It’s finally here!

Movie Tagline Showdown

It ain’t just loglines anymore!

If you’ve never participated in a Logline Showdown, this is how they work.  You read the five entries down below, decide which one you like best, then vote for it in the comments section.  We love to hear why you liked (or disliked) an entry.  So, if you have time, let us know why you chose your winner.

You’re probably wondering how the addition of a movie tagline affects things.  Look, you vote however you want .  If you love a logline, vote for that entry.  If you love a tagline, vote for that entry.  Ultimately, I’d like to find the best script and the logline will be a better indicator of that.  But you do you!  I’m not going to tell you how to vote.

Oh, and enough with the protests! Just vote. This is the opportunity for someone to get some publicity for their script. You could help them do that. But not if you don’t vote.

All right, it’s time for this month’s entries.  Good luck, everyone!

Title: Beckys
Genre: Comedy
Logline: After waking up from a six-year-long coma, Becky Schaffer is horrified to learn her late husband has used her exact physical likeness to create the #1 selling humanoid personal assistant – basically, an Alexa that can carry your groceries for you. Now, Becky will have to learn how to survive in a world with 5 million versions of herself.

Tagline: How do you stand out in a crowd when your face is the crowd?

Title: Final Girl Kills
Genre: Horror
Logline: Famous for her many roles in slasher films, a young actress takes a break from acting to attend university, but when students bearing her characters’ names start turning up dead, she must find and stop the killer before she becomes a real-life “final girl.”

Tagline: A killer has taken their love of final girls one stab too far.

Title: Fragments of Blackstone
Genre: Mystery
Logline: A man wakes up in the wreckage of a plane crash on the outskirts of small town Wyoming with no memory of who he is or how he got there.  When he’s brought into town, he’s recognized for being the sheriff’s son who’s been missing for twenty years and wanted for double homicide.

Tagline: How do you defend yourself against a crime you don’t know if you committed?

Title: Devil in Transit
Genre: Supernatural Thriller
Logline: A wanted criminal and a recovering addict are forced to smuggle a possessed fifteen year old girl across the Mexican border to a supernatural holding facility in the United States before her terrifying power is unleashed.

Tagline: And Hell followed with her…

Title: My Sister and I
Genre: Thriller/Horror
Logline: Two teenage sisters both raised in solitude in the Scottish Highland Wilderness by their psychopathic, survivalist father begin to question his cruel and unorthodox ways and plot their escape from his evil clutches after finding the remains of a young woman, who could be their estranged mother, hidden underneath their secluded farmhouse.

Tagline: Just yous wait til’ your da gets home.

Also, you’ve got ONE WEEK left to enter The Tagline Showdown! Details Below.

The Greatest Dialogue Book Ever Written is a quick read and will revolutionize your dialogue. If you’ve EVER received notes on your screenplay like, “Your dialogue is too on-the-nose,” “There’s way too much exposition in this script,” or “Your dialogue is too bland,” then you need to buy this book right now. Honestly, just ten of the tips in this book are going to put you ahead of 75% of other screenwriters. To think you get 240 more AFTER that? I mean, come on, it’s the deal of the century. So head over to Amazon and grab it!

Also, don’t forget that we have Logline Showdown coming up at the end of next week. So get your entries in. I need your title, genre, logline, and also your *movie tagline*. Some notable movie taglines from the past…

“Live. Die. Repeat.” -Edge of Tomorrow

“If you see only one movie this summer . . . see Star Wars! But if you see two movies this summer, see Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me”

“If at first you don’t succeed, lower your standards.” -Tommy Boy

“The True Story of a Real Fake” -Catch Me If You Can

What: Tagline Showdown
I need your: Title, Genre, Logline, and Movie Tagline
Competition Date: Friday, April 26th
Deadline: Thursday, April 25th, 10pm Pacific Time
Where: Send your submissions to carsonreeves3@gmail.com

Week 15 of the “2 Scripts in 2024” Challenge

Week 1 – Concept
Week 2 – Solidifying Your Concept
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

At the start of the year, we said we were going to write a script. This week, that dream becomes a reality. Because if you’ve been following the schedule I’ve laid out every Thursday, you are just 10 pages away from typing “FADE OUT.”

