amateur offerings weekend

I have seen The Last Jedi! And you know what? Let’s just get into it. Starting with the Porgs. What’s the deal with… heh heh heh. You didn’t think it would be that easy, did you? My Last Jedi review isn’t coming until Monday. And I’ll just say this. It may be my longest review ever.

In the meantime, let’s find ourselves another great amateur writer and launch their career! Here’s how to play: Read as much of each script as you can and submit your winning vote in the comments section. Votes will be counted through Sunday, 11:59pm Pacific Time. Winner gets a script review next Friday!

To Sumbit For Future Amateur Offerings: Send me a PDF of your script, along with the title, genre, logline, and why you think people should read it (your chance to really pitch your story). All submissions should be sent to Carsonreeves3@gmail.com.

Note: Due to strange Uploading Problems, I can’t display first pages this weekend. :(

Title: Parallel
Genre: Sci-Fi / Adventure
Logline: Having survived a deadly plane crash, an expectant father to be awakens inside the mythical city of Atlantis in a parallel universe. In order to get back to his version of reality, he must play an active role in the planet’s civil war.
Why Should You Read: CHARACTERS! If a chef cooks without love, you will get served sad food. If a doctor checks out during a consultation, you will be misdiagnosed. If an escort had a bad morning.. well, you get the idea. Parallel is the only screenplay on the open market that has characters with personality in a high stakes battle to the death in an underwater city. If I’m wrong, I’ll wash your car.

Title: DO NOT OPEN
Genre: Christmas Horror!
Logline: After receiving a mysterious Christmas present, an agoraphobic young woman must face her deepest fears when she finds herself trapped inside her apartment building with three ghoulish entities.
Why You Should Read: Believe it or not, horror fans really love Christmas! Sure, Halloween is our big day, but there’s just something liberating about the holiday season that nicely offsets our darker sensibilities. Unfortunately, there aren’t too many movies out there that successfully bring those disparate aspects of our personalities together. GREMLINS and THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS are kind of the gold standard in this arena, but both of those are family films and don’t exactly qualify as horror. We need more good Christmas horror flicks that we can revisit each year, damn it! — ‘DO NOT OPEN’ started out as a short script. But, thanks to the November writing challenge that a few of us took part in, I’ve expanded that set-up into a modern day, horror re-imagining of a certain Dickens holiday classic. The result is basically ‘A CHRISTMAS CAROL’ meets ‘IT’. — Thanks for taking a look. I can only hope that it’s as much fun to read as it was to write!

Title: The Writhing
Genre: Horror/Drama
Logline: When a vain actress ingests a dangerous parasite to help her lose weight for the Oscars, it’s up to her stay-at-home husband to save their family.
Why You Should Read: I’ve always wanted to take a B-movie premise and try to make it as realistic as possible. The idea of doing that with a parasitic, slug-like creature was too promising for me to resist. To find the heart of the story, I had to look, not only at the world around me, but deep down within myself. What could this creature be a metaphor for? What came out was vanity, pride and the poisoning effect of today’s self-image obsession. Hopefully, some kind souls on the site will give my script a shot and help me make it better!

Title: Octagon
Genre: Sports Drama
Logline: A humble MMA fighter descends to a state of self-destruction after rising fame and fortune, tense family dynamics, and strained relationships get the better of him.
Why You Should Read: Sports movies are an underrated aspect of the movie lineup each year. Every other month there seems to be a new boxing movie, a new football movie, a tennis movie. Sports are a huge part of cultures all across the globe, and at the moment, the UFC has risen rapidly over the past several years. Yet, the only notable MMA movie is “Warrior”. I’m looking to get ahead of the curve on MMA movies, and I believe Octagon can do the trick.

Title: The Sphinx
Genre: Historical Drama
Logline: In the Golden Age of Hollywood, the mysterious silent-actress GRETA GARBO determined to change the Status Quo, arises as myth in the midst of a war of Gods & Beasts.
Why You Should Read: My name is Elena Gallen, writer/director and art director working in film, fashion, art and culture for over 10 years. After reading my feature treatment, I was encouraged by Spanish writer/director Paco Cabezas (Penny Dreadful, Dirk Gently, Into The Badlands, Fear the Walking Dead) to develop this script. He has been very supportive and trusting on my artistic voice. I am now determined to find a way to get my story noticed to materialise ‘The Sphinx’ and/or the coral drama series ‘Dames’ that sprout from it as a side-project. But Hollywood is a sick endogamic bastard I trust you might be impelled to introduce me to. As an artist and an independent working woman in a men’s world, I have become the medium to a voice that shines a light on the historical questioning of gender-roles, who claims those avant-garde women that a century ago fought for achieving equality treatment within Hollywood, in spite of the repressingly patriarchal system reigning in the world at their time. It is a culturally, historically and aesthetically significant story — and today America’s socio-political context makes it profoundly current and relevant.