Any Screenwriters On The Board??
- Thread starter LeftyLuchini
- Start date
Is there a resource for professional coverages?
Not lookin for a service - don’t want coverage.
I want to review coverages. See what readers/analysts etc have written up on scripts xyz etc
Ideal would be the same way scripts are available in online databases, there may be a library of verified professional coverages.
Writers post bits and pieces and whole coverages in forums and have for decades but I’m not aware of an actual HUB…
Could be a great resource for not just writers. Hundreds of years of scripts AND hundreds of years of coverages written on them and the tens of thousands millions I guess lol of never was scripts both spec and commissioned…
Thanks in advance for any and all resources!!
Not lookin for a service - don’t want coverage.
I want to review coverages. See what readers/analysts etc have written up on scripts xyz etc
Ideal would be the same way scripts are available in online databases, there may be a library of verified professional coverages.
Writers post bits and pieces and whole coverages in forums and have for decades but I’m not aware of an actual HUB…
Could be a great resource for not just writers. Hundreds of years of scripts AND hundreds of years of coverages written on them and the tens of thousands millions I guess lol of never was scripts both spec and commissioned…
Thanks in advance for any and all resources!!
I know this is super unlikely to ever happen lol. Kills the mystique. Even with scripts. We all know there are almost ZERO first submission drafts or even early drafts of any kind online. Almost everything is shooting or just before and even still many post production - publishing polished and ready screenplays.
In a world where most of what we see is littered with tropes, IE things we expect to see. And what we expect to see isn't necessarily how it really is, it's just what we expect to see.
I'm watching national treasure right now and it stars Nick Cage and his toadie or lackey. So you have an alpha-ish male and a beta male
Why don't we see friends who are relatively equally yoked, like Zach Braff and Donald Faison or Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. I'm sick of seeing this trope, but one of the biggest issues with going away from tropes is the audience is expecting to see the trope.
Don't forget the romantic tie in. I always struggle whether to include that in my stories or not. The idea of it simply seems forced on many occasions
My question is two parts:
1. What tropes are you sick of seeing in movies?
2. And how do you get the audience on board when you go away from what they are typically used to seeing?
I'm watching national treasure right now and it stars Nick Cage and his toadie or lackey. So you have an alpha-ish male and a beta male
Why don't we see friends who are relatively equally yoked, like Zach Braff and Donald Faison or Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. I'm sick of seeing this trope, but one of the biggest issues with going away from tropes is the audience is expecting to see the trope.
Don't forget the romantic tie in. I always struggle whether to include that in my stories or not. The idea of it simply seems forced on many occasions
My question is two parts:
1. What tropes are you sick of seeing in movies?
2. And how do you get the audience on board when you go away from what they are typically used to seeing?
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You're right. There aren't as many early drafts available online these days. But if you dig around some of the old screenplay sites, you'll find stuff from the 80s and 90s. I've always been curious about the early drafts of Good Will Hunting. There was this rumored subplot about a shadowy government agency trying to recruit Will, but Affleck and Damon were advised to drop it, so I guess they did. It would also be fun to read all the rejected scripts for Mahershala Ali's Blade movie. They've gone through at least 3-4 screenwriters at this point.
Here's an old, old site that used to be popular back in the day
It's from the guys who wrote the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. They also wrote that Denzel Washington movie, Deja Vu (2006). The site has a few scripts available to download. Some might be early drafts. The site is hella old, but some of their articles about the craft still apply.
In the end, we're probably not going to find some big piece to the puzzle by reading coverage. There are tons of stories about scripts that were rejected all over Hollywood for years but eventually became successful films. It's all subjective.
Remember Robinne Lee from Deliver Us from Eva?
Well, she wrote a novel, and it was turned into a movie starring Anne Hathaway.
Drops this Friday on Amazon.
