Genre: Thriller/ Serial Killer
Premise: When her sister goes missing, Minnow, a seemingly troubled woman, goes to extreme lengths to hunt down the mysterious man who took her. The disturbing truth goes beyond just one missing girl, and nothing–including Minnow–is as it seems.
About: Today’s writing team secured the fifth most votes on 2025’s Black List, a list of the best screenplays in Hollywood.
Writers: Zach Strauss & Christopher Silber
Details: 91 pages

Maisie for Minnow?

Is anything real anymore? I just learned about this Stranger Things debate that’s raging due to the poorly received final episodes in the series. Apparently, there was a promotional picture taken on set where the Duffer Brothers had a naughty tab open on their laptop – CHAT GPT!

Did Chat GPT write the final episode of Stranger Things???

I’m akin to saying it’s more likely that Millie Bobby Brown’s lip filler wrote the final episode.

Not that I care. I’ve got bigger scores to settle.

Scriptshadow Nation? We are down to our last hope.

I made a proclamation that if none of the top 5 scripts on the 2025 Black List rated higher than a “wasn’t for me,” then the Black List was officially no longer relevant.

To be clear, that doesn’t mean that out of the 75 scripts that routinely make the list each year, all of them are bad. Of course there will be some good ones. But if the way you tally votes results in none of the top 5 scripts being any good, then something is broken here. And the Black List needs to overhaul its process.

Well, we’re down to our last potato. This is it, people. The fifth and final script in the top 5.

The good news? It’s a serial killer script — a good genre to work with if you want to write something entertaining. But I’m nervous! I don’t want to be the person who officially announces that the Black List is dead.

So let us pray one final time to the Script Gods. William. Billy. Paddy. Robert. And, oh hell, let’s throw a living God in there as well. Quentin? Lead us through this screenplay, that it may be gloriously good, and raise us up unto celebration before all. So help me, slug line.

In giving you a plot summary here, a gentle warning that this is a very twisty and turny script. So if you don’t want to know what happens via my review, go read the script first!

When we meet 20-something Minnow, she’s a tatted up drug-addict sleeping in her car. The girl’s clearly hit rock bottom, and seems to only be interested in finding her next score. Gotta find a mark. Gotta steal dough. Gotta buy drugs. Or so we think!

A day after we meet her, Minnow is in a bar being propositioned by a creepy dude. She’s pissed and tells him to screw off. The kind bartender apologizes for the crappiness of the clientele and offers her a drink. But Minnow is already skipping this lame joint. Unfortunately, she doesn’t make it far. Once outside, she feels woozy, stumbles, and blacks out.

When she wakes up, she’s in the “cab” section of a giant semi truck. This is the little bedroom behind the front seat where truckers can sleep on long routes. But this isn’t a normal cab room. It’s a prison. There’s no way to break out of this thing.

Minnow fights and fights to get out but it’s hopeless. The Trucker, ignoring her, just keeps on driving across the country. But where is he taking her?! During this time, through little snippets of dreams and dialogue, we learn that Minnow used to be a Marine. And her sister was kidnapped!

Cut back in time (spoilers follow) and a fresher non-addict version of Minnow meets an odd obsessive man named Buck. Buck’s daughter went missing and Buck’s theory is that a trucker took her. Realizing they’re looking for the same guy, they profile the type of man this trucker is and design a version of Minnow that would fit the ideal look that this trucker is looking for. That’s right – they’re designing Minnow to be bait!

We then cut back to the present where we now realize that Minnow had planned to get caught by this dude the whole time so she could find out what happened to her sis. Minnow calls upon her Marine skills, escapes the cab, and turns the tables on the trucker, putting him in the cab! The trucker then tells her something shocking – “I’m just the delivery guy.”

Once a trailing Buck catches up to them, they argue about what to do next. In doing so, they lose focus and the trucker escapes into the local mountains! So Minnow goes after him! Except that Minnow gets tricked and walks right into a trap he set! He’s about to kill her when… he gets shot! It’s a state trooper we met earlier who was tracking Minnow.

The police consider this serial killer case closed but Minnow tries to explain to them what the trucker told her. That he’s the delivery guy. The real killer is still out there! Naw, the head trooper says. We’re good. This forces Minnow to go off on her own in search of the final boss. But maybe, for this leg of the mission, she’s finally in over her head.

