Just finished watching The Shooter with Mark Wahlberg. It put me in mind of my action movie Hollywood script. Here’s the condensed version.
Name: action hero’s gotta have a good strong name with one syllable or the audience gets confused. Something like Jack.
Course, we need a nice strong last name for the audience (they’re only cattle after all) to identify that this is indeed the protagonist. Something like… Strong, there you go, now we’re talking, Jack Strong.
We could have something like Sam Wright too. See what we did there? We stick a W in front of the word ‘right’ and the cattle, excuse me, audience isn’t even aware of the fact that we are telling them this is the right guy, the one to root for. This is imperative, audience is dumber than a box of rocks.
But Sam sounds a little feminine compared to Jack. You almost expect a Sam to be playing with dolls. So unless the hero is going to be portrayed by Judd Law, we’ll stick with ‘Jack’.
Plot:
Good guy gets betrayed. In the process of such betrayal, a loved one is killed (i.e. wife, child, partner, dog, or all of the above). The more loved ones get killed, the better. The more pissed off the good guy will be. Every dead loved one fuels the righteous rage.
Good guy gets pissed.
Good guy gets captured. Because, even though he is the good guy, and a trained SEAL, he’s too fucking dumb to get the hell out of dodge and hangs around.
Good guy escapes capture with the help (unwittingly or intentionally) of another good guy who is working for the bad guys, but doesn’t know they’re bad guys. Yet. This good ol’ boy is not as dumb as a box of rocks, but is certainly not the sharpest tool in the shed. Gotta have a good name too, but not as good as the protagonist or we really screw up the audience. Usually two first names will suffice, and better still if one of them is that name of a state or a place or an object. Something like ‘Russ Maynard’, or ‘Bob Birchtree’, or ‘Stan Compton’. Keep it short or we’ll lose the audience.
Good guy who works for the bad guys figures out they’re bad, confides in his boss. Boss is the evil henchman of the bad guys. This brings us to…
Bad guy:
This dude is pure evil. He is calm, collected, emotionally detached, but boy is he bad. This is the guy who killed the good guys’ loved ones. Or at least his dog.
He is distinctly ugly, the more facial hair the better. This is a guy who eats kittens for breakfast. He sports a nefarious name, something like ‘Mr. Bad’ for example. In today’s climate of middle eastern xenophobia, an arab sounding name would be much better, ‘Baturay Alakay’. Or failing that, then french. The french should always be bad guys (freedom fries and all that. Bastards!).
A note about names: ever since Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created Spiderman way back in the 60’s, alliteration has become a fad in names. We have the likes of ‘Peter Parker’, ‘Bruce Banner’, ‘Lois Lane’, ‘Otto Octavius’, etc, etc. So you can never go wrong with alliteration it appears.
The love interest:
No hollywood script is acceptable without a love interest. The more impossible the relationship between our good guy and the girl the better. Following are some rules:
1. if one of the dead loved ones was a buddy, then the love interest should be the buddy’s girlfriend, sister, mother, aunt, etc.
2. if dead loved one was wife or girlfriend, then love interest has to be a nurse, tarot reader, witch, homeopath, librarian, etc. that is, some type of character that helps our good guy come back from the brink.
3. if dead loved one was dog, then that’s easy: a dog breeder!
Climax and resolution:
This is the easiest bit. Love interest is kidnapped by bad guy, is in the verge of death. Good guy to the rescue, sacrificing himself for love interest. Both are about to die. Lots of explosions, car chases, guns (the more and the bigger the guns, the better the film will score with audiences), some Matrix-style scenes with slow-mo shooting and bullets flying. At the very last minute, good guy manages to escape by tricking bad guy into killing himself with the same weapon or method meant for good guy. Bad guy goes up in a huge blaze that levels 10 square blocks and all the bad guy’s underlings, yet, miraculously, leaves love interest and good guy unharmed.
Movie ends with love interest and good guy kissing among the wreckage. It is night. It is raining.
The End.
I am selling the rights to this wonderful script, contact me for details and pricing. Soon in a theater near you.
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