Search Results for: twit pitch
A thousand Twit-Pitches have been narrowed down to one winner. Was your favorite chosen??
Months back, I decided to try an experiment (at the worst possible time, mind you – I was creating a new site and writing a book). The experiment was to allow people to tweet me the loglines for their screenplays. The catch was that they only had one tweet to do it in. So they had to boil down an already boiled down logline to even LESS words.
I took the Top 75 of those loglines and I read the first 10 pages of each, tweeting live reviews on Twitter. It was a pretty cool experiment. I wanted writers to be able to get into the head of a reader AS HE WAS READING their script. You could see exactly what they were thinking as they were thinking it. And I didn’t hold back. If something was dumb, I’d say it was dumb.
The top 20 of those first 10 pages moved on to the final round, where I read the entire script and reviewed each of them here on Scriptshadow. So how did the experiment end? What did I learn from all this? Well, I’m not sure I learned anything definitively. But I will say this. The winner and runners-up of Twit-Pitch stood out for two different reasons. The first because it took chances, pushed the envelope, and didn’t go where you expected it to. The second and third because they had smart contained concepts and were well written. None of these scripts were home runs. They all had their problems. But I do think there’s a good lesson here. You CAN stand out by pushing the envelope or just with good old fashioned solid writing on a strong idea.
And with that, let’s get to the winners. Here they are…
***FIRST PLACE***
Proving Ground by James Topham – (Original Twit-Pitch Logline) 9 strangers wake in a deserted Mexican town besieged by killing machines: they must discover why they’ve been brought there to survive.
**RUNNER-UP**
Fatties by Matthew Ballen – (Original Twit-Pitch Logline) When a lonely masochistic chubby chaser is abducted by two fat lesbian serial killers, it’s the best thing that ever happened to him.
*THIRD PLACE*
Guest by Matthew Cruz – (Original Twit-Pitch Logline) After checking into a hotel to escape her abusive husband, a woman realizes guests in the next room are holding a young girl hostage.
Genre: Contained Thriller
The Last of the DEFINITES. Sounds like a good title if anyone decides to adapt Twit-Pitch into a movie.
Make no mistake about it: Twit-Pitch and I have experienced some rocky times together. It wasn’t always spelling-mistake free first pages and freshly polished gold brads. There was that time where I realized the writer hadn’t written his script before entering the contest. Oh, and then there was that other time where I realized the writer hadn’t written his script before entering the contest. But through it all, we stuck together. Maybe longer than a lot of you thought we should. There were times when Twit-Pitch was downright abusive to me. But I remember when I broke up with Looper in front of the world. You know who the first one there for me was? Twit-Pitch. That’s who. I’m kinda gettin’ all…teary-eyed just thinking about it.
As far as where today’s Twit-Pitch script brings us? Well, here’s the thing. There’ve been flashier concepts. There’s been better writing. But reading the first ten pages of “Guest,” I thought, “This could be the one that actually gets made.” The contained thriller element – a protagonist with something under the hood – the low-budget price tag? If this thing were done right, it may be the sleeper that woke this damn contest up. Let’s find out if that was the case.
Samantha Given is 56 years old. One look at her and you know whatever roads she’s taken in life, they’re not the same roads you and I drive on. These roads are the unpaved kind, the backwoods gravel-laden pieces of shit you get lost in. She wears every wrinkle of that 56 year old face. And it doesn’t take long to figure out that’s why she’s here, checking in at this hotel. She’s sick of those f*cking roads. And she’s finally doing something about it. Even if it’s just holing up for a few days.
Now this hotel isn’t Hotel Transylvania, but it’s got its fair share of spooky shit going on. There’s loud thumping noises happening every hour or so. They actually put that famous Van Gogh Scream painting on the wall (who puts that in a hotel room?). Oh, and the bellhop, the overly polite but totally sketchy Diego, likes to get a little too personal with his questioning. Since when do bellhops ask, “So what do you plan to do for the rest of the day?” Not only that, but he seems really keen on getting Sam into a “better” room.
