The summer movie slate begins this weekend with The Mandalorian and Grogu. Over the course of two prime summer months, we’ll hit the finale of the summer season with The Odyssey.

Both of these movies are getting online pushback for different reasons. With The Mandalorian and Grogu, the pushback is, “Is this story worth telling?” And with The Odyssey it’s, “Does this story actually look good?”

Let’s start with The Odyssey because, of the two, it’s the movie that clearly has a better chance of connecting with audiences. But Nolan hasn’t made things easy for himself. The Odyssey is free IP and it’s been there for anyone to take and no one’s taken it. Why?

I’ll tell you why. Because the story is a post-adventure story rather than an adventure story. That’s the reason why The Odyssey never floated my boat. Because the important thing has already happened. Now, it’s just a matter of getting home so you can sleep in your own bed.

Psychologically, that’s not as exciting as going off on a traditional hero’s journey.

Nolan hasn’t helped his case because the trailers look pretty mid. Kinda cool stuff happens, like a cyclops peeking through the darkness in a cave. But there isn’t a single “holy shit” shot in a Christopher Nolan directed film’s trailer. I understand why that concerns people.

However, I think that Nolan’s purposefully holding back the good stuff. Remember that The Odyssey has the Lotus Eaters, who erase memory, seductive sirens luring sailors to their deaths, Circe the witch who turns men into animals, and the terrifying sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis. And let’s not forget one of the most famous revenge sequences that’s ever been put to paper.

Little known fact. That final revenge sequence is known as one of the first true representations of a payoff in writing history.

All this stuff about a black Helen of Troy and Elliot Page playing Achilles is theater. I don’t think anybody outside of “people who are way too online” give a crap about that. And I believe that, in the end, this movie is going to be a huge hit.

Now, as for The Mandalorian and Grogu? It’s looking bad folks. When you don’t get even a single “Holy shit this was great” tweet from a carefully curated group of reviewers after your film’s premiere, that’s concerning. To give you some perspective, 2015’s Fantastic Four, widely considered to be one of the worst superhero movies ever made, got around 50 “Holy shit this was great” tweets after their premiere.

It’s a huge moment for Star Wars. If it is the worst performing Star Wars film ever, which it’s projected to be, Lucas Arts is going to be in a very strange spot. Because they just finished putting a new group of people in charge, led by Dave Filoni. Dave Filoni has been doing interviews in anticipation of The Mandalorian’s release, and he claims he’s in the process of putting together a game plan for the next phase of Star Wars.

I’m going to explain how this makes me feel with an analogy.

As many of you know, I’m originally from Chicago. I grew up with Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls dominating basketball. I was young enough and dumb enough to think that that would last forever.

Cut to 20 years after that, in 2016, and the Bulls weren’t terrible but they weren’t good either. They were about the 8th best team in the league. And they were led by this egomaniac of a player named Jimmy Butler.

Butler had been with the team for six years and his antics were getting to the point where the organization wondered if he was worth the trouble. They decided he wasn’t and put him up for a trade. Their hope was to get back several young great players, be bad enough for a couple years to get a couple of high draft picks, then launch themselves back into one of the top 3 teams in the league.

But anybody who knew about the Bulls organization knew that it was run by a man, Jerry Reinsdorf, who didn’t care about basketball. He was also known as one of the worst owners in the league. His whole mantra was, “If the seats at the stadium are filled, that’s all that matters.”

So while I watched as everybody in my city celebrated what the trade of Jimmy Butler could become for the Bulls, I knew that dark days were ahead. The top of our organizational tree was a disaster. And he was going to figure out a way to make us even worse. And that’s exactly what happened. The Bulls immediately fell from the 8th best team in the league to the 20th best team. They squandered draft picks. Traded for terrible players. And for the last ten years, they’ve been irrelevant in the NBA.

I get the exact same feeling moving from Kathleen Kennedy to Dave Filoni. Kennedy is bad, no doubt. But Kennedy produced over a dozen of the greatest movies ever. She had an A+ producing resume. Her initial Star Wars instincts resulted in a 2 billion dollar movie. Her downfall was that she never really understood the mythos of the Star Wars universe. But to say she didn’t have any success is a lie.

Meanwhile, Dave Filoni has zero resume. In many ways, he’s the anti-Kathleen Kennedy. He’s someone with zero experience who understands every square inch of the Star Wars mythos. But is a Star Wars Encyclopedia Brittanica the solution for this franchise going forward? I don’t think it is. Because while he can tell you exactly how many Jawas can fit in a Sandcrawler, he doesn’t know the difference between a slugline and a description line.

In other words, Kathleen Kennedy was Jimmy Butler. She kept Star Wars up at that 8th place slot for franchises. But with Dave Filoni? We’re about to plummet to depths we didn’t even know were possible with a franchise that used to be the equivalent of Michael Jordan.

