This movie is a game changer for the documentary industry. But is it actually a good movie?
Genre: Documentary/Drama/Comedy
Premise: Documentarian Nathan Fielder moves in with the infamous Elizabeth Holmes, founder of a multibillion-dollar tech startup, Theranos, who was ultimately convicted of defrauding investors.
About: This movie is turning into one of the biggest documentary success stories in history. After a trailer that went mega-viral, You Can See Everything opened to $15 million this weekend on just 850 screens, making it the biggest opening for a non-musical documentary since Fahrenheit 9/11 back in 2004. A24 gave Fielder and co-director, Oppenheim, extraordinary creative freedom to make the film. They could spend years filming, and if they didn’t come up with something worthwhile, they didn’t have to release anything. Fielder said the studio essentially told them they could throw the whole thing away. In one of the strangest demo announcements of movies in years, 70% of You Can See Everything’s audience was under 25. That means that a bunch of 20-somethings sat through a 3 hour documentary in theaters, something the industry had recently conceded was impossible.
Writers: Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim
Details: 3 hours
Before I get into this review, I must point out that You Can See Everything may be the future of theatrical documentary filmmaking.
Because first of all, the movie made 15 million bucks. Which is the equivalent of three times that in the narrative box office world, because documentaries make no money. And they especially don’t make money theatrically anymore. So clearly, this is a huge opening for a documentary film.
That got me thinking. How did this film achieve this when all these other documentaries make nothing?
To answer that, you have to understand why people don’t see documentaries in the theater anymore. The answer is because you can go to YouTube, type in “Charles Manson,” and get 50 documentaries about Charles Manson that you can sit there and watch all day long if you want.
This has happened because making documentaries is cheap now. And guess what? It just got even cheaper. The most recent documentaries I’ve been watching online have started using AI for insert shots or to recreate video. And while you’re aware that it’s AI, there’s no question that it’s a level up from what these no-budget documentary filmmakers used to have to do, which was go with stock images. Or stay on whatever documentary subject was speaking in a publicly accessible video.
Now you can actually recreate exactly what they’re talking about.
So the question then becomes, if you want to make a documentary that actually makes money and premieres in theaters, how do you do that?
You Can See Everything gives us the answer. You have to expand the documentary format into something we haven’t seen before.
Now, Nathan Fielder’s ability to do this is on another level. But I want to make clear that you don’t have to be a genius filmmaker who knows how to work his way into the documentary in a meta and entertaining way to pull this off. You just need to find an angle that expands the documentary format into something weirder or stranger or different from what we’ve seen before. And I think it’s all up for grabs as far as what you can do.
But I do think that filmmakers inserting themselves into these movies is one avenue. Becoming sort of the star of the documentary. Because you can almost create a franchise out of that. It’s similar to what Michael Moore used to do. You didn’t come to Bowling for Columbine just to learn about Columbine. You also came to see Michael Moore challenging Charlton Heston about guns.
And Nathan Fielder has taken that one step further by adding his quirky sense of humor and meta advancements, like bringing in real movie stars to play the roles of characters when he doesn’t have access to his documentary subjects.
That’s the sort of inventiveness you want to embrace in this new world of documentary filmmaking. Because if you’re just making by-the-books, by-the-numbers documentaries, forget about it. Just put your stuff up on YouTube. Cause I guarantee you no one’s paying 15 bucks in a theater for it.
Okay. Now let’s talk about the actual movie.
I went into this confident that it was going to be my favorite movie of the year. Ever since I found out about You Can See Everything six weeks ago, I’ve been desperately counting the weeks until it comes out. I love Nathan Fielder. He’s probably up there as one of the top five creative minds in Hollywood.
Nathan comes into Elizabeth Holmes’ life 36 days before she’s scheduled to go to prison for defrauding investors in her Theranos business, where she supposedly developed a blood-testing technology where people could prick their finger, put a blood sample into a machine, and test for hundreds of different things.
This had the opportunity to disrupt a medical testing industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars. So it was a big deal. And supposedly she knowingly said it could do some things that it couldn’t do. But this documentary is about Elizabeth claiming she’s always told the truth and that she’s innocent.
When Nathan comes into her life, she has a relatively new partner, Billy. Billy becomes a very big part of the documentary in that he’s taken the driver’s seat of both this relationship and this business, because they want to start up Theranos again, but a new version of it.
So Nathan starts living with Elizabeth and Billy in his beach house. They have two young kids with them. And Nathan’s goal appears to be to get to the bottom of what happened at Theranos. He wants to know if Elizabeth knowingly lied or not.
Because she’s always claimed that she didn’t lie. And actually a big moment in the documentary is Nathan asking her, “Have you ever told a lie?” and Elizabeth Holmes saying, “No.”
That becomes a central theme of the film. Truth. Not long after that moment, we learn about an infamous New York Times article. In it, Elizabeth Holmes says, of the fictionalized TV shows of her story, “They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created.”
And this quote becomes a big deal in the movie because Elizabeth Holmes swears that this line, which ends up going viral and sort of becoming an unofficial slogan that defines her, is something she never said. And she recorded all of the interviews that she did for people and claims that that line is nowhere to be found on any of the recordings.
But The New York Times says it was, so Nathan Fielder tries to talk to The New York Times and see if they can find the actual recording of her saying those words. And The New York Times can’t find it. Which begs the counter-question to Nathan’s assumption that Elizabeth lied to the world: Was this just one big smear campaign?
Nathan digs and digs but the more he talks to Elizabeth, the less sure of the answer he is. Which leads him to lose the plot a bit. If Elizabeth is innocent, then what is this movie really about? To give you some context, Elizabeth Holmes contacted A24 and said I’m open to being documented. And A24 went to Nathan and Lance and said, “Do you want to do this?” And Nathan decided, “Sure,” and ran out there to Elizabeth and Billy’s beach house to get to work. But there was a strange catch. Elizabeth only had 36 days left before she was sent to federal prison (screenwriting tip alert: ticking clock!).