That's the only way to do it. The only way that they will approve new IP is if it's a successful novel. Otherwise look forward to fast and the furious 17 gentlemen, whether we wanted it or not
There's more potential for conflict and/or comedy with contrasting characters. It's a staple of the buddy comedy. The visual dynamic is easy to sell in a movie poster. It's kind of funny that you mention Zach Braff and Donald Faison as a break from the norm because the interracial buddy trope has been around for decades. Doesn't matter if they're equally yoked or not, the race angle is enough.
1) This one comes to mind:
2) This is tricky. Most people don't like change or anything that challenges the status quo, so it's going to be an uphill battle to get them on board. That's where your talent as a storyteller comes in.
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30 pages and counting.
Bump.
Bump.
I just thought of this and added this to my post
"Don't forget the romantic tie in. I always struggle whether to include that in my stories or not. The idea of it simply seems forced on many occasions"
The disposable black romantic tie-in is annoying to say the least. It's just rife with lazy writing and storytelling.
I would much rather someone focus on the fact that men and women in general have so little in common rather than intentionally adding a love interest that is just cast aside because they really want to be with person X
"Do you like football? "
"No. "
"Basketball? "
"Not really."
"What would you like to do"
"I like movies"
Then you can have a bonding moment going to the movies and have him montage showing that and then showing them sitting in the movie theater or laying on a couch watching the movie together and then talking about the movie afterward.
That's authentic. It's not a trope because it's actual reality. Men and women don't typically have a whole lot in common but when there is a common ground you can draw from that
"Do you like football? "
"No. "
"Basketball? "
"Not really."
"What would do you like to do"
"I like working out"
So they go to the gym together and he's trying to show off how much he can press, and then she corrects his form. Tell him that if he keeps lifting like that he's going to tear something.
Then says that she put herself through college by being a personal trainer and went to college on a partial track scholarship.
He then brags about how fast he is and they Go to the track and race, and though he wins, it's close. He says, you're a lot faster than I thought you were. She says "what part of track scholarship don't you understand," and laughs. Then you've got banter
There are alternatives to the tropes we always see, but they always go to the easy button which is the trope
If we're lucky enough to sell a Black novel
Her other book wasn't even a Black romance; it was interracial, and they still weren't interested.
If we're lucky enough to sell a Black novel
Her other book wasn't even a Black romance; it was interracial, and they still weren't interested.
I thought I remembered her from 7 Pounds
If we're lucky enough to sell a Black novel
Her other book wasn't even a Black romance; it was interracial, and they still weren't interested.
I think I'm going to go the route that Eric Jerome dickey did in his Gideon series. He had the main character and his mother and even his brother as being ambiguous. Other characters he was more specific on as to their race, but the main character he left ambiguous.
I spoke to him on Twitter before he passed and he said he did it intentionally, although he didn't really put too much thought into the names
If we're lucky enough to sell a Black novel
Her other book wasn't even a Black romance; it was interracial, and they still weren't interested.
Wow
Whelp tv pilot season may be permanently dead
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Not sure what they're looking for in the submission materials. Screenplays, short films, pitches, or treatments? Either way, it's worth checking out.
I appreciate these posts @raze - I make sure I share them with my brother who is working on a few scripts.
Thanks.
Amazon dude getting punked. LOL
I was just gonna say the same thing
Bezos making sure to STAY rich.
Probably makes that man pay full price for Amazon Prime membership
That shit is a heinous crime.
That mf still middle class lol
I would've been like “Take me off the list I dont need yall in my business.”
If we're lucky enough to sell a Black novel
Her other book wasn't even a Black romance; it was interracial, and they still weren't interested.
Unfortunately, that’s how you gotta do it sometimes
Where's the flag?!
These mutha fuckas just transferring wealth to each other for no reason, fuck merit, hard work or proving your skills.
How can you ever think youre getting a fair deal?
Where's the flag?!
These mutha fuckas just transferring wealth to each other for no reason, fuck merit, hard work or proving your skills.
How can you ever think youre getting a fair deal?