It really will be fascinating because there are some key dates here that nobody’s talking about. Dave Filoni became the top dog at Lucas Arts January 15th. Josh D’amro became the new CEO of Disney (which owns Lucas Arts) on March 18th. In other words, D’Amaro did not approve of this move. Therefore, if Mando does poorly, I wouldn’t be surprised if D’Amaro changes up the whole structure at Lucas Arts again. And I think he should. Cause if he doesn’t, all us Star Wars fans are going to experience what I’ve experienced for the past decade as a Bulls fan. Which is complete and utter irrelevance.

Over the weekend, I finally watched “Send Help.”

This is the movie where an asshole CEO of a company crash lands on a deserted island with the weirdo female accountant in his company who he was planning on firing right before the trip. He (Bradley) gets seriously injured and, therefore, must rely on her (Linda) to survive.

I can’t hide how much I adore these spec script setups. While this isn’t technically a spec script, it is a spec script. Producer Zainab Azizi found the script, brought it to Sam Raimi to produce, and he liked it enough to direct it.

So it’s a good example of what coming up with a charged spec-friendly concept can do for a writer. And by spec-friendly, I mean that it works as a script AND a movie. It reads really great on the page, which is what gets people excited and wanting to turn it into a movie.

A lot of scripts are written just for the screen. A script like Sinners with its 40 minute first act setup with tons of exposition is not spec friendly. Dune, with its laborious mythology, is the opposite of spec friendly. I’m guessing The Brutalist was the most difficult script to read of the year.

Meanwhile, Send Help is two people on an island trying to survive and also trying not to kill each other. That’s something that’s easy to follow on the page. You only have to remember two characters. Your mind can drift sometimes and you’re still able to keep up. The dialogue between the two keeps your eyes shooting down the page. The thriller genre is always one of the easiest genres to read. That’s spec-friendly.

And the script has a great ironic setup, which I always tell you guys is a huge bonus. This is a movie about a boss and subordinate who get into a situation where the subordinate becomes the boss and the boss the subordinate. That’s a great concept.

But I didn’t realize how tricky this script was to pull off until I watched the film. It’s kind of a miracle that it works. Cause they’re walking several tightropes at once and if the audience doesn’t buy into a single one, the film is screwed.

For example, one of the main plot points is that Linda found a knife. And because she has the knife, she’s in control. There are numerous scenes of Bradley staring at her using the knife to cut food, implying that “If he could just get a hold of that knife, he could kill her.”

Meanwhile, in the very same scenes that he’s staring at the knife, Bradley is putting together their shelter with a rock-hammer, lol. Linda has to go to sleep at some point, right? Pretty sure he could kill her with the rock hammer. He doesn’t need the knife.

And then the writers have to walk this line between the two hating each other but also falling for each other, since that’s an important plot point for the story to work. The idea is that Linda wants Bradley. But he’s the worst person ever so it doesn’t make sense that she wants him. And then Bradley has to like her for some late story twists to work, and so they have to make that plausible as well.

In many ways, Send Help is Misery but without the logic. The reason that Misery worked was because Paul Sheldon was helpless. He was literally stuck in a bed. Bradley can move around wherever he wants. So it doesn’t make nearly as much sense that Linda is in total control.

But I got to give it to these guys. They get the key thing about the story right – which is the chemistry between these characters. And that’s a great screenwriting tip to take away. You can’t write a perfect screenplay. It’s impossible. There will be tonal slip-ups. There will be plot holes. There will be character inconsistency. There will be plot sloppiness. But you want to figure out what the most important thing is for your script to work and make sure that’s as strong as possible. Because if you nail that, the audience will overlook the other things.

And you really wanted to see what was going to happen with this relationship between Bradley and Linda.

So I definitely think this movie is worth checking out. And one more point in the win column for the power of a good spec script.

Coming Wednesday: A review of the new AMATEUR Top 25 script which comes in at 180 pages. Get ready! And yes, I will be providing a script link so that you can read it yourself.

Genre: Action Horror
Logline That Led To The Script Being Chosen: When his brother is gunned down by a murderous gang, reclusive Joel must leave his hidden mountain home to get revenge. His quest for justice sets him on a collision course with a homicidal cop, stone-cold psychopaths, and a bloodthirsty militia, but Joel won’t stop until he’s torn them all limb from limb. Also, Joel is a Bigfoot.
About: The Blood & Ink Horror Screenplay Contest is a unique screenwriting contest whereby, six months ago, you had to pitch your way into the contest. Scripts either got in with a “yes” by me or they got at least 15 upvotes when pitched in the comments section. The 90+ writers that were chosen then had six months to write their script. I am currently reading all the scripts and will put together an official two weeks of reviews for the Top 10. But, in the meantime, I will occasionally review one of the scripts here. Which is what I’m doing today. If you want to see the last Blood & Ink script reviewed, you can check that out here.
Writer: Jacob Rainer
Details: 121 pages

This was one of the splashier loglines that was pitched during those four crazy Blood & Ink pitch weekends. I remember a lot of people were talking about this one. So, I was excited to read it.

Our movie begins with a Bigfoot attacking a militia at the general store of a small town in the middle of Washington (the state, not the city). “Outside, something CRASHES and SCREECHES across the parking lot. The militiamen outside are SHOUTING and RUNNING.” We see the beginnings of a Bigfoot massacring the locals.