So when Elizabeth heads to prison, Nathan loses his documentary subject. In the process, he also loses his narrative. But Nathan has this unexpected other character he’s left with: Billy. So I think Nathan decided, okay, we couldn’t prove that Elizabeth was bad. But we’ve got this guy over here who’s a weirdo and he says a lot of douchey stuff. Let’s go all in and make this an “Elizabeth Holmes’s husband is a psycho” documentary.
There’s a scene earlier in the doc where Nathan may have realized this was the way to go. Elizabeth is in the kitchen making eggs. She’s whisking them in a bowl, talking to Billy, and at one point Billy just takes the bowl out of her hands and starts whisking them himself. But faster.
And Nathan immediately stops everything. “Whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Why did you just take the eggs from her?” The moment gets a big laugh in the theater. And Elizabeth explains that Billy thinks she doesn’t whisk them enough and that the eggs taste better when they’re whisked more.
Ah-ha, Nathan seems to realize. Billy is the controlling evil villainous husband here! I mean look at this guy. He can’t even let his wife whisk some eggs without taking control!
This annoyed the hell out of me. Billy and Elizabeth have been together for a few years now. They have two kids together. And for all we know, they’ve had this exact same conversation 80 times already.
Maybe Billy has politely asked her to whisk the eggs more 50 different times. Maybe he’s let her do it her way a hundred times. Maybe he’s having a particularly busy morning and doesn’t have time to get into the whole egg-whisking debate again, so he just takes the bowl and does it himself.
I could see myself doing that. I could see my partner doing that. When you’re around someone 24/7, you’re going to have moments like this. Now, maybe Billy really is a controlling asshole. But my point is, we don’t know that from a two-minute exchange. Yet the movie treats this as some world-changing moment.
Not to fear, though. Cause Nathan now makes it his mission to deliver on that narrative. He highlights that, once she goes to prison, Billy takes over Elizabeth’s Twitter account. He makes decisions for her. He’s aggressive. He’s opinionated. He’s the kind of guy who doesn’t really care what anybody thinks about him.
And let’s be real about this. Hollywood gets all up in their underwear about this kind of man. A man who takes charge in a relationship, who makes decisions, who doesn’t apologize for being masculine.
Here’s a question. What if, after everything Elizabeth has been through, after being dragged through the media for a decade, after losing her company, after facing hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, after knowing she’s about to go to prison, she actually loves the fact that this guy has come into her life and said, “You know what? I’ll handle this.” I’ll make the decisions. I’ll deal with the press. I’ll deal with the bullshit. You don’t have to worry about it.
Isn’t it possible that she finds that incredibly attractive?
Because whenever Elizabeth talks about Billy, she is over the moon in love with him. She loves that he takes charge. Yet the film seems determined to convince us that this is a bad thing.
**MAJOR SPOILERS FOR SECOND HALF OF MOVIE FOLLOW**
Which brings me to Amanda Seyfried, someone who may have low-key just become the biggest villain in Hollywood. No wonder she was cast in Mean Girls.
Nathan brings Amanda into the documentary as a, sort of, “Elizabeth Holmes expert,” the reason being that Amanda played Elizabeth Holmes in the Hulu series about Theranos’ downfall. At first, Amanda is there to recreate scenes to help Nathan understand Elizabeth better, particularly because he no longer has access to Elizabeth.
But eventually Amanda becomes a much bigger part of the story. When Nathan shows her some footage he’s shot of Billy and Elizabeth, she’s horrified. She concludes that he’s controlling. That he treats Elizabeth terribly. And that she’s a victim of Stockholm Syndrome.
At one point, while she and Nathan are driving to see Billy, she actually says, “Let’s break these two up.” And she has this weird little sinister smile on her face when she says it. And I’m thinking, wait a minute. Who the hell are you??? You don’t know these people. You haven’t spent years with them. You don’t know what their relationship is like when the cameras aren’t rolling. Yet you’ve decided that you understand Elizabeth Holmes’s relationship with her husband better than Elizabeth Holmes???
I mean isn’t the whole point of empowering women that they get to decide what they want? What if what this particular woman wants is a guy who takes charge? What if she doesn’t want to make every decision? What if she loves having somebody in her life who’s willing to shoulder all the responsibility?
There’s actually a shocking little moment when Amanda first meets Billy. She’s spent all this time getting worked up about how awful this man is. She’s ready to tear his head off. And then she meets him in person, shakes his hand, and the very first thing she says is, “Oh my God, you’re really tall.” And for that one split second, her whole demeanor changes. She almost seems mesmerized by him, momentarily forgetting that she’s supposed to despise this guy.
It’s a fascinating moment because it gives us a glimpse into the difference between the masculine traits people criticize in the abstract and how they actually respond to those traits when they’re standing in front of someone who embodies them.
Amanda’s able to recover though and, once they all sit down at a table, gets back on message and accuses Billy of being controlling. Boy did the ladies in my theater like this moment! You didn’t hear cheers that loud in an Avengers showing.
But Billy has this line during the argument that I thought was one of the best lines of the documentary. He says, “I don’t care what you think, Amanda. You’re an actress.” And Amanda shrivels up quickly after that. Because he’s right. She doesn’t have any special authority to tell people how to live their lives.
Imagine somebody who’s never met you, who’s watched a few edited videos of you and your spouse together, showing up at your house and telling you that your relationship is wrong. How would you respond?
And then there’s another moment where Billy starts talking about how much anger he has inside him. He says he has hate in his heart. He has revenge in his heart. It’s more evidence that he’s the second coming of Patrick Bateman.
But let’s add some context. Imagine the person you love more than anything has been dragged through the mud in the media for ten years. Imagine you have two children with this person. Imagine that EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. you have to watch people attack her, mock her, and say things about her that you know aren’t true.
Wouldn’t you be angry? Wouldn’t you have some hate in your heart for those people?
Look. I don’t even like Billy. He seems like a jerk. But I can also see why Elizabeth loves him. He’s confident. He’s decisive. He’s willing to say things other people are afraid to say. He doesn’t seem concerned with being liked.
What’s interesting is that Nathan, begrudgingly, seems to come to the same conclusion. He spends all this time trying to figure out Billy’s angle. Why would this wealthy guy voluntarily get involved with a woman who’s hundreds of millions of dollars in debt and about to go to prison? Why would he take on all this stress? What’s his real motivation?