Bars of total absolute truth
Where's the flag?!
These mutha fuckas just transferring wealth to each other for no reason, fuck merit, hard work or proving your skills.
How can you ever think youre getting a fair deal?
What's really deep?
After all the fake pop and circumstance especially after metoo and George Floyd, you would think this would be a no brainer.
Plus that was a huge unexpected return on investment.
And the Asian audience is very sought after.
So these white men would LOSE MONEY over ego and setting a pay scale??.
This why I NEVER fully trust these budget and box office numbers. Movie math is probably the dirtiest math ever.
It's inflated asf
There is just TOO TOO MUCH nepotism within Hollywood.
They've set themselves up to win even when they fail.
This is why most the movies coming out of it are trash now.
Attach their friends names to projects to fluff up their resume to justify the pay.
It's not like she didn't have experience before this or didn't write for other movies.
Time and again minorities are only there to give film the air of cultural authenticity for them to cash in on everyone else's culture.
Crazy to think a film about being wealthy and they can't even pay the writers appropriately.
This is a good read, but beware; it has varying degrees of spoilers for American Fiction, The American Society of Magical Negroes, The Blackening, and They Cloned Tyrone.
In 2017, Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” was a critical and commercial smash that immediately became one of the defining movies of the Trump Era. The next year, Boots Riley’s masterful “Sorry to Bother You” seemed to herald a new golden age for Black satire films. But as those movies stood out for using surreal plot twists to humorously — and horrifically — unpack complex ideas like racial appropriation and consumer culture, the crop that has followed hasn’t kept pace. The current moment is defined by a central question: What does the “Black” look like in Black satire films today? Too often lately it’s “not Black enough.”
By that I mean to say a recent influx of films, including “The American Society of Magical Negroes,” “American Fiction” and “The Blackening,” have failed to represent Blackness with all its due complexity — as sometimes messy, sometimes contradictory. Instead, they flatten and simplify Blackness to serve a more singular, and thus digestible, form of satirical storytelling.
The foremost example is “American Fiction,” inspired by Percival Everett’s 2001 novel “Erasure,” which won this year’s Oscar for best screenplay. In the film, a Black author and professor named Monk (played by Jeffrey Wright) finds literary success through “My Pafology,” a novel satirizing books that feed negative Black stereotypes. But Monk’s audience receives his book with earnest praise, forcing him to reconcile his newfound prosperity with his racial ethics.
The surface layer of satire is obvious: The white audiences and publishing professionals who celebrate “My Pafology” do so not because of its merits but because the book allows them to fetishize another tragic Black story. It’s a performance of racial acceptance; these fans are literally buying into their own white guilt.
Monk’s foil in the film is another Black author, Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), who publishes a popular book of sensationalist Black trauma about life in the ghetto. Profiting on her white audience’s racist assumptions about Blackness, Sintara is this satire’s race traitor — or so it initially seems. Because when, in one scene, Monk questions whether Sintara’s book is any different from “My Pafology,” which she dismisses as pandering, she counters that she is spotlighting an authentic Black experience. Sintara accuses Monk of snobbery, saying that his highfalutin notion of Blackness excludes other Black experiences because he is too ashamed to recognize them.
But the fact that it is Sintara who voices the film’s criticism of Monk shows how loath “American Fiction” is to make a value statement on the characters’ actions within the context of their Blackness. Sintara, whom Monk catches reading “White Negroes,” a text about Black cultural appropriation, somehow isn’t winkingly framed as the hypocrite or the inauthentic one pointing out the hypocrisy and inauthenticity of the hero.
This adaptation seems to misunderstand that “Erasure” is as much a critique of how white audiences perceive these Black characters’ art and their identities as it is about how the characters decide to manipulate or contradict these perceptions. “American Fiction” takes the easy way out by making both of these characters right, a move which undercuts the nuances of how Monk and Sintara are negotiating themselves as Black people and the ethical weight of their choices.
