspense are still the best elements of the film. Consider all the ways time was used to heighten the suspense. Every day Batman fails to reveal himself, people will die. Then, we’d know who the target was and we’d keep watching because we’re curious if or how the Joker will get to that target. “Depending on the time, he might be in one spot… or several.” He had “just minutes left” to save either Rachel or Dent. The way the Joker parceled out crucial information about his new game quickly heightened the tension in that interrogation scene with Batman. Then there was the commercial – tonight at five o’clock, we’ll reveal the identity of Batman. Stay tuned. Or the Joker’s phone call – “If Coleman Reese isn’t killed in sixty minutes, I’m going to blow up a hospital.” Or the ferry situation – If you don’t blow-up the other ferry by midnight, I’ll blow-up both of your ferries.

Tension, baby! You can never have enough in your script.

6. Frank Darabont’s Fahrenheit 451

I want to f**k this script, I love it so much. I don’t know what Darabont’s doing dicking around with this zombie TV show for AMC. I’d be pulling miracles out of my ass to get financing for this project. It’ll be a classic! The handling of the adaptation is down the line everything I hoped to see. Every strength in Bradbury’s book is evident in the script.

Let me list a few strengths:

– The emphasis on the inner turmoil of Montag. Here, Darabont trusts the face and takes the time to show us Montag’s inner feelings.

– You had a great and powerful antagonist in Captain Beatty. Let me hearken back to the words of Hitchcock, a story is only as good as its villain, and Beatty is one of the best. He was not simply a man of power, a man who could burn you out and send you to jail, but he was also an intellectual force to be reckoned with on the topic of book-burning, which Montag was ill-equipped to debate. Beatty had seen a few books in his time and read a few and could so easily quote the books he condemned so fervently as leader of the firemen. There was also in Captain Beatty the subtle, yet fascinating, element of self-destruction that was evident in so many other book-lovers. The quotations from books was a clue to his own need for books. Interestingly, a few years after F451 was released, there was a theatrical play, and Bradbury wrote a new scene where Captain Beatty invites Montag to his house and he shows him walls of books. Here in Darabont’s script, Captain Beatty’s role is so juicy, it has the potential to give a lucky actor an Oscar nomination.

– The thick tension. The stakes are as high as humanly possible. Their lives were a lie. Montag was feeding the lie to his wife, Mildred. She was ingesting the lie and embracing status quo. And in the book, when Montag sought to address their emptiness by reading books, Bradbury gives us a scene between Montag and Mildred of heart-wrenching high drama where Montag tries to convince her to go on this journey with him to read books and figure out for themselves if they’re evil. “We’ve got to start somewhere here, figuring out why we’re in such a mess,” Montag tells her. “You and the medicine nights and me and my work. We’re heading right for the cliff, Millie. God, I don’t want to go over…” That scene is in the script. Not only that, the tense scene of exposition in Montag’s bedroom in which Captain Beatty explains why they burn books is also in the script. However, the scene brilliantly moves from the Bedroom to the Parlor (with the three walls of huge TV screens) to be given the most visual treatment imaginable alongside Beatty’s monologue.

– The setups and payoffs were carefully constructed, such as the mechanical hound, who appears in the opening burn sequence in the film, sniffs out Montag’s hidden book in the middle of Act Two, and plays a big role during the chase sequence in the Act Two climax. You have to establish how scary the mechanical hound is first before you can deliver an effectively tense chase sequence. There was also the crucial self destructiveness of the book-lovers which leads to the death of Captain Beatty as well as the destruction of the city.

– True to form, the script opens with a big bang, a big Hollywood treatment of firemen responding to an alarm and burning out another citizen who has been harboring books. But as I mentioned many times before, my “Big Bang Theory” of screenwriting says that any film that opens with a big bang must close with an even bigger bang. There’s no question this script lives up to its promise of a big ending.

– Many key characters are seen again when Montag joins the book-reciting wanderers in the woods.

– The dialogue’s fun. Here are some words from the opening sequence on the Salamander as they go to burn someone out.

– It’s a very high energy script. Just feel the vigor in this passage:

Editor’s Note: Fahrenheit 451 was a casualty of the Universal DMCA Request, so it is not currently available here. Apologies.

7. George Lucas’ July, 1974, first draft of Star Wars

Let it be said, my friends, that this script is a rank steaming pile of outer space alien s**t. In fact, it’s so bad, you may not be able to finish reading it. Being a great visionary does not necessarily qualify you as a great storyteller. George Lucas had at least six page-one rewrites over the course of four years before we got the finished masterpiece that was Star Wars. How many of you aspiring writers out there have done as many page one rewrites in order to get your own stories into proper shape?

Three lessons I took away from these early drafts of Star Wars:

1) Many screenplays are as awful as this one, which means that that many bad first drafts have the potential to reach great heights like Star Wars if the writer takes the time to do the necessary page one rewrites. Too many of us love our own words too much. Get over yourself!

2) Yes, I know Lucas hired ghost writers, but I must say how impressive it is to me that Lucas was willing to scrap a script he just finished and approach the story again from a completely different perspective, which was done repeatedly before settling on Luke and the hero’s arc, Joseph Campbell style. We all need this quality. Too many of us get too stuck on one approach and lack the imagination to start the story from scratch from an entirely different perspective just to see how it plays out.

3) Visionary people can create whole universes populated with all kinds of characters, but that doesn’t necessarily make for a great story. You need an accessible portal into that universe, a reason for the audience to care, which is always through characters, and Lucas never quite found that portal until he focused on Luke and the hero’s arc. We found common ground with Luke who was disadvantaged by his circumstances and who had guardians that were holding him back from being what he really wants to be. Who couldn’t sympathize with that? When his guardians were murdered we knew he was on a trajectory for a great adventure that we were very ready to go on with him. And so we were introduced to this great universe through Luke and his inner needs, which made all the difference in the world. Err, universe, I mean.

Check out more:
Mystery Man’s official site @ mysteryman.org
Mystery Man @ twitter.com/MMonFilm

Related Posts:

• Jeff Beck Reviews: The Dark Knight
• Kevin Lehane’s Seven Scripts You Gotta Read!