Nathan keeps looking for an answer and eventually comes to the conclusion that he’s terrified to admit because it’s the least interesting answer for his documentary. Which is that the two actually love each other. Which is what we’re left with. Nobody knowingly lied. And these two are driven by love.
I walked away from this movie frustrated. Not necessarily because of what I just shared. But because the movie seems to be at war with itself and isn’t sure how to end that war. In many ways, it feels abandoned. Like the documentary version of The Empire Strikes Back, but if there was no slated Return of the Jedi to follow it. So I actually flirted with giving this movie a “wasn’t for me.”
But when I got home, I spent 7 straight hours looking up reviews of the film and that’s when I realized that this documentary had a hold on me that very few movies ever achieve. I know I will never forget about this film or certain scenes in it. And while I wouldn’t say the movie leaves me feeling satisfied, I will say that anybody who loves movies should see it. Because it gets under your skin in a way that’s worth studying. And the intensity within its presentation is so affecting that I think that it may even challenge The Odyssey for best film of the year at the Oscars.
What did you guys think?
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[x] genius
What I learned: One of the reasons I ultimately liked this movie is because of how desperately Nathan wants to find the truth. His investigation may shift from Elizabeth to Billy but his determination to get answers never wavers. Watch the trailer below. Look at how badly Nathan wants to find the truth from Elizabeth.
I explain why I chose the six loglines for last week’s Amateur Showdown and I go over five loglines that didn’t make it, so that you can see the common logline mistakes that writers make.
It always gets controversial when it comes time for me to pick loglines. Many writers are baffled by my choices, and even more baffled that those choices won over their loglines!
Which is why I like to be transparent here at Scriptshadow and let you know why I choose things (as well as why I didn’t choose the rest). I don’t speak for everyone in Hollywood. But there are some universal truths about well-written loglines and I’m hoping that by adding some context to the choices I made last Friday, you can get a sense of why they may have been chosen over your own.
Of the six choices for Amateur Showdown, I’m going to rank the loglines from my personal favorite to my least favorite. Let’s take a look.
Title: Deer Day
Genre: Horror/Thriller
Logline: When a group of hunting buddies take their pampered teens into the woods for the first day of buck season, they are hunted by killer deer who have a taste for human meat.
Whenever I’m looking to do an Amateur Showdown, I try to find that entry that says, “Okay, we’ve got a showdown now. This feels like a legitimate script.” This was that entry for me. It’s an idea that’s extremely marketable. It fits into a well-known genre. And, most importantly, it sounds fresh. On top of that, it has some irony, which you should all know by now supercharges a logline. And to be honest, it’s something that I have a little personal connection to, which always helps when you’re sending an idea to someone. I went to college in Wisconsin and all anybody talked about was hunting deer, which agitated me. I was like, “Why are you killing these poor deer! What did they do to you??” I didn’t get it. So this script gave me the promise of a little revenge.
Title: Invasive
Genre: Horror
Logline: Held hostage in a garage, a traumatized medic must perform an improvised autopsy on a dead soldier to learn how to defeat an alien invasion.
As you know, I love a good contained premise. And I love a good fresh take on aliens. This gave me both. I will say that I was concerned by the simplicity of the premise. Could this last a full 90 minutes? But that’s the thing about a good logline. The writer gets an opportunity to prove it’s a screenplay. I would have doubts that a writer could make a movie about a girl hanging from a tree for 90 minutes but then I read Osculum Infame. It was the memory of that read that inspired me to give Invasive a shot.
Title: Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree
Genre: Christmas Comedy
Logline: When the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree burns to a crisp, a ragtag group of misfit landscapers band together to find a replacement before the official tree lighting ceremony. It goes badly.
As I stated in my review, I rewarded this concept because it was the first Christmas concept I’d been pitched in as long as I could remember that felt different. Same but different. Same but different. Same but different. It’s one of the most annoying pieces of advice in the screenwriting world. But this is a good example of how it works. We’ve all seen a group of comedic misfits banning together to achieve some wacky goal. That’s our “same” here. And our “different” is finding a replacement for the Rockefeller Christmas tree. Nobody’s made a Christmas movie about that before.
Title: Gratuity
Genre: Drama/Thriller
Logline: The tranquility of autumn in small-town North Carolina is broken when a sculptor’s hardheaded husband fails to tip a handy waiter, leading to dire consequences.
I’m pretty sure one of the commenters threatened to skewer me on his barbecue for including this logline. “Leading to dire consequences!!??” he comment-screamed. “You better have a really fucking good reason for this Carson after telling us we should never be vague in a logline!!” Look, it’s a fair criticism. Cause I do usually dismiss loglines for vague endings. But this is the complex art of choosing loglines. Just like a script, they are the sum of their parts. And if you like enough of the parts, you can overlook a part that you don’t like. It’s no different than dating. Let’s say you’re only attracted to brunettes. But then you meet this really cool blond who has a great smile and is super positive and funny and you say, “I can make an exception here.” I personally love ideas that start with something tiny that then turn into something huge. That’s what hooked me with this one. Which is the main reason I chose this logline.
Title: Cornelius
Genre: Dark-Comedy
Logline: When his criminal mother returns after a decade, a timid teenage dishwasher who competes as an underground mascot fighter must choose between the biological mother who abandoned him and the controlling, delusional bar owner who raised him.
I always leave a little room in my reading schedule for ideas that are on the weirder side. And this is my kind of weird. An underground mascot fighter. That’s unique. I could see that leading to some really fun scenes. And I liked the “superhero” component of it, whereby he’s a dishwasher by day and this weird fighter by night. But I did worry that the logline didn’t have a strong plotline. A guy choosing between two people being the central plot of your movie is weak. I suspect there’s a better plot to express in the logline. So I’d encourage Cornelius’s writer to find that.
Title: Made Men
Genre: Crime / Heist Thriller
Logline: Four professional thieves with the same face discover they are disposable human reconstructions created to bankroll the original man. To escape his cycle, they must outthink the one criminal who knows every move they were built to make.