But Sam’s fine with the room she’s in. That is until those thumping noises start again. After awhile, Sam decides to do some investigating, listening through the wall, and starts getting this idea that someone’s being held captive in the next room. Oh, this would be a good time to mention that Sam’s on anti-psychotics. So yeah, not everything’s kosher at the top of the Christmas tree. But man does she become convinced that something’s up. So even though she knows it’s going to put her on the hot seat, she calls the cops.
The police come in. There’s a big hubbub in the hallway. The guy staying in the next room is obviously pissed. And when the police check inside, they find nothing. Not a single trace. But Sam knows something’s up. Diego, the bellhop, is always acting weird. If he were in on it, they could’ve moved the girl they’ve kidnapped. Assuming there’s a girl. And assuming all of this isn’t in her head.
If this weren’t bad enough, we’re also learning more about Sam’s past and why she’s here. Her husband, Charlie, has been treating her like a pinata for the last 30 years, and this is the first time she’s had the balls to do something about it. But Charlie’s constant calls and texts asking her to come back are starting to break her down. And Sam’s daughter, completely oblivious to the abuse her mom’s been through, is getting pissed that Sam is being such a baby.
All this leads to an increasingly precarious situation. If there is someone being held captive in the other room, Sam has to find a way to save her. If there isn’t, and she’s just imagining it all, then maybe she’s as weak as her husband’s made her out to be. And maybe her best option is to go crawling back to him, apologize, and continue to live a life of abusiveness.
Something I want to bring to everyone’s attention right away is that readers LOVE reading scripts like “Guest.” Low character count. Contained location. An easy-to-understand situation. These are easy reads! Readers know they’re not going to be taking endless notes trying to keep track of who’s who and how they’re related and how those fifteen other subplots factor into everything. And that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go to some unexpected places with your story. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have complicated stuff going on with your characters. Of course you want that. But the overall story situation is easy to follow and therefore very reader-friendly.
Something else that gave me confidence in “Guest” was that the adjacent room wasn’t the only mystery. The second mystery was Sam herself. Whenever you’re writing something that takes place in a contained area, you don’t have as many places to go with your story. So it’s ESSENTIAL that you make your characters themselves a story. That way, we’re not just trying to find out what’s going on in the “other room.” We’re trying to find out what’s going on inside our protagonist.
And to that end, I think Cruz did a good job. The whole “abused wife” thing can be really cliche if done badly, and I thought Cruz brought a realism to it that made me give a shit about Sam. I believed she had this past with her husband. And I liked the parallels of her being trapped in this relationship, needing to be saved, just like this girl (if there’s a girl) is trapped in the next room, needing to be saved. Watching Sam gradually gain the courage to go from victim to hero wasn’t a perfect transition, but it was convincing enough.
The problems I had with the script mainly fell on the technical front. When you’re doing a contained thriller, I’m not sure you should ever take us outside of that setting. I believe it’s important that we feel stuck here, even if we technially aren’t. When Sam went to have coffee with her daughter, that carefully constructed fabric of danger was instantly ripped apart. I wanted to stay in that hotel. Or actually I didn’t. Which is exactly why the writer should’ve kept me there.
Also, one thing I’m always on guard with with these scripts is the writer biding time. Most writers get these ideas for contained thrillers, think they’ve struck gold, but then realize they have these huge chunks of time to fill up between the main scenes. And since the sparse setting offers little in the way of choices, these writers come up with shit for the sake of coming up with shit instead of giving us scenes that actually matter, scenes that are actually entertaining. As a result, the script slows to a crawl. Overall, I thought Cruz did a good job avoiding this but there were a good 10 pages early in the second act where Sam didn’t seem to be doing much and I started to get bored. It picked up afterwards but still, you can’t have ten slow pages in a thriller. Especially one that’s only 80 pages long.
(Spoiler) My last issue is I would’ve liked to have known more about Danielle. Why was she kidnapped? The few hints that we got indicated that this wasn’t your average kidnapping. There was more of a story to this. I was waiting for that story to be revealed but it never came, and I was disappointed by that. That could’ve been a nice final twist, if Danielle’s kidnapping wasn’t exactly what we thought it was.
