Genre: Thriller
Premise: When a psychiatrist and his sickly wife travel to their country cabin for a quiet Thanksgiving weekend, they will have to deal with an unexpected visit from one of his patients, who claims his dead twin brother is after him for revenge.
About: This script finished with 11 votes on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Dani Feito
Details: 113 pages

(note: I strongly encourage you to read this script before reading the review. This is a spoiler-heavy screenplay).

A funny thing happened when I went through the loglines on the 2024 Black List to see what to review today. There isn’t a single logline on that list that’s better than the top 75 loglines in the Blood & Ink Showdown.

My bar for loglines has risen considerably after this month. And everything on the Black List is just so tame in comparison to what we were able to generate for the Blood & Ink Contest. So, good on you guys.

The reason behind my decision to read this script is that I like these setups. I like when people are in a remote area and you throw some potentially dangerous x-factor character into the mix. I love the psychological games that are played in those early parts of the screenplay, before all has been revealed. I like that you can take advantage of dramatic irony, choosing which information to share with the reader before sharing it with the characters. They’re just fun setups to play with and fun setups to read.

But this is the Black List! And as I was just telling a couple of writers the other day, the industry only pays attention to the top 5 scripts on the list these days. I’m the only one in town who really pays attention to anything past the top 10. And I do that because there are still a handful of gems in those bottom 60 and it’s fun to discover them.

Case in point: There is a swimming pool.

Extra Scriptshadow points to those who know that reference.

Is today’s script the next “there is a swimming pool?” Let’s find out.

Dr. Howard Lacey, 50s, is a psychiatrist who’s recently ventured into podcasting to detail some of his patients’ woes. Specializing in twins, his latest series focuses on David, who had a twin brother with cerebral palsy. Later in life, his brother would die in an accidental fire in his home and David has always felt guilty about it.

Howard is looking forward to Thanksgiving with his wife, Karen, who’s recovering from open heart surgery after a heart attack. The two head up to their remote cabin in the mountains and share a meal with their neighbors, George and Megan.

Afterwards, Howard gets a call. His patient, David, is outside the house! He claims that his brother is trying to kill him. Karen is terrified and begins hyperventilating but Howard insists he can de-escalate the situation, letting David in.

David insists his brother is in the house. Karen is deteriorating quickly. Howard gets into a scuffle with David. And the next thing we know, David has Howard on the floor and strangles him to death. He then turns to Karen, insisting that she is his dead twin, and comes to kill her but it doesn’t matter. She has a heart attack and dies.

(Spoilers start now)

As soon as she dies, Howard stands up. He’s… fine? Not only is he fine but David starts speaking in a British accent? Ah, it turns out that this was planned out months ago. David is a completely constructed person. He never had a twin. It was all a lie to lead up to this moment. Howard’s business is crumbling. He’s in financial duress. And his wife (along with all her annoying medical expenses) was bleeding him dry. So he needed her 5 million dollar life insurance policy.

Howard and David rejoice. Howard goes to get David’s share of the money and when he comes back, shoots David. He was never going to give this punk a dime. He then orchestrates a pretend freaked out phone call to the police, and soon they’re there. But there is now a problem. It turns out that Karen is still breathing!

They take Karen to the hospital as Howard tries to figure out what to do. That’s when he’s confronted by Amanda. Amanda is David’s ACTUAL twin! And she wants the money that was owed to David. When the hospital only agrees to release Karen back to Howard if there is a nurse present, Howard and Amanda concoct a plan where she’ll be the nurse and the two will scare Karen to death (as Amanda will pretend to be David’s original ghost twin) so she’ll have her final heart attack. Will this plan work? You tell me!

When screenwriter Dani Feito went to the Twist Store on La Brea and Olympic to buy herself a prime twist for her screenplay, the store must’ve been offering a deal. Cause instead of picking up just one, she bought half a dozen!

Does it all work?

No.

You can’t possibly make a script work with that many twists. But, is the script entertaining?

Welllllllllll… let me put it this way: It sure as hell tries to be.

Everything leading up to that first twist is great. I mean it really is. I thought I might be giving out an “impressive” rating, which doesn’t come often for Black List scripts these days.

But a big question lingered: How does a script with 80 pages left to go get better after a world-beater of a twist? I didn’t see how it was possible. And I turned out to be right.