I did not choose this one. Scripty did. But this is what Scripty told me. He said he likes concepts that take big swings. And this felt like a 2026 version of Face-Off, a Top 5 all-time movie for Scripty. He also said, “You always tell everyone to come up with a movie idea that allows an actor to play multiple roles” and he’s right. You could see an actor very much wanting to play all these parts. What I told Scripty was that this is one of those ideas that, when I’ve been pitched something similar over the years, the script ends up being messy. You can pick up on the messiness in the logline if you pay close attention. But it’s also one of those ideas that if you’re a really good writer and you have a solid plan to execute the script (as opposed to trying to figure it out along the way), it could be cool.
Okay, now let’s take a look at some of the ideas that didn’t make it.
Title: APPROACHING SUNSET
Genre: Drama
Logline: Billy Wilder and his writing partner Charles Brackett fight with each other, the studio and all of Hollywood to make their perverse masterpiece “Sunset Boulevard.”
I want to emphasize that everyone in Hollywood has different tastes. And as long as your screenplay clears a certain execution bar (meaning the writing is strong enough that people can judge it on the story itself rather than get distracted by amateur mistakes), your job becomes finding the people in Hollywood who love the same kinds of movies you love to write. This idea is just not my jam. I hate real life stories in general. I think that if you want to tell a real life story, make a documentary. I’m a fiction guy. And so this does nothing for me, even though I love Sunset Boulevard. With that said, these types of scripts get a lot of votes from development execs for the Black List. So, just because I didn’t pick this idea doesn’t mean others wouldn’t.
Title: Sunsetting
Genre: Dark Romantic Comedy
Logline: When a terminal heart diagnosis suddenly makes sex fatal, a silver fox tricks his therapy-obsessed, sports-betting-addicted son into a cross-country road trip for one last fling with the one who got away – a grieving widow who still resents their broken engagement from 50 years ago.
This is a great example of an idea that, on the surface, sounds like it could make for a decent movie. But the way the logline is written makes me wonder if the writer has fully figured out what their movie is yet. The logline begins by telling us that our hero could die if he has sex. But that setup is never paid off. Instead, we take a detour that introduces us to the hero’s son, who we then learn has an addiction that seems totally irrelevant to the rest of the concept. And then we’re told he has to trick his son to go on this trip with him. We’re not told why he needs to trick his son or why he even needs to include his son. And then we’re off to find this “one who got away” woman, which vaguely hints at this idea that our hero might be trying to commit suicide? He knows he will die the next time he has sex so he wants to make sure it happens with the one who got away? Then again, there’s a good chance that that’s not what the writer was intending you to think at all. There are a lot of funny little elements here. But they don’t come together as a whole. And that’s what loglining is all about. Taking these individual pieces and making them feel like they belong in the same movie.
Title: The Prototype
Genre: Action
Logline: Falsely accused of murdering a grizzled detective’s son, a street-smart wheelman steals a prototype car believing it contains the evidence to clear his name. To survive, he must convince the grieving cop to stop hunting him and instead ride shotgun to take revenge on the real killer.
When I said that 90% of the entrants needed to order a logline consult (e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line “logline” if you want one – they’re only 25 bucks) this is a good example of why. This title is evocative. It gets your imagination going. And when we find out that it’s a prototype *car* we’re talking about, that makes it even cooler. Yet none of this logline is about the cool prototype car and how that plays into the story. Instead, we get a generic story about some murdered guy and a dude who has to clear his name. You’ve literally run away from the coolest thing about your idea in your logline, and instead focused on the generic thing that’s in every movie! You’d be surprised at how often I see this in loglines. The goal of a logline is not to tell everyone what’s the same about your movie. It’s to tell them what’s different. More prototype car!!!
Title: CAPTAIN DANGER AND THE TERROR CROWN
Genre: Action Adventure
Logline: A war-haunted smuggler races across the 1933 Caribbean with a scientist to destroy her ground-breaking shell-shock cure before her financier weaponizes it to plunge entire armies into their worst nightmares.
A common mistake we all make as writers is assuming the reader knows what we know. Sometimes, that’s okay. If we say our story takes place in a “small town,” we can assume the reader has a good idea of what that might look like. But sometimes writers make much more specific assumptions and that’s where they get in trouble. You can occasionally get away with this in the script itself because there’s so much context that follows. But in a logline, it’s deadly. The second I got to “ground-breaking shell-shock cure,” I checked out. Cause I have no idea what that means. And since the rest of the story is built on top of that idea, I’m completely lost. I don’t understand how weaponizing “shell-shock” makes people experience their worst nightmares. You guys HAVE to get feedback on these loglines or you’re going to send stuff out to producers that has no shot. Cause here’s the frustrating thing. The first part of this logline intrigued me. I was into it! And then those four words killed it.
Title: Not By Blood
Genre: Elevated horror, action
Logline: To save her dying species, the last vampire and the amnesiac man she rescues must learn to trust each other before an immortal butcher – or her violent secrets – destroy them both.
I kind of like the amnesiac trope. However, it has to be integrated into your story in a clever way. And here, it doesn’t seem that way AT ALL. It feels like the writer just threw in an amnesiac because, hey, amnesiacs make stories more interesting, right? Well, no. Not unless there’s something about this particular situation that makes having an amnesiac exciting. And I’m not seeing what that is. The next mistake is introducing some random villain, the “immortal butcher,” like we’re supposed to know who that is. What does that even mean? That’s the kind of thing that needs context. You can’t just drop a name like that into a logline and expect us to understand why we should care. And then there’s the issue of stopping the logline dead in its tracks with those dashes to throw in a piece of information that adds absolutely nothing. You should never EVER interrupt the momentum of a logline unless what you’re adding makes the movie sound more exciting. If it doesn’t, get rid of it. This logline needs a complete overhaul before it’s ready to properly promote the script.
And there you have it. Feel free to debate these loglines as well as my analysis of them. And I’d also encourage you to share your own loglines and get feedback. Any feedback you get from others is going to be valuable. There are often problems with a logline that are impossible for the writer to see, but immediately obvious to someone else. Have an awesome weekend everyone. I’m off to see You Can See Everything, a movie I’m absolutely DYYYYYYING to see. I’ll have my thoughts for you on Monday assuming I can get into what will surely be a ton of packed theaters.
