This is it! The Second Annual Mega-Showdown winning screenplay. And we don’t wait around here at Scriptshadow like other contests. We celebrate the script THE VERY NEXT DAY. Hence, here’s the review for… Hard Labor.
Genre: Real-Time Action Thriller
Logline: A heavily pregnant woman is found by criminals she’s been hiding from and the shock makes her go into labor. Now she must awaken old skills to survive this night – because killers are coming…but so is the baby.
About: While Hard Labor finished third in the original voting tally, when it was facing 9 other screenplays, it took the top spot after everyone had a chance to read all four finalists’ first five pages (say that five times in a row!). You can check out those first five pages here. Overall, it was a fairly close competition, with Hard Labor taking in 35% of the votes. That’s 12% higher than the next highest vote-getter. But all four scripts received a solid amount of votes. You can check out the original Mega-Showdown post with the 10 contenders here. And you can check out the finalist post with the top 4 scripts here. For anyone with questions about Hard Labor, I’m sure the writer, Mike, will be in the comments to answer anything you want. Oh, and Mike. CONGRATULATIONS!
Writer: Mike Hurst
Details: 98 pages
Anya Taylor Joy for Tamara??
I noticed that some of you were concerned that this script might come off as goofy with the whole pregnancy angle. And, you know what? I was worried about that too. It was one of the things that made me waver as to whether to choose this script for the competition.
But, as I told you, this competition wasn’t just about the logline. Or even the first page. It was about the first five pages. In other words, I had to make sure that all the writers in this contest could write! And when I read these first five pages, I didn’t have any doubt that this script had to be in.
Nine months pregnant, Susan, is preparing to have her baby. The doctor just told her to get her “go bag” ready. Susan’s response: What’s a go bag? In her defense, she doesn’t need to know a lot about raising babies because she’s giving hers up for adoption after her little girl is born.
Susan heads back to her little apartment that she shares with her gay roommate, Brett. Brett brings home a hookup from work, a guy named Lyle, but Lyle is suspiciously more interested in Susan than he is Brett. It doesn’t take Susan long to figure that old Lyle is a killer. So she utilizes the exploding microwave trick to throw him off balance and then attack and kill him.
Brett loses the desire to get laid pretty fast after that because now he’s got a much bigger problem – There are four more men outside in a car who want to kill Susan. Oh, and her name isn’t really Susan. It’s Tamara. And she’s a hitwoman for one of the most notorious mobsters in the region, Big Red.
Big Red, you say? Yeah, that would be the father of the baby inside Tamara. And he really wants to get that baby before Tamara passes him off to the hospital and the child gets lost in the adoption system, never to be found again. Tamara is determined to deliver this baby because she doesn’t want it growing up in this awful violent life. Getting her as far away from Big Red is paramount.
So, she gets Brett to drive her to the hospital, which immediately results in a chase from Big Red’s main crew. The crew includes the mountainous black bodyguard known as Halsey, and the slick leader of the crew, Ryder, both of whom are determined to kill Tamara (but not the baby!) at all costs, as, should they fail, Big Red will end them.
A chase follows throughout the city. Tamara hides just about everywhere she can (including an active ambulance ride), all while in the middle of labor. But a 120 pound 9 months pregnant assassin can only do so much, and she’s eventually captured. That’s when she drops the bombshell on Halsey (spoilers). This ain’t Big Red’s baby. It’s yours. Halsey, realizing that visual confirmation means he’s dead the second this baby is born, is forced to help Tamara escape. But it may be too late for that. Because Big Red has finally arrived on-site.
Let me start by saying why I chose this script.
Like I said earlier, I was a little skeptical about the setup. I was afraid of that potential goofiness factor. I’ve seen women who are nine months pregnant and their bellies are enormous. That can definitely come off as comical in the wrong hands.
And, the truth is, we won’t know if it works until we see it. Mike has a secret weapon here, which is that the visuals are hidden. Which means we can imagine what we want to imagine. And I imagined a pregnant woman who’s just lean enough to still believably run around like Tom Cruise. Whether that’s how it’s really going to look……? We’ll have to find out.
But the reason I chose the script was because it was one of the few scripts that started the way that I tell everyone to start their script – WITH A STORY. You easily could’ve started this script with a woman in a hospital bed getting an ultrasound. 95 out of 100 writers would’ve done that.
But that’s boring. Unless something crazy is going to happen during that scene.
