First off, I want to thank everyone who’s congratulated me both in the comments section and personally. The response has been overwhelming and one of the themes I’ve spotted in the aftermath of my producing announcement is that people respect when you follow your dreams.
It’s easy to accept that comfortable safe route in life. And there’s nothing wrong with it. Especially if you have a family you’re supporting and lots of responsibilities. But I didn’t have that excuse and my life was definitely missing something. After a lot of introspection, I realized that what was missing was doing something I really wanted to do. Even if it scared me. Fear is a strong deterrent but the reality is, fear is where all the fun is. That’s where the best things in life happen, when you do the stuff that scares you. If that inspires any of you to make changes in your own life, great. Even after one week, I can confirm that it’s a lot more exciting on this side of the curtain.
Moving on to today’s showdown, I didn’t get that huge glut of final day submissions I usually do before a showdown. But I did get a lot of contained thriller submissions for The Last Great Screenwriting Contest. So I think what a lot of people did was shift their Contained Thriller script over to the big contest. Which I understand. In a Showdown, you’re not guaranteed I’ll read any of your script, whereas with the contest, you know I’ll read at least the first 10 pages. I’m not sure what this means for future showdowns but we’ll figure it out.
In the meantime, I’m hoping that one of these five scripts is awesome and we’ll have found our first big producible script of the year.
For those new to the site, Amateur Showdown is a bi-weekly tournament where I pick five screenplays that were submitted to me. Then you, the readers of this site, read as much of each script as possible and vote for your favorite in the comments section. The winner will receive a review the following Friday that could result in props from your peers, representation, a spot on one of the big end-of-the-year screenwriting lists, a partnership with yours truly, and in rare cases, a SALE!
In order to participate, e-mail me at carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Include your script title, the genre, a logline, and a pitch to myself and potential readers why you believe your script deserves a shot. It could be long, short, passionate, to-the-point. Whatever you think will convince someone your script is worth opening, make your case. Just like Hollywood, the Scriptshadow readers are a fickle bunch. So be convincing!
Good luck to all the writers this week!
Title: Deathbed
Genre: Contained thriller/horror
Logline: A young nurse must fight for her life when the bed she ordered for a back injury turns out to be haunted by the victims of a serial killer.
Why you should read: When Carson announced the contained thriller/horror AOW I was super stoked. I’ve been a fan of the genre ever since I saw Buried. Coming up with an entertaining feature length script with a single location and minimal cast is arguably the toughest writing challenge of all. Deathbed is my attempt. It takes a big risk in that it attempts to combine two sub-genres: Supernatural with Home Invasion. I hope you enjoy it!
Title: Hunny Pig
Genre: Contained Thriller / Dark Comedy
Logline: A recreational poker player, unemployed, abandoned by his family, and desperate for a big win, is slowly driven to the brink of madness by an unbeatable online nemesis who may be Satan himself.
Why You Should Read: Sometimes we write trying to fix the things that are broken in our lives. Well, on-line poker nearly broke me. The drug I never knew I needed became the thing I couldn’t live without. It took hold of me in ways that cocaine or alcohol never could. With a career in free-fall and cursed with endless free time, I would play long into the night, burning through cash and literally SCREAMING into the cyber-void, unable to cope with my constant losses. The more I lost, the angrier I got. It became so bad, my wife threatened to leave me.
Luckily, salvation came from an unlikely source; the US Justice Department — who shut down legal on-line play in 2011. And although I reclaimed my sanity and patched things up with my wife, I never forgot how that crack in time made me feel: UNLUCKY. WORTHLESS. CURSED.
Years passed, and I thought — why waste all those juicy negative feelings? Turn them into a ultra-low-budget, darkly comic screenplay instead! So I did! I hope you enjoy… HUNNY PIG.
Title: The Album
Genre: Contained thriller
Logline: After being kidnapped by a psychotic music producer, a guitarist and her drummer boyfriend are forced to record an album in chains while they try to escape his studio prison.
Why you should read: We were shooting for Misery meets Green Room. Would love to see what the people here at SS think. It’s a quick read too at 85 pages.
Title: In The Night Garden
Genre: Psychological Horror
Logline: After a pregnant sleepwalker kills her husband and daughter, she is transferred to a mysterious facility for treatment, only to suspect the overseers are after her unborn child.
Why You Should Read: Can a conversation be terrifying? The psychological horror genre has always fascinated me, and for years I tried to pursue it, only to fall back into cheap tropes: jumps, gore, monsters, and haunted-house scares. And while I can’t promise that this screenplay avoids these completely, the core of its horror runs far deeper. The unholy lovechild of Ex Machina and Rosemary’s Baby, In The Night Garden explores motherhood in ways that will shock, disturb, and stay with you long after the final page has turned.
Title: The Fire Tower
Genre: Contained Thriller
Logline: When a family on vacation to a remote fire lookout tower rescues an injured female hitchhiker, they wind up in a battle for their lives.
Why You Should Read: When I was 10, we went on a cross-country camping trip out west. One night we got horribly lost on a winding road, high in the mountains. Out of the darkness a hitchhiker jumped in front of our car asking for a lift. We gave her some water and snacks (but my mom wouldn’t let my dad give her a ride). Later, I was told that a whole family had disappeared without a trace not far from there. That was the seed of the story. But I needed a contained space to trap my family.
Lookout towers have been used in the United States for 100 years. At the peak of their popularity in the ‘40s, the U.S. had about 8,000. Today, there remain about 85 fire lookout towers in the U.S. in extremely remote mountain areas in the National Forests which you can rent for $25-$75 a night.