Genre: Christmas Comedy
Logline: When the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree burns to a crisp, a ragtag group of misfit landscapers band together to find a replacement before the official tree lighting ceremony. It goes badly.
About: This past weekend, we had an Amateur Showdown here on Scriptshadow. Out of a little more than 200 entries, I picked the six best concepts and let you guys vote on your favorite. The voting was VERY close, but I ultimately decided to go with Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree as our winner. So today we find out if the script lives up to the concept!
Writer: Ervin Anderson
Details: 103 pages
One of the reasons I picked this script is because I’m always looking for Christmas movie ideas that are different. I get sent a lot of Christmas scripts. And I swear 90% of them are some variation of The Santa Claus. I liked that a Christmas idea FINALLY didn’t do that.
But did it work??
Brian Parsons is a 32-year-old loser who works for his dad, the head gardener at Rockefeller Center. Brian has a gambling problem and, as a result, a hell of a lot of debt. And also a bad man who wants to collect on that debt.
One night, while Rockefeller Center is doing a test run for its annual Christmas tree lighting, Brian’s idiocy leads to the tree catching fire. The whole thing burns down. To make matters worse, dad has a heart attack (shout out Tommy Boy). And with the lighting ceremony less than a week away, New York City is about to have its first Christmas tree lighting without a Rockefeller Christmas tree!!
Desperate to redeem himself, Brian announces on live television that he’ll find an even BIGGER tree. His boss wants him to retrieve a safe backup smaller tree in upstate New York. But Brian’s meanie sister, Sarah, a reporter desperate for a career-making story, offers to pay off his $100,000 gambling debt if he gets a spectacular 100-foot tree in Minnesota instead.
Brian assembles a team of misfits, including a wannabe Santa Claus, a socially awkward mechanic, and a runaway Rockette carrying a bag of cocaine. They head to Minnesota for the bigger tree, where a stubborn old man named Ike guards the tree. Unfortunately, Ike has no intention of giving it up. And with the clock ticking, Brian has to figure out how to get the tree, transport it across the country, and save Christmas in New York.
Sometimes I’ll throw a screenplay into ChatGPT just to see how good it’s getting at script analysis. And what’s interesting is that about 80% of its notes are technically correct. The problem is that they’re all very by-the-book.
It can identify a passive protagonist or a first act that runs too long, but it reminds me of when I first started giving script notes. You learn all these screenwriting rules, and you’re so excited when you catch a script breaking one that you immediately point it out. “This is bad because somebody else told me it was bad!”
But here’s what I’ve learned over the years that AI still doesn’t understand. Whenever I identify a problem, I ask myself one simple question…
If the writer fixed this, would I actually like the script more?
And if the answer is no, then I haven’t identified the real problem (if you want notes on your script, contact me). That’s the difference between giving technically correct notes and giving genuinely helpful notes. You have to figure out what’s fundamentally wrong with the script, because until you fix that, none of the other stuff matters.
So what’s the note here that matters?
Well, first, we have to talk about comedy. Comedy is the simplest genre to judge and the hardest genre to write. And there’s a specific approach to the comedy here that’s limiting how funny this script can be.
Ervin relies heavily on what I call quick-hit comedy. Little jokes. Little quips. A character says something funny. Another character responds with something funny or does something funny. We move on. And there’s nothing wrong with that! You need funny lines in a comedy. But the problem with building your comedy around funny lines is that they’re essentially mini lottery tickets. Some hit. Some don’t. But even the ones that hit only provide one second of comedy.
You need ENTIRE SCENARIOS that are inherently funny, situations that can produce four or five pages of laughs without you having to come up with a hilarious line every five seconds.
For example, there’s a scene in this script involving a giant bag of cocaine that winds up getting ripped open, spreading everywhere, and eaten by pigs. That’s the kind of comedy I’m talking about! You could build an entire extended sequence around that. But Ervin is always rushing to the next joke. The next joke. The next joke. And I think that approach is, ironically, costing him a lot of laughs.
Which brings me to what I believe is the script’s biggest problem. Ervin made the wrong creative choice when deciding how his characters would find the tree.
Early on, Brian goes into his dad’s office, opens a file, and discovers that his dad has already picked out two potential replacement trees. One is in New York. The other is in Minnesota. That’s it. Problem solved. Now all they have to do is go get one.
NOOOOOOOOO!
You just made things easy for your protagonist! One of the most important things you can do as a screenwriter is make things difficult for your characters. You want them behind the eight ball, not with a head start.
And I can already hear some of you saying, “But Carson, it’s a comedy. Does that really matter?” IT MATTERS MORE! Because comedy comes from conflict. It comes from people struggling. It comes from characters trying to do something and failing spectacularly. The harder you make their goal, the more opportunities you have for that struggle.
So here’s how I would’ve approached this.
First, I wouldn’t have Brian working on the Christmas tree to begin with. I’d make him a total loser with some loser job who gets thrust into this responsibility. He’s the LAST PERSON ON EARTH you’d want in charge of saving Christmas. And then, instead of giving him a file with two preselected trees, I’d make him find the tree himself.
What would an idiot like Brian do? He’d probably search Google Images and type in “best Christmas tree ever.” Eventually, he finds a picture of the most magnificent tree he’s ever seen. THAT’S IT! That’s our tree! He finds the location, assembles his team, they get their equipment together, and they head out on this enormous road trip.
All sorts of ridiculous things happen along the way. They get lost. They get delayed. But FINALLY, after all this trouble, they arrive at the tree. And… it’s tiny. Like, comically tiny. The picture was taken from some deceptive angle that made it look enormous. In reality, it’s about six feet tall.
They’re devastated. They’ve traveled halfway across the country. They’ve wasted all this time. They have no backup plan. They’re screwed. Until one of them looks off in the distance and sees this giant beautiful Christmas tree, the best tree in the history of Christmas trees.
Except there’s one problem. It’s on a mobster’s property. And this mobster is NOT the kind of guy who’s going to let a bunch of idiots chop down his tree. So what do they do? They decide to steal it.