Cut to a couple of days earlier and we meet Sheriff Cale Dyer, who’s one of the only chill voices in a town that seems to be obsessed with bloodlust. If they’re not shooting something, they’re not happy. And a chunk of the locals have heard stories since they were kids about Bigfoot sightings in the area.

There’s the angry young deputy, David. There’s his angry convenience store checker girlfriend, Georgie. There’s the weirdo giant of a man, Kevin. There are war veterans Casey and Bryan. There’s the one somewhat nice guy in the bunch, Luke. And then there’s the worst of them all, Ranse.

It turns out Luke has gotten his hands on a secret Bigfoot calling. A knocking sound that lures Bigfoots, sort of like Duck Dynasty’s duck call. So the others force Luke out into the forest to help them get a Bigfoot.

Meanwhile, we meet Bigfoot Joel (that’s not his actual name – the writer names him that so we know who he is) and his younger brother, Ethan. They live deep deep in the forest where nobody can find them. They’ve got their own little mini-utopia.

But unlike Joel, Ethan yearns for bigger things. He wants to see the world. And one day, he hears that special Bigfoot knocking and he goes to look. Once he’s in a clearing, our camouflaged rednecks pump a bunch of bullets into him and he’s dead within minutes. Joel arrives at the tail end of the killing and clocks everyone in the group.

He then enacts his revenge. But he gets shot right away and that puts him in a local farm, where the elderly owners attempt to help him when the militia descends upon the farm, ready to bag their second Bigfoot. Joel is able to escape and decides to move in on their home turf – the town. But before he gets there, he grabs a chainsaw from the farm. Yup, we’ve got a Bigfoot with a chainsaw.

After Joel takes out an entire bar full of men with his new toy, he continues into town, where he targets each and every person involved in killing his brother. The end goal is getting his brother’s body back. But to do that, he’ll have to survive an onslaught powerful enough to level a small army.

I love this opening.

Lately, I’ve been trying to figure out what separates writers, what elevates some above others. And while there isn’t any one thing, the way in which they write matters more than I thought. Because when you’re describing anything, there are an unlimited number of ways in which you can describe it. And what I’ve found is that the writers who add personality to their writing excel more than those who don’t.

When I say personality, I don’t mean “Balls Out” writing with phrases like, “Fade the fuck in.” Although, if that’s authentically who you are as a writer, it can work. What I’m really talking about is bringing your personality to the page. Maybe your voice is low-key. Maybe it’s somewhere in the middle. The point is that your writing should feel like it’s coming from a human being who’s genuinely engaged with the story. That personality signals interest. It signals passion. It shows that you cared enough to give the writing a little flavor instead of just relaying information. Because what I see way too often is purely logical writing. And once you understand what that looks like, you’ll immediately see the difference. Let me show you. Same opening. Just written logically.

We’re on: Georgie’s General Store.

A common store that looks similar to other stores in small towns.

In the parking lot are a number of men in military gear holding A-15s.

Do you see the difference? Taking that little extra time to show your personality in the writing can make a noticeable difference. It’s probably not going to change how we feel about the story. But it makes reading the story feel more alive.

Also, I want to give Jacob props. He WENT FOR IT here. You’ve got a Bigfoot with a chainsaw taking down an entire bar full of rednecks. You’ve got characters who have sexual necrophiliac Bigfoot fetishes doing unspeakable things. I like when writers push past that line that most are too afraid to step over.

But let’s talk about the script overall.

It’s a mixed bag and I think the main problem is that it’s too long. We’re talking a 122 page thriller script. I just brought this up a couple of weeks ago. There is no such thing as a good long thriller. Thrillers need to thrill and then they need to say “The End” before the reader gets bored.

Length encourages writers to include things that are just okay and not excellent. The more room you have, the more stuff you’re going to insert. And not all of that stuff will be good. One of the first screenwriting lessons you learn is to only include what you need to push the story forward and nothing more. Don’t add ANY FAT into your screenplay. Fat is a script killer. Maybe not a little bit of fat. But a medium amount of fat? Script killer. A lot of fat? Script destroyer. I wouldn’t mess with that if I were a screenwriter. It’s too risky. Favor lean and mean.

But here’s the good news.

This script has MOVIE SCENES IN IT. What I mean by that is: There are scenes that producers will read in this script and think, “Ooh, I want to see that scene in a movie theater.” The grandaddy of screenwriting books, Blake Sander’s Save The Cat, admitted that his one big spec sale was made into a movie specifically because a producer read the car chase scene where the mom was driving with Sylvester Stallone and instead of it being a fast car chase, it was an insanely slow car chase because the mom was driving. The producer said, “THIS is a movie scene.”

And I got the same feeling when I watched Joel take down an entire bar with a chainsaw. That’s a crazy fun scene.

But now, we need to figure out what this script really is and hone in on that. Because I think we’re setting up way too many characters here. We’re overcomplicating what should be a simple narrative. A Bigfoot revenge movie should not have a more complex plot than John Wick.