Technically speaking, these should be the easiest pages you’ve written all script. Chances are, you finished the climax last week. Or, if your climax bleeds into the final 10 pages, you’ve already got momentum going from last week so finishing up should be a cake walk.

But one thing I didn’t talk about last week, and something that’s likely to come up at the end of your climax, is THE CHOICE.

Last week was all about structuring your ending like a miniature movie – giving it that first act, second act, and third act.

However, there is something going on concurrently with that, which is the conclusion to your main character’s (or main supporting character’s) arc. Remember, at the beginning of your script, you will have created a character with a gigantic weakness. This weakness is known in some circles as “the fatal flaw.” It is the flaw that’s holding your character back in life – that’s keeping them from finding happiness.

Most flaws exist inside a person’s blind spot. That’s because a flaw is as much of who you are as any other attribute. So you don’t think of it as a weakness. It’s just “who you are.” You may be selfish, stubborn, a procrastinator, a coward, impulsive, a cynic, or indecisive, and have no idea.

I remember the first time somebody assigned a character flaw to me, telling me I was a perfectionist. I said, “What are you talking about? I’m not a perfectionist.” They then proceeded to give me five active examples of my perfectionism. I honestly had zero idea that was a flaw of mine until that moment.

So, most of the time, your hero won’t know their flaw. We, the writer will know it. Almost everyone who knows your hero will know it. But your hero won’t truly recognize this as a flaw until the climax. Until they’re faced with a CHOICE within the climax that gives them the option of either…

a) Continue to live their flawed life.
b) Overcome their flaw and change.

Interestingly enough, the answer isn’t always “b.” Sometimes your character will choose “a.” When they do, though, a price must be paid. You can’t have your hero remain flawed and not pay a price. So, in tragedies, the hero is given the big choice at the end, they choose to remain the same, and they usually die as a result.

But let’s get back to how this affects our ending.

You want to create a choice in the final “battle,” where the hero can either keep doing what they’ve always been doing or they can change. Keep in mind, that if you do this well, it will be the most powerful moment in your entire screenplay. This is the moment that is going to give your audience the feels. This is the moment where you can make people cry.

Three of the most common flaws that pop up around this time are: cowardice, selfishness, and a lack of belief in one’s self. So, you’d write a choice into the ending where the hero could either continue to be a coward or finally show bravery. We see this with George McFly in Back to the Future when he finally stands up to Biff and punches him in the face to save Lorraine.

In The Matrix, Neo has spent the entire movie not believing in himself. He doesn’t believe he’s “The One.” He’ll get into little spats with the agents but, at the end, he does what the group tells him to do – RUN. So in that final climactic moment where he gets cornered by the agents in a hallway, he has his CHOICE built around his flaw: He can continue not to believe in himself and run away. Or he can believe in himself and face the agents head on. Guess what he does?

Who’s the most selfish character in the original Star Wars? It’s Han Solo. He has a choice at the end of that movie. He can take the money and leave his allies high and dry or he can stay and fight and help them destroy the Death Star. In the end, his choice is to come back, shoot down Darth Vader, which allows Luke a clear shot at the Death Star.

That moment – that moment where the Millennium Falcon appears at the very last second to shoot down Darth Vader’s ship before Vader can take out Luke – is one of the single most exciting moments in movie history.

And the REASON that is is because it’s coming on the heels of a major character transformation. That’s the power that an expertly executed climactic character transformation can accomplish. That’s why this formula is so important.

I talk to so many writers who treat the act of finding a character flaw for their protagonist to be some kind of burden. They know that it’s something screenwriting books tell them they have to do and that’s the only reason they do it. But this is WHY you want to integrate a character flaw. It’s FOR CREATING MOMENTS LIKE THE ABOVE with Han Solo.