Every 20 pages of Twin Soul gets sillier than the previous 20 pages.

The first issue was the hospital. We were neck-deep in conflict and suspense and excitement for those first 30 pages. Everything before that twist was built up at the perfect pace. Now, all of a sudden, we’re waiting around?  Doing nothing?

Feito has to abide by some level of real-world believability in regards to the hospital and police allowing Karen to come back home. So, we have to wait 24-48 hours for her to be released from the hospital. And, when that happened, all the momentum and energy seeped out of the story like air out of a cheap balloon.

Then David’s real twin, Amanda, shows up, and I knew the script was cooked. It feels way too forced. And then when the two come up with a plan to work together to kill Karen, whereby Amanda is going to be pretend to be the nurse – any hope that the script could rebound melted away like ice cream on a hot summer day.

Why didn’t this work?

Because the writer already established a very clever first act. I wouldn’t say it was perfect in the sense that you could believe Howard would get away with it. But it was definitely plausible. He thought of everything and was very careful about even the smallest of details.

Meanwhile, once the wife comes back to the house and he and Amanda are planning to kill her again, Howard literally does two-dozen sloppy things that any cop would easily catch. In retrospect, it destroyed that genius opening. Because all of that meticulous planning was erased by the sloppiest murder plan ever.

How could this have been fixed?

For one, the script can’t be 113 pages. It needs to be 100. More pages just means more areas to screw up in a script like this. Keep it lean. Have the shocking murder twist happen at the midpoint as opposed to the end of the first act. Now, you only have 50 pages to fill instead of 80. You’re in a much more manageable place structurally.

I would get rid of the stupid female twin character and bring in a real mandatory nurse for Karen, as was originally suggested by the hospital. That nurse is the only thing standing in the way between Howard being able to kill his wife or not. You could add some ticking time bomb whereby Karen’s mom, who lives across the country, is showing up in two days to help her daughter recover. So, he’s only got two days to kill her. And this nurse character gives you one more opportunity for a final twist (she could have her own agenda).

In other words, keep it simple. Where these scripts suffer is when writers try to add too many variables. The more variables, the more sloppy things are, the more the writer has to keep track of. And because it’s impossible to keep track of everything, you inevitably create a ton of plot holes.

There were so many good things in the first 30 pages of this script. But with how spectacularly the plot falls apart after that, I unfortunately can’t recommend it.

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

What I learned: Cleverness in screenwriting demands precision. There’s no tolerance for sloppiness, not even a trace. When you promise the audience intelligence, you’re committing to a script without holes. In fact, you want the opposite: every creative choice must be meticulously crafted and purposeful. That level of care clearly wasn’t maintained in Twin Soul beyond the first act. Which is too bad. Because boy what a first act it was.

If you haven’t been on the site lately, we’ve spent the last two weekends pitching horror loglines.

It’s a cool experiment and, even better, it’s an experiment that’s working. Regardless of whether people enter or get into the Showdown, what I wanted to convey with this challenge is the risk of going with the first movie concept you come up with.

We all like our movie concepts, no matter how dumb they are. Because there’s something in them that speaks to us. But what we often ignore is whether they speak to other people. And, unfortunately, those other people matter. Because you’re not writing a movie for yourself. You want other people to see it.

I’ve seen so many instances in this challenge where a writer pitches a bad idea and my thought process is, “What the heck are they thinking? This is awful.” It gets a ‘no’ and it gets no upvotes, confirming that it’s not a good idea.

Then, three hours later, that same writer will pitch something that gets 20 upvotes and a ‘strong maybe.’ All of a sudden you’ve got a genuine movie idea on your hands. And, without this contest, that writer may have never considered the better idea because they didn’t get any feedback on the first one, then assumed it was good, and wrote it instead, wasting 8 months of their life on something that never had a chance.

Here’s a great example. An early pitch by Stephen that got a no.

People of Walmart

The day before Turkey Day. Ruthless Walmart crowds. A mark takes refuge from pursuit by a dogged bounty hunter. But this hunter has some special gadgets up his sleeve… because this mark? A shapeshifting Chimera. Will the people of Walmart turn on one another or band together to survive this mythological foe?

And then here’s this idea he pitched that got a yes.

