My favorite writer is back!  John Jarrell.  You may remember him from the awesome interview I did with him a few months ago.  The guy has a ton of screenwriting knowledge and unlike us hack bloggers, the man’s actually been in the thick of it for 20 years, fighting the good screenwriting fight, landing those six figure jobs we all dream of.  Which is why I’m more than happy to promote his new screenwriting class – Tweak Class — starting this January. Who better to learn from than the guy who’s seen it all?  Goddamit, he’s even taken his pants off for a publicity shot (that’s really him above!).  This man is dedicated.  And today, he’s going to share with us a couple screenwriting stories from Hollywood Hell.  I enjoyed this piece so much I told John he needs to write a whole book of this stuff.  Let him know if you feel the same in the comments!

“Will You Please Buy My Script Now, Please?” — One Writer’s Journey Into the Troubling Bowels of Development.

By John Jarrell

Back in 1995, I wrote a Horror spec called The Willies.  It was essentially Carrie with Evil Twins.  People are constantly abusing and shitting on these orphans, until at last, after making a pact with the devil, they take their bloody revenge.

My agent went out with it and immediately got a sadistically low-ball pre-emptive bid from a smaller studio in town.  By that point in my life, my dream of becoming a legitimate screenwriter was nearing extinction.  I’d been struggling in L.A. for four years, was stone-cold broke, about to lose my apartment, and my girlfriend and I were subsisting solely on the 49-cent value menu at Taco Bell.  Facing even more of that ugliness, I did what struggling young writers have to do sometimes — I sucked it up and took the shit money, simply glad to survive and hopeful I would live to fight another day.

First day working, I go into a story meeting with the company’s “Creative” VP and Head of Development.  We dug in and spent several hours doing notes starting Page One — discussing what they thought worked, what didn’t, and what I’d need to address in my rewrite.

At one point, the VP looks up at me and says, “Wow, John.  This description on page fifty-two is really good writing.  Would you mind reading it out loud?”

Flattery will get you everywhere with a screenwriter, and I’m sure I flushed with pride as I found the page and paused to clear my throat.

The set up was simple — a grieving daughter (our protagonist) looking through her deceased Mother’s belongings, which have been boxed up and stored in the attic.  The beat offered a brief respite from all the genre action, gave us a further glimpse into our lead’s character, and prompted her discovery of an important clue at the end.

This was the description I wrote, verbatim —

“She rifles several of the boxes, finding little more than old letters and checkbook stubs, key chains and their forgotten keys.  The meaningless remnants of our too brief lives.”

There was a long pause after I finished.  The VP and Head of Development were nodding their heads in synchronized approval.  Then the VP says —

“Yeah, it’s really great.  Great stuff.”

(HARD BEAT)

“Lose the poetry, John, cut it all out.  It’s slowing down the script.”

I’d never been quite so close to crapping my pants.  Did he just say LOSE… THE… POETRY?  a.k.a. LOSE THE GOOD WRITING?  Wantonly kill off two short sentences — two sentences he actually likes — which perfectly sell the moment?  And replace them with what, Mr. Hemingway?  “She opens her dead mom’s shit and finds a mysterious clue!”

Like every other indignant scribe in Hollywood history, I sat hooded in a queasy half-smile, cerebral cortex locking up.  Surely “development” couldn’t be like this everywhere?  Surely this exec must be a nutter, a lone gunman of sorts, some soulless script assassin who didn’t value lightweight artistry over the groan-inducing stock lines which had been stupefying readers for decades?

But I was wrong.  He wasn’t the slightest bit insane.  In fact, Mr. Company VP was the Gold Standard — an Industry veteran and Number Two guy at the whole company!  And if I didn’t “lose the poetry” voluntarily, believe me, he would have no qualms hiring another low-ball writer to lose it for me.

Way back at NYU, an older studio vet had once shared a bit of sage wisdom with me — “It’s better for you to fuck up your script the way they want then have ’em hire somebody else to fuck it up for you.”

As baffling and counterintuitive as his advice had seemed, now I grabbed onto it like a life vest.   I labored at “losing the poetry”, beat after tight beat, good scene after good scene.  For nine agonizing months, they “developed” the script this way.  Any nugget of goodness was ruthlessly ferreted out, any clever turn of phrase or interesting character tick was quickly sandblasted into beige.  My reward, such as it was, was being kept onboard on as sole writer.

Finally, they were ready to go out with it.  And they did.  And in a matter of three short weeks, the company blew a sure-thing co-financing deal, flatlined similar offers via absurd distribution demands, then shelved the project out of self-loathing and/or shame, never to see daylight again.  Their epic fail also left The Big Question still looming — Had sacrificing all my poetry to the Commercial Film Gods made my script better… or worse?  Now, tragically, there was no way I’d know for sure.

Instead of my project — and I’m totally NOT kidding here — the company produced the urban side-splitter “Don’t Be A Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood” in its place.  It survived three demoralizing weekends before being euthanized and laid to rest in the VHS market.

During what I thought a poignant last ditch appeal, before all the lights had been turned out, I’d made the case to the company that horror was an American genre mainstay, essentially a license to print money when well-executed.  This is what that same VP told me —

“Horror’s dead, John.  Nobody wants horror anymore.  It’s all about the urban audience.”

Scream opened that same December and made $173,046,663 worldwide.  In its wake, an uninterrupted avalanche of extremely profitable low-budget horror pics overran the coming decade.

And me?  Exactly one year after the sale, my girlfriend and I found ourselves back at Taco Bell.

* * * * *

Those first professional cuts for any young writer are excruciating.  Everything about your script — every flat character, every lousy throwaway line, every unnecessary parenthetical — feels personal and inviolate, gifted from the heavens and written in stone, like some multimedia take on Moses’ holy tablets.

“Change something?  Why?  It was plenty good enough for you to buy it in the first place, wasn’t it, douchebag?”

Some version of this is what the working writer yearns to bark in his benefactors’ (read: torturers’) faces.  If you loved it enough to put real money behind it, why in the fuck do you want to change every last thing about it now?  Why date a tall, skinny brunette if you really wanted a short, squat redhead?  Where’s the logic in that?

This mentality is, of course, completely understandable.  The script is quite literally your baby, your winning Powerball ticket, the lone vehicle by which you hope and pray to escape the nagging self-doubt and just-getting-by poverty of a middle class kid with a mountain of student loans.   This is your shot — perhaps the one and only shot you’re gonna get — and if it’s mishandled somehow, if somebody shits the bed and drops the ball, you and you alone will pay the ultimate price for that.

On the other hand… there’s a couple big problems with sticking by your guns every damned time.  One, without question, you’ll be replaced as soon as your steps are up, and most likely won’t work for that company or any of those people again.  Producers hate writers as it is, see them as largely unnecessary evils.  Certainly nobody wants to work with a “difficult” one sitting in meetings with his or her fingers jammed in their ears.

Two, and this can be a tough one for us writers to swallow, what if all these developmental numbskulls are actually right???  What if a few of those “shitty notes” you keep bad-mouthing to friends turn out to be gems, pure gold, BIG IDEAS that help take your script to that hallowed “next level”?   Some writers are so busy being defensive that they’re throwing away the very ideas which can dramatically increase their odds of success… and survival.

So John, you ask, how in the hell do I know when to do what?   How do I discern between the gold and the gravel, the shit and the pony?  How can I insure I do the right thing creatively while traversing such treacherous industry tundra?

And that, my friends, is the eternal question every writer faces, every time they book a gig.  Because there aren’t any right answers one-hundred percent of the time.  The whole endeavor is entirely subjective, a complete crapshoot, with the looming possibility of some ravenous tiger waiting to bite your head off behind every corner.

