ScriptShadow and Mystery Man

Moedred

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Montana Smith

Active member
Attila the Professor said:
I've seen some of these before, but look forward to taking a good long look at them come Monday. Hopefully I'm not the only one...

There's at least two of us! I love this sort of thing.

Opening the ROTLA page immediately struck a chord: THE POWER OF THE ACTIVE PROTAGONIST.

So I opened the KOTCS and found what I was expecting: THE PROTAGONIST ISN’T ACTIVE.

It's an argument I've used numerous times here.

ScriptShadow said:
You wanna know what happens in the first scene? Indy's been captured. Indy is REACTING to everyone else. Indy is doing WHAT OTHERS TELL HIM TO DO. It sets the tone for who Indy will be for the next 2 hours...

Moedred said:
They are also respectively the guys who leaked the Leigh Brackett draft of Empire and the Raiders Story Conference Transcripts (after they were first leaked here and deleted upon request).

The name Leigh Brackett was ringing bells in my head so loudly I had to open IMDB - and then the bells stopped ringing: Rio Bravo, El Dorado, Hatari.

And you inspired me to back and re-read the thread, THE BIG BANG: Raiders story conference transcripts!!?? .
 
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Moedred

Administrator
Staff member
Some praise for Lucas in Scriptshadow's Star Wars 7 review:
The one thing Lucas brings to the table that JJ doesn't is imagination. JJ basically used pieces that were already there. Lucas CREATED ALL THOSE PIECES. I read an interview with Lucas a long time ago and in it he was asked how he came up with Jabba the Hut or some other weird character. And he said, 'Honestly, some of this stuff is just whimsy. I like the thought of it.'
And JJ's not like that. He's a storyteller and when you tell a lot of stories, it gets drilled into your head that everything needs to make sense. Everything needs to be logical. The reason Star Wars is what it is is because it isn't always logical. It doesn't make logical sense to have a giant slug who couldn't escape a determined alien amputee be the most feared gangster in the galaxy.
And the thing that made Lucas Lucas is that he didn't care. He just liked the idea of a giant slug gangster. JJ doesn't have that talent. He's scared to go into the depths of his imagination and come up with something truly weird because those are the things that are the least easy to calculate. JJ knows that having someone take advantage of Rey early on will result in a calculable emotional reaction from the audience. But he doesn't know what will happen if he makes Finn a no-headed Quaseldorf from the planet Yim-Yam. So he makes him a stormtrooper instead.
 

Moedred

Administrator
Staff member
From his newsletter:
Okay, I’m going to be getting into some potential spoilers here, even though I don’t know if the things I'm spoiling are even true. To start, though, I thought this new trailer was great. Yes, it’s weird that Indiana Jones is 80 and should probably be exploring assisted living centers instead of South American caves. Do they make special walkers for cave scaling? But it’s looking like this is going to be a time travel movie. And if you say Indiana Jones and time travel to me? You might as well be saying I won the lottery and married a supermodel. Because, honestly, this is the only way the movie was going to work. It wasn’t going to work with an 80 year old Harrison Ford playing an action hero. But it could work with a 50 year old Harrison Ford playing an action hero. In some ways, this Indiana Jones movie was predicted. Ford was the original actor attached to Gemini Man back in 2003 where the promise was they were going to digitally de-age him for the younger scenes. So Ford has always been game for this. The only question left is, will we believe the de-aging? If we do, the movie’s going to kick ass. If we don’t, it's going to be a shot of prune juice straight to the veins. I’m way more optimistic about it being the former after this trailer.
 

emtiem

Well-known member
I do enjoy script analysis, I find it rather fascinating how some stories work and others don’t. And because Indy stories are very straightforward and rather mechanical (that’s not a criticism: it’s just the genre) I think they’re ripe for analysis, and when they’re written well they’re like finely honed machines.

Reading his criticism of Skull is interesting not least because I’m not totally convinced by all of it. He says the motorcycle chase doesn’t work because we don’t know what the baddies’ objectives are; I agree they’re unclear, but does that mean that the boat chase in LC doesn’t work? Because I’d disagree with that.
I’d be curious to read his take on LC; I don’t think the film is the best but I would say that the script is pretty perfect.
 

Moedred

Administrator
Staff member
A little more here. As David Koepp says, writing these scripts is hard.
(Spoilers) Rumor has it that this is going to be a time travel Indiana Jones movie. Anyone who has tried to write a time travel movie will tell you the same thing. It’s one of the hardest narratives you’ll ever have to write, cause you’re always dealing with a paradox. If the plan doesn’t work, you simply go back in time and try again. Sure, you can come up with rules like, “You can only time travel two (or three) times,” but therein lies why the genre is so difficult. Cause the second you start adding hard rules, those rules need to make sense within the mythology. They can’t just be rules that the screenwriter needed to be there. That’s when movies start feeling fake. So, with time travel, you have to outline like an insane person and rewrite like crazy. There’s no other way around it. A well-executed time-travel script will take you twice as long as any other genre script in order to work out all the kinks and make the time travel stuff as seamless as possible. If you’re willing to make that commitment, go for it!
 

emtiem

Well-known member
Well, Koepp certainly made it look hard! 😅

(That’s cruel of course: I get the impression he was probably torn in all sorts of directions on Skull)

I’m not sure that stuff about time travel scripts rings true either. There’s lots of different types of time travel stories, from the narratives that intertwine with themselves like Back to the Future 2 or that Harry Potter one, to ones where the time travel is like just going to another place, like Star Trek 4. And some writers are just great at handling them.
 

Lance Quazar

Well-known member
This guy is and has always been a complete fraud. Out of morbid curiosity, I clicked on one of the articles. The "Secret Ingredient" to Star Wars is one of the most basic, 101-level screenwriting bromides of all time. It didn't take a genius to regurgitate something you learn in the first half hour of a writing extension course.
 

emtiem

Well-known member
I liked his DoD review; the second piece I agreed with less. I think he should have at least rewatched the set pieces he was talking about in preparation for writing it (he mentions a character who wasn't present in the scene being in one of them).
 

British Raider

Well-known member
Yes I agree that DoD isn’t a patchwork job like a lot of blockbusters and that they committed to those ideas and wrote it in much the way Raiders was really. This is something that was immediately apparent with us but not so much in those early reviews.
 
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