Red Shift

His first night on the job, a paramedic must contend with the reality that the city he is working is on the brink of a zombie outbreak, and the patient he’s got in the back of his van is ground zero.

No shade on Walmart or Chimeras but one of these is a clear movie and the other isn’t.

And people… THAT’S FINE.

That’s what this is all about. It’s about trying ideas out to see what works and what doesn’t. That’s a huge strength of this community. It gives us an advantage over the studios. Because everybody in a studio has an agenda and a ton of those agendas have nothing to do with trying to make the best movies possible.  But here, if your idea is good enough, it will find a way through, one way or another.

Now, what surprised me about this weekend was that none of the Star Commenters voted an idea in. I’m not saying this is a good or a bad thing. I’m just surprised is all. But it tells me that maybe I’m a little more lenient than I thought I was. These guys are the true tough crowd.

Going forward, I’m worried for anyone who has a serial killer idea. I’m so sick of seeing “serial killer” in a logline at this point that my knee-jerk reaction every time I see it is to give it a ‘no.’

Too many writers think that certain subjects or phrases or words are enough for the concept to be worthy. For example, if they want to write about something mundane, like an Amazon factory worker, they think they can end the logline with “serial killer” and they’ve all of a sudden got a movie.

No.

Any tried and true horror element you use has to still be integrated into the story in a clever way. A logline is not a series of separate pieces. It’s a series of interconnected pieces that add up to a compelling whole.

So it’s not that I’ll never like a serial killer idea again. But the second I sense that “serial killer” was shoved onto a half-baked premise, there’s no way that logline is advancing.

And “serial killer” is a stand-in for any horror trope – vampires, hell, werewolves, witches. The elements around those things have to be well thought out if you want a chance to compete in the Blood and Ink Showdown.

The more frustrating thing is that there are quite a few writers who keep posting weak loglines and they’re not reflecting on them to figure out what’s wrong. So they keep making the same mistakes. And I don’t have the time to coach them through the problems and help them get better.

But if you’re one of these writers who hasn’t gotten at least a ‘soft maybe,’ I would do some reflection and consider whether there’s a consistent mistake you’re making.

For example, some loglines are so long that we get lost when we read them. Some loglines lack a big enough hook. Some loglines stay so much on the surface that we don’t feel anything deep enough to care about. Some loglines are clearly rushed. So many loglines start out with a hook then devolve into such vague actions for the hero that it’s clear the writer has no idea what the movie would be past the first act.

Ask for feedback from the people on the site. If you get a note once, consider it. If you get the same note from two different people, that’s a confirmation that there’s a real problem there.

And I know some of you think of loglines as these necessary evils that you just aren’t good at and you think they don’t matter because what really matters is the screenplay, so you assume this contest just isn’t for you.

I’m sorry but loglines definitely matter. You know how I know? Because every good writer I’ve ever known knows how to write a good logline. The reason they know is because they understand that if you can’t explain what your movie is about quickly in written form, then there’s probably something wrong with the idea. Because the logline should be an overall directive for what happens in your script. If it’s unclear, your will script will be unclear.

You can fight this notion all you want but I’m one of the few people in this town who can actually confirm it. Because I’ve read thousands of loglines then read the scripts for those loglines, and I can tell you that a poor logline is one of the surest signs that the script will not only be bad, but be bad in the exact same way that the logline was bad (for example, if the logline is unfocused, the script will be unfocused).

Unless you’re a writer-director and know how to use cinema’s visual language to make up for weaknesses in your screenplay, that’s going to be the case.

So, what can we expect for next week? Will there be a new way to get in? I don’t know. Maybe. We’ll see. I can tell you this, though. We have to do something about the campaigning. I get that it’s hard for people to find loglines to upvote inside 2500 comments. But more scripts are getting through via upvotes than I expected. So I think the formula is working just fine.

I’m thinking of eliminating writers who delete their pitches after they’ve received my vote. This pitch session is a learning experience for writers who come to the site and we can’t learn if pitches are being deleted. And it’s just bad form. I might allow for one deletion since everybody has that one precious idea that they want to protect. But that’s probably it.

I haven’t counted all the submissions that have gotten through yet but I believe we’re on pace for 60 scripts in the contest, which would be perfect. I’m expecting that a third of the entrants won’t complete their screenplay, which depresses me but I’m just being realistic. That leaves 40 scripts, every single one of them a good movie idea. That’s more than enough.