Your creative action — or inaction — affects not only this project, but the possibility of the many unseen projects yet to come.  Of prominent producers and execs putting in a good word, greasing the skids for a full-freight first draft at 100% of your quote… or not.  Of you being able to pay off those loans, buy your hard-working parents a house of their own, live the creative lifestyle you’ve always dreamt of and suffered so damned much trying to actualize…

Best advice I’ve heard?  “You’ve got to choose your hills to die on.”

But hey, no pressure, right?  Best of luck on those pages.

* * * * *

Spring of 1999, I was coming off saving a film for a big studio.  My stock was high and I was starting to make my first legitimate splash.

After years of obscure, unpaid laboring, I was really feeling it, finally discovering my groove.  All that “woodshedding” had vastly improved my writing.  It was becoming much better crafted and far more intuitive.  Better still, proof of this breakthrough was now coming across on the page, for anyone and everyone to see.

A hungry young agency saw it and took me on, and they had enough juice to start getting me into the right rooms.  As every artisan in Hollywood knows, if you can’t get into the room, you sure as hell can’t get the job.  My new agents totally had my back in that department and very quickly it became plug and play — they’d send me out, after that, everything else was on me.  As you might imagine, this was a really good time for a young writer.

So… as a last ditch effort, the big studio had hired me, and against all rational odds, I’d saved their movie.  Not only that, but to everybody’s further surprise, it became a big hit.

In this town, you always strike while the iron’s hot.  My agents quickly set me up with a very famous director, one of the old school legends, in fact.  There was a new company in town spending real money, and he’d set up a project there.  All they needed now was a writer.

We met on his studio lot, the Director and I immediately hitting it off.  This guy was a blast, regaling me with wild tales of ’70’s Hollywood, each more x-rated hilarious than the last.  These were the classic movies I’d grown up with and deeply loved, back to front I knew them all.  Now here I was talking to the guy who’d actually made some of them!  For a good hour we jawed warp-speed, then spent maybe ten minutes talking broad strokes about his project.  It was to be a modern-day Robin Hood — the big twist was casting a famous Brazilian MMA fighter as the lead and setting it in the violent ghettos of inner city L.A.

Now remember, this is ’99, way before the whole MMA/UFC thing fully turned the corner.  But within two years, Dana White and Co. would radically reinvent the marketing of that world and find themselves sitting on a multi-billion dollar business.

So in a way — even though it wasn’t on purpose — the Director’s idea of casting an MMA superstar with international appeal in a kick-ass action film was perfectly timed.  By the time it was ready to roll out, the U.S. would be beginning its new love affair with the UFC.  And we’d be standing there waiting with lightning in a bottle, boffo box office certain to ensue.

I drove back home.  Two hours later (just two hours!) my agent calls.   Business affairs from this new company had called and made an offer — $100K against $275, or 100/275 in film biz parlance.  The Director was crazy about me and knew immediately I was the perfect guy for the job.  Just like that it became a spontaneous four-way love fest; Company, Famous Director, Agents, Me.  My cup runneth over with this highly-addictive first burst of adulation.

It was pretty hard to wrap my head around.  A guaranteed ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS for drinking a free bottle of Evian and listening to one of Hollywood’s most successful filmmakers tell epic war stories?   For just being (GASP!) me???

Abruptly, the lightbulb went on.  So THIS is what everybody was chasing.  Everyone knew there were heaps of money to be made — Monopoly money, from where I was standing.  But what about having all the heavyweight ego-stroking a film-addled shut-in like myself could desire?  Wasn’t that shit awesome, too?

Next came a company meet-and-greet to discuss our collective vision for the project.  My honeymoon continued unabated.  We were all on the same page! We all agreed EXACTLY what this film should aspire to!  From the top down, everybody on-board was euphoric with developmental glee!

Our homage to Robin Hood would be set in the impoverished jungles of East L.A. Our Lead, forced to flee Brazil because of his heroic actions against homicidal police, would join his Uncle in L.A. to start building a new life for himself.  But after witnessing dehumanizing oppression in the sweatshops, and running afoul of local gangsters who violently extorted and terrorized the good-hearted (but powerless) immigrants who had befriended him, our Lead is compelled to take the law into his own hands, seeing justice done, whatever the cost.  I was urged to think of the story as gritty, raw and realistic — “Robin Hood ’99” if you will, with someone like Jay-Z playing Friar Tuck.

Robin Hood is one of the oldest legends in all of Western Civilization, and for good reason.  The timeless themes of rich vs. poor, the corrupt haves vs. the honest have-nots, still speak as loudly to audiences today as they did in Medieval times.  So our ripped-from-the-headlines take involving sweatshops and immigrant labor, oppression and cultural inequality, would fit perfectly alongside the honorable intent of the original.

After a few frenzied white-guy high-fives (“I love this guy!” from one goofy exec), and another complementary bottle of Evian, I was sent off to knock out a treatment so we could quickly proceed to first draft.

* * * * *

Ensconced back in my bungalow, I set about creating my masterpiece.  Like I said, I was totally in my wheelhouse at this point, doing the very best writing of my young career.  I buckled down and poured my heart and soul into the idea.  I skipped concerts, cancelled dates, ate nothing but bad Chinese and Mexican delivery.  Day and night, I labored to make the story not just a kick-ass MMA thrill ride — the essential dynamic of the entire project in the first place — but a film which would actually have something to say as well.

I saw it as a classic have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too opportunity — killer action and ultra-cool, franchisable genre characters, with a timely message to the contemporary audience nestled behind all the head-butting and hard talk.

Listen, end of the day, if all you wanted was to see somebody’s trachea stomped into tomato soup, or some asshole’s nutsack blown off, yeah, you would get that in spades.  I mean, this was a MOVIE afterall, mass escapist entertainment.  But for the more discerning genre lover (like myself) there would also be a legitimate subtext they could hang their hats on.  A little something… more.

One month later I submitted my twelve-page, single-spaced treatment.  I was anxious, but extremely confident.  Never had I felt better about the work and what I was trying to accomplish.  I believed it awesome that Hollywood execs were willing to push for a meaningful story, even within the confines of a tiny little genre pic like this.  Maybe the self-serving, head-up-ass development stereotypes I’d been brutalized by before would be proven wrong this time around.

A week passed.  Then a second.  Neither my agent nor myself heard so much as a whisper.

Believe me, if there’s anything a writer learns in Hollywood, it’s this — the silence is deafening.

Silence is never good.  Silence says disinterest, displeasure or — scariest of all — disappointment.  When you put finished pages someone paid for in their impatient little palms and they don’t get back to you a.s.a.p. something is terribly and irrevocably wrong.  In my experience, there are no exceptions to this rule.

Sure enough, start of week three we finally got word.  It wasn’t good.  Let’s just say nobody loved it.  The company didn’t hate it initially, per se, but the Director’s people did.  They loathed it with a passion.  Which meant the company had to start hating it as well.

Judgment Day came in the company’s flagship conference room.  Picture a Hudsucker Proxy-sized oak conference table, all five of my company inquisitors massed at the far end, and me — best of intentions, isolated, confused — docked in a half-mast Aeron chair at the other.

The Head of Development led the prosecution.  He was a real trip, an IMAX D-Guy Cartoon, 3D cells brightly penciled in by Pixar.  We’re talking Aliens level development exec here, with him playing the egg-laying Queen, not one of the day-player xenomorphs.   For the safety of all involved, let’s call him Producer X.

“This treatment is too preachy, too grim, too goddamn G-L-O-O-M-Y,” his first salvo whistled across my bow. “Where’s the fun in this world, John?  The Lethal Weapon III of it all?  The wink-wink, the hijinx, the Wow Factor?”