What’s the solution?

Hang with me and I’ll explain.

Let’s talk about what writing spec scripts THAT YOU WANT TO SELL is really about. I want to emphasize that part “that you want to sell” because that’s different from writing a spec script that you hope to get representation from or that you want to option or that you want to get on the Black List or that you want to try to turn into a movie. Those are different paths that require different writing strategies.

But when you’re trying to win the grand prize, the “one in a million” shot of selling a spec screenplay, you need to do something buzzy with it. And this script has an opportunity to do that that it’s ignoring: Stay with the Bigfoot the whole time. Just like you stay with John Wick the whole time. Cut this down to a lean and mean 85-90 pages, eliminate all dialogue, and it’s just this thing enacting revenge.

That’s a way buzzier angle than trying to fit this into a traditional structure with a bunch of characters who we feel like we’ve seen in other movies already. It would really help this script feel different from every other script out there.

Would it be a challenge? Of course! It’d be more difficult setting up the bad guys if we’re not with them. But there are things you could do. You could have Joel scout these guys out from afar. Watch them from a safe distance. Or do what you already do here with psycho sexual Kevin. He nearly does something terrible to Joel before Joel escapes him. Now, we’ll want to kill Kevin more than anything.

I just think that this current execution feels too safe. Not in its choices but in its structure. And, more importantly, it stretches out a thriller that should move like lightning into this beefier more lethargic origin story type script of who Bigfoots are and the huge backstory behind everyone in this town. To me, the single best moments in Wildman are the attack on the general store and the chainsaw bar scene. That should be the feeling we have throughout the entire script.

This will definitely feature in the Top 10. As to where, I’m not sure. But it’s still a few rewrites away from getting to where it needs to be.

Script link: Wildman

What did you think?

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

What I learned: Writing with personality, which I mentioned above, is going to become more and more important in the age of AI.  AI can write straight-forward prose.  But it does not contain its own unique voice that it can inject into its writing.  Only you can do that.

As the male and female demographics fight it out this weekend at the box office, casting their votes for devils or fatalities, I want to acknowledge one of the most unique screenwriting challenges there is. Only a small number of screenwriters ever find themselves in a position where they have to tackle this challenge. And almost all of them fail. So today, I want to talk about how to avoid screwing it up.

But first, since the theme this weekend was “screenplays that fall apart,” I don’t think there could’ve been a more perfect example of that phenomenon at play than Beef.

I’ve been egg and noodling my way through these final episodes and wow has this thing gone off the rails. A show that started out promising has become borderline unwatchable due to sheer sloppiness. To give you an example of what I mean, Episode 7 sends the entire country club cast to Seoul. And man is the screenplay straining to make that development happen.

Once they arrive, everybody suddenly realizes their lives are at stake. So now our cast of five completely normal people are trapped in a kung fu battle against a gang of angry plastic surgeons (this includes the 4 foot 11 inch 78 pound Cailey Spainey). I’m not exaggerating! Out of nowhere, the show turns into a Jackie Chan version of John Wick, with the camera flying around while characters dive, punch, kick, and kill, occasionally teaming up for synchronized dual kicks as the score swells heroically.

Meanwhile I’m sitting on the edge of my couch leaned forward with my mouth hanging open saying, “WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO THIS SHOW????”

I know some of you don’t like White Lotus. But this is what happens when somebody with one tenth the talent of Mike White tries to make a White Lotus style show. It’s a perfect demonstration of how quickly a story collapses once the writing implodes.

There are a lot of lessons you can pull from this but the biggest one is that stories start falling apart the second writers impose what they want characters to do instead of letting characters behave the way they would if the situation were real.

Because look at what’s happening here. The writer desperately wants everybody in Seoul. Which means the screenplay has to bend itself into pretzels manufacturing excuse after excuse to force every character onto that plane. None of it feels organic. None of it feels authentic. And that’s because, in real life, most of these people would never make these choices. Maybe one or two of them would. But all of them? No chance.

Audiences are rarely conscious of the technical mechanics behind bad writing. They’re not sitting there analyzing screenplay structure. They’re not identifying motivation problems. But they absolutely feel when something is wrong. They feel when a story stops behaving like life and starts behaving like a writer dragging characters around by the neck.

I actually think this battle between what we, as writers, want our characters to do and what those characters would realistically do is one of the most underrated aspects of screenwriting. Because obviously your story has to conclude. Real life usually doesn’t. People avoid confrontation. They procrastinate. They leave things unresolved. Which means that every screenwriter eventually has to push characters toward decisions they might not naturally make.

The trick is making those decisions feel plausible anyway.

That skill is one of the biggest differences between good writers and bad writers. And look, I’m not naive about the realities of television production. Time pressures absolutely contribute to this stuff. If writers don’t have enough time to smooth out motivation and behavior, they start forcing story beats into existence that no longer resemble human decision-making. Maybe that’s what happened here.
But it’s still shocking because Episode 1 of this season felt professional. Episode 7 feels like a film school student who’d never made a movie before was suddenly handed 20 million dollars and told to direct an episode. He’s serving his inner fanboy rather than the story.