Next weekend will be an extra long pitch session as Monday is Labor Day. So that should get crazy. Keep working on those loglines people! Don’t wait until the last second. Loglines need to be rewritten until they’re perfect, just like scripts.

And if you need help, you can always order a logline consultation from me. Just e-mail me here: carsonreeves1@gmail.com

Thank you everybody for a fun weekend! And if you haven’t made it through yet, KEEP TRYING! You’ve got two more weekends.

P.S. If your soft maybe, maybe, strong maybe, or yes haven’t been counted, e-mail me at carsonreeves3@gmail.com and let me know. Also, if I never responded to your pitch, e-mail me as well and I’ll remedy that.

Pitching closed for the weekend!

Last weekend, we had over 1000 logline pitches for the Blood and Ink Showdown. A lucky dozen writers got a golden ticket into the official competition. How do you get a golden ticket? Let me tell you a little about the contest first.

I have a direct line to, arguably, the biggest person in horror in all of Hollywood. And this person trusts my taste implicitly. If I send him a script, he’ll start reading it within 10 minutes. But, his bar is EXTREMELY HIGH.

So, I thought, let’s build a screenplay contest around that.

Instead of allowing anybody to enter, I will only allow good horror concepts that I know will have a realistic shot with this person. That’s where these pitch sessions come in. You pitch your horror logline down in the comments and I will tell you whether the idea is good enough to advance into the official competition, in which case, you will write the entire script. Don’t worry, you have time. The deadline for Blood and Ink will be mid-to-late February.

Here are the responses I will leave after your pitch and what they mean.

No – Doesn’t make the cut.
Soft Maybe – No but you can improve logline and pitch again next week.
Maybe – No but you can improve logline and pitch again immediately.
Strong Maybe – You’re in.
Yes – You’re in plus special treatment.

You get FIVE logline pitches. So, make sure they’re good. Last weekend people were throwing anything and everything against the wall and it didn’t work. What worked were when writers pitched well thought-out ideas. I’ve been pitched upwards of 30,000 loglines in my life so I can tell when a writer hasn’t put in the effort.

If you’re worried that I’m too hard to please, you still have a shot. Consistent Commenters, Brenkilco, Jaco, Poe, Scott Crawford, and Arthur all get ONE YES they can give out over these final three pitch weekends. But don’t get too excited. I overheard some of them saying they wouldn’t have given anything a ‘yes’ last weekend. For all I know, they may be harder to impress than me.

There is one other way to get in.

GET 15 UPVOTES

If your idea gets 15 upvotes, you’re automatically in. So, I encourage everyone here to be constantly screening the newest entries and upvoting any concept you like. It could literally change a writer’s life. And this supersedes a “no.” So, even if I “no” a concept, it can still advance with 15 votes.

For those of you re-pitching your ‘maybes’ from last week, those do not count against your 5 loglines. But, you only get one shot with them. I will decide if they’re dead or move on.

For each pitch, all I want is your…

Title:
and
Logline:

Okay, let’s get to it!

P.S. If you want more of a conversation about your logline pitches, rather than just a ‘yes’ or a ‘no,’ or you want to pitch your ideas in private, you can order my logline service. It’s $25 for a logline analysis (along with a yes or no) and $50 for unlimited e-mails where we potentially workshop a weak logline into something that is contest worthy. There are no guarantees, though. You can’t put lipstick on a pig. If you want to use this service, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com.

Genre: Thriller
Logline: At the height of World War 2, a young Japanese-American investigator must race to prevent a terrifying Japanese plot to unleash a devastating plague on the United States. Inspired by true events.
About: This is one of the four Mega-Showdown finalists. It finished with 16 votes, tying it for second place. You can read the winning script review, Hard Labor, here. You can also download the script for yourself, as there’s a link in the review. This script first broke onto the Scriptshadow scene when it won the First Page Showdown. It used that status to become one of the early favorites in the Mega Showdown Screenwriting Contest. And it rode that wave all the way to the finals.
Writer: Finn Morgan
Details: 85 pages

I’ve been intrigued by this one ever since I read the first page.

Let’s see what happens afterwards!

It’s 1944. We’re in an internment camp in Northern California, where Japanese Americans are being kept imprisoned. One of these is 22 year old Laird Tanaka. And one night, Laird sees something in the windows of one of the workshops on-site and goes to check it out.

