It’s been many moons since I’ve last been enamored by a script. Or a movie, for that matter. It’s led me to question what the issue is. Is it everybody else?  Do people simply not know how to write anymore? Or is it me? Have my standards become too high?

I’ll tell you what I’m scared of. I’m scared of becoming that Scriptshadow commenter who hates every movie. If I can no longer enjoy the movies I watch or the screenplays I read, then there’s no incentive for me to continue doing this. I’m not interested in having a website that craps on everybody.  I want to spread LOVE!  Not be a hater-potater.

And yet Hollywood is doing everything in its power to lure me into a hate cocoon. I commend the Marvel marketing team for their Herculean effort to convince people that The Marvels is actually good. I’m assuming they sent Chris Hemsworth out to spend a day with every critic who gave this film a fresh score on Rotten Tomatotes.  But come on, Marvel has known for a year that they’re dealing the cinematic equivlanet of fentynal.  It’s insulting to sell us that this movie is actually watchable.

Then we get this new Ghostbusters trailer.  What is going on here??  It’s a movie about an ice villain???  Did they accidentally swap with one of Marvel’s scripts?  We’ll find out a year from now when Marvel releases Ghost Thor: Who Ya Gonna Call.

I haven’t even enjoyed the Star Wars offerings.  You know what’s sad (or awesome, depending on your point of view0?  One of the ways I wind down is watching Youtube videos of people watching the original Star Wars for the first time.  It’s so addictive seeing them experience this wondorous perfect movie for the first time ever.  And every time, without fail, they always get excited at the right moments.  They laugh in all the right places.  In a way, it’s like I’m watching Star Wars for the first time as well.

But these days, the serious Star Wars TV shows (Andor) don’t work for me.  The silly ones (Ahsoka) don’t work for me. That Madalorian episode with Lizzo and Jack Black very well may have heisted my soul and sold it on ebay for Yoda earings.

I haven’t even been able to enjoy the Oscar-hopefuls – Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon, Barbie – which are supposed to be the projects that actually put time and effort into their screenplays.

So I think about this question a lot. Are my standards for screenwriting so high, at this point, that they can no longer be met? I’m biased but I don’t think they are. Still, several things have happened in the industry that have really hurt screenwriting in the past decade.

One of the issues is we don’t have that central screenwriting teacher anymore. In the 80s and 90s, it was Syd Field. In the 2000s, it was Blake Snyder. But once the internet popped up, writers stopped reading complete books on how to write screenplays and, instead, piecemealed their screenwriting education together through online screenwriting articles. So they know certain things  (add conflict to your dialogue!) yet are totally clueless to others (how to build a compelling second act).

In addition to this, feature screenwriting moved away from singular protagonists trying to achieve a goal – the purest form of storytelling – to the “Marvel Ensemble” model where the writer is juggling 10 different protagonists and their subsequent storylines. Which isn’t normal! That’s not a typical story anyone would tell.

Then you have the rise of golden era television, with 1000 shows on TV, so that’s where all the writers went. And what does television promote? The never-ending story. There is no climax, which teaches screenwriters terrible habits. Cause if you don’t have to end your story, you never have to think about where your characters are going. And when those writers dip their toes back in the feature space, they bring that issue with them. Their narratives seem flighty and aimless because that’s the only kind of story they’ve had to write!

In other words, NOBODY KNOWS THE BASICS ANYMORE. They’re just making sh*t up as they go along. Yesterday’s script, which barely BARELY got a “worth the read,” is a good example. The theme of the script is messiness. The messier the better. That’s not good screenwriting. Good screenwriting requires focus and structure and planning.

So what I thought I’d do as we head into the weekend is remind writers of the basics. It’s not that hard. It really isn’t. But if you’ve never learned these things, then you’re probably writing a lot of weak-sauce material.