As for Devil Wears Prada and Mortal Kombat, I think we’re watching a major shift in how studios approach these properties. Mortal Kombat currently has a 65% Rotten Tomatoes critic score but a 90% audience score. Devil Wears Prada sits at 78% with critics and 86% with audiences.

And honestly? I think studios in 2026 care way more about that audience number than they do the critic score.

The path to getting here has been interesting.

For most of the 2000s, Rotten Tomatoes took over Hollywood. If your movie dipped below 70%, there was a good chance it was dead commercially. So studios became obsessed with reverse engineering critic approval. What did critics want? Whatever those things were, they started building them directly into the screenplay process from day one.

This was Marvel’s entire strategy during Phase One and early Phase Two. And it worked brilliantly. Every movie was scoring above 85%. Then the marketing would get to work weaponizing those scores. If a movie had a 92% on Rotten Tomatoes, that was objective proof that the movie was great.

Then audience scores entered the equation.

At first, nobody trusted them. They felt messy and unreliable. But something interesting happened. Certain movies started getting mediocre or bad critic scores while simultaneously pulling huge audience numbers. And those films realized they could flip the narrative. They could market themselves around the idea that critics didn’t understand the movie. But the audience did.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie was the peak example of this. Critics shrugged it off. Audiences devoured it.

That changed things.

Because once audience approval becomes more valuable than critic approval, studios no longer felt pressured to cram every screenplay full of the kinds of things they thought critics admired. Fake depth. Forced thematic importance. Characters who feel engineered in a laboratory to generate think pieces.
Most regular moviegoers don’t care about that. They just want to have a good time. The first Mortal Kombat movie felt lost, a mash-mash of ideas in desperate search of a narrative. This new one looks like it understands the assignment. 

Honestly, centering things around Johnny Cage was the smartest move they could’ve made. You need somebody grounded and charismatic to pull audiences through a tournament this ridiculous. You need a human anchor amidst the insanity. That connection point matters way more than pretending Mortal Kombat is some profound meditation on the human condition.

As for Devil Wears Prada, I was thinking about how unique a screenwriting challenge it is to revisit characters we haven’t seen in 20 plus years. And how almost every screenwriter assigned with this challenge screws it up.

The two examples that immediately jump to mind are Happy Gilmore 2 and The Last Jedi.
Because what inevitably happens in these situations is that the writer becomes obsessed with the question: “What has this character been doing for the last 25 years?” Which, to be fair, is not a bad question. In fact, it’s a very natural question. But it’s also a dangerous one because it can trap you into approaching the character backwards.

The best version of this process should always begin with: “What’s the best possible version of this character for this story?”

That’s where most screenwriters start when creating someone new. But legacy sequels don’t do that. They often start with chronology instead of storytelling. They start with biography instead of essence. And once you do that, you open the door to building a bad version of the character simply because it logically connects to the passage of time.

Which is exactly what happened with Happy Gilmore 2 and The Last Jedi.

Both movies started with the question of what these characters had been through over the years and both writers arrived at the same answer: they must now be depressed, bitter, cynical shells of themselves. And in both cases, that decision completely destroyed iconic characters.

Because audiences are not coming back after 25 years to reconnect with the worst version of somebody they loved. They want to reconnect with the essence of why they loved that character in the first place.

I actually think JJ Abrams understood this much better with Han Solo. He knew that if Han Solo showed up as some defeated suburban dad buying diapers at the Ewok Trading Hut on Endor, audiences would revolt. Nobody wants to see that version of Han Solo. We want to see the guy still out there stirring shit up across the galaxy. We want the rogue. We want the swagger. 

That does not mean characters can’t evolve. Of course they can. But evolution and erosion are not the same thing.

Look, understanding your character’s backstory is important. I encourage it. It helps you discover behavior, psychology, motivation, wounds, contradictions. All good things. But you cannot allow the backstory to dictate the core identity of the character to the point where they no longer feel like themselves.

What did you guys watch this weekend? Please let me know because outside of Widow’s Bay, I genuinely cannot find anything on the streamers right now that I like.

And what can you do to make sure it doesn’t happen to you?

During yesterday’s read of the first Blood & Ink script, a question burrowed into my mind. And it’s not a new question. It’s one of those screenwriting questions that never fully goes away because nobody seems to have a definitive answer for it. But it’s worth continuing to explore because it’s such a pervasive problem in the craft.

How come so many screenplays fall apart?

Yesterday’s script started strong. It was setting up this potential romance, this weird subject matter, this fun little town, this wacky space mold. You could feel the potential. But as each subsequent five pages passed, the script became messier and messier.

And I’m not picking on the writer, Eric. I see this all the time. I see it in scripts I consult on. I see it in Black List scripts. I occasionally even see it from high earning professional screenwriters.

So let’s figure out why this happens and what you can do to avoid it.

