I Wrote a Script. Here are a Few Things I Learned.

Plus, a sneak peek at the final product: “We Three Kings”

To paraphrase Goodfellas, “As far as I can remember, I always wanted to be a picture maker.”

I’ve been writing scripts for as long a time. The first few were parodies of James Bond movies starring my brother as Bond; then, I rewrote Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Before long, I started adapting Dickens, Vernes, and Hemingway. I even wrote a full-length script in college about the Jacobite Uprising. That work is really, really bad. Only one of these was made into an actual movie—an adaption of a WW-II short story by Hemingway that I directed during my senior year of high school.

Then life happened. I was afraid to major in digital media or film in college, so I fell back on my intellectual loves: history and politics. But my mind never strayed far from the dream of writing something decent enough to make it into a genuine movie.

Then, the pandemic happened, and the world stopped.

Still from my first (and only) movie so far, Hemingway’s Crossroads (2015)

In the long isolation, I picked up a biography of the filmmaker John Ford, best known for his Westerns. The book in question, “Searching for John Ford,” is a tome of a thousand-plus pages and chronicles all 142 pictures Ford ever made. Early on, the biographer, a noted film scholar named Joseph McBride, commented that Ford only told the same story twice in all the pictures he made.

Specifically, Ford's 1919 silent Western Marked Men was remade post-World War II as Three Godfathers starring John Wayne, both adaptions of the Saturday Evening Post short story “The Three Godfathers” by Peter B. Kyne.

This odd anecdote sparked a question: Why did Ford tell this story twice?

Naturally, I went to the source material to find the answer. And the imagery and themes struck me. A religious allegory in the backdrop of the American West—a story of the Three Wise Men, but instead of seeking out the child, they’re saving it.

I saw the themes of redemption and fatherhood in the tale. Unsurprisingly, it was a short story, and Kyne did not have the ink to explore the themes fully; nonetheless, I saw a world between the lines on the page that was worth exploring.

So I started writing, and writing, and writing some more. Then, I enlisted my Cinemantics colleague

Caleb Boyer

to join the project and our esteemed

Graham Piro

to add additional material.

The result? A feature-length script titled We Three Kings.

We Three Kings is the story of three outlaws who come upon a shocking discovery while evading a dangerous tracker after a bank robbery goes wrong. 

It’s a Western with a healthy dose of mysticism. It’s about what it means to be a father, what it takes to be “redeemed,” and how hard it is to do either. In movie terms, it’s probably somewhere between The Searchers and The Seventh Seal if those pictures mean anything to you. It shares the same tagline as the original short story but expands dramatically on the characters and the world. It’s darker, it’s world-weary.

Mind you, this isn’t supposed to be a sales pitch.

I’m just trying to set the stage before diving into the lessons I learned. Since I started this project four years ago, the script has been re-written fourteen times—expanded and contracted and expanded again. It looks almost nothing like the original draft that I finished in quarantine.

With that in mind, and in the name of more Cinemantics content, I thought I’d share some of the lessons I learned during the screenwriting process.

Inspiration can come from anywhere.

I was not expecting to write this in the spring of 2020 when the whole world was locked down, and there was nothing to do. All I wanted to do was a.) survive and b.) find a way to enjoy the relative solitude apart from Caleb, my then-roommate. This whole enterprise sprung to mind when I asked myself a question while reading a book. It’s as easy as that! Always be open to what the world can throw at you, whether it’s a passage in a book or a conversation you’ve had with someone you know. L. Frank Baum found all the inspiration he needed when he noticed that the two letters that started and ended a row on his typewriter were “O” and “Z.” From that little observation, The Wizard of Oz was born.

Wear your influences on your sleeves.

Nothing is original under the sun, and movies are quite the same. Even the best directors and screenwriters are pulling from their heroes, from their favorite pictures. The question, then, is not how to create something wholly original but how to combine those inspirations interestingly. This movie is inspired, thematically or narratively, by films as varied as The Searchers, Seventh Seal, Lawrence of Arabia, 3:10 to Yuma, Rio Bravo, The Passion of the Christ, Silence, The Fellowship of the Ring, True Grit, and The Shining. Now, we can all agree if we saw all those movies walking into a bar together, people would turn their heads and look confused. But when I saw the film in my mind, these were the ones that came to it. And that’s okay. Lean into the things that have shaped you. Only then can you actually shape something that is uniquely your own.

Movies are marathons.

Back in 2023, I sent a draft of the script, then a short film titled The Ballad of New Jerusalem, to a friend for notes. After reading it, my friend commented that the draft of the screenplay he read lacked momentum. And it was true. It had drama but no stakes, nothing to push the story forward. The second he pointed it out to me was the second that I realized I was missing a fundamental component of a picture: momentum. It was just kind of, well, dull. After my friend’s gracious notes, I returned to the script and realized that nothing was pushing the characters forward. There was no urgency. So, I found the tension that pushed the characters. In the process of this re-writing, I discovered that movies are much like marathons. You never start at full speed. Instead, you start at a consistent speed and, over time, gather momentum until you’re sprinting across the finish line.

Write, re-write, and then write some more.

Put every idea down on paper, bad or good. Then, take a step back and consider the scene from the perspective of the whole: Does this further the characters? Does it deepen the stakes? Is this essential or just a tag-on? If the answers don’t satisfy you, throw the scene out and start again. During one writing session, I wrote ten pages that I deleted before closing my laptop. Sometimes, a scene doesn’t work. Sometimes, you gotta toss it out. I cannot begin to count the number of times that I’ve pulled up the Google Doc that houses the script and just scrolled through, finding things to tweak. This tinkering only makes it better—so long as you don’t cross the point of diminishing returns. In short, no failed writing day is a waste; it’s merely an experiment. A testing ground for the better ideas to come.

Let the story tell you where to go.

Writing a script is going on a road trip where you only know the people in the car with you and the general direction of where you want to end up. There’s no map, no directions, no concept of who or what you’ll encounter along the way. You follow where the road takes you. Planning too far in advance hinders the process. Part of the reason why the script took me four years to complete is because the first thing I wrote was a version of the ending. That was dumb. Everything I wrote was in service of that ending. Ironically, the more I revised the script, the more that ending changed. Now, it barely resembles what I first put to paper. For years, I was beholden to what I envisioned the picture’s conclusion to be at the expense of the really interesting detours made along the way. Because of that, it took me longer to get to where I needed to go. To quote Dame Julie Andrews: “Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.”

Trust your friends—but don’t forget your gut.

If you trust someone’s judgment enough, there’s nothing wrong with letting them read your script. When you do so, ask them four questions:

• Where were you bored?

• Where could you not understand what was going on?

• Where did you not find things credible?

• Was there anything that you found emotionally confusing?

Let them give their honest feedback. Take whatever they have to offer with goodwill. If you don’t, then you probably shouldn’t have given them the chance to read the script in the first place. It’s always important to trust your friends and family, but you should never forget about your own creative intuition. This is your script, your project, and you’re the final arbiter of what happens in the world you create.

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So, what comes next? Well, it’ll probably be copyrighting the script and developing a proof of concept: storyboarding, artwork, and pitching to potential investors.

Now, just to be clear upfront, do I know the first thing about funding a movie?

No, I sure as shit don’t.

But we’ll figure it out along the way. That’s what makes this adventure so exciting.

Should anything exciting come from this, I’ll keep you posted on the adventures had and the lessons learned. Should anything not come from this, then it would still be worthwhile.