Now you’ve got a HEIST MOVIE!
Think about how much comedy you could get out of a bunch of morons trying to steal a 100-foot Christmas tree from a dangerous mobster. They have to sneak onto his property. They have to figure out how to cut the thing down without anybody noticing. They have to transport it without getting caught. That’s twenty pages of comedy right there!
And even if they succeed, they’re not out of the woods. Because now you’ve got a mobster chasing them halfway across the country. That’s a much funnier movie to me.
And notice what I did there. I didn’t come up with a bunch of funny lines. I came up with a PLOT THAT NATURALLY GENERATES FUNNY SCENES. That’s what comedy writers should be trying to do.
Because the version we get, where Brian goes to Ike’s house and tries to convince him to give up his tree, doesn’t generate nearly as much conflict as it should. Ike is actually quite accommodating. He invites everyone inside. He cooks them dinner. He’s easy to talk to.
And Ervin missed some comedic opportunities there too! Take that dinner. Ike invites everyone in for a meal and it turns out to be amazing. Why???? This is a comedy! Make it the WORST DINNER ANYONE HAS EVER EATEN. But because they desperately need his tree, everybody has to pretend it’s delicious. And Ike keeps giving them more.
“Have another helping!”
“No, really, I’m full.”
“Nonsense! You’ve barely touched your plate!”
Now you’ve got a scene.
And even the eventual solution to Ike’s refusal feels too easy. Sarah engineers the return of his long-lost love, and suddenly he’s willing to give up the tree. Why not make that backfire? What if she shows up and tells Ike that the one thing she remembers most fondly about their relationship was that beautiful tree? Now Ike is MORE determined to keep it!
That’s what you want. Every time the audience thinks the characters have solved the problem, you make the problem WORSE.
Let’s talk about Brian for a second.
Your job as a screenwriter is not over once you come up with a good concept. That choice should then lead to the second most important choice, which is, what character journey can I place inside this concept that takes maximum advantage of it? What kind of character change would be the most entertaining and emotionally satisfying?
Here, Brian’s big flaw is that he’s a gambling addict. Okay. But what does that have to do with Christmas? It’s a generic flaw that could be placed in almost any movie. I would much rather see a flaw that grows directly out of this specific story.
Which brings me to something interesting about Ervin’s writing. He actually puts a TON of work into his characters. Everybody has a storyline! Lee wants to become Santa Claus. Nellie wants companionship. Kitty has her family issues and her drug dealer problem. Sarah wants to become an anchor. Eva has her own dreams and disappointments.
It’s almost insane how much character work Ervin has packed into this thing. But ironically, the main character’s journey is the weakest one! I would just make Brian a loser. He’s someone who’s never been able to get the job done. And this is his opportunity to finally prove that he can. You don’t even need the gambling stuff.
I’d also shorten the deadline. Six days is the equivalent of six years in movie time. I’d love to see this mission become truly impossible. Give them 72 hours. That’s when the audience starts leaning forward and saying, “How the hell are they going to pull that off?”
There’s a better movie hiding inside this one. A funnier movie. A more challenging movie. The good news is that the concept is good. I just think the execution needs to take a bigger swing.
Script link: Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Never give your protagonist a head start. When Brian needs to find a replacement Christmas tree, his father has already identified two perfect candidates. That’s too easy! You want your protagonist starting from LESS THAN ZERO. It must sound impossible. That’s what gets us all jazzed to watch the mission. If we feel like they have things in the bag already, why would we keep reading?
Other Mommy Unfriends The Social Reckoning! Plus, The Most Baffling Movie I’ve Seen All Year!
First of all, thanks for all of you who took the time to vote this weekend in Amateur Showdown in what turned out to be a very close competition. I took away five first time votes from Deer Day as they seemed suspicious and yet, still, the unique high concept premise edged its way to a victory.
So, congratulations to DEER PEOPLE. But I do not yet know if I’m going to review that script. I may review one of the other leaders and allow Kool-Aid Man to rewrite it, as he says he’s aware that it’s very rough. So, tune in Friday to see what I review. It was a close race so it could be anyone. And oh, in case anyone forgot, a little script called The Ballad of the Ember Knight once finished second-to-last in an Amateur Showdown. So we may be striking gold this weekend.
Okay, let’s talk about the box office. Other Mommy got dogged hard after getting abysmal reviews. And hey, I get it. I read the book (written by the Bird Box author) and it wasn’t great. But Other Mommy pulled in 30 million bucks this weekend because it aced the key screenwriting skill that matters: If you deliver on what you promise, audiences will forgive you for almost everything else.
This script was about a creepy antagonist and scary scenes. That’s the promise. That’s what people are showing up in hopes to see. So, if you deliver on those two things, the audience will leave happy! Those trailers were fucking scary, yo. I was watching through my fingers.
This is why I always tell writers to prioritize the thing their movie is selling. If you’re writing an action movie, you shouldn’t obsess over whether the exposition in your dialogue on page 74 is perfect. That’s not what people are coming to see. They’re coming to see action scenes that they can excitedly tell their friends about later.
The other big release this weekend was The Social Reckoning, which, let’s be honest, should never have been made. They probably could’ve doubled their box office if they’d gotten Jesse Eisenberg back, who Sorkin desperately attempted to lure to the sequel. But Eisenberg seems to be on some kind of spiritual journey these days. Every time I hear him talk, I feel like I need to swaddle him in a blanket. He’s dealing with his own shit and clearly has no interest in returning to the Zuckerberg universe.
Despite that, you’ve got Jeremy Strong, Jeremy Allen White, and Mikey Madison. If you told me three years ago that these three were headlining a movie, I would’ve told you it was the hottest project in Hollywood.
But in 2026? It feels like the most dated cast around. Which is CRAZY to say because they’re all really good actors. I love Mikey Madison. I thought she was amazing in Anora. Jeremy Allen White is always good. Jeremy Strong and his method-loving ass gets shit done even if Brian Cox hates him more than week old bagels.