The first problem is that when writers come up with an idea, they usually only come up with the beginning of the idea. If you create a body switch concept like Freaky Friday, you’re almost exclusively focused on the switch itself and the two or three funny scenes that immediately come after it. You’re thinking about the fun. The irony. The hook.

But you’re not thinking beyond that.

Which leads us to our first mistake.

1) Starting too soon

If you start writing your script days, or even weeks, after coming up with the idea, you’re putting yourself in a very weak position. Because all you really know is the inciting incident, a few fun scenes after it, and maybe the climax. Everything in between is a giant question mark.

You are writing blind.

That’s not to say you can’t eventually find your way through the valley. Plenty of writers do. But the odds are stacked against you. You have no idea where you’re going and eventually that lack of direction catches up to you.

Treat a script idea like an expensive jacket you want to buy. Don’t buy it immediately. Let it sit for three months. If, after three months, you still desperately want that jacket, then you know it means something to you. Same with scripts. If the idea is still burning inside you months later, there’s probably enough depth there to sustain 110 pages.

Because a screenplay is not built on excitement alone. It’s built on depth.

Which brings us to the second mistake.

2) Weak concepts run out of gas

Think of a screenplay like a rocket. It needs enough propellant to break through the atmosphere. Weak concepts have less propellant.

And by “weak,” I mean concepts that don’t contain a strong character pursuing a strong goal.
In Project Hail Mary, Grace and Rocky desperately need to figure out what’s killing the stars or the galaxy is doomed. That objective powers the story forward. It gives every scene urgency and direction.

When you get into those later second act scenes, scenes 30 through 45, you need a protagonist who’s still aggressively pursuing something important. Because that pursuit is what keeps the screenplay alive. It creates momentum. It pulls the reader through the story.

Without that engine, scripts start wandering. Scenes become repetitive. Characters start talking in circles. The screenplay loses shape.

Okay, time to move into controversial territory.

3) Outline

You could argue that the entire purpose of outlining is to make sure the back half of your screenplay actually works.

Outlining is your chance to test drive the story before spending months writing it. It allows you to sketch out the second half and see if there’s actually enough material there to sustain a movie.

Even if you hate outlining, you should still spend a week imagining what scenes occur after the midpoint. Because when writers first conceive of an idea, they naturally imagine scenes anyway. Usually early scenes. Sometimes the climax.

But what about the middle?

Do you actually have scenes there?

Because if you’re struggling to imagine scenes in the second act, that’s a warning sign. Either the concept isn’t strong enough yet or you’re approaching it from the wrong angle.

And if you truly can’t imagine scenes there, you definitely need to outline. Because it means you don’t yet understand the specificity of your movie. Outlining forces you to engage with the execution in a concrete way.

One thing writers consistently underestimate is how much real estate a screenplay takes up. We think we’ve figured out 100% of the movie. Then we start writing and realize we’ve only figured out 25%.
That’s when the immensity of a screenplay hits you.

The more prep work you do, the more land you’ve mapped out before the journey begins. But if you’re staring at 100 miles of uncharted territory, eventually you’re going to get lost.

4) Very few writers understand how to navigate Act 2, especially the back half

There are three things that need to be firing on all cylinders throughout your second act.

Your hero must be pursuing a goal they desperately want to achieve.

Your characters must constantly be running into conflict, both internally and externally.

And you must continue throwing obstacles at your hero that make achieving the goal difficult.

I thought Project Hail Mary did an amazing job with this. The goal remains pervasive throughout the second act (solve the astrophage problem to save the stars). We always know what needs to be accomplished.

Meanwhile, Grace is battling his own self doubt. We see this in the present but mainly in the flashbacks, where he’s constantly signaling that he doesn’t believe in himself.

For the relationships, there’s conflict with Rocky, particularly in their inability to communicate at first. A big chunk of the second act is solving that problem.

And the obstacles continue to be thrown at our heroes. I mean how’s this for an obstacle: At one point, Rocky dies.

This relationship-conflict map applies to character pieces as well. In Poor Things, the conflict comes from Duncan constantly trying to control Bella, somebody who is fundamentally uncontrollable.

But both movies understand the same principle. Conflict pushes the second act forward.

We know Grace and Rocky cannot save the galaxy unless they learn to communicate. Therefore we are deeply invested in them learning how to communicate.

That’s where yesterday’s script, The Mold, really fell apart. The central conflict between Bri and Mac remained unclear for far too long. We know they used to be together, but we’re fuzzy on who broke up with who and why. We’re also unclear on the role of Bri’s ex and why he matters.

Once conflict within a character AND BETWEEN CHARACTERS becomes muddy, a screenplay can unravel surprisingly fast.

5) You’re probably putting in less effort than necessary

I’ve gotten to the point where, when I read a script, I can teleport into the writer’s mind and see what they were thinking.

A screenplay is not just a story. It’s a breadcrumb trail of the effort the writer put into it.

A lazy sentence tells me the writer doesn’t care about details. And if they don’t care about details at the sentence level, that laziness usually extends into the plotting and character work as well.

A generic scene halfway through the screenplay (some paint by numbers car chase or argument scene) tells me the writer is tiring out. They’re no longer pushing themselves creatively.