In the similarly watered-down comedy-horror film “The Blackening,” a group of Black college friends reunites in a remote cabin for a Juneteenth celebration. Once there, the friends are hunted and threatened by unknown assailants and forced to play a minstrel-style trivia game proving their Blackness.
The racial satire of “The Blackening” is straightforward: The villains are white people who appropriate, sell and kill Black bodies. And the whole concept of the film is based on that common racist horror film trope in which the Black character is the first to die.
Like “American Fiction,” it falls into the trap of building its scaffolding from an outside look at Blackness, as something defined by and reactionary against whiteness. The result is another film that neglects being “too Black” — skimping on an interior look into Blackness that may sometimes contradict or betray itself. Blackness is so singularly defined — these Black friends are celebrating Juneteenth, and the game asks them questions about rap lyrics and “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” — that neither the plot’s action nor the comedy surprises. The reveal that the nerdy Trump-voting Black character (played by Jermaine Fowler) is the true bad guy is obvious, and says little on a satirical level beyond that “illegitimate” or “inauthentic” Blackness is dangerous and easy to spot.
“The American Society of Magical Negroes,” a title that references a particular character trope seen in movies like “The Green Mile” and “The Legend of Bagger Vance,” also fails to offer a three-dimensional depiction of Blackness. In the movie, a meek Black man named Aren (Justice Smith) is introduced to the titular group by longtime member Roger (David Alan Grier). Aren initially denies that he’s concerned about race but then embraces his role as a magical Negro — until his love life intersects with his first assignment, forcing him to choose between embracing agency over his own life and defying society.
The film’s fantastical central idea, however, is more show than substance. For most of a film that’s supposed to mock a racist character trope, it’s ironic that we don’t see much of these characters beyond their acting in this trope. Aren’s Blackness tellingly feels incidental though it’s central to the plot. His biracial identity is thrown out as a brief aside, when it seems like a prominent character detail to explore in a satire about proscribed racial roles.
The one-handed satirical approach of these films may, to some extent, come down to a failure of the writing. But there’s another factor at play — box office politics. The more obvious layer of satire, addressing white oppression and white guilt, seems aimed at white liberal audiences so they can feel in on the joke. Black audiences, on the other hand, are left with a simplified representation of their race that doesn’t dare be too controversial.
Just a few years ago “Get Out” and “Sorry to Bother You” each offered its own sharp satire about how whiteness may break down the Black psyche. While both films build their action around the absurd ways whiteness sabotages the protagonists on a societal level, they differ from the newer satires by representing, either metaphorically or literally, spaces of Black interiority or consciousness damaged by whiteness. In “Get Out,” it’s the Black hero’s entrapment in the Sunken Place, which became one of the defining metaphors of its time. In “Sorry to Bother You,” the hero’s moment of truth arrives when he must choose whether to retain his identity and class status, or to continue using a racial performance to gain clout and success, to lose his humanity.
There is one recent exception to the recent spate of middling Black satirical films: Netflix’s “They Cloned Tyrone.” In the film, a drug dealer named Fontaine (John Boyega), a pimp named Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx) and a prostitute named Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris) discover a clandestine program at work within their town. The Black residents are being cloned, experimented on and mind-controlled via rap music and stereotypically Black products like fried chicken and chemical relaxers.
But the satire works in both directions. The film cleverly makes the main three characters conscious of the stereotypes they portray. They question whether those roles serve them or serve the racist scheming happening around them. Fontaine eventually discovers that the big bad is the original Fontaine, who initiated the cloning process and is trying to whitewash Black people into white people a la another famous satire, “Black No More.” Through this twist, “They Cloned Tyrone” showcases how racism can subvert the minds of even the marginalized.
“They Cloned Tyrone” succeeds in its depiction of “authentic Blackness” in comparison to other recent satires. It’s not just about the way characters speak or the exaggerated depictions of their lives; it’s also about their internal conflicts, whether they choose to submit to a racist narrative and how much agency they have over their own narratives.