Where’s the fun in… illegal immigration?  In the callous rich taking advantage of the struggling poor?   Is that what he was asking?

“Look, John, trust me — it’s not THAT BAD down there.  There are plenty of happy stories to tell.  Happy stories which give those people plenty of hope.”

Whoops.  My Spidey Sense began an ugly twitch.  “Down there.” “Those people.” This couldn’t be going anywhere good.

“To some, you know, this might sound controversial.  But I’m going to go ahead and say it anyway, ’cause frankly I’m not a P.C. person and I don’t give a damn,” Producer X leaned forward now, Sunday smile, as if confiding in me.  “You know what?  I have a maid, and she’s an illegal.  That’s right.  An illegal.  And guess what, John?   She LOVES working for me.  Loves it!  She couldn’t be happier!”

“Me too.” The famous director’s D-Girl piped up. “My husband and I have an illegal nanny.  Always smiling, that woman.  Very Zen.”

“In fact,” Producer X blazed on, “Recently I had a bit of a funny conundrum.  My maid’s daughter was having her quinceañera, and she told me they didn’t have enough decorations for it.  So guess what I did?  This is great — I let her go around the house and gather up all the old flowers that had been there a few days and take those to the party!  Isn’t that terrific?  She was soooooo happy.”

There was one exec in the room I’d met before, a good guy, coming from the right place.  I watched the same horrified shockwave blitzkrieg across his face that I already wore on mine.  So they weren’t all Replicants, I thought.  Thank Christ.

Oversharing kills.  No doubt, I’m every inch as white boy as the next white motherfucker out there.  But there was one huge problem.

I wasn’t that kind of white.

Both my mother and father had Ph.D.’s from Teachers College at Columbia.  Their specialties?  Education for Gifted Minority Students.  My girlfriend was Hispanic, a social worker born literally — true shit — in a dirt-floored shack in Pacoima. So yeah, this probably wasn’t going to work out too well.

All this time, Scriptshadow Reader, I’d been racking my brain, trying to figure out why they hated my treatment so much, why everyone was acting like I’d totally butt-fucked the pooch on this one.  Now it hit me full-force — my pages were too, well, Robin Hood.  I’d done exactly what we’d agreed upon, gotten it pitch perfect… which was criminally out of tune for these folks.

Class struggle?  Rich vs. Poor?  What was I thinking?  They envisioned our heroic Brazilian as a grubby street urchin, crashing Beverly Hills parties, stuffing his shirt with hors d’oeuvre and stealing thick wads of cash from mink coat pockets.  Which is precisely the take they pitched me.

Everything quickly became a vague blur, Charlie Brown’s teacher shot-gunning syllabic nonsense.  The only part I remember was Producer X’s take on our protagonist — “It’s like Ché Guevara.  He was sexy, he was hot, did a couple of cool killings.  Cinematic stuff, right?”

Talk about mind-fucks.  Their collective brainstorm now was to take the Robin Hood out of Robin Hood.   Regrettably, it was kind of, well, getting in the way.

Meeting over, we shook hands with the nauseous smiles of strangers who’d eaten the same rotten shellfish.  I grabbed my ’66 Bug — the same car I’d driven out to L.A. eight years earlier — and puttered straight up Wilshire to my agent Marty’s office.

When I walked in, I just unloaded.  Play by play, line by line, vomiting up details of the nuclear winter I’d just lived through.  From Marty’s expression, I could see he was having trouble making sense of it all.  He knew my background, knew the guy I was, but still.  After I’d slaked my desperate need to rant, I punctuated things with this cute little gem —

“They can keep the money,” I said.  “I don’t want it.”

In Marty’s entire life, I don’t think a single client had ever told him that.   And why would they?  Idealism and moral outrage are the privilege of a rarified few in this Biz.  At the grunt level, the level I was at, those concepts played worse than kiddie porn.  Besides, who the fuck was I?  Claude Rains in Casablanca?  “I’m shocked, shocked to find that half-baked racism is going on here!”  It’s not like I’d signed up for the Peace Corps or anything.

Still, I had my principles, and I was willing to put all that Monopoly money where my naive pie-hole was.  Marty’s advice was to go home, cool my tool and let him do some reconnaissance.  Once he’d sussed things out, he’d get back to me.

Two things bailed me out.  First, the exec I knew called Marty and totally vouched for my eyewitness testimony (told you he was a good guy).  Second, Producer X himself knew how badly he’d fucked up and called trying to smooth things over.  “Listen, Marty,” he told my agent, “This is a big misunderstanding.  Nobody over here wants to make an… irresponsible movie.”

They scheduled a second meeting trying to salvage things, but in many ways it was worse than the first.  My time was spent daydreaming about putting Producer X in a chokehold and pulling a Sharky’s Machine — pile-driving us through the plate glass and then plummeting 200 feet straight down to the pavement below.

So that’s it.  The deal died.  They paid for the treatment, and I — insisting on principle — left the other $65,000 sitting on the table.   SIXTY-FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS.  Just walked away from it.  And yeah, it kinda stings to write this, even now.

You may have wondered — what about the Famous Director, the one guy who surely would’ve had your back?  Predictably, after that first, glorious filmic dry-humping, I neither saw nor heard from him again.  No phone call.  No nothing.  To this day, I don’t know if he actually hated it, or his D-Girl with the illegal nanny had cut my throat without giving him the real scoop on any of what went down.

And Producer X?   Was there any Bad Karma due a producer like that?   Would the bold heavens take a stand and angrily smite down what the film industry itself would not?

You’re fuckin’ kidding, right?  This is the Film Biz.

A few years later, I was over at some friends’ place watching the Oscars on auto-pilot.  About ten hours in, after two dozen absurd dance numbers, they finally got around to Best Picture.

And who should win but Producer X.

This go ’round I did crap my pants.  Openly and without restraint.   But this wasn’t even rock bottom.  Because up next was his acceptance speech —

“I’m soooooo happy you’ve taken my movie into your hearts, this wonderful little film about compassion, racial harmony, the end of prejudice of all kinds, and, of course, hope.  Always hope, for all those people less fortunate than ourselves.”

Producer X had just won an Oscar.  That’s right.  A fucking Academy Award.  By playing the “Can’t we all just get along?” card.

Before he even left the stage, I was stumbling into the backyard, begging the hostess for a frenzied bong hit.  A writer can only take so much, you see, and my mind was dangerously close to snapping.  My only real hope of retaining any sanity now lay in a bright, protective sheen of cannabis.

As I slipped into oblivion, a single thought ran roughshod through my mind —

“I wonder if Producer X’s illegal maid is back at his house watching this, too.”

Carson again.  Naturally, I’m asking the same question you are.  Who the hell was the producer??  John refuses to name names, but I will find out.  Mark my words!  In the meantime, head over to John’s Tweak Class Page and sign up for his screenwriting class that starts this January.  It truly is a unique opportunity to study with a produced, working writer.  You won’t be disappointed!

Genre: Tarantino
Premise: (from IMDB) With the help of his mentor, a slave-turned-bounty hunter sets out to rescue his wife from a brutal Mississippi plantation owner.
About: This is the next Quentin Tarantino film, coming out Dec. 25.  Django Unchained stars Jaime Foxx as Django, Christoph Waltz as Dr. Schultz, Leonardo DiCaprio as Calvin Candie, and Samuel Jackson in the fearsome role of Candie’s 2nd hand man, Stephen.  QT has wanted to do something with slavery for awhile, but not some big dramatic “issues” movie.  He wanted to do more of a genre film.  Hence, we got Django Unchained!
Writer: Quentin Tarantino
Details: 167 pages, April 26th, 2011 draft

These days, much of the time, I read scripts with a workman-like focus.  That’s not to say I don’t enjoy reading.  I love breaking down screenplays.  But there’s always another script to read, another friend or consult or review to get to.  Which means I have to stay focused, I have to get everything done.

