Genre: Horror/Comedy
Premise: In a world where the Grim Reaper has a popular TV show with live random fatalities, a struggling rock artist agrees to become his assistant to protect her marked-for-death band members.
About: For those new to the site, last year I did a pitch contest called Blood & Ink. Anyone who wanted to could pitch me movie ideas. I then accepted the best 100 of those ideas. The writers then wrote those scripts. And, ever since, I’ve been reviewing them, looking for the best one. Already, one script, Wildman, written by Jacob Rainer, got him a manager and possibly more. Stay tuned. One of the criteria for getting into the Blood & Ink contest was that, if I did not personally approve of the idea, it could still get voted in by the public. If you got 15 votes, you got in. This is one of those upvoted scripts.
Writer: Mikael Grahn/TigerMoomin
Details: 114 pages
I made it pretty clear at the time that I didn’t think this concept could work. But you guys voted it in. So, let’s see how you did.
We hop right into the story here. There’s no dilly-dallying. There is a live TV show where the Grim Reaper – like, the real one – kills people. And people watch it. It’s a complicated production run by a couple of guys named Brian and Colin. They have to get cameras in place for all of these kills, as well as make sure everything’s set up ahead of time.
After we watch a plane engine fall off a plane and land on someone, we then see (via a drone camera) a group of teens watching this very show in a house while eating popcorn. But it turns out production made sure that, when this popcorn was made, that a glass broke in the factory and all the pieces fell into the popcorn. So all four of the teens die by their throats ripping up due to the glass they just ate.
We then meet rock and roll lead vocalist Roxanne, who, along with her band Megalotherium are late to their gig. They’re zooming through traffic, and barely get there in time. But then Roxanne notices a mini camera in their green room and figures it’s for the Grim Reaper show. It turns out this whole place is rigged to go up in flames and they’re all supposed to die for the show!
Roxanne makes her case to the Grim Reaper why he shouldn’t do this and the Reaper likes Roxanne so he makes her a deal. He’ll spare her bandmates if she finds him a new person to kill every week for the show.
Roxanne doesn’t put up much resistance so now her life consists of looking for bad people she can mark for killing. The job is fairly easy cause there are a lot of bad people out there. First, a sleazy guy who hits on women in a bar. Second, the magazine writer who gave their last gig a bad review. Then an ICE agent. Then a guy online who says he’s going to suicide bomb a mall.
Can Roxanne keep this up forever, though? Or will she run out of targets, forcing the Grim Reaper, along with the show, to finally take down the rest of her band, Megalotherium?
Tiger?
You might want to turn your head here. This is going to get ugly. There’s no way to sugarcoat this.
I remember early on in my screenwriting days hearing that some people you sent your script to wouldn’t even finish it. I was mortified by that. I’d say for a good year I thought of these people as the worst people in the universe.
These days, I have a slightly different point of view. I’m one of the few people in Hollywood who, when I say I’ve read a script, I’ve actually read the entire script. Because I’m reading them for consultations or script reviews. And that’s given me a great perspective. Because I’ve gotten to see what actually happens after most people give up on a script. I get to see if the writer turns it around.
And I can tell you that after reading 10,000 scripts, that 99.99999% time they do not turn it around. If you run into 7-8 red flags by page 15, the chances that that script is going to somehow get its shit together are basically 0.
I gave this script until page 50. Which I’m guessing is more generous than most people will give it.
And I’m disappointed. Not so much with Tiger. But with the people who upvoted this concept because you wanted to be friendly. You sent Mikael on a suicide mission. This script had no chance of being good. The concept was insanely flawed and people still said, “Yeah, go spend six months writing this.”
For starters, we’re dropped into the most ridiculous world ever and asked to just accept it. We live in a world now where the Grim Reaper has a TV show where he just kills people in bloody horrible ways and the whole world watches.
I suppose you can argue that The Running Man and The Hunger Games did something similar. But those are set in the future, where you can buy into the idea that the future got so fucked up these things could happen. This show is set in the present. And there’s no explanation as to how it came to be.