What he finds, impossibly, is a Japanese submariner, who’s been ravaged by hundreds of fleas. Before he knows it, the submariner is attacking him and he shoots him dead. This gets him in a lot of trouble with the soldiers running the camp, who don’t seem nearly as concerned about why a Japanese soldier would be holed up in one of their buildings as Laird does.

Laird is thrown into the camp jail, where Sheriff Bill Jefferson is intrigued by the story and wants to look into it. He deputizes Laird so he can bring him with, despite the fact that Laird wants nothing to do with this. They follow the clues to the nearby ocean shore that night, where they find a giant Japanese submarine washed up.

Jefferson forces Laird to follow him inside the sub and that’s when they find more dead submarine people with fleas all over them. Out of nowhere, a still fully alive soldier decapitates Jefferson with a sword and Laird jets the hell out of there. He runs into the forest, where he finds evidence of more Japanese heading towards town.

He eventually figures out that these fleas are carrying a plague that the Japanese are trying to unleash on America. But a storm crashed their sub before they could get to San Francisco. So now they want to get on a train and get to their original destination, on New Year’s Eve of all times, when people are everywhere, ready to spread some plague!

Laird will have to battle American racists and Japanese allies to get to the plaguers and stop them himself!

What I liked best about The First Horseman was how relentless it was. Finn calls this a thriller and it sure is plotted like one. It is impossible to go into a scene where something big doesn’t happen.

That’s actually one of my… what’s the opposite of pet peeves? Pet pariahs? It’s one of my pet pariahs. I like when period pieces move fast. Cause, traditionally, the further back you go in history, the slower a movie moves. So I loved that this had such a relentless pace.

And I loved that it was never boring. I suspect that that was one of Finn’s driving directives and why the script is only 86 pages. I sense that any scene, no matter how short, that could be considered unnecessary, was cut without a second thought. Leaving us with a lean and mean screenplay.

Despite that, I still struggled to get through The First Horseman at times. I would often be reading a scene and knowing that it was a technically sound scene for a thriller. Our hero needed something. There was always something interesting trying to prevent him from getting it. But I noticed my brain drifting during some of these scenes and I didn’t know why.

Things started off strong. I loved the stuff with the washed-up submarine. Just lying there on the shore. That was badass. I loved walking through that thing. Talk about freaky. That scene could’ve gone toe-to-toe with any scene that’ll come out of Blood and Ink Showdown.

And I loved how relentlessly cruel Finn was to his characters. He wasn’t afraid to kill them off, no matter how big of a character they were. We get one of those scenes in the submarine and it was just like, “Wow.”

But then later in the script, there’d be a scene in a house and I’d find that I just wasn’t that invested. Which perplexed me because not only did we have a plague on the loose. But it was an original ‘end-of-the-world’ threat. These de facto kamikaze sub pilots had come here to kill themselves in order to spread this unique ‘flea plague’ to take down America.

Maybe that would be my first question for Finn. These fleas are carrying the plague. The Japanese are trying to bring them to San Francisco to let the fleas loose. Except there are already fleas that have gotten loose everywhere. They climb all over Laird numerous times throughout the movie. How is he not infected?

And how bout the tens of thousands of fleas that have been transferred wherever else these fleas were found? You’re saying that you can just side-step these things and you’re okay? Or that if they get on you, you could potentially still be fine? If so, that’s not a very threatening plague, is it? It should’ve been that if one of those things even grazed you, you were fucked. That’s what the opening scene indicated, right? Which is why the worker in contact with the virus was immediately shot.

Another thing about this script that I couldn’t figure out was that, for a fast story, it sure read slow. I was constantly checking what page I was on and would be shocked that I wasn’t nearly as far into the script as I thought I was.

This phenomenon can be hard to measure because whenever you have problems with a script, it will read slow. So maybe that’s what I was experiencing. But I still think there was something else going on. Reading the text, even though it was kept sparse, didn’t keep my eyes moving quickly enough. It could be something in the writing style. It’s hard to tell.

I’m not sure where I stand on this script, to be honest.

The setting is cool. The set-pieces, like the sub and the train, were cool. I liked some of the recklessness of the creative choices, like killing off characters you didn’t expect to be killed. But I can’t deny that, towards the end, I wasn’t as invested as I should’ve been.