There was a famous screenwriting book written a few decades ago called, “I Liked it, Didn’t Love It.” It was a genius premise for a book about screenwriting because it got to the heart of what separates WHAT HOLLYWOOD PULLS THE TRIGGER ON versus WHAT HOLLYWOOD PASSES ON.

You see, the mistake so many writers make in their assumptions about the industry is that only the bad scripts get passed over. But that’s not the case at all. There are actually a lot of decent scripts out there that don’t deserve to be movies. They don’t have that extra gear, that extra fang, that extra wild card that makes them stand out.

This was the premise in that book. These development executives would read a ton of screenplays that they mildly enjoyed. But there was nothing special about them and, therefore, there was no reason to recommend them to their boss to get produced.

And, by the way, I’m not talking about amateur screenplays here. These development execs were mainly reading scripts sent out by legitimate agents. These were repped writers. Which is a reminder that there are levels to this world.

Minnow is a “Liked it didn’t love it” screenplay. I might even go a step lower. It’s a “liked it in places but didn’t like it overall” screenplay. It does have some good moments. When we jump back in time to a perfectly fine Minnow and go through a series of steps that catch us up to the reality of the situation – Minnow created a persona to deliberately get caught by this serial killer – that was a legit good moment.

But no sooner had that moment settled in than the trucker escaped and headed up this mountain. All of a sudden, I’m now reading a survivalist movie about a woman tracking a killer in the mountains?? We’ve strayed too far from the original premise.

I call these screenplay moments “reboots.” They require the writer to reboot the story for this new setting that doesn’t look anything like the original story that was set up. It can work in rare circumstances. But that moment was the official moment I gave up on the script. Which is too bad. Cause that twist was good.

This is another thing that separates the big paid screenwriters from the struggling ones, is inconsistency. You create a great moment. Then you follow it up with a questionable one. The good writers consistently make strong creative choices.

Of the top five scripts on the Black List, I would put this in a tie with yesterday’s “Untouchable.” It’s completely different from that screenplay but I like that it plays with the execution. This script is definitely better than had it gone about its story linearly. Because by doing it this way, it creates a shocking moment out of nothing.

And Minnow is a mostly cool character. I wouldn’t say she’s great. I thought the Marine background felt questionable. But she’s super active and super active characters do wonders for your plot. They always push things forward because they’re always ACTIVELY looking for the next clue, the next lead, the next opportunity to make something happen.

Sadly, the inconsistency of the narrative towards the end derailed this for me. This is not a bad script. But, unfortunately, it’s not something I would recommend to anyone.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: At a time when Hollywood needs better scripts than ever, the Black List has become unreliable. So, let me remind you that it is very rare I read a script where I feel that the writer gave me everything they had. That doesn’t mean the script has to be perfect. But I feel like they gave me all their best choices. They gave me the best versions of every scene they wrote. They gave me their best versions of the characters they could put into that story. If I said to any of these writers, “Is that opening scene the best you could do?” They would say, without flinching, “Yes.” “Can you make this character any better?” “No.” I mainly run into scripts where the writers get everything to about a 70-75% level and call it a day. Which is exactly why their scripts get the “liked it didn’t love it” response. Cause “good enough” ironically isn’t good enough. You have to leave it all on the page and I just don’t think writers are doing that – in an age, mind you – where the immense proliferation of content across all media platforms has made the margin for error in storytelling microscopic. If you want to stand out from the pack, give us everything. Literally EVERYTHING you have. You can’t afford not to.

Genre: Historical/Serial Killer
Premise: The true exploits of Eliot Ness during his hunt for the “Torso Murderer,” a serial killer whose bloody reign terrorized 1930s Cleveland.
About: This script finished number 4 on the latest Black List, an annual list of the best scripts in Hollywood. I have read the top 3 scripts already, all of which were not good. That’s never happened before in the history of me reading this list. That led to a new goal – find at least one good script in the top 5. That journey has taken me to today’s script. Both writers Reiss Clauson-Wolf and Julian Silver were staff writers on the TV show, “SEAL Team.”
Writers: Julian Silver & Reiss Clauson-Wolf
Details: 114 pages

Butler for Ness?

I am happy to announce that we’ve found two Black List writers who know how to write! I know we’ve put up many a flyer across Los Angeles since December 12th, when the 2025 Black List was released. MISSING: GOOD WRITERS ON THE BLACK LIST. Finally, we have our first lead.