Writers think they’re getting away with this stuff.

They’re not.

Readers can feel when the effort level drops. And eventually that drop catches up to the screenplay.
One trick you can use is to rank every scene on a scale from 1 to 10. Be brutally honest. Are those late second act scenes scoring 7s and 8s? Or are they scoring 3s and 4s?

If the scenes are weak, figure out why.

Sometimes you were simply lazy in your scene choice. Other times the issue is structural. Maybe your protagonist no longer wants the goal badly enough. And once that desire weakens, every subsequent scene suffers.

6) Finishing the script is not the prize

I remember when I used to finish writing scripts and feel this huge sense of accomplishment.
But all I’d really accomplished was typing “The End.”

Anybody can reach The End weakly. Anybody can stumble there with half baked scenes and no structure.

The real accomplishment is getting there while giving the screenplay everything you possibly had.
Newer writers especially tend to celebrate completion instead of execution.

So let’s summarize.

Let your idea sit long enough to prove it has staying power. Make sure the concept has enough fuel to sustain an entire screenplay. Outline as much as possible, especially the second half. Build characters whose internal and external conflicts can generate scenes all the way through the ending. Be honest about your effort level. And don’t celebrate simply finishing the screenplay. Celebrate finishing it well.

A couple of final thoughts.

I understand that everybody has time limitations. We don’t all have endless months to work on a screenplay. I get that. All I’m asking is that you put forth the maximum amount of effort with the time you do have. If you can honestly say you did that, then you’ve done your job. After that, it’s up to the script gods.

And if you’re not an outline person, that’s okay. But then you need to become a draft demon. Your early drafts will be about discovery. Figuring out what the movie actually is. Then you refine and sharpen it through subsequent drafts.

But understand that you will probably need more drafts overall than someone who outlines. And if that process works better for you creatively, great. You just need to give yourself the time to do it.

What about you guys? Where do you think screenplays fall apart? And how do you fix the problem?

The Blood & Ink Horror Script Contest is a unique screenplay contest where you had to earn your way into the contest with a good enough concept. I accepted just under 100 entries. Those writers had half a year to write their scripts. And now, the judging begins!

Genre: Horror/Comedy
Premise: A killer space mold terrorizes a small town during their local cheese festival and threatens the lives of a food journalism intern and her cheesemonger-in-training ex-boyfriend.
About: You have until 11:59pm tonight (Tuesday) to get your Blood & Ink entry in. Now, let me remind you how this contest will work going forward. I’m going to read all the Blood & Ink scripts and then I’m going to review the Top 10, starting at 10 and working my way up, over the course of two weeks. When will this start? Optimistically, in 1 month. More realistically? 2 months. In the meantime, I may review a Blood & Ink script here and there on the site. I’m too excited not to! If these early reviews end up being Top 10 Worthy, the reviews will reappear during the Top 10 Review fortnight.
Writer: Eric Levin
Details: 85 pages

The Blood & Ink Contest is off and running!

Actually, some of these entries are running faster than I can keep up with. Which is a problem because they were never accepted in the first place!

Let me remind everyone that your concept needed to be accepted into the contest. It’s not an “anyone can enter” situation. That’s probably my fault for not being clearer about that but now it’s going to take some work to figure out and remember which concepts got accepted and which didn’t.

Because I know there were a good dozen or so concepts that I would not have accepted but they did get voted in via one of the other secret ways into the contest.

Okay, moving on to today’s script. This was one of the loglines that made me smile the brightest so I thought it would be a good one to start with.

20-something Bri and her ex-boyfriend, 20-something Mac, are headed to upstate New York because Bri is writing an article about the Finger Lakes Cheese Festival. She’s brought her ex along because he is a cheesemonger apprentice and can help her understand this world. If the article is good, she’ll be promoted to an official journalist at the paper.

What neither of them know yet is, not far from the festival, an alien meteorite has crashed into a farm and has started spreading killer mold. The only thing we know about this mold, early on, is that light kills it.

Bri and Mac immediately visit one of the many cheese farms in the area. That’s where they meet 20-something Lyla, who is excited that two big New Yorkers have come up to write about their little cheese festival. Later, they will run into Jason, Bri’s bad boy ex-boyfriend.

They get to the festival just as a lunar eclipse occurs and that gives the alien mold exactly three minutes to wreak its havoc. And boy does it take advantage. It eats up a good dozen people at the festival. Bri and Mac are able to escape to her farm. But the night is fast approaching. So, even though the eclipse is over, it’s only a matter of time before the mold strikes again.

Eventually, the mold is able to take form into an alien creature. The only way to stop this creature, apparently, is by singing to it. So Mac is able to save himself repeatedly by singing to mold monster just before he attacks. Meanwhile, Bri gets beamed up to an alien spaceship and learns from the piloting alien that he loves coming to planets and destroying them with his pet mold.

Somehow, Bri is going to have to escape this ship if she’s to save Mac, who’s been placed in a mold web by the mold monster. Apparently, Mac’s singing is only going to save him for so long. And it’s a long ways away from sunrise…

So??