But it’s Mikey Madison who’s going to wear this failure the hardest. This was her big chosen film after Anora. The one that was supposed to shoot her into the stratosphere. And she blew it by choosing this project over all the others that were offered to her. There’s no other way to frame it. She blew it.
It reminds me how careful you have to be when you become hot in Hollywood. I’m not just talking about actors here. I’m talking about screenwriters. Those moments when everybody wants to work with you? They don’t come around often. And you’ve got to make the most of them.
Of course, nobody knows what’s going to hit and what isn’t. But the big thing you have to watch out for is feeling yourself too much. And Mikey Madison was feeling herself. She’d just won an Oscar. She was a serious actress now. She wanted serious roles that reflected that.
The Social Reckoning is exactly the kind of movie you take when you’re in that mindset. It’s important. It’s prestigious. It’s got a big message. It’s the kind of thing that screams OSCAR CONSIDERATION.
The problem is that nobody cared. And I don’t think anybody was ever going to care about this movie. Even if David Fincher had directed it. Because the movie is the embodiment of the self-important, I-have-a-message, please-give-me-an-Oscar film that audiences don’t just dislike. They hate. They hate when you slam that message into their face like a raspberry pie.
It’s the movie equivalent of a pick-me girl. You look at this film, shake your head, and say, “Have some respect for yourself, Social Reckoning.”
Okay, now let’s talk about one of the most baffling movie-watching experiences I’ve had in a while. I finally watched The End of Oak Street this weekend.
I’ve wanted to see this movie forever. It finally went down in price on streaming, so I dusted off my 1960s popcorn maker, switched on the “mega-butter” setting, and settled in for a movie I genuinely had no idea what to expect from.
And, man.
I don’t even know where to begin with this thing.
First of all, this is my jam as far as concepts go. If you’re wondering what kind of concept Carson loves, THIS IS IT. An entire neighborhood gets transported back to the prehistoric era, where they have to survive dinosaurs? SIGN. ME. UP. That’s an amazing premise.
But what I witnessed was such a bizarre execution of that premise that I currently look like that spinning pinwheel you see on your computer screen when it’s frozen. My brain is unable to comprehend how odd this movie was.
Just to be clear, there were parts of this movie that I LOVED. And then there were parts that were so awful I genuinely thought I was watching one of the worst movies I’d ever seen.
Let’s go back to what I said about Other Mommy: Give audiences what they came for.
In The End of Oak Street, we’re coming for dinosaurs attacking people in a suburban neighborhood. And we get that! There’s a scene where a giant eel dinosaur slides into a house that I thought was brilliant. It was tense. It was unique. We weren’t really sure how the family was supposed to stop this thing. It didn’t feel like another recycled Jurassic Park scene.
Even some of the more traditional dinosaur stuff, like the T-Rex chasing people, was fun.
But then you’ve got Ewan McGregor. If this were the first movie I’d ever seen Ewan McGregor in, I might’ve concluded that he was the worst actor in the entire universe.
It was like somebody was standing off-camera reading him his lines and he was just repeating them back. It’s honestly made me reevaluate him as an actor. He was amazing in Trainspotting. But I don’t know if I can point to a single other stand-out Ewan McGregor performance. Go take a look at his IMDB. And don’t try to sell me Obi-Wan Kenobi. He was okay in the role.
Anne Hathaway, meanwhile, was trying her hardest. Maybe a little TOO hard at times, like she always does. But at least she was trying.
And then you’ve got these completely baffling creative choices. There’s a LONG SCENE in this movie where two giant dinosaurs are having sex. You read that right. There is a dinosaur sex scene in this. And it’s a major scene! It’s not something we see in passing. I’m sitting there going, “What am I watching right now?? Is this really happening??”
Who thought this was a good idea??
It reminded me of Rian Johnson inserting his weird sense of humor into The Last Jedi. You’d be watching this serious Star Wars movie and then some out-of-left-field joke would show up and suddenly we were in some 2 million dollar Rian Johnson indie flick.
Same thing here.
We’re watching this intense survival movie about a family trying not to get eaten by dinosaurs and suddenly we stop everything for a dinosaur fucking scene. I froze. There’s another scene where dinosaurs are eating and shitting at the same time. It’s this bizarre humor that completely takes you out of the movie. David Robert Mitchell. Time to retire that comedy pen. I hate to be the bearer of bad news but it’s not your forte.
But here’s the biggest issue I had with the film, and it’s something I think every screenwriter can learn from. Whenever you write a big concept movie, the first thing screenwriting teachers tell you is that you need compelling characters. You need relationships. You need character arcs. Otherwise you’re just watching a Michael Bay movie where things explode for two hours.
And that’s good advice!
The problem is that writers often take that advice and create the SCREENWRITING VERSION of compelling characters. They start checking boxes. Okay, this character needs a flaw. This relationship needs conflict. These two characters need to be estranged. This person needs to learn a lesson. And by the end, everybody needs to resolve their issues.
In The End of Oak Street, the parents, Denise and Greg, are on the verge of divorce, and they’re keeping it from their kids. That’s our family conflict. That’s our broken relationship. We’ve got our emotional storyline.
Except none of it feels real.
And THIS IS THE BIGGEST LESSON I WANT YOU TO TAKE FROM TODAY’S POST. If you’re only creating character storylines because that’s what a screenplay is supposed to have, IT WILL FEEL FAKE. You need something real to latch onto.
Let’s say you’re writing about a marriage that’s falling apart. If your own parents went through a horrible divorce, you’ve got a direct connection to that experience. You remember the little things. The weird arguments. The awkward silences. The stuff people said that they probably shouldn’t have said. You can bring all that into your screenplay!
Maybe your parents didn’t get divorced, but your best friend’s parents did. You spent a lot of time at their house. You saw what was happening. You absorbed some of that reality. Okay, you’re a little further removed, but you’ve still got something genuine to draw from.
But what if you’ve never been anywhere near a broken marriage? What if everything you know about divorce comes from movies and television? And now you’re writing this big divorce storyline because screenplay books say you need a moving character storyline.
I GUARANTEE YOU IT WILL FEEL FAKE.
The arguments will feel manufactured. The emotional beats will feel forced. The characters will say things because the screenplay needs them to say things, not because real people would actually say them.
