Time to vote!
Man, when I told you guys to send me those weird script ideas you’ve had trouble getting anyone to read, you really took that to heart. I’ve gotten so many bizarre concepts. They’ve been fun to read through but some of them had me thinking, “I have absolutely no idea how this could be a movie.”
Also, I received a TON of Christmas submissions. You guys must have heard of my contact at Sony who loves Christmas flicks (he produced the new Arnold Schwarzenegger Christmas movie coming out later this year). Only one of them made the cut. Believe it or not, there was a better Christmas idea but the writer botched the logline. I’d say 90% of the writers who submitted need logline help. If you’re sending those loglines out to other people I am BEGGING you to get a logline eval from me before you send it out again. They’re just 25 bucks. E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com if you want one.
I already know some of you are going to say, “Why did that stupid concept get in when my clearly superior concept didn’t?” and you can rest easy. I’ll explain why I picked each entry on Monday. I’m holding off until then because I don’t want to influence the voting.
If this is your first Amateur Showdown, here’s how it works:
Below are the five entries that caught my interest (and one that caught Scripty’s), along with first pages and links to their scripts. You only need to judge the loglines to vote. The scripts are there if you want more context or need help deciding between two entries.
Unlike the High Concept Contest, you get ONE vote. And no splitting your vote between two scripts. You’ve got to commit. Consider it practice for real life.
To vote, leave a comment naming your pick.
Ideally, tell me a little about why you chose that entry, especially if you’re a new voter. Occasionally, people try to game the system by creating fake accounts to vote for their own scripts. If I find evidence of that, you can be disqualified. A reason for the pick helps verify that the voter is real.
An explanation isn’t required, though. If you just want to name your pick, that’s fine. And for our longtime voters, you already know the drill.
Voting closes Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Pacific time. I’ll tally the votes, and the winning script will get reviewed on the site next week.
Here are your five contenders. Scripty wouldn’t shut up about letting Made Men in, so that’s number 6. Save the Cat wanted E.C. Henry’s script included but I had to draw the line somewhere. If you are a writer of one of these scripts and want to share a poster for your entry, you can do so in the comments.
Let’s see which script you guys want me to read.
Good luck to everyone!
Title: Deer Day
Genre: Horror/Thriller
Logline: When a group of hunting buddies take their pampered teens into the woods for the first day of buck season, they are hunted by killer deer who have a taste for human meat.
Title: Cornelius
Genre: Dark-Comedy
Logline: When his criminal mother returns after a decade, a timid teenage dishwasher who competes as an underground mascot fighter must choose between the biological mother who abandoned him and the controlling, delusional bar owner who raised him.
Title: Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree
Genre: Christmas Comedy
Logline: When the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree burns to a crisp, a ragtag group of misfit landscapers band together to find a replacement before the official tree lighting ceremony. It goes badly.
Title: Invasive
Genre: Horror
Logline: Held hostage in a garage, a traumatized medic must perform an improvised autopsy on a dead soldier to learn how to defeat an alien invasion.
Title: Gratuity
Genre: Drama/Thriller
Logline: The tranquility of autumn in small-town North Carolina is broken when a sculptor’s hardheaded husband fails to tip a handy waiter, leading to dire consequences.
Title: Made Men
Genre: Crime / Heist Thriller
Logline: Four professional thieves with the same face discover they are disposable human reconstructions created to bankroll the original man. To escape his cycle, they must outthink the one criminal who knows every move they were built to make.