1 – Give us a likable character. Introduce your character in a way where we like him or her. Or, at the very least, sympathize with them. For example, if a woman’s husband of 20 years just blindsided her with divorce papers, we will sympathize with her. The reason this is so important is because nothing you do after your protagonist’s introduction will matter if we’re not rooting for them.

2 – Create a problem. A story cannot start until there’s a problem. This is the thing that jolts our protagonist into action. Think about it. If there’s nothing that forces your character to do anything, then they won’t do anything! You don’t have a movie if your main character isn’t doing anything. In one of my favorite movies from recent years, Parasite, the “problem” is very simple. The family is broke. They have no money. They need a solution.

3 – The problem introduces the goal. Once you introduce a problem into your hero’s life, you’ve created the all important GOAL. Cause now your hero has to SOLVE THE PROBLEM. And needing to solve a problem is a goal. To use Parasite as an example again, the goal is to take over the rich family’s home.

4 – The goal gives you your stakes. The reason the goal is so important is because it needs to power you through your second act. If the goal is minor or flimsy, it won’t be able to achieve this. This is where STAKES come in. We have to feel like everything is on the line for your hero. If you succeed, you get everything. If you fail, you lose everything. In other words, the bigger the problem, the more impressive the goal, which means higher stakes, which means you have more power to drive the second act. And just to remind you, NONE OF THIS MATTERS IF WE DON’T LIKE YOUR HERO. Which is why getting number 1 right is so important.

5 – Throw obstacles in front of the goal – A goal, in and of itself, is boring. Where the excitement happens is when that goal is challenged. So you want to think of your second act as the “Goal-Challenging Section.” You want to throw a bunch of things at the hero so it’s hard for them to achieve the goal. The harder it is, the more we’ll enjoy ourselves. Cause think about it: how exciting is it to watch someone try to achieve their goal with only minor pushback? To use Parasite as an example again, the midpoint has this crazy psycho dude secretly living in the basement. Talk about a challenge. How do you take over a house when you have this other guy already living there?

6 – A challenged goal makes your hero stronger – The bonus of challenging your hero in their pursuit of a goal is that it BUILDS CHARACTER every time they overcome one of these challenges. And each time that happens, assuming you got the number 1 rule right, we will like your character even more. Cause we like people who take on obstacles and overcome them. You know your second act is working when our love for your protagonist is growing.

7 – Endings aren’t as hard as you think – A good ending is less about some inventive never-before-seen plot twist and more about your hero facing their flaw head on and overcoming it. The endings that stick with us have some sort of emotional catharsis. Again, you got to get number one right or NOTHING YOU DO in the third act will matter. But, if we like your hero, and we’ve seen them struggle throughout the second act, and they overcome their flaw in the climax (Rocky overcomes his self-doubt to go the distance in the championship match), that goosebump-laced rush will shoot through the reader. Always try and think of your climax as an emotional catharsis and not as the final piece to a plot puzzle.

These tips don’t cover everything, obviously. You still have to surprise us, make interesting creative choices, write good dialogue, have a couple of stand-out characters besides your hero. You’d also like to execute your story with a unique voice or a fresh angle in order to stand out from the pack. But if you follow the above seven tips, it’s really hard NOT to write a good screenplay.

As for whether I’m still capable of being impressed anymore, I already have 10 movies that are going to make my Best Movies of 2023 list. I already have 10 scripts that are going to make my Best Scripts of 2023 list. That’s 20 stories right there. Should I really be asking for more than that in one year? I don’t think so. That’s plenty. I guess I was hoping for more stuff to blow me away this year. But maybe that’ll come in 2024.

I offer feature screenplay and pilot script consultations – the best notes in the business.  If you mention this article, I will give you a $150 discount. Your script doesn’t have to be ready yet to secure the discount.  You can send it in at a later date.  Just e-mail me at Carsonreeves1@gmail.com.  Can’t wait to read your script!