But all in all, this is EASILY one of the best Twit-Pitch scripts. It probably needs to come in longer than 79 pages, but the writing here is really strong. And more importantly, the STORYTELLING here is really strong. Check this one out for sure!
Script Link: Guest
What I learned: In contained low-character count screenplays, make sure your main characters are dealing with some kind of inner conflict, some kind of troubled back-story that needs to be resolved. Because your story choices are limited in contained situations, you need an additional interesting story going on within your main character to keep us entertained.
Genre: Period/Mystery/Thriller
Is anyone still here? I got a lot of comments yesterday from people saying they were never going to read Scriptshadow again. Because I gave Looper a bad review. I can’t help if I thought the writing was bad. Though I admit my morbid fascination with Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s face maaaaaay have prevented me from picking up on some key plot points early on, mainly about this Rainman character, who I’m still confused about. But we can’t go backwards. We must go forwards. And in going forwards, we must go backwards, back to 1867.
I soooooo wanted to love this script! It was not only my favorite first 10 pages of the Twit-Pitch contest, but the writer, Nikolai, is a hardcore Scriptshadow Twitter follower. The man retweets my tweets like cray-cray, and is a huge supporter of the site.
The problem Nikolai runs into with The Tradition is one I’ve become more and more familiar with over the last few months. Nikolai is an amazing writer. But he isn’t yet an amazing storyteller. What I mean by that is that the descriptiveness of The Tradition is TOP NOTCH. I can’t think of any other screenwriter who could make me feel like I was in 1867 London more than Nikolai. Take this simple description of a character as an example: “A fusty old SOLICITOR with great big grey pork chop sideburns and pince-nez glasses is shuffling through papers like a catfish.” I jumped to a random page and found that. That’s how everything is written in The Tradition. We are pulled into this world due in whole to the amazing writing. No question about it.
But pulling us into a world has nothing to do with telling us a story in that world. That’s a completely different skill. And unfortunately, there’s isn’t much of that skill shown in The Tradition. It feels like a story that could’ve taken place in 30 pages, stretched out to 116. That’s what was so frustrating. One of the reasons The Tradition got me in its first 10 pages was because something HAPPENED. A man is running from a mysterious tribe of Polynesian boys. He’s captured. Killed. It was an exciting first scene. But after that scene, shockingly enough, little to nothing happens for another 100 pages. It didn’t feel like a story was being told so much as a series of mundane events was being meticulously chronicled.
The Tradition starts off with that early great scene, then flashes forward 50 years to England circa 1867. A young and beautiful woman, IDA, has just buried her father, only to realize that he’s left her in a boatload of debt. Her once illustrious lifestyle is torn from her in order to pay this debt, and she soon finds herself slumming it up as a seamstress to make ends meet.
That job falls to the wayside soonafter, and Ida is less than a month’s rent away from seriously considering prostitution. So lucky her when she’s spotted by the son of a royal Lord, John, who asks her and her roommate to come work for him in the countryside. Away they go, along with many other women and children, and all of a sudden Ida has a job, a future…Things aren’t looking so bad!
In the meantime, we meet Arthur, John’s younger brother. Arthur’s the family outcast, mainly because he doesn’t agree with a secret tradition the family goes through every year. We’re only given vague hints as to what this tradition is, but it’s evident that wherever Ida and all these other women are being taken, it isn’t going to end well.
Which is strange because the mansion Ida and the others arrive in appears to be a dream come true. They get new clothes to wear, yummy food to eat, lovely beds to sleep in. The only downside seems to be that the Lord is a little sleezy and John is a bit of an asshole.
It’s at this point, unfortunately, where the script really starts to lose itself. The stuff that goes on at the house – which is essentially nothing – goes on forever. The story is relegated to people wandering through halls, occasionally bumping into each other, followed by some talking. Nothing is actually happening. Nobody’s trying to do anything. My guess is that Nikolai was trying to rest his story on this impending sense of doom in this house, and I admit to being a little curious as to where it was all going. But there was so little drama and conflict leading up to the final act that I became bored.