Rarely do I read a script where I turn off the script analysis side of my brain and just enjoy the story.  It happens two or three times a year.  With Django, it actually went beyond that.  Halfway through the script, I was so pulled in, I canceled everything and made a night of the second half of Django.  I cooked dinner.  I opened a nice bottle of wine.  I pushed back deep into the crevice of my couch. I ate, drank and read.

Okay okay, so I didn’t actually cook anything.  It was a lean cuisine meal.  And I popped open a bottle of coke, not wine.  I hate wine.  But the point is, Django Unchained was that rare reading experience where the rest of the world disappeared and I just found myself transported into another universe.

And you know what?  I’m not sure why the hell this thing worked so well. It was 168 pages.  There was usually more description than was needed.  Many scenes went on for ten pages or longer.  BUT, Tarantino found a way to make it work.  What that way is, I can only guess.  Maybe it’s his voice?  The way he tells stories makes all these no-nos become hell-yeahs.  And that’s not to say he bucks all convention.  There’s plenty of traditional storytelling going on here.  It’s just presented in a way we’ve never quite seen before.

Django’s a slave who’s recently been purchased by a plantation owner.  Part of a bigger group, the slaves are being transported to the new owner’s farm.  There are a lot of nasty motherfuckers in this screenplay, guys way worse than the brothers pulling Django along this evening, but these men are still the kind that need a good bullet in the head to remind them of just how shitty they are.

Enter an upper-class German gentleman who appears out of the woods like a ghost.  Dr. King Schultz is as smart as they come and as polite as you’ll ever see, and he’d like to ask these brothers which slave here goes by the name of “Django.”  Predictably irritated, the brothers tell him to take a hike or take some lead.  While respectful, Dr. Schultz doesn’t like to be told what he can and cannot do.  So he smokes one of the brothers, disables the other, and makes Django a free man.

You see, Dr. Schultz is a bounty hunter.  He gets paid lots of dough for the carcasses of wanted men.  And it appears he’s looking for Django’s former owners, three rusty no-good brothers (there are lots of siblings in Django Unchained) who’ve changed their names and are hiding out on some plantation.  Dr. Schultz will pay Django a nice sum if he can identify these men so he can kill them.

Now these men also happen to be the men who raped and branded his wife, Broomhilda.  So yeah, Django knows who they are all right.  He’ll help the strange German.  Plus, with the money he earns, he can go off and search for his wife, who’s since been sold off to another owner.  Django doesn’t know who or where, but Schultz tells him he’ll help him find her.

Away the two go, infiltrating the plantation where the brothers are hiding out, and Django gets some sweet revenge on his former slavers.  The two are such a great team that Schultz recommends they extend their contract and start making some real money upgrading to the big names, the kind of names that need two people to take them down.  Besides, he persuades Django, if they’re going to save Broomhilda, Django has to be in tip top shape.

So the two go off, hunting wanted men, and in their downtime, Schultz teaches Django how to read and shoot.  Eventually, Django becomes the most educated badass cowboy around.  And it’s a sight to see.  And a sight people aren’t used to seeing.  When townsfolk observe an educated free black man riding into their town on a horse, they think it must be some kind of joke.  And at first, Django feels like a joke.  But after awhile, he starts seeing himself the way Schultz does, as a man who deserves to be respected.

Once they’re ready, the two come up with a plan to save Broomhilda.  Unfortunately, Broomhilda is being held by one of the nastiest plantation owners in all the state, a detestable villanous soul named Calvin Candie, and Calvin Candie won’t just see anybody.  If you want his attention, you have to pony up.  Which means Schultz and Django must pretend to be looking for a fighter in one of Calvin’s favorite hobbies – Mandingo fighting.  Basically, these are slaves forced to fight other slaves for white men’s entertainment.

In their scam, Schultz will play the rich interested party, and Django will play the “Mandingo expert” he’s hired in order to find the best fighter.  Calvin could give two shits about the two until Scultz says the magical words, “Twelve thousand dollars.”  Now Calvin’s ready to talk, and he decides to take them back to his plantation where the talking acoustics are a little nicer, the amusement park-esque estate known as “Candyland.”

While at Candyland, the two covertly scope out Broomhilda’s whereabouts, except that Calvin’s number 2 guy, groundskeeper Stephen (who’s, surprisingly enough, Calvin’s slave), suspects something is amiss with these men, and starts to do some digging.  It doesn’t take him long to figure out their intentions, intentions that have nothing to do with buying a Mandingo.  He lets his boss know, and for the first time since we’ve met Django and Shultz, the tables have turned.  They’re not in control of the situation anymore. Once that happens, our dynamic duo is in major trouble.  And it’s looking unlikely that they’ll find a way out of it.

Let me begin by saying that a big reason this script is so awesome is because of the GOALS and the STAKES.  There’s always a goal pushing the story forward, which is extremely important in any screenplay but especially a 168 page screenplay.  If your characters don’t have something important they’re going after, a solid GOAL, then your story’s going to wander around aimlessly until it stumbles onto a highway and gets plastered by a semi.  A gas tanker semi.  A gas tanker semi that explodes and starts a forest fire.

The first goal is Schultz’s goal of needing to find these brothers.  Once that goal’s taken care of, the true goal that’s driving the story takes center stage – Django needs to find and save his wife.  But, you’ll notice that even when we’re not focused directly on that, we have little goals we’re focusing on.  It may be to kill one of the many wanted men they’re hunting.  It may be to learn to read or fight or handle a gun, so that Django can be equipped for his final showdown.  QT makes sure that we’re always driving towards something here, and he does it with goals.  Goals that have stakes attached to them.  How can the stakes be any higher than your wife’s safety and freedom?

But that’s not the only reason.  Outside of Mike Judge, I don’t know any writer who can make his characters come alive on the page better than Tarantino.  He just has this knack for developing unique memorable people.  I can go through 5-6 scripts in a row and not read one memorable character.  This script has like two dozen of them.  It’s amazing.  Sometimes it’s because he subverts expectations – Dr. Schultz is a German in an unfamiliar land who’s as dangerous as fuck yet always the most polite man in the room.  Sometimes it’s through irony – A slave bounty hunter hunting the very white people who enslaved him.  And sometimes it’s just a name – Calvin Candie.  I mean how perfect a name is that?  How are you going to forget that character?

I tell writers NEVER to overpopulate their screenplays with large character counts because we’ll forget half the characters and never know what’s going on.  But when you can make each character this memorable?  This unique?  You can write however many damn characters you please.

And the dialogue here.  I can’t even tell you why it’s so awesome because I don’t know.  There are certain elements of dialogue you can’t teach and QT is one of the lucky bastards who possesses that unteachable quality.  But I will tell you this, and it’s something I’ve become more and more aware of in subsequent Tarantino movie viewings.  He depends on a particular tool to make his scenes awesome, and it’s the main reason why he can write such long scenes and get away with it.

Basically, Tarantino hints that something bad/crazy/unpredictable is going to happen at the end of the scene, and then he takes his time building up to that moment.  Because we know that explosion is coming at the end, we’re willing to sit around for six, eight, ten pages until we get there.  The anticipation eats at us, so we’re biting our nails, eager to see what’s going to happen.  In these cases, the slowness of the scene actually works for the story because it deprives us of what we want most, that climax.