But it’s more than that. We’re already being asked to accept that society has somehow reached a point where watching innocent people get brutally murdered on live television is mainstream entertainment. That alone is a gigantic conceit. But then, on top of it, we’re asked to accept that the Grim Reaper is real and hosts the show. That’s another gigantic conceit. Instead of taking one crazy idea and surrounding it with a believable world, you’ve stacked crazy on top of crazy. And every time you do that, you make it harder for the audience to buy into the movie.
From there, we’re introduced to rules that don’t make sense at all. This show seems to be tracking these deaths via a very elaborate production system that includes drones flying around and hidden cameras set up ahead of time, all so that these deaths can be recorded live. For example, somehow, we have a camera up on a plane to catch its engine falling.
As far as I can tell, this entire production team consists of maybe 10 or 20 people. But they’re somehow setting up and filming multiple elaborate live kills every episode, all over the world. Think about the logistics involved in pulling that off. Wouldn’t this require hundreds, if not thousands, of people working behind the scenes?
Also it seems, at times, that the production team is helping the Grim Reaper kill people. For example, with Roxanne’s band’s gig, some of the production team get there ahead of time to set up a bunch of flammable material in order to burn the whole place down and kill everyone inside the venue.
This despite us seeing the Grim Reaper snap his fingers and make a giant church bell fall to the ground from its perch. So, sometimes the Grim Reaper kills people using his superpowers but other times he needs help from a production crew? I’m so insanely confused by the rules of this story.
From there, we basically get Roxanne looking for really bad people to kill so she can keep her bandmates alive. The problem is, we’ve barely established her relationship with those bandmates. We haven’t seen why she loves them, why she needs them, or why losing them would devastate her. So the entire emotional engine of the movie is built around Roxanne desperately trying to save people we don’t care whether she saves.
I think the official ‘tap out’ moment for me was Roxanne finding some sleazy guy with a pee and poo fetish at a bar, marking him for that week’s death, and then going to his place and setting up cameras so we could see the death on the show and then showing that the sleazy guy, in anticipation of Roxanne coming, fills a tub with poo for their sexual exploits.
This is why I tell you guys – you can’t outsmart a bad concept. You just can’t.
But it’s actually more than that. When you have a weak concept, you eventually run out of story. That’s the problem with bad concepts. They don’t naturally generate scenes. They don’t keep opening new doors. You exhaust the premise quickly and suddenly you’re out on a plank in the middle of the ocean with nowhere to go.
So what do writers do? They start manufacturing increasingly outrageous situations in a desperate attempt to keep the reader reading. Enter the sleazy poo-fetish guy. But outrageousness isn’t story. It’s noise. And by that point, it doesn’t matter anyway, because the reader checked out 20 pages ago.
But look. I learned from my mistakes last time. That’s why I created the “veto” rule for the High Concept Pitch Contest. And I’m okay with going into this new competition with less scripts for that reason. I don’t want anybody spending six months on a script that never had a shot.
I’m actually curious what the people who upvoted this idea saw in it. Can you tell me the movie you were imagining it was going to be? Cause I was 1000% certain there was no way it was going to work. Can you give me a movie like this that did work?
Screenplay link: Untimely
[x] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: There’s some confusing advice out there when it comes to generating screenplay concepts that says instead of building your movie around one strong high-concept idea, you should combine it with another one. This supposedly “doubles” the power of the concept. So if you have a zombie movie, add time travel. Two hooks are better than one! I don’t agree with this advice. If Curry Barker had followed this logic with Obsession, Bear would’ve also been a hitman who had to kill five people in the neighborhood. Now you’re not strengthening the original idea. You’re competing with it. The best concepts tend to be simple. They take one strong, easily understood premise and squeeze everything they can out of it. Combining a live television show where people are murdered with the literal Grim Reaper didn’t double the power of this concept. It diluted it. And in this case, it sent the movie straight to the grave.