You need SCENARIOS in your screenplay. You need intriguing mini-stories with their own goals and complications and mysteries and conflicts and characters pushing up against other characters. For example, maybe Ida is given the job to prep each woman before taking them down to a mystery room. She has to make sure their dress is perfect, their make-up is right, that they look as good as they can possibly look. She does this. However, once she brings these women downstairs, a mysterious assistant takes them and she never sees them again. She begins to get suspicious and starts looking into it, putting herself in danger. Now, at least, we have a woman doing something as opposed to obvliviously stumbling around the castle hallways occasionally running into someone and talking to them.
That’s the difference between writing and telling a story. When you’re writing, you’re trying to think of the best way to describe what’s happening in the moment and figure out what each character is going to say to each other right now. When you’re storytelling, you’re looking to construct scenarios full of mystery and tension and drama and conflict and danger that extend beyond the immediate scene.
I started getting worried after those first ten pages. After we set up that Ida was on her own, it just took forever to get her to the castle. I don’t remember the exact page number but I’m pretty sure it happened after page 45. We should’ve been on our way to that castle by the end of Act 1, page 25. Remember guys, your story is almost always playing slower than you think it is. So while you think you need this long scene showing how difficult it is for your character to be out of a job, we’re waiting for the next interesting thing to happen. With The Tradition, I felt like I was always waiting too long for that next interesting thing to happen.
Character-wise, there wasn’t much going on with anyone other than Arthur, the black sheep brother who refused to partake in the tradition along with the rest of the family. I liked that Nikolai tried to create a flaw within him, that he was basically a coward. But the coward flaw is always difficult to execute because you risk the possibility of the audience thinking the character’s a p*ssy and being annoyed with him. I have to admit, that’s how I perceived Arthur. Instead of rooting for him to stand up for himself, I kept thinking, “Grow some balls, buddy. Jesus.”
The character we should’ve been exploring was Ida. She started out strong, with this crippling scenario of losing her father and her home, but there wasn’t enough going on inside of her to keep my interest after that point. We need some sort of conflict inside someone that needs to be resolved, whether it be a flaw or something from their past or whatever, and that wasn’t here. Jodie Foster had both a past and a flaw to overcome in Silence Of The Lambs, for example. She had the lambs. She also had an obsession to show that a little girl could do the job just as well as the big boys. Ida’s just sort of naively going wherever the story takes her.
For these reasons, I couldn’t get into The Tradition. But I have high hopes for Nikolai. He’s obviously an excellent writer who now needs to become a storyteller.
Script link: The Tradition
What I learned: Repeat after me – “Screenwriters are not writers. They’re storytellers.” “Screenwriters are not writers. They’re storytellers.” “Screenwriters are not writers. They’re storytellers.”
Genre: Sci-Fi/Western
I remember reading through the first ten pages of this one and thinking…hmmm, now this is different. Writers are trying to come up with high concept ideas all the time. But it’s a tough proposition. I encounter a lot of ideas that seem high concept, or are high concept “on paper,” but there’s something about them that doesn’t scream movie high concept, the kind of true bona fide high concept idea you hear and you say, “Oooh, now that’s a movie I’d check out.” And it’s usually a tiny unique addition to a tried-and-true idea that does it. The tried and true idea here is a small group of people fighting off “monsters.” The unique twist is that they aren’t “monsters,” per se, but rather mech machines designed to kill humans.
And I’ll just be honest. I’m a sucker for movies where a hero wakes up someplace unfamiliar with no idea how he got there. I know it’s cliche. I know it’s been done a billion times over, but I just think it’s such a compelling situation. That’s why I put this one in the coveted “definite” pile when I first read it. However, the “definite” pile hasn’t exactly been a bastion of quality. None of the definites so far have even reached “worth the read” status. Let’s hope today’s script changes that.
John Caan has just woken up in a Mexican pueblo. He doesn’t know where he is. He doesn’t know how he got here. He’s never even been to Mexico. So why he would be here is beyond him. But that’s not even on the radar right now. What is on the radar are the noises coming from outside.