But being a good writer does not guarantee that you will write a good script. There are too many potholes on the construction path to writing something people enjoy. So take a journey with me on the 4th highest voted Black List script to see if it’s any good.

It’s 1934 in Cleveland, Ohio. Eliot Ness, who has become famous throughout the United States for leading “The Untouchables” in pursuit of Al Capone, has taken this new job of Public Safety Director here.

He’s done so well at his job that they’re throwing parties for him! Until one unfortunate evening when someone discovers a bunch of headless torsos in a grimy lake in the bad part of town.

You have to keep in mind that serial killers aren’t a thing yet. The only thing anybody on the planet knows about someone killing multiple people is Jack the Ripper. But that’s all the way over in England!

Ness finds purpose in this new threat and immediately puts together a task force, with detective Paul Marlow helping him, a haunted cop who hides his secret homosexuality. And if you’re rolling your eyes right now, just know that you’re not alone.

The two start looking into the Torso Killer but there’s very little evidence to go on. And, remember, they don’t have the FBI serial killer playbook yet. That’s something that will come about decades later. This means that they’re running around with their heads cut off, no pun intended.

Eventually, the killings cease and Ness and Marlow have nothing to do. So Ness retreats into his troubled marriage, which has his wife emotionally cheating with another man and Ness physically cheating with another woman. Meanwhile, Marlow is getting his freak on at the local men’s club.

When new bodies are found, Ness finds his investigation thwarted by the local Sheriff, who Ness fired a year ago due to incompetance. Because of this, the Sheriff refuses to share information with Ness and Marlow. Not to mention, the Sheriff is close pals with the local mob boss, Big Paulie. This whole situation is starting to stink.

To make matters worse, Marlow thinks Ness is the Kim Kardashian of his era, desperate for adulation. So he quits. When Ness finally thinks he’s found the killer, we’re shocked to learn that it’s someone closer to him than we could’ve possibly imagined. With Ness being on his own now, it’ll be up to him to get the confession he so desperately covets.

Quinto for Marlow?

Let’s begin with the first scene, which follows a party that the mayor is throwing to celebrate Elliot Ness’s successful attack on local crime.

I pay a ton of attention to party scenes in scripts because if a writer knows how to write a party scene, they usually know how to write a script. That’s because a party scene is one of the most difficult scenes to write in screenwriting. It covers a lot of time. It covers a lot of characters. And that creates a really bumpy canvas to work with.

What I always tell writers is that you want to think of your party scenes as mini-movies. You need a hero (or key character) with a goal. You need that goal to have stakes. And you need there to be an urgency in achieving that goal.

That’s the simplified version. There are many other things you can do to create an entertaining party scene. But that baseline gives you your best shot at succeeding.

Now, here’s the interesting thing about “Untouchable.” It doesn’t have the goal, the stakes, or the urgency. It actually approaches the scene in the wrong way. Clearly, it’s a scene created to set up many of the main characters, and that’s a mistake. It’s just not entertaining. As a writer, you’re basically saying, “I know you’re bored. But memorize this boring part and I promise I’ll start the good stuff afterwards.”

I don’t agree with that writing philosophy at all.

However, I felt that Clauson-Wolf and Silver made it out of the party scene unscathed. They definitely didn’t win any awards with it. But they didn’t tank the scene either. How did they make it out? One little trick that did a lot of the work for them. They made Ness not want to be there. Ness was the guest of honor. He’s the most important person at the party. And he doesn’t want to be there.

Why is this important?

Because a character at odds with himself is a character in conflict. And conflict is the lifeblood of drama. I’ve said it here dozens of times. If all else fails and you can’t shape a compelling story into your scene, at the VERY LEAST, add conflict. And that can get you through.

Every interaction Ness has here contains a tinge of conflict because he doesn’t want to be talking to these people. They all want something from me but he doesn’t want to give it to them. He just wants to go home and rest and then do what he does best tomorrow: his job.

That choice gave me enough confidence in the script that I knew it would be better than the top 3 entries. And the next 20 pages seemed to bolster that belief. I liked the buildup of Ness and Marlow getting ready to look for the killer.

