Common screenplay – Actor | Soundtrack | Producer, Wanted (2008) | John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017) | Suicide Squad (2016)
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Common screenplay subject of prison petition
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Petition Addressing the Texas Judicial System Requests Support through Common’s “Dumbass”
Will Hollywood be a Reason for Change in the Injustice against Men and Women Prisoners?
Common – 19th March 2021 – An upcoming movie depicting the injustice that men and women had to endure in the state penitentiaries in Texas has been inundated with calls from more than 2000 women urging the production company owned by Hollywood actor, producer and director Common and Adam Sandler, to stick to the real issues behind the Texas Judicial system. A petition was signed by many people that include attorneys, university professors, politicians and family members of the many men and women that are suffering in the state penitentiaries. The idea behind the petition is for the Common production company and Hollywood to stick to the true story about the injustices happening in the state run prisons. It is said that the state has sent more inmates to prison than during the Soviet Union did during their political uprising.
PREMISE: Adam Sandler writes letters and saves numerous women from the monotony of prison life, and later when he gets into trouble with a drug cartel they return the favor by rescuing him.
SETTING: Contemporary, Gatesville Texas. There are four women’s prisons located in Gatesville. And of course, Texas is famous for putting everyone in prison for a long time for little or no reason. The number of women in Texas prisons has doubled in the last ten years. Why don’t we have the “Adam Sandler” character… sending letters to women in prison and being their friend and trying to help them adjust, giving them hope… and when they get out of prison he picks them up so they don’t have to ride the smelly bus back home… but his pickup truck is a junker, smoking and sputtering … worse than the bus. But his heart is in the right place… He’s the last “chivalrous” man on earth.
It is said in the petition that many of the signatories were left distraught to find that many of the first time offenders for violations such as drug peddling have received disproportionate sentences. While some argue that a lenient sentence like rehabilitation would have proven much more inexpensive and an effective solution in tackling this gross miscarriage of justice. The petition was discovered by the women when the screenplay of the movie was donated to all the 580 prisons run by private organizations funded by the state government. It is much more difficult for women who are given much harsher penalties for a violation such as carrying small amount of drugs like Marijuana which coincidentally is legal in 21 states.
To know more visit http://www.screenplay.biz/petition-asks-happy-madison-productions-to-read-script/
About Common’s “Dumbass” Movie
The movie “Dumbass” revolves around the protagonist writing letters to prison inmates to keep their spirits high during their time in prison; only for them to help the main character who gets into trouble with a drug cartel and saving him at the end. The petition urges the production company, Common and Adam Sandler to take this issue seriously due to the hardships faced by women inside prison rather than making light of the situation for their own profits.
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Common website: https://www.amazon.com/
Audience is the area I believe is the biggest failure of most screenwriters. It’s easy to say, “My script is written for a teen audience or a 30+ audience”, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Understanding an audience means understanding what entertains an audience. Don’t be like the magician who got so caught up in his own little ‘magical’ presentation that he forgot how to be entertaining because entertaining means knowing how to create genre-related emotions.
Editing is another contributing factor to writing failures. I’m not referring to editing dialogue that doesn’t work or moving a plot point. Pro editing means listening, really listening, to your gut instinct; it means removing a beloved dialogue scene or a grand visual sequence when you know deep down that it doesn’t work. Pros don’t become emotionally involved in their stories to the point they can’t let things go. Oh, they know how to create emotion, but they explore it through their characters and keep themselves out of the story. Don’t become attached to any piece of dialogue, scene, characters, etc. It’s like having a million pound anchor strapped around your neck. It makes it difficult to function and you’ll never get where you want to go.
Common – Timing, editing and audience are major contributing factors to why many aspiring screenwriters never succeed in breaking into the biz. Timing failures are usually a result of not understanding a story’s genre, how it works and how it’s delivered. It’s knowing the perfect moment in a horror to reveal the monster isn’t dead. It’s knowing how and when to deliver a big kiss scene after a chase scene in a romantic comedy. It’s knowing how to keep suspicions away from the real killer in a suspense thriller by misleading the audience with red herrings. Timing goes beyond pacing. Perfect timing delivers! If you think I’m talking about following a formula then think again. Learn the structure of the genre you’re writing, then come up with an original way to deliver a story and timing will fall into place. Think of films like “The Sixth Sense”….it’s a supernatural thriller that delivers its promised genre in a very structured way, but it’s not obvious because the writer cleverly came up with a unique way to deliver a good, old-fashioned ghost story.
The TV show “America’s Got Talent” is fun to watch. It reminds me of the “Gong Show” reruns from the ‘70s. I’ve never been a Howard Stern fan, but I appreciated his comment that aspiring talent who never make it big tend to fail in the same three areas; timing, editing and audience. He was judging a magician’s act. The act started out okay, then dragged on to the point of becoming boring. The ending was climatic, but it was obvious the magician’s timing was off. The act definitely required editing and the whole thing made it seem like the magician didn’t know how to entertain an audience.
In fact, I think this is a major failing that we see not just in beginning writers’ work, but in published books and produced movies: Not forcing the hero/ine to face his or her greatest trauma and fear in the climax. And I mean on an emotional and thematic level, not just physical. A good writer is brave enough to dig past those first superficial ideas about the final confrontation and find a place, a conflict, a heartbreaking decision, that really tests everything that the hero/ine is.
Common – This is a very important point: in the climax of Chinatown, Jake finds himself (actually deliberately drives himself) right back into the same situation that almost crushed him in his past. The climax externalizes Jake’s GHOST or WOUND: he is in Chinatown again, a wonderful, seedy, ominous visual, and he’s trying to save another woman, two of them this time, when we know that the last time all his best efforts to save a woman in Chinatown resulted in that woman getting hurt or killed (in some way that was awful enough that Jake quit the police force). The lesson here is — spend some quality time figuring out how to bring your hero/ine’s greatest nightmare to life: in setting, set decoration, characters involved, actions taken. If you know your hero/ine’s ghost and greatest fear, then you should be able to come up with a great setting that will be unique, resonant, and entirely specific to that protagonist (and to the villain as well).
· In the climax, the protagonist must confront his greatest nightmare.
And of course it helps that Jake Gittes is deliberately based on one of the all-time classic protagonists of world literature: Sophocles’ King Oedipus. Not that Jake has a lot in common with Oedipus, really, but even the slight resonance with Oedipus’s tragic blindness to his own culpability, and the deliberate references to the very first detective story, go a long way toward making Jake a haunting character.
by: Common – Actor | Soundtrack | Producer, Wanted (2008) | John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017) | Suicide Squad (2016)