These satires, after all, come down to narratives: Beneath the commentary, the jokes and the ironies are meant to reveal what are, essentially, Black stories. But so many of these films fail to understand the central, perhaps the only, parameter of a “Black story”: that it be honest and complicated and, at the very least, inclusive of the people it depicts.
The post Black Satire Is Having Its Hollywood Moment, but Something Is Missing appeared first on New York Times.
Black Satire Is Having Its Hollywood Moment, but Something Is Missing
In 2017, Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” was a critical and commercial smash that immediately became one of the defining movies
dnyuz.com
Black Satire Is Having Its Hollywood Moment, but Something Is Missing
In 2017, Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” was a critical and commercial smash that immediately became one of the defining movies of the Trump Era. The next year, Boots Riley’s masterful “Sorry to Bother You” seemed to herald a new golden age for Black satire films. But as those movies stood out for using surreal plot twists to humorously — and horrifically — unpack complex ideas like racial appropriation and consumer culture, the crop that has followed hasn’t kept pace. The current moment is defined by a central question: What does the “Black” look like in Black satire films today? Too often lately it’s “not Black enough.”
By that I mean to say a recent influx of films, including “The American Society of Magical Negroes,” “American Fiction” and “The Blackening,” have failed to represent Blackness with all its due complexity — as sometimes messy, sometimes contradictory. Instead, they flatten and simplify Blackness to serve a more singular, and thus digestible, form of satirical storytelling.
The foremost example is “American Fiction,” inspired by Percival Everett’s 2001 novel “Erasure,” which won this year’s Oscar for best screenplay. In the film, a Black author and professor named Monk (played by Jeffrey Wright) finds literary success through “My Pafology,” a novel satirizing books that feed negative Black stereotypes. But Monk’s audience receives his book with earnest praise, forcing him to reconcile his newfound prosperity with his racial ethics.
The surface layer of satire is obvious: The white audiences and publishing professionals who celebrate “My Pafology” do so not because of its merits but because the book allows them to fetishize another tragic Black story. It’s a performance of racial acceptance; these fans are literally buying into their own white guilt.
Monk’s foil in the film is another Black author, Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), who publishes a popular book of sensationalist Black trauma about life in the ghetto. Profiting on her white audience’s racist assumptions about Blackness, Sintara is this satire’s race traitor — or so it initially seems. Because when, in one scene, Monk questions whether Sintara’s book is any different from “My Pafology,” which she dismisses as pandering, she counters that she is spotlighting an authentic Black experience. Sintara accuses Monk of snobbery, saying that his highfalutin notion of Blackness excludes other Black experiences because he is too ashamed to recognize them.
But the fact that it is Sintara who voices the film’s criticism of Monk shows how loath “American Fiction” is to make a value statement on the characters’ actions within the context of their Blackness. Sintara, whom Monk catches reading “White Negroes,” a text about Black cultural appropriation, somehow isn’t winkingly framed as the hypocrite or the inauthentic one pointing out the hypocrisy and inauthenticity of the hero.
This adaptation seems to misunderstand that “Erasure” is as much a critique of how white audiences perceive these Black characters’ art and their identities as it is about how the characters decide to manipulate or contradict these perceptions. “American Fiction” takes the easy way out by making both of these characters right, a move which undercuts the nuances of how Monk and Sintara are negotiating themselves as Black people and the ethical weight of their choices.
In the similarly watered-down comedy-horror film “The Blackening,” a group of Black college friends reunites in a remote cabin for a Juneteenth celebration. Once there, the friends are hunted and threatened by unknown assailants and forced to play a minstrel-style trivia game proving their Blackness.
The racial satire of “The Blackening” is straightforward: The villains are white people who appropriate, sell and kill Black bodies. And the whole concept of the film is based on that common racist horror film trope in which the Black character is the first to die.