Unfortunately, a combination of three things sink this script. Let me be fair here though and say that a spoiler would ruin this analysis. So I’ll just confirm that the spoiler softens one of the mistakes here. But it doesn’t get rid of that mistake.

The first problem is that the writers tell us, before the story even starts, that the Butcher was never found. So we already know that they’re going to fail.

There are dramatic reasons to tell the writer what’s coming ahead of time. That’s one of the ways you create dramatic irony and anticipation. It’s a legitimate storytelling tool. But I don’t know what advantage you gain by telling the reader: “By the way, the two main characters fail.” I mean, why are we still reading then??

The next problem is that the story lacks urgency. The killings happen. It creates a lot of excitement. Ness and Marlow are on the case. And then…… months go by without any killings. Or any new leads. And then there’s another killing! So, more investigating! But then the assumption is the butcher fled the state and a year goes by without any killings. And then there are another two killings! Etc.

Look at the unenviable way these two things work together. A year can go by in this story without any progress. That alone is boring. But you’ve also told us that they don’t find this guy! So we know that enduring these endless periods of inactivity aren’t going to lead to any satisfying conclusions.

Finally, the script has no real stakes. Yes, people are dying, but the victims are homeless men with no social weight. In true crime, audience engagement follows a clear hierarchy: the more socially valued and the more innocent the victim, the higher the emotional investment. By choosing victims at the very bottom of that hierarchy, the reader could give two shits about them. The deaths don’t move the needle because the audience isn’t given any one of any real value to care about.

Here’s the good news: this is the best of the top four scripts on the Black List. The bad news is that, despite some really well-written prose, a worthy protagonist, a strong command of craft, and a confident writing style, the story doesn’t have a solid enough foundation to carry the reader all the way to the finish line. It gets to about page 40 before the slow-grinding gears catch hold of the pages and, from that point on, we’re mostly bored. Can’t recommend this one.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Adding more of a thing that’s not working does not make it work. If your thought process is: “one dead homeless man may not be enough to make the audience care. But if there are ten dead homeless men, then they’ll care.” No. Sorry, that’s not how it works. If we didn’t care about the one, we’re not going to care about the many.

And my thoughts on Golden Globes Best Screenplay Winner, One Battle After Another

I don’t put much stock in the Golden Globes. I’m not sure anyone does. But I did notice that One Battle After Another won the screenwriting award, which raises the obvious question: should it have?
Let’s look at the other nominated scripts. There were:

Sinners
Marty Supreme
It Was Just an Accident
Sentimental Value
Hamnet.

Start with Sinners. Was it a good screenplay? I’d say no. Not a brutal no, but clear enough that if it were a UFO in the sky, you’d be able to take a picture and start disclosure. The story took far too long to get going. There was an overload of setup and exposition, and that’s one of the most important tools a screenwriter has. It’s also one of the easiest things for studios to point to when justifying why they hire a writer. Someone who can handle that part of the script is incredibly valuable.

Movies need to move. And the opening, which carries the heaviest informational load, is where non-screenwriting development types need the most help. No amount of AI assistance can guide viewers through an information-dense opening the way a great screenwriter can. Here, the setup just kept going and going. It was clumsy sauce with a splash of lazy lemon.

Once the story finally hit its stride, it was pretty solid. But let’s be honest: it ultimately boiled down to: vampires are trying to kill us, ahhhhhh!  For that reason alone, it makes sense that Sinners didn’t take the award.

Next up is Hamnet. I don’t know much about Hamnet other than that Chloe Zhao directed it and was a co-writer. Hey, it looks emotionally affecting. I suppose the screenplay might be good. But Chloe Zhao is not about narrative. She’s about vibes. You don’t win screenplay awards on vibes alone. There has to be serious technical skill at work. The great screenwriters are the most rigorous below the page and the most invisible above it. That’s not how Zhao writes, so Hamnet losing isn’t surprising.

Moving on, we’ve got It Was Just An Accident. You can’t give an award to a movie nobody’s ever seen. Word on the street is there was exactly one screening of this movie, in the town of Minab near the southern border of Iran, and every single person in the audience was a cousin of the director. Putting this on the list is just silly. It feels like someone said, “We’ve got one slot left. What do we do?” and another person went, “Well, it’s got a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes from the 72 most pretentious film critics on Earth. Nobody will question it.” And that’s how it ended up here. This is catnip for snooty publications that love movies nobody actually wants to sit through. So yeah, I completely understand Accident not winning the award.