For example, there’s a scene in the second act where the young man who’s bought Broomhilda and since fallen in love with her, takes her out for a night on the town.  He unfortunately walks into one of Calvin Candie’s establishments and before you know it, Candie himself has invited him over to his table to play poker with the big boys.  Broomhilda knows something’s not right, but the poor soul is too flattered to listen to her.  This scene goes on and on and we see that Candie is becoming more and more sinister, and we just know this isn’t going to end well.  We know something terrible is going to happen.  So of course, we’re on the edge of our seats dying to see in what terrible way it will end.

Tarantino also did this, most famously, in the opening “Milk Scene” of Inglorious Basterds.  A German Commander shows up at a farm house looking for fugitive jews, and we just know this isn’t going to end well.  That’s why the German commander can ask for something as unexciting as a glass of milk.  That’s why he can talk about mundane things for minutes on end.  Because we know this isn’t going to end well, yet we’re dying to see how it does end.  Go through Django Unchained again and you’ll see that there are LOTS of these scenes, and one of the biggest tricks Tarantino has in his toolbox.  He keeps going back to it, and it works every time.

But what I think really separates Tarantino from everyone else is that you never quite know where he’s going to go.  You can predict most movies out there down to the minute.  But with QT, you can’t.  And it’s because he already knows where you think he’s going to go, so he purposely goes somewhere else.  Take the opening scene, where we see a polite white man being kind and cordial to a slave.  Not prepared for that.  Or when we see that Calvin Candie takes his orders from a black man, his slave, Stephen.  Or how when Broomhilda is first purchased, she’s actually purchased by a shy young white man who quickly falls in love with her and treats her kindly.  I was always trying to predict where Tarantino would go next, and I was usually wrong.  And even better, the choice he ended up going with always ended up in a better scene.

My complaints are minimal.  There was only one area of the script that felt lazy.  (spoiler) Late in the third act,  Django’s life is spared because, apparently, he’ll experience a much worse death “in the mines.”  This allows him to be transferred off the plantation, which of course allows him to trick his transporters and go back to save Broomhilda.  Come on.  No way the Candie family doesn’t torture and kill him right there.  No way they let him go off to the mines.  So I was disappointed by that because it felt like a cheap way to give Django his big climax.  With that said, the big climax was phenomenal.  Average Joe Writer would have had Django go in there Die Hard style.  QT took a slower more practical approach, and created a much better finale because of it.

So you know what?  I can’t believe I’m doing this since I haven’t done it in two years before a month ago, but I’m giving another GENIUS rating.  This script is freaking amazing.  It really is.  I don’t know if the Academy knows what to do with a movie like this, but if we’re talking writing alone, this script should win the Oscar.  And, heck, it should win for best film too.

What I learned: Always look for ironic moments in your screenplay.  Audiences LOVE irony.  Django, a slave, must play the role of a slave driver near the end of the film.  He must treat other slaves like they’re dirt.  He must talk to them like they’re dirt.  It’s tough to watch but also fascinating, since he himself was, of course, a slave a short time ago.

Genre: Horror/Zombie
Premise: A married couple goes on a cruise to heal their wounds after losing their son, but when the ship rescues a strange sick man, they soon find that their own lives are in danger.
About: Hey, how often do we get to read a script by TWINS?  Touchstone bought this spec back in 2010.  Alexi Hawley scripted the 2004 Exorcist prequel, Exorcist: The Beginning, and more recently was story editor on the Nathan Fillion show, Castle.  Brother Noah was a writer on the TV show, Bones.  
Writers: Alexi and Noah Hawley
Details: 110 pages

In all honesty, had I known this was a zombie script, I wouldn’t have read it.  Dead In The Water was a random script I had in my screenplay pile which I knew nothing about, which is exactly why I wanted to read it.  I was hoping for another Ends Of The Earth or Dead Of Winter.  But didn’t get it.  I got a zombie flick.

I’ll tell you what, though.  Before I knew this was a zombie script – in other words throughout the first act – it was pretty damn good.  And once it became a zombie flick, the darn thing kept going.  It took some chances along the way – did things a little differently – and therefore, gasp, kept me fairly entertained.  I’m still not sure what to make of it on the whole.  There’s a character called Suparman who feels like he’s been beamed in from a different movie…on a different planet.  But all in all, I think there’s more good here than bad.

The script starts out with a great opening scene.  A group of doctors are out for a spin on their sailboat when they spot a couple of men on a trawler dumping bags into the ocean.  The trawler speeds away and the doctors decide to investigate, only to find that the bags aren’t just bags.  They’re body bags.  And as they move up to get a closer look, one of the bags…STARTS MOVING.

They open the bag up to save the individual but it turns out it’s not him who needs saving.  Blood splatters.  There are screams.  And we CUT to a cruise ship.  This is where we meet Brian and Carrie Lake, a couple grieving over their dead son.  Both are devastated but Carrie’s ready to move on. Brian, a cop, can’t let go however, and would rather sleep in their room all day than go out and “have fun.”

So Carrie heads out on her own, and while up on deck, spots something in the water that stops her cold.  It’s a man!  Drifting along on a piece of debris!  She calls out to the ship’s crew and the next thing you know they’re lifting the man up on deck.  Well waddaya know?  It’s one of the doctors!  And he’s not looking good.  In fact, he starts vomiting blood all over the place!  Mmmmmm…blood vomit.

Carrie relays the experience to Brian, who continues his bed brigade, so Carrie goes to take a nap on deck.  When she wakes, however, something is off.  There’s…nobody around.  It’s like everyone from the cruise just disappeared.  Oh, until she sees a man with a blood-stained mouth coming after her.  And then another one.  And then another one.

Carrie runs off, where she’s able to find a few more people, and the group quickly realizes that a virus has spread throughout the ship, bringing the dead back to life, dead who are hungry for human flesh.  Let this be a lesson about picking up strangers.

Carrie now has a single-minded goal – finding her husband, and this is where the script does something different.  It starts out with a segment called “Carrie,” which follows Carrie’s journey as she tries to find Brian.  Then, when that’s over, we cut to the “Brian” segment, where we show Brian trying to find Carrie.  If that were it, the script still may have been too predictable for me.  But then, for some odd reason, we also have a final segment titled, you guessed it, “Suparman.”  Suparman is a 22 year old Indonesian man who is some sort of circus acrobatics expert, able to wield duo-machetes which allows him to slice and dice zombies like they’re tomatoes.  I honestly have NO IDEA what Suparman was doing in the script, and yet, I was glad he was.  It gave the story this slight level of absurdity that differentiated it JUST ENOUGH from typical zombie faire to give it an edge.

The first thing I want to point out is what an advantage CONTAINING a horror scenario is.  For those who read or saw Contagion – if you were like me, you saw a movie trying to cover so many countries and so many scenarios that it eventually lost itself.  It’s hard to sell mass death when there are so many places to hide, so many islands and areas safe from contamination.  On something like a cruise ship, however, there’s nowhere to run.  You’re trapped.  And that makes the situation a thousand times scarier.

I thought the cutting to different people was a smart move too.  It broke up the conventional zombie structure of a group trying to move from point A to point B (while avoiding zombies).  That’s where I think a lot of these scripts die.  Because once the mystery is over, once the group knows they’re zombies and have to get to [some location] to survive, the scripts become very technical.  They’re just moving on rails while avoiding zombies.  All the creativity is gone.  Now I’m not saying Dead In The Water completely eliminated this, but the structure break-up was just enough to keep us on our toes.

As far as the characters here….hmmmm… I guess they were okay.  The whole “dead child” thing is a little stock.  I’ve seen it before.  In fact, it was the main storyline for another “dangerous person comes aboard a boat” flick, Dead Calm.  I don’t know what it is about this backstory but I’ve never been a fan of it.  First, there’s something just too sad about a dead child.  It doesn’t translate well to screen.  And second, it’s almost impossible to avoid melodrama with it.  The couple has to be sad, they have to discuss how sad they are, and it always comes off as too much.  I’d avoid this backstory unless you have a fresh take on it.