Instead, we start with a “story scene” that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. We start with Leo being pulled out of his house, towards his pool. There’s a first act, which starts with a goal: Bad guys need information from Leo (Where’s Tamara?). There’s a second act, with conflict: Leo insists he doesn’t know where she is. And there’s a third act, with the conclusion: They get the information then kill Leo anyway.
Stories are just so wonderful to start your script with because they shift the reader into a “what’s going to happen next” mindset immediately. I’m not asking, “What’s going to happen next?” if a pregnant woman is quietly asking her doctor who’s giving her an ultrasound, “Is it a girl or a boy?” That’s not a story. It’s setup. Setup is just information. It’s not entertainment. I’d guess that 95% of aspiring writers don’t understand this and it’s what cooks half their screenplays.
Granted, we do get some of that setup in the second scene. But, by then, we’re already hooked, because the writer has pulled us in with a story.
Now comes the question: Did the rest of the script live up to the first scene?
For the most part, yes.
Hard Labor is one uninterrupted ride. Which is both its powerful chest and its Achilles heel. The problem when you put your pedal to the metal for 90 pages is that it’s easy for things to become a blur. For example, there was a moment early on when we were in the first car chase where I was losing focus because it was so repetitive. There wasn’t enough variety to keep me focused. And that would happen periodically.
But I’ll tell you how the script won me over.
One of the things I always say is to figure out what it is about your story that’s unique and build the majority of your story’s scenes around that unique thing. If you’re writing a movie about a little girl whose monstrous sketches come to life, I better be getting a lot of scenes that deal with real-life sketches attacking people. At first, I was wondering if Mike was doing that enough here. There were a number of set pieces that could’ve been copy and pasted over to a John Wick film, which worried me.
But I realized that Mike was heeding my advice after all. Just ON THE PERSONAL SIDE OF THE SCREENPLAY. We weren’t getting “pregnant-specific” action scenes. But the pregnancy is definitely integrated into the character and plot sides of the script. One of my favorite developments by far was the reveal that Halsey was the father.
There’s this great scene right after Tamara has told him this and Halsey gets in the car with Ryder, who’s still ignorant of the secret, and Ryder brings up that if this isn’t Big Red’s kid, Big Red is going to annihilate, in the worst fashion possible, whoever the father is. And, of course, since there wouldn’t have to be a DNA test for Big Red to figure out who the father is once this baby is out, Halsey is internally freaking the hell out.
This leads to Halsey helping Tamara later and that’s all you need. You need the unique hook your story is built around to drive the major moments of your script. You can’t write the Halsey reveal or Halsey doing a 180 and deciding to help the heroine in any other script. It specifically comes out of the pregnancy hook. I loved that.
By the way, this script could’ve used more humor. Sometimes we make the error as writers to hide our script’s weakness. But often the best writers shine a light on that weakness and use it to their advantage. A woman running around with a gun 9 months pregnant is kind of a funny image. So why not inject some humor into the script? Brett would be a great character to have more fun with. He could freak out more. He had that capability but I always felt that Mike was putting a muzzle on him.
Check out Anora to see how Sean Baker did a great job with a similar scenario. He had one of the thugs constantly throwing up throughout the story because Anora beat him up earlier. And there were quite a few funny moments even from the serious characters in that movie. I would use that as a template to approach the humor here in a baby’s heartbeat.
In a lot of ways, the script reminded me of Clementine, which came from another Scriptshadow reader, David Williams. That script is now in my Top 10. Is Hard Labor going to make the Top 25? I don’t think so. It’ll definitely make the Top 25 Amateur list. But I think for this script to jump up another level or two, it needs a little more variety, as well as originality in the set pieces. I don’t know if we have a stand out set piece here. We have a lot of solid set pieces. But we need an all-star set piece and then we need a “1a” set piece.
I would love to hear the readers of the site volunteer some ideas for some original set pieces. That’s one of the wonderful advantages of doing this contest. Unlike other contests, there’s community support here and we can all help each other. Because I definitely think Hard Labor could be a movie. Even without a rewrite. But I don’t want to just be the starting point for an average movie. I want something great to come out of this.
Overall, I’m very happy with how you guys voted. And one more final congratulations to Mike Hurst!
Script link: Hard Labor
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Make sure the stakes aren’t just high for your hero but for your villains too. We learn early on that if these thugs don’t kill Tamara, Big Red is going to kill them. So the stakes are very high for them to achieve their goal.