On to Sentimental Value. This movie is basically anti-screenwriting. It’s the kind of film where, if the production showed up one morning and realized they’d left the script at home, it wouldn’t have mattered. They still would’ve rolled cameras and nobody would’ve noticed. The story doesn’t move with any urgency. It’s perfectly happy to hang out, wander off, follow random threads, then drift back whenever it feels like it. You could invent an entire sequence on the spot, shoot it that afternoon, and it would slide right into the movie without causing a ripple. I’m sorry, but that’s not screenwriting. So yeah, I completely understand Sentimental Value not winning the award.

No script? Shoot a beach scene with no dialogue at golden hour!

Finally, we’ve got Marty Supreme. Of the six nominated films, this one had the best chance at stealing the screenplay award from Battle. If your main criteria for good screenwriting is memorable characters — and that is one of the hardest things to do in screenwriting, is create memorable characters — then Marty Supreme probably should’ve edged out Battle. But the narrative was such a goddamn mess. And so was Battle’s. But Marty Supreme felt a little sloppier. As I’ve said a million times, you gotta use that urgency, baby. That urgency gives your narrative focus. By spreading that movie over a year’s time, it disintegrated any focus that might’ve pulled this mess together.

So the voters were kind of stuck. There isn’t great screenwriting on display here. But Paul Thomas Anderson is one of the last holdovers from that ’90s wave when all those distinct voices broke through and voters remember that. They’re not voting for Battle, which is clumsy and unsatisfying. They’re voting for Boogie Nights. They’re voting for There Will Be Blood. The brand tells them, “This is the safest, most reasonable choice.”

I just hope no aspiring screenwriters are watching these Golden Globes and thinking they should use Battle as a template for how to write movies. Cause if they are, the future of cinema is in a lot of trouble!

Let’s move on to some real screenwriting, shall we?

The Housemaid!

The Housemaid is turning into a crazy slow-boil hit. The kind of hit that we used to see in Hollywood half a dozen times a year. Now, it only happens once a year. And The Housemaid has snagged this year’s title. It started off with a solid but less than exciting 19 million dollar opening weekend. But it fell only 19.5% in its second weekend, 1% in its third weekend, and 25% this weekend. It’s currently at 94 million dollars domestic and is probably going to play strongly for another month.

I told Sydney the last time we chatted, which was on this site that she most certainly reads daily, that she can’t make these vanity projects like Christy anymore. Play to your base. She listened, signing onto this movie, and the rest is history.

Now, the movie may have “officially” started off as a book. But it essentially started off as a spec script. What I mean by that is, these quick-read thriller novels are spec scripts in disguise. They’re short like scripts.  They’re always contained in some way (here, both in location and timespan), which translates beautifully to movies. Like any good thriller, it includes “talked about moments” — in this case a couple of fun twists. And they have that easy marketing hook that, just as I was talking about Thursday, can be captured in a poster that gets people excited to see the movie.

These romantic thrillers or “danger” thrillers or horror thrillers, or any combination of these subgenres, are script sale gold. It’s like you’ve found this secret cave full of spec scripts that sell effortlessly. And make no mistake, the success of this film is going to mean that at least for the next year, studios are going to be desperate for these types of scripts. Not just because they’re easy to market and they’re hot. But because they don’t cost a lot of money.

I love a good thriller script. I love this stuff! Fatal Attraction and Single White Female and Basic Instinct are seared into my screenwriting blood. So if you guys are into this genre at all, throw it my way at some point. Because I would love to make one of these movies.

Your thoughts on Housemaid, Golden Globes, or even Avatar (Is it possible to have a billion dollar bomb?). Share’em in the comments!

Just to put everyone’s mind at ease, I want to give a quick update on the Blood & Ink Contest.
About a month ago, I asked all the entrants to check in and let me know how things were going. The most common response was simple and honest: they were behind. But the more telling response came from the people who didn’t email me at all. My guess is that a lot of them are stuck. They don’t think they have a movie. They don’t think they can finish. Nothing is working, so they’ve gone into avoidance mode and buried their heads in the sand.

I want to make something very clear, not just to the writers in this contest, but to all the writers reading this post. A lot of you think this problem is unique to you. It isn’t.