Cause you can’t create emotional beats in your climax if you haven’t set up any character transformations to happen. You can still come up with decent endings, especially if you’re good at plotting and paying off setups, which all good endings do. But if you want to come up with that ending that hits the reader in the gut, figure out a character flaw at the beginning of your writing process, explore that flaw throughout the movie, then pay it off here in the climactic scene.

It’s easy to forget that a movie should be an emotional experience. Viewers want to connect with the people leading them through the story. And just like we, as real-life people, like to see our friends and family overcome their weaknesses and become successful in life, so do we want to see these new “friends” of ours – these movie characters – overcome their flaws and become successful.

Movies really are a metaphor for life. That 2-hour experience feels like we’re living a life with these characters. So if you do your job, we will connect with and care about those characters, and want to see them win in the end. But not just win. CHANGE. When they change for the better, that’s what gets the feels flying into fifth gear.

After you finish your climax, it’s up to you how many more scenes you want to write. But the general rule is that you don’t want to stick around much longer. The viewer will start to get restless. They came here to see the main character win. The main character won. So they’re ready to leave. Some movies (Rocky) will end right there! But it’s okay to wrap up a few character relationships if you need to. I would say try to get out of your script after the climax within three scenes.

Time to bring the torch home!

We will celebrate next week after you’ve completed your script.

Then we can talk about rewriting.

It’s going to be a BLAST. :)

And I feel fine

The movie we were promised

Alex Garland’s “Civil War” pulled in 25 million dollars this weekend. On the surface, that seems like an average number. But when you look deeper, it’s staggeringly high.

This is independent studio A24’s biggest opening ever. The whole reason it’s an A24 film is that it’s an indie movie. Despite the way it promotes itself, which I’ll talk about in a bit, it’s a character piece about photojournalists. Most of the movie takes place away from the war. So, for a film like that to pull in 25 million dollars is gigantic. It rarely happens.

Now, I love Garland so I very much flirted with seeing this. But I ended up deciding not to. I’ll share with you why later. It does come down to a screenwriting choice Garland made, which is usually how it goes with me.

But before we talk about that, I wanted to discuss the marketing of this film. Cause the marketing is what allowed the film to achieve its unprecedented box office. And yet that marketing is deceptive.

It’s deceptive because this movie is not about a civil war. It’s about photojournalists. The negative reactions coming out of the film almost all revolve around the frustration of thinking they were going to get a movie about a civil war when, in actuality, they got a movie about how difficult it is to be a war photographer.

This is one of Hollywood’s best tricks. They know when they have a movie that if they marketed it honestly, nobody would show up. So they create a marketing campaign that promotes the aspects of the movie that are marketable, even if those elements are barely in the film.

They’ll even go so far as to misrepresent a movie if they fear that the truth will keep people out of the theater. They did this recently with the campaigns for both Mean Girls and The Color Purple. ZERO MENTION in the trailers of the films being musicals. Cause they feared that if people knew they were musicals, nobody would show up.

This becomes relevant to all screenwriters because, once you finish your screenplay, your job will be similar to the marketers’ jobs when promoting a movie – which is, you’ll have to send loglines to people and pitch people to get them to read your script.

As someone who does around 300 logline consults a year, I am particularly savvy in this department of deception because, often, writers will come to me wanting the sexiest logline possible even though the script itself isn’t sexy. And I’ll help them because I know that a better logline means more read requests.

But I do have the conversation with each and every one of them where I say, “Next time, before you write your script, don’t write the boring version of the script then try to come up with an exciting logline afterwards. Write the exciting version of the script to begin with so that your logline will be an accurate representation of your script. That way you get the best of both worlds.”

Because, inevitably, what happens, is that even if you are able to trick the potential reader into reading your script, there’s a high likelihood that they will leave disappointed because the screenplay you promised them never materialized.

That’s why some people are coming out of this movie disappointed. The negative reviews are almost all the same: “What I was promised never showed up.”

On the flip side of this, this movie shows you the power of concept – and more specifically: TITLE. How the title of a script or a movie can have so much influence over potential readers/viewers.