Maybe it’s Laird. Maybe he needs to be more likable or interesting or deep or have more personality. Because, in the end, for any movie to work, we have to be behind the main character and want him to succeed. I don’t know if I was ever a Laird fan. Starting with the stuff at the internment camp. Maybe that was the problem – that Finn thought that just being an internment camp prisoner would be enough for us to want to root for this guy.

It really isn’t a bad script. It just didn’t pull me in enough. I know some of you have already read the script so I’m curious to hear what you thought. What you liked and disliked as well. And if anything I said here resonated.

Good entry overall for Finn. Just needed something extra!

Script link: The First Horseman

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

What I learned: One of my biggest pet peeves is when the hero asks for help from a cop and the cop says he doesn’t believe him. Why? Because it’s a lie. A cop’s job is to believe people. Not only that. But if America is so afraid of Japanese people that they’ve put them in internment camps, then how does it make sense that someone calling 911 saying there’s a Japanese invasion that’s happening, that that cop blanketly dismisses it. Worst of all, writers do this so they don’t have to deal with the logical consequences of the police getting involved. They want only their hero involved. So it’s a cheat. Please don’t use movie logic like this in your scripts. It’s lazy.

Wow.

What a crazy weekend.

I’m both excited by how much enthusiasm there was for this opportunity and also a bit frustrated as some of my weekend plans had to be canceled so I could respond to all the entries. :)  And a big thank you to Scott for keeping track of all of the madness.  I almost felt guilty giving maybes after a while cause I knew how much work it made for him.

If you’re just now coming to the site, I did a pitch session this weekend for horror loglines.  If you come up with a good enough horror movie idea, you are in the official screenplay competition.  I discuss the specifics on how this works in the original post.

This weekend was always going to be the test bed for this challenge and now that I have a better understanding of how things are going to go down, I can adjust the parameters accordingly.

Don’t worry if you didn’t get through on the first try. We are doing this for three more weekends. You have more shots.

Let’s start with the good news. If you received a “Yes” or a “Strong Maybe,” you are in! You can start writing your scripts RIGHT NOW. And I recommend you do that. As in, START TODAY. The more time on task you get with these scripts, the more ready they’ll be for the official showdown. If you don’t remember, you have until middle to late February to finish.

So, congratulations to everyone who made it through.

A quick piece of advice. If you received a strong maybe (or even a yes), e-mail me at carsonreeves3@gmail.com and I will let you know what I think is the best direction and tone for the story. You don’t have to use my advice. But it’s probably a good idea that you know what I liked about your idea.

Also, if you don’t know where to start with the writing of your script, just follow the Scriptshadow Write-A-Script schedule, which instructs you on how to write a first draft as well as one rewrite…

Week 1 – Concept (you’ve done this)
Week 2 – Solidifying Your Concept (you’ve done this as well)
Week 3 – Building Your Characters
Week 4 – Outlining
Week 5 – The First 10 Pages
Week 6 – Inciting Incident
Week 7 – Turn Into 2nd Act
Week 8 – Fun and Games
Week 9 – Using Sequences to Tackle Your Second Act
Week 10 – The Midpoint
Week 11 – Chill Out or Ramp Up
Week 12 – Lead Up To the “Scene of Death”
Week 13 – Moment of Death
Week 14 – The Climax
Week 15 – The End!
Week 16 – Rewrite Prep 1
Week 17 – Rewrite Prep 2
Week 18 – Rewrite Week 1
Week 19 – Rewrite Week 2
Week 20 – Rewrite Week 3
Week 21 – Rewrite Week 4
Week 22 – Rewrite Week 5
Week 23 – Rewrite Week 6

Now, I will say this. If you received a maybe or a soft maybe (or any other type of maybe), you will have one shot to pitch that concept again (with a revised final logline) next weekend. I will make a final decision on those concepts from that logline.  After that, those concepts are dead. You can’t keep pitching them.

If I were one of the writers with a maybe, I would go to your other writing friends and workshop your logline until it’s the best it can possibly be for next weekend. I will even allow you to workshop it in the comments this week if you don’t know a good writers’ network and the Scriptshadow community is the only community you know of that gives good screenwriting advice.