How was our first Blood & Ink entry???

Here’s what I liked about The Mold. It’s an old school premise that delivers in an old school way. And it’s something you could see becoming a movie. These types of horror-comedy setups are perfect. They never die. And this is an original enough take on the sub-genre to stand out.

I loved the cheese stuff.

There’s something in screenwriting I like to call “doggy bag” moments. They are things you can teach the audience about your subject matter for them to “take home in a doggy bag.” There’s a lot of that here with the cheese. We go really in depth with how to make cheese early on and I felt like I learned a bunch.

I loved how Eric SHOWED instead of TOLD when it came to his mold rules. For example, when we see the mold first spread through the shade and see it hit a patch of sunlight, it instantly dies. Now we know that rule: the mold dies by sunlight.

A lot of times writers will get lazy and try to fit those rules in via dialogue. It’s always better if you show as opposed to tell. The reader understands the rules 100x better that way.

I also thought the setup was strong. I was gearing up for this cheese festival. I was curious what was going to happen. The script almost had this “Sideways” vibe to it, except that, instead of wine, we were dealing with cheese.

However, once the mold became a focus for the screenplay, the script lost something. All the specificity (about cheeses) was gone. A lot of what made the story feel original was gone. It essentially became “People run away from mold.”

And I know that’s the point. But that’s the challenge with writing a screenplay. You don’t just give us the obvious execution of the idea. You gotta figure out ways to make it exciting and dramatic and scary and entertaining. And not enough effort was put into making that happen.

There isn’t a single great mold kill in this movie. And there needs to be about five of them. They’re all pretty bland. Mold approaches. Person tries to get away from it. They fail. Mold overcomes them. That can’t be every single kill. There’s got to be more variety. There’s got to be more imagination.

But the real problem with the script is the main core of characters. No character had a flaw that was explored well. Brie kind of had this flaw where she leaves when things get tough. But, unlike the mold rules, this is told to us rather than shown to us, and therefore, it doesn’t stick.

The miss here was the Brie, Mac, and Lyla triangle. The way the dynamic should’ve been written is that Brie left Mac. She broke up with him for whatever reason you want to use. And the two are friends now but Mac is clearly still in love with her. And, originally, he’s hoping this trip will allow him to get her back.

But then they meet Lyla and Brie watches in dismay as Mac and Lyla have amazing chemistry together and, all of a sudden, she realizes she lost the prize. Now she’s trying to get him back but maybe Mac has finally moved on. What’s going to happen here?? That’s a much stronger character dynamic to play with.

The Jason stuff was weak and barely explained. A lot of it didn’t even make sense (Brie broke up with Mac because Jason destroyed her confidence several years earlier???). I don’t even know why you’d want Jason in this movie unless he’s a complete asshole who we’re rooting for to die.

The second half of the script shows a pretty steep dive in quality and, unfortunately, I’m expecting a lot of that from these entries. I talked about this in an article recently. We over-focus on our first acts and don’t put the same amount of time into the later parts of the script.

The stuff with the mold turning into a monster isn’t bad but needed a more natural build-up. The alien character felt like he was from a totally different movie. He was too wacky. He didn’t feel calibrated or tonally consistent with everything else.

Another big missing opportunity was the cheese! We spend the entire first 30 pages hyping up cheese. But then cheese never appears in the script again. It’s odd. I think that cheese should somehow be the only weapon to defeat the mold. Certain cheeses do better than others at holding it back. That way, all that setup can actually be paid off.

And I would’ve loved more time at the festival. More time meeting some of the wacky people who inhabit this cheese universe. I felt like we rushed past that.

But hey! That’s the great thing about screenwriting. You can rewrite and make the script better. Hopefully, Eric sees some value in the problems I’ve identified. If you want to prioritize, start with the characters. Nothing matters until that’s squared away. Better flaws for Brie and Mac and work that new love triangle. It’s going to make this so much better!

Script Link: The Mold

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

What I learned: If you’re going to kill a bad person, get the most out of it by setting up that they’re a bad person! That’s half the fun! There’s a scene in the grocery store where the customers don’t know about the mold yet. And this woman comes rushing in and slams the door shut. When a customer wants to leave, she won’t let him go out there. He says, “I have places to be you crazy bitch,” pushes past her, goes outside, and is dead ten seconds later. You could’ve spent a page building this character up as an asshole. He’s being a dick to one of the workers. He’s calling the checker stupid for a mistake she made. NOW when that guy gets killed, we’re going to FEEL SOMETHING.  That’s what you’re trying to do in scripts. Is make people feel something. If you rush past the setup of any character, even small ones, we won’t feel anything when they engage with your story.

For the first person who e-mails me the answer to this trivia question, I will give them super-discounted $199 script notes. What is the most famous spec script ever sold that had a strong focus on cheese?? E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com if you know the answer. Put “TRIVIA” in the subject line. NOBODY WRITE THE ANSWER IN THE COMMENTS UNTIL 2PM PACIFIC WEDNESDAY!