That’s exactly what happens in The End of Oak Street. Every scene involving this marriage felt written. You could practically see David Robert Mitchell sitting behind his computer deciding which emotional beat needed to happen next.
Which is crazy because his first movie, It Follows, was the exact opposite. Everything in that movie felt natural. The characters felt like real people. Nothing felt pushed. Here, everything feels pushed. And sometimes the results were downright ridiculous.
There’s a scene where the family has just been transported millions of years into the past. They’ve already been attacked by dinosaurs. They’re boarding up their windows, trying to keep these prehistoric monsters from eating them. And Denise suddenly smells alcohol on Greg’s breath. So she starts browbeating him about drinking.
LADY!
YOU’VE JUST BEEN TRANSPORTED MILLIONS OF YEARS INTO THE PAST AND THERE ARE DINOSAURS TRYING TO EAT YOU!
Why the fuck are you worried about your husband having a sip of whiskey???????
That’s what happens when you’re forcing a character storyline instead of letting it develop naturally. You end up creating moments that make absolutely no sense because you’re so determined to hit your screenplay beats.
And this applies to every kind of character. If you’re writing about a drug addict and you’ve never been an addict, never known an addict, never been close to anyone dealing with addiction, you’re going to fail at making them feel authentic. You just will. I promise you.
The only time you won’t is if you do an insane amount of research. I’m talking meeting with multiple addicts and having hours upon hours of conversations with them where you try and understand their lives. But writers these days will never do that. And you won’t either. You’ll go to AI cause it’s easier. It won’t work.
So, what am I saying? You need to personally experience everything you write about? To some degree, yes! Not directly. Like I said, you can have second-hand experiences. But if you try to write about an Only Fans model and you’ve never experienced that life or know one of these models closely, good luck. Seriously, good luck trying to make that character feel authentic.
That’s what made The End of Oak Street such a frustrating experience for me. One minute I’m watching a really cool dinosaur sequence. The next I’m watching some of the fakest family drama I’ve ever seen. Then I’m watching dinosaurs have sex. Then I’m watching another cool action scene. The I’m watching a dinosaur shit. I’ve never been yanked back and forth so violently before in a movie.
And it’s too bad because the premise is absolutely KILLER.
I suspect that’s a big reason the movie didn’t break out into a bigger hit. People saw it, kind of liked the dinosaur stuff. But they thought the character work was abysmal. So it didn’t hit them on that gut level. And when a movie doesn’t hit you on a gut level, you don’t recommend it to other people. That and Ewan McGregor recently received an acting lobotomy.
Anyway, I’m curious what you guys thought of the film. Did you like it? And what else have you been watching lately?
Let me know in the comments!
Time to vote!
Man, when I told you guys to send me those weird script ideas you’ve had trouble getting anyone to read, you really took that to heart. I’ve gotten so many bizarre concepts. They’ve been fun to read through but some of them had me thinking, “I have absolutely no idea how this could be a movie.”
Also, I received a TON of Christmas submissions. You guys must have heard of my contact at Sony who loves Christmas flicks (he produced the new Arnold Schwarzenegger Christmas movie coming out later this year). Only one of them made the cut. Believe it or not, there was a better Christmas idea but the writer botched the logline. I’d say 90% of the writers who submitted need logline help. If you’re sending those loglines out to other people I am BEGGING you to get a logline eval from me before you send it out again. They’re just 25 bucks. E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com if you want one.
I already know some of you are going to say, “Why did that stupid concept get in when my clearly superior concept didn’t?” and you can rest easy. I’ll explain why I picked each entry on Monday. I’m holding off until then because I don’t want to influence the voting.
If this is your first Amateur Showdown, here’s how it works:
Below are the five entries that caught my interest (and one that caught Scripty’s), along with first pages and links to their scripts. You only need to judge the loglines to vote. The scripts are there if you want more context or need help deciding between two entries.
Unlike the High Concept Contest, you get ONE vote. And no splitting your vote between two scripts. You’ve got to commit. Consider it practice for real life.
To vote, leave a comment naming your pick.
Ideally, tell me a little about why you chose that entry, especially if you’re a new voter. Occasionally, people try to game the system by creating fake accounts to vote for their own scripts. If I find evidence of that, you can be disqualified. A reason for the pick helps verify that the voter is real.
An explanation isn’t required, though. If you just want to name your pick, that’s fine. And for our longtime voters, you already know the drill.
Voting closes Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific time. I’ll tally the votes, and the winning script will get reviewed on the site next week.
Here are your five contenders. Scripty wouldn’t shut up about letting Made Men in, so that’s number 6. Save the Cat wanted E.C. Henry’s script included but I had to draw the line somewhere. If you are a writer of one of these scripts and want to share a poster for your entry, you can do so in the comments.
Let’s see which script you guys want me to read.
Good luck to everyone!
Title: Deer Day
Genre: Horror/Thriller
Logline: When a group of hunting buddies take their pampered teens into the woods for the first day of buck season, they are hunted by killer deer who have a taste for human meat.
Title: Cornelius
Genre: Dark-Comedy
Logline: When his criminal mother returns after a decade, a timid teenage dishwasher who competes as an underground mascot fighter must choose between the biological mother who abandoned him and the controlling, delusional bar owner who raised him.
Title: Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree
Genre: Christmas Comedy
Logline: When the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree burns to a crisp, a ragtag group of misfit landscapers band together to find a replacement before the official tree lighting ceremony. It goes badly.
Title: Invasive
Genre: Horror
Logline: Held hostage in a garage, a traumatized medic must perform an improvised autopsy on a dead soldier to learn how to defeat an alien invasion.
Title: Gratuity
Genre: Drama/Thriller
Logline: The tranquility of autumn in small-town North Carolina is broken when a sculptor’s hardheaded husband fails to tip a handy waiter, leading to dire consequences.
Title: Made Men
Genre: Crime / Heist Thriller
Logline: Four professional thieves with the same face discover they are disposable human reconstructions created to bankroll the original man. To escape his cycle, they must outthink the one criminal who knows every move they were built to make.
