Mega Showdown is back, baby! The 2-Week event is coming to your doorstep in roughly two months, which gives you plenty of time to tighten up your screenplay. Unlike the 700 dollar price tag that the Nicholl Fellowship charges, Mega Showdown is completely free! So there’s literally NO reason not to enter.
HOW TO SUBMIT
What: Mega Showdown
When: Friday, August 1
Deadline: Thursday, July 31, 10pm Pacific Time
Send me your: Script title, genre, logline, and a PDF of the script
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
Now that it’s been officially announced, you’re probably wondering how you’re going to win the Scriptshadow Mega-Showdown. Well it turns out I have an inside guy at the site and may be able to help. Here’s what he told me.
STEP 1 – A GOOD CONCEPT
We’re going to start with the obvious. You need a concept that pops, something that grabs the reader’s attention. Not just for me. If your script gets picked, it will be standing along with nine other entries and the readers of the site, aka, the voters, are not going to read every entry. They’re going to pore over the loglines and decide on which scripts to open depending on the concept. So if you have a boring logline in a sea of sexy loglines, you’re toast.
Remember, a concept doesn’t have to be gigantic (Jurassic World) to create curiosity in a reader. But it must at least be thoughtful – clever, fresh, or original. Here are some loglines that would probably do well in the contest…
When a group of teenagers repair an old clock with a mysterious 13th numeral, they are granted an extra hour where their actions have no consequence.
A group of workers at an Ikea-like store find themselves lost within its maze-like interior after a late-night seance goes wrong.
In a claustrophobic race against time, a woman must unravel the mystery behind a malevolent crowd before she succumbs to their relentless pursuit.
A team of financially desperate hotel employees embark on a deadly treasure hunt to recover priceless diamonds from a wrecked yacht in the middle of “The Red Triangle,” the world’s most dangerous hunting ground for great white sharks.
When their embarrassing, sometimes filthy, possibly cancellable group chat falls into the wrong hands, a group of dudes must go on a madcap scavenger hunt around town to appease a mysterious blackmailer.
And here are ones that would not do well…
Eve and Anders dated for a decade. Now, Eve is going to see Anders for the first time in years… at his dad’s funeral. Together, they confront their shared past and the infinite nature of love, even after it dies.
Nothing says “It’s complicated” like breaking your crush’s arm. Set in rural Spain against the backdrop of a passionate soccer rivalry, the story follows young protagonists Sophie and Gloria as they navigate their relationship.
Three people at different points of the immigrant experience come together when the mother of a 10-year-old musical prodigy is arrested in an ICE raid.
A family doctor in East Cleveland juggles his personal life, as he reconnects with an old flame, deals with his teenage daughter’s problems, and selling his family’s medical practice.
Note the difference. The first ones are sexier. They have higher concepts or bigger ideas. The second group chronicles more day-to-day stuff. That’s not to say you can’t write good stories about everyday events. But they have to be way better to get noticed because they get 1/10 to 1/20 the amount of script requests.
Also, beware the “big idea” that feels dated (A trio of sassy, elderly women receive a unique offer from Death for a week of youth in exchange for their lives) the flashy concept that feels random (A struggling screenwriter’s life spirals into chaos when he becomes obsessed with telling the true* story of a mermaid’s life and death.) or the big big concept that lacks a clever angle (A young dad revives his 24-year-old cryogenically frozen mom, unleashing terror and forbidden tension that haunt his family and threaten to unravel his marriage).
STEP 2 – A GOOD FIRST PAGE
The first page is even more critical in a Scriptshadow Showdown than it is in the real world. The reason a first page is important is that this is the page where you are being evaluated on whether you can write. Are your sentences clean and clear? Is the style of your writing pleasant? Is your writing lean and concise? Is there a confidence to your writing? Is there a polish to your writing? Is there a voice to your writing? The second the reader determines any of these things aren’t up to par, they will bail. It’s actually much easier for a reader to bail on page 1 than page 7. So they will do it more often. This is why a good first page is so critical.
STEP 3 – A GOOD FIRST FIVE PAGES
The first five pages are important because they will contain your first full scene. And it is in a scene that readers are able to evaluate whether you are capable of telling a story. As I’ve pointed out many times before, you want to show that you can write a scene with a clear beginning, middle, and end, that it is dramatic, and that makes readers want to turn the page. This is a very difficult skill to master, which is why 95% of writers cannot do it. Cause if you can’t tell a story in one scene, there’s no chance in a million years you can tell a good story over the course of 100 pages. A great recent example of this is the Skyview Restaurant opening scene in the new Final Destination movie. A riveting story-within-a-story. If you write an opening scene like that, I guarantee you, you will hook the reader.
STEP 4 – AT LEAST ONE CHARACTER WE REALLY WANT TO ROOT FOR
A character that the audience loves is a cheat code. Because falling in love with a character isn’t that different from falling in love with a real person. What happens when we fall in love in real life? All of that person’s faults disappear. We are unable to see anything but hearts. Same thing in a script. If we love that character of yours, we don’t see any of the plot’s weaknesses. We don’t need the scenes to be perfect. Mark Watney in The Martian, Ani in Anora, Nate in Novocaine, Roz in The Wild Robot, Deadpool, Willy Wonka in Wonka, or Robert McCall in The Equalizer. A cheat code on top of that cheat code is to ask if an extremely likable or charming actor would want to play that part. If you could imagine Glen Powell wanting to play the role, it’s probably a very likable character.
This is not to say that you can’t write challenging characters – characters like Oppenheimer, or Mad Max, or Bella from Poor Things, or Arthur Fleck from Joker, or Driver from Drive. But your command of character must be VERY VERY HIGH to pull this off. Honestly, all you have to do to make people like your character is give them a good ‘save the cat’ moment and then make them sympathetic in some way (they’re blind, such as in Bring her Back).
But challenging characters require a deft knowledge of character equilibrium, which is the process by which you balance your character’s negative traits against their positive ones, and always have them at a net +1. So: one more positive trait than however many negative traits they have. You must also be obsessed with human psychology to pull off these characters. You have to want to dig into the depths of what makes humans tick. Cause if you don’t love that stuff, it’s very hard to create the depth you need to make these characters three-dimensional. But, the good news is, if you can’t, you can always just make the character likable, which as I just pointed out, is relatively easy.
STEP 5 – A SCRIPT WITH A PLAN
If you can do all of the above, you will be in the top 10 of the Mega Showdown. But if you want to win, you have to know how to write a good script. Obviously that takes more explanation than the last few paragraphs I’m going to write in this article. But a key component of any great script is an engine that’s always running underneath the story. Whether you create that engine with a compelling goal (“Companion” – survive everyone trying to kill you) or a compelling mystery (who’s sending all these drops in “Drop”?), the degree to which we will want to turn the page will be dependent on how strong that engine is. If it peters out at any time, we will lose interest. So there must always be something pushing your characters forward with force.
From there it’s a matter of throwing a lot of obstacles in the way of the objective. Throwing some curveballs at the characters that twist the plot in unexpected ways. Showing your characters grow by fighting through their flaws (and ultimately overcoming them). Creating compelling broken relationships that you eventually resolve in satisfying ways. And putting 100% of your effort into every scene. There shouldn’t be a single scene in your script that you don’t rate at least a 7 out of 10. And the large majority of them should be at 8 out of 10 or higher. Effort alone will get you ahead of most of the screenwriters out there.
Do these things and you will have a winning script. But remember, it all starts with that concept. If that’s weak, the reader will never get to steps 2-5.
Good luck!