There has never been a writer in history who finished a piece of work without, at multiple points, wanting to quit. There has never been a writer who didn’t become convinced midway through their script that what they were writing was terrible. There has never been a writer who didn’t believe, at some point, that they were the worst writer on the planet.

That’s not a personal failing. That’s just how the writer’s mind works, dude!

Writers live in their brain matter. That’s their gift. It’s what allows them to imagine worlds, characters, and all that swelling emotional nuance. But it’s also a curse. Internal people are very good at spiraling. Very good at catastrophizing. Very good at convincing themselves that everything is broken and unsalvageable.

Once you understand that, you gain power over it. You can ignore those thoughts. You can cut them off. Or you can let them pass through you and keep going anyway.

Self-judgment is the enemy of output.

Stop judging yourself. Just get the pages down. Don’t worry about where the script will be in a month, a week, a day, or even an hour. Focus on the present moment and on moving new words onto the page. If you do that consistently, you will finish. If instead you obsess over the perceived quality of every little word you’re writing, continuing becomes impossible.

I watched an interview with Vince Gilligan recently, after finishing Pluribus, and he said, “Writing never gets easier.  You’d think it would.  It would be nice if it did.  But it doesn’t.”  And I know what he means.  It always remains hard to discover those game-changing creative choices that bring a script alive.  You gotta fight for them.

So do this for me. Don’t quit. Keep writing!

Now, moving on.

Since it’s the start of a new year, I want to talk about beginnings. Specifically, the beginning of ANY NEW SCREENPLAY you’re about to write. My job gives me a unique vantage point into the choices writers make at this stage, and there is one decision that comes up again and again as the most important of all. That is: deciding what kind of script to write.

That choice shapes everything that follows. Arguably, it’s the most important decision you will make on a screenplay. I’ve written a lot about choosing concepts, but over time I’ve realized there’s a variable that makes this decision especially tricky.

That variable is you.

As writers, we’re drawn to certain subjects. We’re fascinated by particular dynamics, themes, and corners of the human experience. The problem is that we often let our personal obsessions drive the idea, rather than stopping to ask whether those obsessions translate into something audiences actually want to see.

For example, I’m endlessly fascinated by people who have known each other forever, like married couples, quietly lying to each other in small, everyday ways. I find that dynamic riveting. But if I wrote a screenplay about a marriage built on tiny, constant deceptions, who’s lining up to buy a ticket to that movie?

My fascination alone doesn’t make it compelling.

This happens all the time. Writers inject their obsessions into scripts without asking whether those obsessions serve the audience’s curiosity. A screenplay should maximize dramatic conflict, deliver a compelling plot, and give audiences characters they want to root for. If the script exists mainly to indulge the writer’s personal interests, the result is a movie that only the writer enjoys.

With that in mind, I want to remind you of the three most effective ways to choose a script idea. I call these Tier 1 approaches. They consistently give writers the best chance of selling a script, getting a movie made, or getting hired for writing assignments.

First, the Big Idea

The Big Idea is baked into Hollywood history. It’s the idea that immediately feels like a movie, either because it’s high concept or extremely marketable. One of the easiest ways to figure out if you have a big idea is to imagine the poster.  Is the poster exciting?  Does it lean into a known genre and “type” of movie whose format we recognize?  Or is it vague, confusing, or boring? Here are two posters.  Which movie would you rather see?

What helps is that the title is in sync with the image.  When those two things don’t connect, it leaves the potential viewer confused.

The Housemaid is a big idea. The Running Man is a big idea. The Long Walk is a big idea. Good Fortune is a big idea. Sinners is a big idea.

On the other side of the spectrum are films like Train Dreams, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, The Baltimorons, and Christy. I’m not making a value judgment here. This isn’t about what’s good or bad. It’s simply about illustrating what a Big Idea looks like. Big ideas are easier to pitch, easier to understand, and easier to get made.

Second, the Big Character

One of the great secrets of screenwriting is that if you have a big enough character, they become their own high concept.  In that sense, the Big Character is the Big Idea’s close cousin.

I first heard this articulated by Wes Anderson. He said that he never starts with a concept. He starts with a character. That’s how Rushmore came to be. He created Max Fischer, a secretly poor student at an elite private school who signs up for so many extracurricular activities that he has no time left to attend class, and is therefore failing everything. Then Max falls in love with a teacher and chaos ensues. You could watch Max Fischer for hours. Which helped you forget that you were watching a very simple movie about going to school.