Caan peeks out the window to see the most horrifying most baffling sight he’s ever seen in his life. Large mech machines, with saws, with machetes, with lasers, with guns, are massacring a bunch of people in the town square.
While this would be too much for any sane man to handle, Caan’s slightly insane. And he knows exactly what he has to do. GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE. So he loads up his gun and heads outside to get the huh-zell out of Dodge. There are people dying all around him but he doesn’t care. It isn’t until a small girl is in trouble that he actually does anything. But after saving her, he slips out and heads through the desert to safety.
Except it’s not that easy. Far off in the desert he encounters a huge electrically charged fence. And more MECHS, standing guard, making sure no humans make it past them. They chase Caan back to the town and it’s time for plan B.
Back in the town we meet a series of other characters – Michael, the almost Alpha-Male, Lily, the mother of the child Caan saved, Petra, a 20-something goth girl, Tom, a 50-something ex-cop, and a few more. This is Caan’s army. And they’re all looking to him for leadership.
But Caan’s not interested in being a leader. He just wants to find a way out of this situation. Unfortunately, that’ll mean fending these mechs off for a few days while he figures things out. So he reluctantly rallies the troops and does the best job he can.
The thing is, nothing goes quite as expected. The weirdness of this situation just keeps getting weirder. For example, sometimes the mechs don’t want to kill them. They just want to toy with them. And (spoiler), the group finds a room deep under the town where 9 bodies lie. A closer look at the bodies show that they’re exact copies of THEM.
So yeah, shit is pretty f*cked up! Caan not only needs to find out how to get them out of this alive, but also what the hell is going on here. And boy is it a shocker when he does figure out the truth!
First off, this is superbly written. The lines are lean. The prose is bare but descriptive. This feels like a spec. It feels like something that deserves to go out wide and vie for producers’ attention.
And it nails a lot of its components as well. Our anti-hero leader, Caan, is mysterious and dark enough to keep our interest throughout. Dare I say he’s a worthy successor to Mad Max himself with his selfish yet reluctantly compassionate demeanor.
The situation driving the story is so damn weird (human-killing mechs) that you have to keep reading to find out why the hell this is all happening. And surprisingly enough – while I admit a tad far-fetched and “out there,” the explanation is – it worked for me in regards to the universe Topham created. That’s where these scripts always fall apart. An outrageous situation to start the script, yet the writer never explains that situation in a satisfactory way. I don’t know if it’s that Topham is such a good writer that you believed it all despite its weirdness, or if it honestly just felt right, but it made sense to me and I was satisfied.
I liked the nice little twists and turns also. For example, early on Caan finds a drawing in a school that shows a man shot in the head, the same man he just saw shot in the exact same way minutes ago. And (spoiler), when the characters find dead versions of themselves in a room…that’s when I really took notice. I like those “sit up” moments in a script – moments that are so shocking or weird or cool, that you actually readjust yourself and sit up. That doesn’t happen very often!
The script is always kept moving by the inherent GSU. The goal is to hold of the mechs and find a way out of here. The urgency is the constant barrage of mechs that keep coming. And the stakes are, obviously, their lives.
I liked how Topham always kept his characters active too. One of the pitfalls of placing your characters in a confined area is that you’ll just have them sitting around doing nothing for long stretches of time. In order to combat this, you must always give them a plan, always keep them trying to achieve something, never sitting down and talking in safety for too long. I remember I reviewed an Amateur script awhile back called “Zombie Knights,” that had this exact problem. The characters just got inside the castle grounds and hung out. Nothing happened for long stretches of time. That can NEVER be the case in this kind of story or in a spec script period.
The only real issues I had here surrounded Caan. Even though I liked him (and I’ll go into why in the ‘what I learned’ section), there were times where he tested me. He was almost too brooding. And the eventual reveal to his backstory was boring. It could’ve been a lot better. And seriously, writers, don’t have your heroes deliberately kill nice animals – EVER. When Caan kills the dog/coyote in this, I was like, “Really?? Are you trying to make us hate this guy?” I find that a little bit of dark or gallows humor can quickly up the likability quotient of your anti-hero. Let’s go that route instead of making him a dog-killer.