If you’re an indie writer and you’re tired of writing your indie scripts that no one seems interested in, do what Garland does here: Find a big sexy subject matter then hide your indie story within it.

Imagine, for example, that Garland had written a movie about news photographers trying to get the perfect photograph of drug addicts in drug-infested cities in an attempt to bring attention to the problem and hopefully make a change.

Sounds very noble. Sounds very indie. Sounds like 5 people would show up.

So you can see the difference by changing “drug infested city” to “civil war.” That’s what smart indie writers do. They find that sexy subject matter so that their character-driven scripts have an actual shot at getting noticed.

Ironically, the reason I decided not to see the film was that I heard, ahead of time, that it was not about a civil war. That it was about photographers who just happened to be operating within a civil war. That didn’t sound like an interesting enough movie to me.

The movie we got

And the more I think about it, the more I think Garland made a mistake. This is a movie that, if it would’ve committed to the Civil War angle, it would’ve made twice as much money this weekend.

It’s a reminder that point-of-view is SO IMPORTANT when writing screenplays. Think about it. You have a modern-day American civil war movie. Think about how many points-of-view you have at your disposal. Is a photographer really the most interesting?

You could’ve gone with a suburban mother, a soldier on the front lines, an abandoned child, a spy, a medic, the president of the United States, a drone pilot, a hacker, a farmer, a survivalist, a drug addict, a black market trader, an Uber driver driving people out of the city to safety.

All of those options would’ve been more interesting than a photographer. I’m not even convinced photographers are a thing anymore. We’re way more enamored with videos taken on peoples’ phones in 2024 than we are some amazing picture. This isn’t 1968 yo. The more I think about it, the more flummoxed I am by Garland’s choice.  He’s probably just really interested in photographers. 

But my point is, whenever you’re writing a screenplay, that needs to be one of your primary objectives: figure out what point-of-view is best for this story. Cause, often, we’ll go with what feels easiest to us, or the most familiar. And those aren’t the best options.

I’m still happy for Garland. His movies, while always artistically challenging, rarely connect with audiences. And here, with his last movie ever, he gets his biggest box office payout.

Now Garland is going back to writing, re-building one of his original franchises: 28 Years Later. But don’t count Garland’s directing career out just yet. When you have a clear number 1 movie at the box office, some big people start knocking on your door. However, from what I understand, Garland hates directing more than anything. So he may be able to withstand these mega-offers.

Did any of you see Civil War? What did you think?

Have you been struggling with your dialogue? I have over (that’s right, OVER) 250 dialogue tips in my new book, “The Greatest Dialogue Book Ever Written.” You can head over to Amazon and buy the book, right now!

Week 14 of the “2 Scripts in 2024” Challenge

Week 1 – Concept
Week 2 – Solidifying Your Concept
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

Okay, so, just to remind you, this entire surgical procedure we’re calling “writing a screenplay,” is approaching the endpoint. We’ve opted for the 110-page version. Which means that, after this week, we only have 10 pages left.

Where that leaves us is in the sweet spot of the climax.

It took me a long time to figure out how to approach the climax of a screenplay. Then, one day, it became as clear as the springs from which Evian gets its water.

A climax IS ITS OWN SCREENPLAY.

For that reason, it has its own beginning, middle, and end.

For those of you who don’t know what each of these sections stands for, let me remind you:

Beginning – Setup
Middle – Conflict
End – Resolution

For anyone who’s intimidated by this information, think of it this way. Almost every story you’ve ever told anyone – even if it was just a story to your husband about what happened to you at work – chances are you SET IT UP for them (“My boss called me into his office”), you then explained THE CONFLICT (“He said that Karen had accused me of stealing her work and taking credit for it”), before finally giving them the RESOLUTION (“I told him that Karen was a lying psycho who’s been trying to make me look bad to everyone. He apologized and said he’d have a long talk with her.”).

It’s the easiest way to tell a story. So it makes sense that we’re depending on this formula for our climax as well.