When you eliminate concept from the equation, you’re forced to work relentlessly to make the character fascinating, because that’s all you have. If the character isn’t shockingly interesting, the movie collapses. And ultimately, this is why people go to movies in the first place. We go to fall in love with people, not plots.

Recent Big Character movies include Marty Supreme, which I just reviewed, Christy from a few months back, Jerry Maguire, Tár, The Martian, and Anora. A good test is this: imagine a role so good that actors would happily stab each other in the back to get it. If that’s the case, you have a Big Character.

Third, the Big Voice.

The Big Voice is an interesting case. Having a strong, distinctive voice is arguably more valuable today than ever before, even though the golden age of the voice-driven screenwriter was fifteen to twenty-five years ago. That era gave us Charlie Kaufman, Diablo Cody, Quentin Tarantino, Richard Linklater, and Alexander Payne.

The media landscape is noisier now. We don’t really create household-name screenwriters anymore. But that doesn’t make voice any less important. If anything, it makes it more powerful. So many scripts today feel safe, familiar, and interchangeable. If you write weird ideas, see the world in an offbeat way, have a dark or unusual sense of humor, and your pages read unlike anyone else’s, you will stand out immediately.

The advantage of the voice writer is that the writing itself makes every page exciting to read.  Even if no great character emerges or no great plot emerges, we enjoy reading the words on each page because those words are a direct link to a very unusual mind, which is a rare experience.

That said, this path only works if you truly have a voice. If your voice is vanilla AF, choose one of the other Tier 1 approaches. And if you do commit to voice, commit fully. Don’t hedge. Give us Bugonia, not Ice Cube’s War of the Worlds. Some contemporary writers working in this space include Charlie Brooker, Ari Aster, Zach Cregger, Alex Garland, Brian Duffield, Jesse Armstrong, Taylor Sheridan, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and Vince Gilligan. When you read their work, it always feels unmistakably like them.

These three tiers will consistently give you the best shot at industry attention. They are not the only path in, but they are the most reliable. You can always choose to write exactly what you want and hope that passion carries it across the finish line. Sometimes it does.

But above all else, I’ll be happy if you just keep writing. Keep writing!! Don’t get discouraged. Writing is a peaks-and-valleys experience, and if we’re being honest, there are far more valleys than peaks. Let that knowledge empower instead of defeat you. When you expect the valleys, you’re better equipped to push through them.

Good luck in 2026. Here’s to a whole gondola full of you breaking in!

And in one of the oddest movie crossovers I’ve ever seen on the Black List, we have Promising Young Woman meets Just One of the Guys

Genre: Comedy
Premise: When a college student is sexually assaulted by a frat guy who faces no consequences, she and her best friend rush his fraternity undercover to get revenge – only to become the unlikely stars of Delta Iota Kappa’s pledge class and get in way too deep.
About: This script finished number 3 on last year’s Black List. The script appears to have been developed at Berlanti/Schechter Films, which has a first look deal with Netflix.
Writers: Read Masino & Cassidy Alla
Details: 116 pages

I’m thinking the writers would love an actress like Nico Parker in the lead role

My plan is to read all five of the top 5 Black List scripts and pray that one of them is good. Because if all 5 are bad, the Black List is in a lot of trouble. Cause that’s never happened before. Typically, I love one of the top 5. And then there’s usually another solid script in the bunch.

So far, I’ve read the two top vote-getters, and each has fallen short in its own way. This is script number three on the list and the stakes are high. If it doesn’t land, only two chances remain.

Let us all briefly pray to the script gods. I would love nothing more than to read something great today. It makes my job so much easier!

Here we go…

Daisy is a freshman at college and one night, when she’s really trashed at a fraternity, the head dog of the frat house, Brad, picks her up and brings her to his room. He then starts forcefully making out with her, leading to heavier groping, leading to maybe full-on sexual assault (the sequence isn’t described very clearly so it’s hard to tell exactly what happens). Then, out of nowhere, Daisy projectile vomits over both of them and a grossed out Brad bails.

Daisy tells the story to her best friend Maddy, a lesbian who doesn’t go to college, and the more they talk about it, the more the wheels start spinning. Eventually, they come up with a plan to infiltrate Brad’s fraternity as male versions of themselves and figure out a way to collect evidence that Brad did this then take him down.

