Today we take on the WINNER of one of the tightest Amateur Showdown races yet! Did you guys do good picking Animosity as the winner??
Genre: Thriller
Winning Logline: After he discovers the body of a murdered 9-year-old girl near his house, a popular horror author’s neighbors decide he must be guilty of the crime and take justice into their own hands.
About: This script won the February Showdown (First Line Showdown) by a mere ONE VOTE. So it was a close one. The first line that helped get the script over the top? “BAM!–ANDY HOLLAND (30s) slams against the passenger window, his eyes wide with fear.” That first line seems to have changed during the rewrite. So let the controversy begin!
Writers: Mark Steensland & James Newman
Details: 93 pages
Joe Alwyn for Andy?
I saw a lot of chatter about this showdown. A good chunk of you thought basing a showdown on a first line was stupid. And you know what? Maybe you’re right. How can one line tell us how good a script is? It probably can’t.
However, the whole reason I did it was to use an inception-like hijacking of your mind to remind you that the reader’s judgment of a screenplay STARTS IMMEDIATELY. Which means you have to impress them with the very first line. I mean, look at how many opinions we got regarding the first lines presented. Managers and agents and producers – they’re looking at those first lines in the exact same way.
But now that we’re past that, we can focus on the next showdown, which is happening Friday, March 22nd. “Movie-Crossover Showdown” will have you using the old 90s way of pitching scripts by crossing over two popular movies. It’s “Titanic meets John Wick.” It’s “Avatar by way of John Hughes.” It’s “Oppenheimer meets Poor Things.” It’s “Mean Girls but with dads.” I have a feeling we’re going to have some really fun pitches so join the club and get your submission ready by March 21st!
MOVIE CROSSOVER SHOWDOWN!!!
What: Movie-Crossover Showdown
I need your: Title, Genre, Logline, and Movie Crossover Pitch
Competition Date: Friday, March 22nd
Deadline: Thursday, March 21st, 10pm Pacific Time
Where: Send your submissions to carsonreeves3@gmail.com
Okay, on to today’s winner!
30-something Andy Holland is his small town’s version of Stephen King. The man likes to write bloody novels. And he’s become quite successful at it. Although, he’s behind on his latest one and it’s adding stress to an already stressful life. His ex-wife, Karen, and his daughter, Samantha, are metaphorically beating down his door to take some responsibility and start spending time with his offspring.
One day, after walking his dog home from the local bookstore, Andy finds the body of a dead girl behind an unused home. He calls the cops, lets them know what happened, and that’s when we learn a little more about Andy. When he was 18, he had a sexual relationship with a 17 year old and he ended up pleading guilty in court for it. This raises the cops’ eyebrows.
Over the course of the next few weeks, Andy notices that his neighbors no longer treat him the same. They walk by his house more. They’re always pointing and whispering at it. His next-door neighbor buddy Ben is all of a sudden asking him more probing questions about his past. And a local reporter named Staci seems to have an axe to grind with Andy and hints strongly in her reports that Andy, being a horror novel writer, is highly suspicious.
After the locals start digging through Andy’s trash at night and poison his dog, Andy has had enough and calls for the police to do something. But the police aren’t interested in helping him. Once the neighbors sense this, they get more aggressive. They start hanging out near his house more. They yell at Andy. They throw things at him. It’s getting bad.
But when a second murder happens, it gets a hell of a lot worse. A lot of the neighbors and even one of the off-duty cops set up shop in front of Andy’s house. When night comes, they start bashing his windows, trying to get in. Andy fights them off as best he can. But things get really crazy when his ex-wife shows up. It’s a moment that will test just how far off the reservation the mob has gone. And it will turn this night into the worst night of Andy’s life.
Well well well.
We’ve got one heck of a dilemma here.
Because half of this script is really good. And the other half is really boring.
Before I get to which was which, let me ask you guys: What’s more important? Writing a good first half of a script or a good second half?
Thoughts please.
Okay, ready for the answer?