Genre: Holiday
Premise: At the height of the holiday season, two strangers team up to rob one of New York’s most famous department stores while accidentally falling in love.
About: Today’s script finished high on last year’s Black List, with an ornament-busting 12 votes (“On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, 12 votes on the Black List…”). The writer, Abby McDonald, has one writing credit. But it’s a big one. She was a staff writer on the mega-successful Netflix show, Bridgerton.
Writer: Abby McDonald
Details: 110 pages

Somehow. Some way. The holidays are upon us.

I like what McDonald is going for here. The holidays have been overwhelmed by the Hallmarking of movies. McDonald is adding a real genre to her Christmas concept. We have a heist film on the most wonderful day of the year.

28 year old New Yorker, Sofia, is scoping out one of the city’s most opulent department stores, Sterling & Co. As she scans the place, she runs into 32 year old Nick, a charming fellow who seems to be doing the same thing. And Nick doesn’t like that.

So tells Sofia to leave the store and stop thinking of doing whatever she’s thinking of. We follow Nick home and find a bunch of goons waiting for him. Nick owes these men a lot of money. Which is why he’s planning to rob Sterling & Co. on Christmas Eve, when they’re going to have alllllllll that holiday money in their safe.

Back to Sofia, who’s visiting her mother at the hospital. Her mom, who used to work for Sterling & Co. for 20 years as a cleaner, had a stroke on the job. But the evil company claim they fired her a day earlier to avoid paying her medical costs. This is why Sofia wants that safe money – to pay her mom’s medical bills AND stick it to the man!

Eventually, Nick learns about Sofia’s mom, which means he could have access to 20 years of experience in this department store. He’ll know every unlocked door, every corner out of camera sight. He may just be able to pull this thing off! But that means, unfortunately, teaming up with Sofia. Seeing as the two kind of hate each other (but kind of love each other too), it’s a dangerous move. But it’s the only move he’s got!

Whenever you write a script, you’re trying to create the best version of that script-type that you can. If you’re writing a horror script, you gotta give us some of the best scares we’ve ever seen. If you’re writing a comedy, you gotta give us some of the funniest scenes we’ve ever watched. And when you’re writing a con man/con woman heist script, you gotta give us amazing quick dialogue and incredibly clever moments.

What most writers will do, and what I’d argue today’s writer does, is give you just enough but nothing more. So, here, we have an early exchange where Sofia and Nick engage in some witty banter at the department store. Nick looks like he came out on top. Then, several scenes later, Nick checks his pocket and instead of finding the security pass that he took from Sofia, he finds Sofia’s library card instead. Zoinks! She lifted it from him.

I’ve probably read somewhere in the vicinity of 250 of these sexy heist team-up scripts and this exact moment was in 240 of them. That’s when you lose me. The goal when writing any script should not be to meet the standard. The goal should be to exceed the standard. You may not have the chops to exceed the standard, but you should always try. Especially when it comes to those things that are important to that genre.

Dialogue is so important to this genre. It’s got to be sexy and biting and quick and clever. If it’s ANYTHING LESS THAN THAT, your script is toast.

I was just telling a writer this the other day. Every time you read through your script, whether it be to spell check or look for plot holes or see if your characters are working, improve three to four lines of dialogue. Most writers will read through a script 200 times before they send it out into the world. If you’re improving 3 to 4 lines of dialogue every one of those read-throughs, you’re gonna have some really good dialogue when it’s all said and done. If you don’t do this, you’re going to have average dialogue.

On the plus side, I liked how McDonald understood that a straight heist wasn’t going to be enough. This is true for all heist scripts. You can’t put the heist in the third act and spend the entire second act preparing for it. You need to create some additional plot threads, and McDonald does that here.

For example, they want access to the key codes that are going to get them through all of the doors in the store. So they try and steal them from the store president’s soon to be ex-wife. But then the wife catches them and wants in. So now, they need to steal an additional thing for her along with the original loot. This additional object is then used as a way to create double crosses and plot surprises later on.