With the help of Maddy’s brother, the two create their male personas, Derek and Max. They then head over to the frat, where they learn that it’s pledging season. So they pledge. Along the way, Daisy meets hottie pledge Jake and starts to fall for him. Of course, it’s tricky because she’s not a woman when she’s around him. And Maddy falls for a stuck-up girl named Stephanie, who she romances as Max, even though she knows that Stephanie is not into women.

Along the way, they keep looking for opportunities to sneak into Brad’s room and look for “evidence.” But while Brad is always bad, he’s never bad enough to take down. So they decide they need to catch him when he’s at his worst. Hence, they target the frat’s big party of the year. There, he will almost certainly assault someone. And they’ll be there when it happens!

Let’s start here:

Why the white folk stray?

I want to know what goes on in a writer’s head that they think it’s a good idea to take a shot at any group of people. On the very first page of their script, no less.

It’s so hard these days to get anybody to back your screenplay. Why would you intentionally alienate half your readers?

I don’t get it.

But anyway, this script has problems beyond its low-key racism.

“Rush” wants to be Promising Young Woman but funny. So the central question becomes: Can sexual assault be funny?

“Rush” certainly tries.

But the script is stuck riding this delicate line of celebrating Superbad-level humor while continually having to come back to this uglier sexual assault plotline.

And the worlds never come into alignment.

It really is true that 90% of a script’s problems can be traced back to the concept. If the concept has any weakness at all, you will not be able to hide it in the screenplay. It’s usually the opposite that happens. That spotlight grows even brighter and lights up every crack in the foundation.

The thing is, the solution to Rush’s problem is simple. Replace the sexual assault storyline with something else. Getting back at the guy who dumped you, for example. Because the real hook here – the thing dominating this story – isn’t the sexual assault. It’s two girls pretending to be guys in a fraternity. That’s the whole movie. The sexual assault stuff only pops up every once in a while.

You want to find a concept that supports the best part of your idea. And the best part of this idea is the two girls pretending to be guys and infiltrating the frat house. When the writers focus on that, they have some success. There are some legitimately funny scenes here.

In this scene, Maddy forgets that she’s dressed as Max, a guy. So when she approaches a girl on campus, she thinks she’s approaching a fellow girl. But all the girl sees is a creepy guy coming up to her. And Maddy gets her first dose of what happens when a girl makes an assumption about you because you’re a man.

There’s also a later scene where Maddy and Daisy have to go on dates to a party where they must, at various times, present as both their male and female selves. And that scene is pretty clever.

But the script has to always come back to this bummer sexual assault storyline and it never works. One moment, we’re reading this really goofy 2025 version of She’s The Man. And then, out of nowhere, it’s rape talk. It’s weird.

This thing becomes way more marketable if it’s just a movie about a girl trying to get even with the boyfriend who left her, sort of a modern take on Legally Blonde. And if the response to that is: the script becomes less interesting cause it’s not dealing with anything “serious,” there are other serious things you can work into the story. And there are other more natural story setups to explore sexual assault in. After the Hunt is a great recent example.

No matter how you slice it, sexual assault and She’s the Man is a very inorganic crossover. One side of the script is always going to feel like it’s in the wrong movie.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: It’s unfortunate that the concept for Rush was faulty, because these writers are the only ones among the top three entries who know how to write scenes. Go back and read the scenes in Equity then read the scenes here. You’ll notice that Equity rarely enters scenes with a clear point. Scenes are mainly used for exposition, with little structure or form.

Here, however, there are several scenes with strong form. Achieving this isn’t difficult. One of the simplest ways is to give your characters a problem and see whether they escape it or not. If the situation itself is funny, you’ll get a strong scene out of it.

There’s a scene where a fraternity hazes pledges by asking personal questions about one another (“Who did Joe lose his virginity to?”). If they answer incorrectly, they have to strip off their shirts to be humiliated. Obviously, if that happens to Derek or Max, they’re screwed, so the stakes are high. When Brad finally questions them, his frustration builds as they answer every question about the other pledges effortlessly because, of course, they’re women and actually listened during their conversations with the other pledges.

It’s a fun scene, but more importantly, it demonstrates that the writers understand what a scene is, something I can confidently say neither of the top two Black List writers did.