Anyway, this one was fun! And it now takes the lead as THE BEST TWIT-PITCH SCRIPT OF THE CONTEST! Check it out yourself in the link below!
Script link: Proving Ground (Since the writer didn’t want his contact info on the script, if you like the script and want to get in touch with the writer, e-mail me and I’ll put you in contact).
What I learned: When you have a brooding protagonist, an anti-hero, or a protagonist who doesn’t talk much, it can be hard for the audience to like/sympathize with him. The lack of talking makes it difficult to identify with or get into the hero’s head. Therefore, look to make us like your character through action or choice. Proving Ground does a great job of this early on. While everyone’s fighting off the mechs, Caan is simply trying to escape. That moment presents itself when a mech leaves its guard at the gate to go kill a little girl. Caan has a choice now. He can slip out the unattended gate or save the girl. In the end, he chooses to save the girl. It’s this action, this choice that makes us like him! Oh, and always place these moments EARLY ON. It’s important that we like our hero right away!
Genre: Comedy
How does one follow up the best reviewed script on Scriptshadow in over two years? It’s kind of like getting your first stand up gig and being told you’re following Jerry Seinfeld. It doesn’t help that Desperate Hours was a big deep-thinking character-driven drama and that Second Chance just wants to make you giggle. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to make people giggle, but coming on the tail of a script that hits every emotional beat known to man, there’s a tendency to get frustrated with a story whose only goal is to make you laugh.
The good news is that Rucker, the writer, *is* funny. He proves that in the first ten pages. Actually, scratch that. He proves that on the title page, which displays his e-mail as Kolby at superhellaawesome.com. So I was ready to throw away any and all screenwriting checklists as long as I had a few good laughs. But there’s a caveat to that. Comedy’s only funny when you’re enjoying the story. If you don’t care about what’s going on, nothing carries any importance. And once that happens, the jokes stop working. So it was time to see whether Second Chance contained a compelling story or not. I hope so. Because nobody gets a SECOND CHANCE at Amateur Friday. Well, unless you’re Orbitals of course.
32 year old Gary Trumball works at a market of some sort where he burns time away by reading books, ignoring customers, and waiting for the clock to strike 5. It’s during one of these clock striking moments that Gary races out and misses a national announcement that will change his life forever. He’s been randomly picked for the most popular show in the world, “Second Chance,” which allows its winners to go back in time and give 15 minutes of advice to their younger self.
It only takes a few phone calls from enthusiastic long lost friends and family members before Gary realizes what’s going on. He’s mildly excited about it, I guess you can say, but more preoccupied with the fact that his ex-girlfriend all of a sudden has decided to like him again. Hmmm, sounds like fishy timing to me. But Gary liked her so darn much that he’s willing to overlook the fact that she cheated on him and treated him like shit.
Gary’s wimpy friend, Big Mike, is very much against any contact with Sarah. He wants Gary to focus on what’s important, which is figuring out what he’s going to tell his past self. But that’s getting more complicated by the minute. The creator of the show, a former child star named Rick Roney, who reinvented his train wreck of a career by giving his past self 15 minutes of advice, doesn’t like how casually Gary’s treating this once in a lifetime opportunity. Just getting Gary on the phone has become a chore, and it’s pissing Rick off.
As if the craziness isn’t bad enough, Gary is soon kidnapped by a hot little number named Erin, who repeatedly drugs him and ties him up for…umm…well, I’m not sure why. To talk to him for a few minutes before untying him?
On their fourth meeting, Erin kidnaps Gary, leading to a Matrix-style chase sequence where we find out Rick has inserted a tracer inside Gary so he can keep track of him. Not sure why in the world he would do that but the sequence eventually leads Gary to some underground futuristic city (??????) where he learns there’s an entire community of people who have been burned by their loved ones screwing them over once they went back in time and wished for a life that made theirs expendable.
It’s at this point when we realize Erin (who’s one of these unfortunate folks) wants Gary to tell his younger self to destroy this whole Second Chance show so that none of this will ever happen – so all these people will have their families and friends back again (I think). Gary’s torn about the whole thing and isn’t sure what he’s gonna do, which might not even matter, since Rick has decided to covertly move away from Gary and give someone else a SECOND CHANCE.