Anyway, the ultimate point is this – if I were a producer, I would buy this script.  It’s a money-maker for sure.  Zombies on a cruise ship?  Never been done before (at least to my knowledge).  You got the contained setup, nowhere to run.  Zombies on a cruise has potential for a lot of fun scenarios, as proven here with the unforgettable shark climax.  And then of course, you get to top it all off with Suparman – the machete-wielding alien from another planet.  What’s not to like?

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: The isolated character name is a good way to imply the screenplay equivalent of a close-up during a key moment.  — Remember guys, you don’t want to write “CLOSE-UP” in your script.  It’s too technical.  So the isolated character name is a great way to imply that the camera is on the character.  Here’s an example from page 40…

They turn and run as the infected flood the stairs behind them.

ERYN

reaches a doorway.  Ducks through it and onto…

EXT. PROMENADE DECK – DAY

Okay guys, Twit-Pitch is alive and well. And if you were following my Twitter feed every night, you’d be seeing me analyze the first ten pages of these entries in REAL-TIME. That’s right. I actually tweet what I’m thinking AS I’M THINKING IT. What other contest does that!? This is unprecedented stuff here so if you’re not following me on Twitter yet, you best remedy that right away!

Now, I bring up Twit-Pitch because when you read ONLY the first 10 pages of a bunch of scripts in a short span of time, you REALLY start paying attention to what makes those pages work or not work. And while it’s nothing new to say “Make sure your first 10 pages are awesome,” it really hit me how important that piece of advice is during this exercise. I realized how quickly that feeling of going one way or the other comes for the reader.

The thing is, when writers hear this advice, they get the wrong idea. They believe “make your first 10 pages great” means immediately assaulting the reader with a huge car chase or a big action set-piece. I’m not saying those won’t capture the readers’ attention if done well, but a generic action scene is just as boring as a generic dialogue scene.

So I sat back and thought about all the openings I liked (both with these pages and with other scripts I’ve read) and while I can’t say I’ve come up with a definitive formula for roping in the reader, I can tell you that when comparing the first ten pages of all these scripts, I found a few go-to approaches that give you the best shot at grabbing the reader’s attention.

One of the best ways to open a script is to introduce a problem. When you introduce a problem, the reader will want to stick around to see if that problem is solved. So in The Sixth Sense, the movie starts with husband and wife having a quiet moment in their bedroom, when, all of a sudden, an old patient breaks in and starts threatening them. This patient is the *problem.* He’s threatening our hero and his wife. I don’t know any readers who would not want to find out how this scene ends.

But you don’t have to be telling a ghost story or writing an action film to start with a problem. You can inject a problem into anything. Maybe you open with a teenage girl on the subway with two menacing hoodlums staring at her from across the car. Maybe you start with a woman finding out she’s pregnant. Maybe you start with a lawyer losing his job. Just introduce a problem and you’ve got us.

The next thing you can start with is a mystery. A reader is always going to be roped in if there’s some sort of mystery presented to them. You need look no further than Inception to see how to open your script with a good mystery. We see our main character washing up on shore. We see our main character asleep in an apartment with a mob approaching. We see our main character asleep on a train. If I’m a reader, I want to find out how this is happening. I want to keep reading.

The third thing you can start with is a good old-fashioned Scriptshadow staple – a GOAL. Just give your character a goal and we’ll want to see if he gets it or not. The prototypical example of this is Raiders of the Lost Ark. Indiana Jones’ goal is to get the gold monkey in the cave and get out. Throw a few obstacles in the way and you have yourself a great opening sequence.

Another solid opening move is a surprise. I like this one because it actually allows you to start slow. You can introduce your characters. Establish a little bit of setup along the way. And then at some point in the scene, throw in a shocking surprise that jolts the reader. It’s been a while since I’ve seen Iron Man, but if I remember correctly, we start with Tony Stark in a Humvee with some other soldiers chatting away, then out of nowhere – BOOM! – his vehicle is attacked.

If none of these openings float your script’s boat, then AT LEAST start us off with some conflict. Give us an imbalance that projects a feeling of instability. If something’s unstable, we intrinsically want to stick around until it stabilizes. So in Fargo, a man walks into a bar to discuss the kidnapping of his wife with a couple of contract men. Immediately, the two parties are not on the same page. They point out how our protagonist is late. Our protagonist counters by insisting he’s on time. This conflict seeps its way into their conversation, making a somewhat straightforward dialogue scene interesting!

Now you don’t have to use any of these approaches if you don’t want. There are plenty of other ways to open a screenplay and I encourage you guys to list them in the comments. But from my experience, if you want to hook a reader right away, these are extremely solid bets. Now if all this stuff intimidates you or confuses you, or you’re convinced there’s no way to use any of these methods in the kind of script you’re writing, then there’s one failsafe rule to fall back on: Make sure something interesting is happening. That’s all. Don’t bore us with two people talking about something that’s ultimately irrelevant. Give us a scene where something interesting is happening and we’ll be intrigued.

So now that you have a good idea of how to rope a reader in with your first 10, I thought it would be the perfect time to look over the first 14 entrants I’ve read in the Twit-Pitch contest. Of these 14, 8 of them did not make it to the next round. 5 of them received “maybe” votes, meaning I’ll revisit them after I’ve read everything, and 1 received the coveted “definite” vote (“The Tradition – 1867 After losing her father, a woman unwittingly takes a job as a maid at a countryhouse of aristocratic cannibals”). Below, I’m including all the scripts the writers let me post. Check out what you can and study the first ten pages. Determine why you liked some and disliked others. Share your observations in the comments section. And if you know of any other tricks to pull the reader in in the first 10, share those too!

DIDN’T MAKE IT

Tusk
The ghost of a legendary movie star gets tangled up in his own biopic when he needs the help of the heartthrob cast to play him.

Untitled Hoarder
A hoarder finds the girl of his dreams only to lose her in his apartment.


Treetop
After running away from home, an eight foot tall teenager stumbles upon a retirement town for sideshow performers.

Nuts & Rats
An ex-cop awakes in an alternative reality where normal people are locked up in mental institutions and society is run by lunatics.

Open House
Desperate to divorce but cash-strapped, ornery newlyweds must put their feuding aside to sell their house, much less agree on a price.

Godfathers
Two guys have one weekend to battle for the coveted ‘Godfather’ title to their best friend’s new daughter.

Local .357
Ex-CIA assassin unionizes an eclectic group of freelance hitmen to “negotiate” with their mob employers. Norma Rae meets RED

The Lipschitz Affair
When an art heist interrupts a wedding at the Guggenheim, everyone’s a suspect — even the bride and groom

MAYBE

The Last Rough Rider
It’s 1901. Terrorists have just taken over the White House. And only Theodore Roosevelt can stop them.

Blackhats
A hacker for hire finds himself in a deadly web of corporate espionage after being hired to steal the 1st sentient A.I.

Ridin’ The Gravy Train
With his favorite fast-food sandwich facing its final week before it’s phased out forever, an obsessed man leads a protest to save it.

Gino And Me
In early 1980s New Jersey, a 12-year-old decides to profile the local mob boss for his seventh grade English project despite the vehement disapproval of his mother.

Crimson Road
Can it get any worse than living next door to a serial killer? It can if you live on CRIMSON ROAD… the whole street is full of them.

Note: No review today.