If you want help direct from the horse’s mouth, you can order a logline consult from me. The benefit of that is that I can tell you exactly what my issue with the logline was and what I need in order for it to cross the ‘yes’ threshold. Those are 25 bucks and include a single reply. You can also order a deluxe consult which gives you unlimited e-mails to figure out the best version of the logline. Those are 50 bucks.

It doesn’t guarantee you’ll get through.  Some of these maybes I gave thinking, “There’s something here but I don’t know what.”  We may not find the answer in a consult.  But at least you’ll be able to adjust the logline with a little more clarity compared to going in blind. Now, I realize that some people may have ethical issues with me charging for these. To be clear, you don’t have to hire me. I will still read your logline for free next week in the comments. If I had the time, I would workshop all of these maybes in the comments but I just don’t. Weekends are supposed to be my free time to get away from work. So I’m already spending time on these that I’m supposed to be spending on myself.

With that said, I’m okay with you approaching it either way. And anyone here can order a logline consult, even if you got a ‘no.’ One of the best things about this weekend has been that a lot of writers have learned what a bad logline looks like. I can give you even more clarity on that difference between good and bad. So, if you want a logline consult, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com.

Okay, moving on to next week…

Unlimited pitches are over.

You will now receive FIVE logline pitches per weekend. Which I think will be good for you. Now you have to think harder about what your best ideas are and think harder about how to put the loglines together so that they maximize their chances. I would, again, encourage you to workshop these loglines all week behind the scenes with your writing friends so that you’re coming to the table with your best.

Another thing I’m going to be encouraging next week is upvotes. Upvotes on loglines you like will increase the chances that that logline gets through. I know that my bias and my personal likes are influencing some of my choices and that I may be missing good ideas because they’re not typically my jam. So, please, upvote any idea that you like. That helps me.

NOW! I’m not going to be fooled by “friend-voting.” So I’m not guaranteeing a highly-upvoted logline gets through, particularly if every upvote looks like a buddy of that writer. But it will influence me overall.

A couple of final thoughts about the loglines themselves.

I’m sorry that sometimes I just have to write “No” without an explanation. I hate doing that (and it was one of the reasons I almost didn’t post this challenge) because I know it feels harsh. But I often had to come in and get through a lot of loglines fast before leaving again so it’s all I had time to do. Please don’t take it personally.

Next, we gotta stop with the vagueness, especially at the end of loglines. Any logline that ends with some approximation of, “…and our heroes must outwit a sinister emerging evil,” is an easy “no.” You have to tell us what the “evil” is if you want a shot. Cause if the rest of the logline is generic and the “evil” is the only unique thing that makes your idea stand out, and you’re not telling us what that “evil” is, I don’t care about the idea. BE AS SPECIFIC AS POSSIBLE, especially in the second half of your logline.

Also, the beginning of your logline is often your HOOK.  The second part of the logline is often YOUR ACTUAL MOVIE.  As in – what the characters will be doing throughout the second act.  So, you don’t want to be vague about that.  You want to tell us what they’re after and what’s in the way.  The more specific, the better.  Of course, it’s still gotta be a lean and mean presentation, which seems contradictory.  But that’s logline-writing.  You gotta figure it out.

Generally speaking, I glaze over words like ‘the Devil,’ ‘Satan,’ ‘go to hell,’ ‘come back from hell.’ Over time, I’ve found that writers who use these words/phrases, on average, construct very lazy ideas, which is why I’ve become so numb to them. So, if you’re going to use any of these words/phrases, make sure your idea is actually clever. It can’t be something like, “Two high school kids make a deal with the devil to become popular but when they change their mind, they risk getting dragged down into hell.” It’s got to be thoughtful and have some sophistication behind it.  It can’t rely on those words to do the heavy lifting.

I’m very close to banning serial killer loglines. There were a million of them and 99.9% of them felt lazy, like putting “serial killer” into a logline all of a sudden made it interesting. Not to mention, serial killers aren’t really horror. Just make sure that if you’re bringing a serial killer logline to the table that it’s something clever, and something you feel passionate about – a story you really want to write.

And that’s it!

I am NOT responding to pitches in the comments until this weekend. So, feel free to use today to workshop some of those maybes. Good luck to everyone and thanks for participating in such a fun exercise, even if it did steal my precious weekend away from me. :)