Kolby is a fun writer with some fun ideas, but like a lot of young writers, he hasn’t put enough effort into learning the craft yet. Second Chance suffers from a giant case of Random-itis, with multiple cases of “What the hell??” We have the occasional fun scene every once in awhile, but while reading Second Chance, you’re usually scratching your head going, “Why did he decide to do that??”
We were just talking about this with Desperate Hours. A story is only as good as its choices, and a lot of Second Chance’s choices are weird or not-very-well-thought-out. For example, as soon as I learned that the time travel element of Second Chance was dictated by a mysterious robot who Rick just happened to find one day, I knew we were in trouble. And then there was the whole futuristic underground city thing. Ummm, what???
When you come up with an idea, one of the first things you have to take into consideration is audience expectation. What kind of movie is the audience expecting to see? For example, if you write a movie called Liar Liar about a liar who must be forced to tell the truth for a day, you probably shouldn’t send the lead character to the moon where he hopes to establish a base for future moon missions. It’s not the kind of movie we’re expecting and therefore it’s not the kind of movie we want to see.
With Second Chance, I was expecting to see a guy having to make the most important decision of his life. I imagined people from every avenue of his life coming to him and pressuring him to do what they wanted him to do. Instead I got robots and futuristic cities. It didn’t jibe with my expectations and therefore I tuned out.
The script problems kind of snowballed from there. I had so many questions that ran through my brain while reading this. Why did Erin drug and tie Gary up twice without actually getting anything from him? It was like she tied him up…just to untie him five minutes later.
Then, I’m not sure if it’s ever actually stated what Gary gets by winning this contest. It’s stated in the logline. But I’m not sure anyone in the actual script says it. That’s a HUGE oversight since the whole story is built on the idea that he has this upcoming talk with his younger self. Very strange it was never mentioned.
Then there’s a lot of wishy-washiness. Nothing is clear. For example, at first Gary seems to be infatuated with Sarah. But then, when she shows up at his place, he seems disinterested in her. Then later he’s excited about her again, then later still decides he’s not. I never knew where he stood with Sarah so it was difficult to care about their relationship.
Likewise, with the going back in time thing – Gary and Big Mike get really excited about changing their lives one scene, and then Gary seems to think the whole idea is stupid the next. I never once knew if Gary even wanted to go back in time and talk to his younger self. It was so bizarre. I mean, you have to be clear about what your characters want!
If Kolby wants to rewrite this script, here’s what I would suggest. Create 5 main relationships with people that Gary has and have all 5 of them want something different from Gary in regards to what he should tell his yonnger self. Make sure all of those relationships are strong ones, so there are some actual consequences (stakes) to Gary going against the other four. If we don’t feel like this is a difficult decision for Gary with complicated ramifications and other people getting hurt by his final choice, then we’re just not going to care.
Then, give Gary a fatal flaw, something that’s plagued him his entire life, and have that flaw be in conflict with what everyone else wants. The most obvious way to go about this is to make Gary’s flaw his selflessness. Gary has always done things for everyone else instead of himself, and everyone else has stepped on him and taken advantage of him because of it. These other five people have made a living on Gary helping them, and so Gary’s decision goes much deeper than simply “What will Gary do?” It becomes more about whether he’ll finally overcome his flaw and do something for himself for once, or will he continue to blindly help others who take advantage of him?
That’s where I’d start and see if you can create some interesting story choices from there. No robots. No futuristic cities. Keep it simple. Focus on what makes the concept compelling!
Script link: Second Chance
What I learned: Establish clarity in what your characters want! We need to know where your characters stand, or, at the very least, why they’re conflicted if they don’t stand on either side. But if a character just randomly jumps from one end of the extreme to the other without explanation, we become confused as to who that character is and what he wants. With Gary, I couldn’t figure out if he was over Sarah or still obsessed with her. I couldn’t figure out if he wanted to do this Second Chance thing or couldn’t care less. For those reasons, I never got a handle on his character, which alienated me from the story.