For those playing catch-up, Twit-Pitch was a contest I held where anyone could pitch me their screenplay as long as it was contained within a single tweet.  These are the Top 100 from a list that included nearly1000. These 100 will send me the first ten pages of their scripts, from which I’ll pick 20-25 full scripts to read.  To read a discussion of the loglines and contest, head over to the 1300-comment post that occurred afterwards.  You should also follow me on Twitter for updates, as I’ll occasionally be tweeting my responses to pages. 

There’s been a lot of discussion about what I picked and what I didn’t pick and I wanted to give you guys some insight into why I chose what I chose. I’ve run a few logline contests now and I’ve learned a few things in the process. The first is, wacky comedies tend to be the worst written scripts I read. The more broad something is, the less the writer seems to care about character and story (instead focusing solely on the jokes). And as you know from reading the site, character and story are the most important things to me. So that might explain why I didn’t pick that many comedies despite the fact that there were some pretty funny ideas out there. I was tired of getting burned.

The other thing I learned is that loglines that end with a vague mystery usually result in vague unsatisfying screenplays. So if you wrote something like, “A man discovers a secret room in his house that leads to a horror that he could’ve never imagined.” There’s just not enough information there. If I’m going to take two hours to read a script, I want to know what the script is about. So many of these loglines didn’t get chosen.

Now let me get into why I chose some of the ideas I did. You’ll notice that a lot of the ideas I picked contained irony. A writer who understands the value of irony in storytelling is usually ahead of the writer who doesn’t. In other words, if I was to come across this logline…


A lawyer wakes up on the day of his biggest trial only to learn that he cannot tell a lie.

I’d pick it over this one…

A lawyer wakes up on the day of his biggest trial only to learn that he can hear people’s thoughts.

Both of those ideas are high concept but the second one doesn’t contain any irony. The lawyer can really be anybody. So it’s not nearly as exciting of an idea.

Also, since everything that happened with The Disciple Program, I’ve been fortunate enough to talk to a lot of producers in the industry. And the thing I continue to hear is, “Bring me a movie I can sell.” Not “Bring me a movie that can win a BAFTA.” Not “Bring me a movie that will fill me with emotion.” But, “bring me a movie I can sell.” That’s not to say that emotion and character development and plotting aren’t important. You guys know now how much I value all of these things. But if those things aren’t inside a package a producer can put on a poster, or sell to the next guy above him, then they’re not interested. Remember, Good Will Hunting sold as a thriller. It wouldn’t have sold as a character piece.

So when I looked through these loglines, there was that little voice in the back of my head reminding me: Is this something you can give Producer A or Producer B and they’ll be interested? The only real producer in town who can get significant character development movies made without having to jump through a million hoops is Scott Rudin. And it’s hard to get to that guy.

Finally, my taste factored into this. You guys all know that I like time travel stuff. I’m also a bit of a sci-fi geek. So you saw a lot of those ideas here. I’m not really into witches and covenants, so loglines like those were at a disadvantage. And you know, sometimes I just took chances. I know the loglines weren’t traditionally ‘sound,’ but something said to me, “This sounds like a unique writer.” The Detroit salt mines one. It felt different. The dwarf opening a pizza shop. It felt different. The dead whale one. It felt different. And those were simply chosen on gut. Unfortunately, that’s not something you can predict when you’re constructing your idea. You never know which gut is going to be looking at your logline.

Now, on to the Twit-Pitch 100. The first 76 were my original picks, and the last 24 were new picks. I chose these by going back through the comments section in the massive Twit-Pitch post and seeing what people liked. I also browsed back through the pitches myself and added a few that didn’t hit me the first time.

I decided to bypass the direct-messaging I promised earlier because it takes a ridiculous amount of time to direct tweet on Twitter for some reason. Therefore, anybody who was favorited and anybody who shows up in the 23 alternates here, you have until Sunday midnight (pacific time) to send me your first 10 pages (to carsonreeves3@gmail.com with subject line: TWIT-PITCH). I’ll let you know next week what the due date is for the entire script, which will be roughly 2 months. Enjoy the pitches!

1) A pill-pushing psychiatrist must connect with his patients when a dissatisfied customer curses him with all of their disorders.

2) Early 1980s New Jersey: a 12-year-old decides to profile the local mob boss for his seventh grade English project.

3) North Atlantic, 1825. A whaling Captain and his mutinous crew are trapped on the body of a dead whale and must fight for survival.

4) A “This American Life” type documentary covering a monster attack on NYC, using found footage, like the 1st anniversary of 9/11

5) Werewolves on The Moon: It’s always a full moon on the moon.

6) After winning a nationwide lottery a man must decide what to do with his prize, fifteen minutes of advice to give to his younger self

7) Genesis Y2K: A Christian broadcasting network hires two failed filmmakers to create a TV series of the Bible before the apocalypse

8) After being framed for his father’s murder, an ex-Army medic goes on the run and uncovers a vast secret buried in Detroit’s salt mines

9) West Side story but hip-hop. Rival barber shops: Hella Cutty vs. Get Faded. Step it up 3 meets Leprechaun in the hood

10) On a dare, a young woman shaves her head… only to discover a pirate’s treasure map tattooed onto her scalp

11) When his fiancee gets promoted, a man must plan their wedding on his own. But he risks losing his bride when he becomes a groomzilla.

12) A troubled teen suspects his father may be trying to kill him for a life insurance payout when he’s involved in several “accidents”

13) A man trying to solve the mystery of his con artist grandfather must overcome his own beliefs and the resistance of his broken family.

14) An uptight half-white half-Latin man confronts his repressed heritage when he’s mistaken for a druglord while on business in Guatemala

15) An orphan grows up in a projection booth. He must use all he learned from movies to survive outdoors or lose his true love

16) A group of friends returns from a time-travel fieldtrip to find a nerdy student has altered his past turning him into a living legend.

17) A hoarder finds the girl of his dreams only to lose her in his apartment.

18) A TV executive is held hostage by the characters from a show he recently cancelled, who demand they be put back on the air.

19) An astrophysicist Jesuit priest suffers a crisis of faith triggered by the discovery of a destroyed civilization lightyears from home.

20) One man unaffected by a world inexplicably frozen in time, seeks a way to end the stasis, and finds to his peril that he’s not alone.

21) Firstclass: Mailmen vs. meter maids, battle in the secret civil servant war for control of the streets while trying to get disability.

22) A down on his luck Ice Cream Man agrees to transport stolen stem cells to Mexico only to find these cells are not from this planet.

23) A team of animals organize to fight the omnipotent Taxidermist after he inflicts their community with a deadly parasite

24) A 30 year old woman who dated twins in college believes that one of them was “The One”, if only she could remember which.

25) Two guys have one weekend to battle for the coveted ‘Godfather’ title to their best friend’s new daughter.

26) A terrorist with a $10 mill bounty, a callous soldier of fortune and a mysterious man with no name walk into a bar in Afghanistan

27) Secrets revealed, lives evaluated and relationships SLAUGHTERED after a small town reality cast deals with the murder of their lead.

28) A paranormal debunker is unknowingly invited to investigate a home by a ghost who is terrified by another evil entity lurking upstairs

29) Ex-CIA assassin unionizes an eclectic group of freelance hitmen to “negotiate” with their mob employers. Norma Rae meets RED

30) When the world’s biggest superhero agreed to grant a dying boy’s last wish, he didn’t count on the boy wishing for all his powers

31) When a suicide cult oddly resurrects in a small town, an ex-cop must uncover the truth, and find his own dead son has also risen

32) 9 strangers wake in a deserted Mexican town besieged by killing machines: they must discover why they’ve been brought there to survive

33) In 1903 North Carolina, the Wright bros attempt the first flight, but shenanigans arise when they fall in love with the same woman

34) The ghost of a legendary star gets tangled up in his own biopic when he needs the help of the heartthrob cast as him

35) Small town funeral home begrudgingly inherited is failing so the owner starts killing for business. Soon, his model goes national.

