Ninja vs Penguin

Penguin June 25th, 2007

In my last post, Love Angle: The Script, I let the world see one of my drafts for the movie. I took a lot of Zach’s advice and started trimming the fat from the script. I managed to cut about two pages. But there was still something about it that just wasn’t working.

Talking to Ninja last night, I realized that there were three fundamental flaws with the screenplay.

The external conflict is too weak. It’s not so much that the possiblility of failing physics sucks, rather, it’s the result of failing physics. Okay, she’ll have to go to summer school, big deal. This may just be my “grown-upness” speaking, but summer school just isn’t that bad. I remember we used to sneak INTO summer school because everyone was there.

You don’t know the characters until the end. This is probably the biggest of the problems. Romantic comedies hinge on the audience identifying with the main character. If this connection doesn’t happen, then they won’t care what happens to them. Thus, they won’t care what happens in the rest of the movie and will have turned off.

I feel like the characters are pretty strong at the end. The go through this arc and this change, but it’s a change from the boring. There’s nothing about them that’s endearing or engaging.

My dialogue sucks. There’s not much I can do about this one. My skills as a writer can only go so far. But I do see deficiencies that I can try and fix. One of the biggest problems with the dialogue right now is the use of “yeah”s and “what”s. Yes, this is the way people speak. But this isn’t what people want to hear. It may seem natural, but it ends up being boring and uninspired.

I remember watching a documentary with Kevin Smith. One of the audience members asked him how he wrote such good dialogue. His response was if he wrote the way people spoke, it would be boring and wouldn’t go anywhere. Instead, he wrote what he wanted his characters to say, what he wanted to hear from his characters.

It’s taken me four weeks to see how bad the screenplay is. As much as I want to start shooting, I can’t see how I can with the current state of the screenplay. I was all set to start shooting. I had created a shotlist that, but if I’m going to fix the script, I’m going to have to throw out a good portion of the shotlist.

Lessons learned.

-Penguin

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Tags: Dialogue

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