Both. Because if the first half is boring, the reader won’t make it to the second half. But if the second half is boring, all that good will you built up in the first half was for nothing. I’d say the ground floor level for what you need to achieve is an average first half and an awesome second half. But any other weak combo won’t work.
This script is tricky as heck because I understand the thought process behind Mark and James’ strategy. They knew that, in order for the house mob to work, they needed to do a lot of setup first. A mob isn’t just going to appear out of nowhere. They need multiple reasons to get to that point. So Mark and James introduced half a dozen plot points in that first half that got the mob to the angry point they needed to be at.
But the plot points were so bland. Even the two killings felt PG. And now that I’m thinking about it, the local reporter implying that Andy had to be involved also felt… how do I put this? Like the way a murder might be covered in one of those Hallmark movies. Like, “Oh no! There’s a murder in town! The local baker ended up dead!”
I feel like Mark and James need to go watch the first season of True Detective or that David Fincher serial killer series on Netflix to get more into that “brutal murder” mindset so you can sell these murders as the horrible things that cause all this chaos.
But man… once we get to the mob part of the script, which begins about halfway through, this script goes from “barely interested” to full-on “impressive.” These two captured mob mentality perfectly. It reminded me of Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing in a lot of ways. Once the mob feeds off itself, logic no longer applies.
There’s this terrifying moment in the script (spoiler!!) where the ex-wife shows up and the mob rips her to shreds. That’s when I said, “We’ve got a movie now.” Not because every script needs over-the-top violence to be good. More so that you finally knew how bad this had gotten. Cause, up until that point, you were thinking, “Logic has to prevail at some point.” Once that murder happened, it was clear that logic no longer mattered to these people.
I think this script is worth pursuing and fixing. But to do that, we need to get to the mob by page 30. That doesn’t mean they have to start attacking Andy’s house by then. But they should be in their cars parked outside. Maybe a couple of the scarier ones set up chairs on the lawn. Start building that world of this growing mob. Cause you can get through all of those early plot beats a lot faster and it won’t hurt the script a lick.
As for the riot, you need to do some finagling there. I think that once the ex-wife is killed, some semblance of reality would set in for, at least, some of the people. They didn’t come here to hurt anyone other than Andy. And also, there’s a cop involved. Once he saw a murder happen, he’s probably peacing-out so that he doesn’t go to prison. It’s not like the old days where you could hide that stuff. Social media doesn’t allow it. Speaking of social media, the normal people in the neighborhood observing this are probably putting it all over social media within five minutes. There would be real cops there quickly.
The way to handle that is to probably keep everything contained to one night. Don’t wait til morning for the mob to reconvene. It’s gotta all happen during that night so that it’s reasonably believable that other people didn’t come and stop this.
Now, I had an idea for this that James and Mark might want to consider. What if we made Andy black? Then it turns this entire story into a metaphor with a much bigger meaning. I understand that a lot of stuff comes with that change. It becomes a “race” script instead of just a thriller. But I’m pretty sure that it would do better on the reading circuit. Curious what you guys think. Share your thoughts in the comments.
But this is a good script with the potential to be a really good script. And as you know from me talking about it all the time, I rarely encounter any script with the potential to be really good. So that’s a big deal.
Oh, and finally, I think we can come up with a better ending here. The revelation (spoiler) that they already found the killer was cool. But I’m wondering if we need a bigger twist. Anybody have any ideas?
Check out the script here: Animosity
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Earn your introductions! This script introduces a lot of characters. When you introduce characters weakly, you force the reader to remember them. That should never be the case. The reader should never feel “forced” to remember anything about your screenplay. It’s your job to make a character instantly memorable either by the memorable way in which they do something or the memorable way in which they say something. Only when you’ve created a memorable character do you earn the right to introduce your next character. A big issue with the first half of this script is that we RAN THROUGH a bunch of blasé generic character introductions. Put some actual thought into these intros because a screenplay *is its characters.* If we don’t know everyone (as in GENUINELY FEEL LIKE WE KNOW THEM), we’re only half-enjoying your script.
Here’s the introduction of Ben, a fairly major character. This just isn’t cutting the mustard. It’s an okay intro. But it’s far from memorable.