36) Can it get any worse than living next door to a serial killer? It can if you live on CRIMSON ROAD… the whole street is full of them.

37) Driven into exile by a goblin invasion, a mythological dwarf struggles to adapt to life as a pizzeria owner in upstate New York

38) When a lonely masochistic chubby chaser is abducted by two fat lesbian serial killers, it’s the best thing that ever happened to him.

39) Determined to find a date for his high school reunion, a loser hires a lifecoach who turns out to be his old school bully

40) An imprisoned Japanese-American doctor and a Caucasian nurse fall in love amid mounting tension inside a WWII internment camp

41) ORBIT – A team of astronauts orbiting the Earth find they may be the world’s only hope during a devastating alien attack.

42) When a billionaire sociopath is sent to death row, he offers $100 million cash to anyone that can successfully break him out

43) SPECIMEN – An amnesiac surgeon who wakes up chained to a steel slab must uncover why doctors are performing grisly operations on him.

44) While investigating a popular student’s unexplained disappearance, a high school psychologist realizes her stepson is a prime suspect.

45) After a series of murders, three survivors must help police piece together the previous night’s events. Rashomon meets Reunion

46) RE-ENACTMENT: A civil war expert and his son must fight to survive a reenactment organized by a dangerous southern cult

47) Douche Patrol: Two partners in the newly created Douche Patrol try to expose a plot to douchify the masses through a reality TV show

48) An ex-cop awakes in an alternative reality where normal people are locked up in mental institutions and society is runned by lunatics

49) After checking into a hotel to escape her abusive husband, a woman realizes guests in the next room are holding a young girl hostage.

50) 3 days after his wife and child die, a man discovers he can travel into the past, one day at a time, as long as he never falls asleep.

51) ActingCoach:a hi-school drama teacher becomes coach of the varsity basketball team, forcing his theater philosophies on the jocks

52) With his favorite fast-food sandwich facing its final week before it’s phased out forever, an obsessed man leads a protest to save it.

53) 3 men kill a friend for suspiciously losing their winning lotto ticket, only to later discover the missing ticket was in fact a loser

54) Head of time travel program learns world’ll be destroyed in 25 years and must stop the terrorist responsible: his 25-year-older self.

55) Desperate to divorce but cash-strapped, ornery newlyweds must put their feuding aside to sell their house, much less agree on a price.

56) AIRBORNE An outbreak of a lethal, unknown virus threatens the passengers and crew of a commercial airliner, forcing it to stay aloft

57) Futuristic re-imagining of SLEEPING BEAUTY. A young woman, cryogenically frozen for 100 years, is discovered in deep space.

58) A warrior sets out to track and kill the last giant – a lonely, anguished creature… and last link to an ancient, beautiful world.

59) The little known true story of how Matisse & Picasso went from being fierce rivals to BFFs.

60) To save his Mom’s home, an obnoxious 40 year old is given one chance: enter the teen TV quiz he had a meltdown on 25 years ago.

61) A group of last-minute shoppers trapped in a mall on Christmas Eve are stalked by a demon-possessed Santa. Horror/Comedy

62) A lowly museum curator races to find Pandora’s box before the resurrected Greek gods destroy the modern world.

63) A famous chef has a nervous breakdown and recovers while working at McDonald’s, where he rediscovers his love for food.

64) RomCom-Man loves woman whose dreams predict future, but future she sees isn’t with him. Can he convince her to choose love over fate?

65) A car thief finds a drug mule tied up in the trunk of his latest grab, then finds himself in the sights of the man who wants her back

66) Emilie can control time at will. When she’s hired to change a key event in a mathematical genius’s life, time begins to collapse

67) A lifelong bachelor accidentally proposes to his clingy girlfriend then tries to trick her into dumping him, but the tables soon turn

68) After forced to choose between her two children during a fire, Sarah fears she is now being haunted by the dead son she left behind.

69) A divorced dad adopts a puppy to fix his family but troubles arise when his ex’s new boyfriend joins his Puppy Kindergarten class

70) DEVIL’S DUE: A cave rescue team fights to escape a collapsing abandoned mine stalked by inhuman ghouls who can mimic victims.

71) After running away from home, an eight foot tall teenager stumbles upon a retirement town for sideshow performers.

72) When a U-Boat vanishes in the 1940s, it leads a team of American GIs to a terrifying secret trapped beneath the ice of Antarctica

73) A dwarf on the run from the mob impersonates the 7-year-old host of an irreverent children’s TV show.

74) After thwarting a terrorist hijacking, passengers debate what to do with the surviving bomber, who’s still set on finishing the job

75) ‘The Tradition’ 1867 After losing her father, a woman unwittingly takes a job as a maid at a countryhouse of aristocratic cannibals

76) After perfecting the ability to send data backwards in time, a brilliant quantum physicist must avert his future murder.

AND NOW – FOR THE ALTERNATES (YOUR PICKS!)

77) The Lipschitz Affair: When an art heist interrupts a wedding at the Guggenheim, everyone’s a suspect — even the bride and groom

78) The Shit List: With the help of his best friend, an underachiever seeks revenge on the people he blames for ruining his life #tp12

79) When a solar storm strands a lonesome geologist in the Canadian wild, she must journey through the dark to survive. “Borealis”

80) When fired by God, a hardworking guy decides to change path and ends up appointed CEO of Hell (, Inc).

81) A bridge appears over the Miss. river. A city official forms a blockade, but news that it travels you back in time starts a hysteria.

82) A chicken farmer watches in horror as his simple life is manipulated by a documentary filmmaker into a feature film.

83) Documentarian interviews Environmentalist Leader only to discover he’s a pawn of the Mob, disposing of bodies in newly created parks.

84) 22yrs old and tired of the pain and suffering of being a real boy,Pinocchio embarks on a journey to get turned back into a puppet.

85) A team of scientists lands on Mars to begin the terraformation process, but Mars fights back in RED MENACE.

86) A mundane father returns to his childhood imaginary world, only to find it has been corrupted by his life as an adult.

87) After a chance encounter, a young couple reunites a few months later only to find their love threatened by a dark secret.

88) It’s 1901. Terrorists have just taken over the White House. And only Theodore Roosevelt can stop them.

89) A high school senior discovers there is a conspiracy to stop him from having sex before graduation.

90) 3 girls spend their last summer before high school rebuilding a old fort and their crumbling friendship.

91) A bounty hunter has 30 days to catch his nemesis before the last spaceship departs, leaving him stranded and alone on a dying earth.

92) BLACKHATS: A hacker for hire finds himself in a deadly web of corporate espionage after being hired to steal the 1st sentient A.I.

93) Haunted by his daughter’s death, a reclusive CIA interrogator saves a suspect he’s ordered to torture; a young girl of alien origin.

94) Ecotourists stranded in a radioactive ghost town at Chernobyl face the threat of wolves, disfigured locals & their own social meltdown

95) 1022 BC. Family corruption and fierce enemy tribes plague the young warrior David as he plots his own rise and ascension to Israel’s throne.

96) Chris Kartje ‏ @chriskartje
When, on Xmas Eve, Santa lands on a frat house & eats all the pot cookies, itʼs up to the last sober Jew to be his designated driver.

97) A failed Elvis impersonator travels back in time to steal the life & career of the real Elvis.

98) New York 2029. The whole city is a walled in maximum security town for the wealthy. The world most dangerous criminal just dropped in.

99) Trapped in an increasingly nightmarish limbo, a dead boxer keeps returning to the ring, desperate for the win that’ll change his fate.

100) A rising young actress struggles to keep her sexuality a secret while falling for her female castmate & trying to succeed in Hollywood