Like “American Fiction,” it falls into the trap of building its scaffolding from an outside look at Blackness, as something defined by and reactionary against whiteness. The result is another film that neglects being “too Black” — skimping on an interior look into Blackness that may sometimes contradict or betray itself. Blackness is so singularly defined — these Black friends are celebrating Juneteenth, and the game asks them questions about rap lyrics and “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” — that neither the plot’s action nor the comedy surprises. The reveal that the nerdy Trump-voting Black character (played by Jermaine Fowler) is the true bad guy is obvious, and says little on a satirical level beyond that “illegitimate” or “inauthentic” Blackness is dangerous and easy to spot.
“The American Society of Magical Negroes,” a title that references a particular character trope seen in movies like “The Green Mile” and “The Legend of Bagger Vance,” also fails to offer a three-dimensional depiction of Blackness. In the movie, a meek Black man named Aren (Justice Smith) is introduced to the titular group by longtime member Roger (David Alan Grier). Aren initially denies that he’s concerned about race but then embraces his role as a magical Negro — until his love life intersects with his first assignment, forcing him to choose between embracing agency over his own life and defying society.
The film’s fantastical central idea, however, is more show than substance. For most of a film that’s supposed to mock a racist character trope, it’s ironic that we don’t see much of these characters beyond their acting in this trope. Aren’s Blackness tellingly feels incidental though it’s central to the plot. His biracial identity is thrown out as a brief aside, when it seems like a prominent character detail to explore in a satire about proscribed racial roles.
The one-handed satirical approach of these films may, to some extent, come down to a failure of the writing. But there’s another factor at play — box office politics. The more obvious layer of satire, addressing white oppression and white guilt, seems aimed at white liberal audiences so they can feel in on the joke. Black audiences, on the other hand, are left with a simplified representation of their race that doesn’t dare be too controversial.
Just a few years ago “Get Out” and “Sorry to Bother You” each offered its own sharp satire about how whiteness may break down the Black psyche. While both films build their action around the absurd ways whiteness sabotages the protagonists on a societal level, they differ from the newer satires by representing, either metaphorically or literally, spaces of Black interiority or consciousness damaged by whiteness. In “Get Out,” it’s the Black hero’s entrapment in the Sunken Place, which became one of the defining metaphors of its time. In “Sorry to Bother You,” the hero’s moment of truth arrives when he must choose whether to retain his identity and class status, or to continue using a racial performance to gain clout and success, to lose his humanity.
There is one recent exception to the recent spate of middling Black satirical films: Netflix’s “They Cloned Tyrone.” In the film, a drug dealer named Fontaine (John Boyega), a pimp named Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx) and a prostitute named Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris) discover a clandestine program at work within their town. The Black residents are being cloned, experimented on and mind-controlled via rap music and stereotypically Black products like fried chicken and chemical relaxers.
But the satire works in both directions. The film cleverly makes the main three characters conscious of the stereotypes they portray. They question whether those roles serve them or serve the racist scheming happening around them. Fontaine eventually discovers that the big bad is the original Fontaine, who initiated the cloning process and is trying to whitewash Black people into white people a la another famous satire, “Black No More.” Through this twist, “They Cloned Tyrone” showcases how racism can subvert the minds of even the marginalized.
“They Cloned Tyrone” succeeds in its depiction of “authentic Blackness” in comparison to other recent satires. It’s not just about the way characters speak or the exaggerated depictions of their lives; it’s also about their internal conflicts, whether they choose to submit to a racist narrative and how much agency they have over their own narratives.
These satires, after all, come down to narratives: Beneath the commentary, the jokes and the ironies are meant to reveal what are, essentially, Black stories. But so many of these films fail to understand the central, perhaps the only, parameter of a “Black story”: that it be honest and complicated and, at the very least, inclusive of the people it depicts.
The post Black Satire Is Having Its Hollywood Moment, but Something Is Missing appeared first on New York Times.