I’m off for the day guys. I’ve been reading Scriptshadow 250 Contest scripts all weekend and need a breather. I know there was a big hubbub over a certain script submitted to Amateur Offerings on Saturday. Guys, honestly? Don’t get your skivvies in a bunch over it. A “Get Noticed” script is a perfectly viable approach to marketing yourself in this industry.
Less and less specs are selling each year so you’re not so much writing to sell as you are writing to get noticed. If someone wants to break the rules and write first-person action lines, it’s not a big deal. We’ve seen Black List scripts do this. We’ve seen Nicholl finalists do this. And hell, we just saw a movie dominate the box office that embraced this mentality. I’m not sure why people were freaking out about it so much.
Moving on, here are 5 scripts that you don’t want to write, derived from the last 5 Scriptshadow 250 scripts I read. I know you’ll all ask, “When will you announce the winner, Carson??” I refuse to answer that question as I haven’t met any of my previous deadlines. All I can say is that I have 18 of the 25 finalists so far and that I continue to read!
1) The “By-the-books” script – I read a biopic and the writing was actually really good. But the writer hit all the biopic beats right down to the childhood flashbacks. There wasn’t a single moment that surprised me. I was 50 pages ahead of the writer, and that was on page 5! You have to infuse some unexpected choices into your scripts guys! Don’t just use a template from a successful script in your genre and follow it to a ‘t.’
2) The “Can’t Get Out of My Own Way” script – This script came from one of my favorite commenters on Scriptshadow so I was really looking forward to it. But the writer was so set on impressing us with his writing that every paragraph was 15 words longer than it needed to be. I had to keep going back through sentences to understand what I’d just read. Just getting through the script became a chore. Stop overcomplicating things. Write in a simple manner that’s easy to read!
3) The “Flashbacks For No Reason” script – Oh boy. This script kept jumping back into flashbacks that would REPEATEDLY tell me things I already knew. The main character liked chocolate. So the flashback would be of the hero as a child buying chocolate from a candy store. No, guys. No. If you’re going to include a flashback, it better have a point that relates to the story!
4) The “I Haven’t Done A Lick of Research Into the World of the Story I’m Telling” script – This particular script was about a bunch of hardcore thugs who came from a rough neighborhood. Though it was clearly written by an upper middle class white dude who’d never spent a day in the hood in his life. If you’re going to write about a world you know nothing about, you better take the time to research that world. The page don’t lie.
5) The “I’m Not Bringing Anything New To The Party” script – It’s perfectly okay to want to bring back a genre. For example, writers have been trying to bring back the Spielberg 80s movies for 20 years now. But there’s a difference between bringing a fresh new angle to these movies, and bringing us the exact same movies we’ve already seen. If you don’t bring the fresh new angle, your script will feel dated, like something that was written in the 80s, and that’s not what you want.
Hope that helps. Oh, and check out both 11/22/63 on Hulu and Love on Netflix. Both rock and are very well-written!