Therefore, almost everything you used to map out your 110 page screenplay, you’re going to use to map out your climax.

The first thing you have to do is figure out how long your climax is going to be. Since your third act in a 110 page screenplay is around 27 pages, the climax has to be less than that.

Because, before you get to the climax, you have three main beats that you’re trying to hit.

First beat: “Stop Crying and Get Up Off Your Keister”

Remember, at the end of the second act, your hero had fallen to his lowest point. Some level of death, either literal or metaphorical, had occurred. So, it wouldn’t make sense to jump from that to a big flashy climax.

You need a beat where they pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and shift their internal momentum from “defeated” to “I’m going to give this one more shot.”

Second beat: “I Love It When A Plan Comes Together”

After they’ve defeated their whiney b**ching and are ready to fight again, they need to come up with an actual plan. You don’t roll up on the Death Star hoping to figure it out on the way. You need that moment where everyone sits down and they explain how to destroy the Death Star.

Third beat: “The Calm Before The Storm”

Most good stories give the audience one final beat before the climax that works as the “calm before the storm.” For example, in Avatar, before the Na’Vi go off and fight the humans, they convene at the big tree of life. They have a little pow-wow where they mentally prepare for what’s about to come and then off they go.

How long should these scenes be? Pretty short, but it will all depend on the movie and the story you’re telling. But I would say 2 pages tops each. So 6 pages in total.

Cause the way you gotta look at it is, you need a few beats after the climax as well, which is going to add pages to your third act. Maybe we have 6 pages AFTER the climax is over.

So let’s do our math = 27 pages – 6 pages (lead up to climax) – 6 pages (post climax).

That leaves us with about 15 pages for our climax. Which is optimal in my opinion. 15 pages gives us an adequate amount of time for a great climactic sequence.

I know some of you hate math but we gotta use it in order to understand how to set up our climax. Remember, like I said, the climax is its own miniature movie. It has a setup, a conflict, and a resolution. Since we now know our climax is 15 pages, we can divide that in the same way we divided our script = 25% for the setup, 50% for the conflict, and 25% for the resolution.

While this is a good guide, I’ve found that setups and resolutions in climaxes tend to be shorter, percentage-wise, than their full-script counterparts. So instead of being 25% in setup, it might be 15%. Instead of 25% for the resolution, it might be 10%.

That’s because the climax is really about the showdown between the protagonist and the antagonist. So that middle section of your climax — the CONFLICT – is the meat.

With that in mind, here’s what we get…

Climax Setup – 3 pages
Climax Conflict – 10 pages
Climax Resolution – 2 pages

I’m already hearing some of you groan. Carson! You can’t possibly distill art down into such a mathematical formula. You’re right. I’m not saying you have to follow this to a T. What I’m saying is, this is the way it’s done in most movies. Therefore, you should use it as a template. How much you want to stretch or condense or twist the template is up to you. But there’s one constant here I can promise you that you need: Which is that your climax needs form. It needs shape. And this is the best way to shape it.

In all the internet hype about an upcoming Happy Gilmore sequel, I watched the original movie recently and the climax follows this formula very closely. The final tournament day between Happy and Shooter is roughly 17 minutes, so a couple of minutes extra.

And that’s why I say these page-counts do have some flexibility to them. I mean, Titanic has a 45 minute climax. The film itself is also twice as long as a regular movie but, the point is, each movie will have its own needs.

The only other thing I want to highlight is that, within your climax, it needs to look like your hero LOST. Just like at the end of your second act, your hero had a “lowest point,” the same thing is going to happen at the end of your climax’s second act.

For example, in Happy Gilmore, as he lines up his final putt, which he needs to win the tournament, one of Shooter’s minions forces a giant TV stand to fall directly in the way of his shot, making an already difficult shot impossible.

In that moment, we think Happy Gilmore is dead. There’s nothing he can do to win this tournament anymore. You need that same moment in your climax.

Okay, we’re almost there, people! We conclude the writing of our first draft next week! Congrats to everyone who’s made it this far! :)