Another thing I give McDonald credit for is that these characters become more likable as the script goes on. This happens to me ALL THE TIME. Every time I read one of these scripts, I initially find the main characters too polished and too slick. There’s no authenticity in their interactions. It’s more about saying the too-cool-for-school line. But once the plot kicks in and the characters actually have something to do besides talk, they grow on me. Maybe this is yet another example of the power of SHOWING NOT TELLING. It’s the characters having to act that pulls me in. So by the time these two were in the heist, I was engaged. Just not engaged ENOUGH.

My advice if you’re going to write a heist screenplay is to stay away from a straight, sexy thriller, unless you’re one of the best dialogue writers in the world. Because these movies are all about the banter between the two main characters, as well as the sexual tension underneath that banter. You can’t control the latter, because that will be up to who they cast. But you can control the former.

If you’re not great at dialogue but you still want to write a team up heist screenplay, I would suggest going in one of two directions. One, come up with a clever setup. Bad Santa comes to mind. Bad Santa is the same movie as this, but it has the more clever set up of a guy dressing up as Santa Claus to work department stores specifically so he can rob them.

Two, come at the genre in a unique way. Try to find an angle that hasn’t been done before. Parasite comes to mind. Parasite is a heist film about a family who steals a home from another family. We’ve never seen anything like that before so it’s a really interesting way to play with the genre.

You can certainly play it straight like this script. And, in McDonald’s defense, this is the most marketable of those three movies I just mentioned. But it’s also the variation that’s most susceptible to cliché and that’s where the majority of this script exists – in cliche.

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

What I learned: Prioritize the things that are important to the genre of script you’re working in. We all have a finite amount of time. We can’t work on a script forever. Which means you’ll have to prioritize what, in your script rewrites, to focus your time on. Your priority should always be the elements that are particular to that genre. So if you’re writing a comedy, spend 80% of your time improving your jokes. If you’re writing a horror script, spend 80% of the time trying to make it scarier. If you’re writing an action movie, spend 80% of your time on your action set pieces. And if you’re writing a sexy heist thriller, make sure the dialogue is electric, that we love both of the leads, and we’re desperate to see them get together.

What a weekend!

If there’s anything I learned, it’s that not even the best logline consultant in Hollywood can compete with a brain-trust of 100+ screenwriters. You guys killed it. I personally liked Katie’s…

A repressed war widow awakens naked in the snow on a military black site and must outwit her ruthless father’s vengeful soldiers when she realizes the carnivorous feline they are hunting is her.

And DG Burton’s best…

A repressed young widow awakens naked in the snow on a military black site and discovers soldiers have been torn apart, she has no memories of last night, and she’s being hunted by the Marines’ most ruthless general – her father.

Now if you could just come up with a logline to erase daylights savings time, I would pay all the money in the world to see that movie succeed! You certainly did better than the movies at this weekend’s box office. This was supposed to be the big Dune 2 opening weekend but the film, like many others, got pushed back because of the actors strike.

It’s so hard to promote a big movie when your stars can’t get out there and make headlines for you. I enjoy the backup plan – sending directors and writers out there – because literally everything they say is more interesting than what actors say. But you can’t deny the fact that, without actors to remind us that their movies are opening, the movies don’t seem as big.

Speaking of someone who’s a writer, director, AND an actor, Sly Stallone has been in the news a lot, with his docu-series premiering on Netflix. What’s interesting about Sly is that he should be one of the richest people in Hollywood. And yet the rumor is, he’s out of money. That’s why he agreed to this docu-series. It’s why he has that Kardashian like show about his family on Paramount Plus. The guy is hustling.

Most of this stems from the fact that he doesn’t own a single sliver of the Rocky franchise. You can’t really fault him for that. He notoriously stood strong when he made that Rocky deal, insisting that he be the star. Which, if he didn’t do, there’s a good chance we wouldn’t know who Sylvester Stallone was today. But he mistakenly didn’t obtain any of the rights to the film, which means he hasn’t gotten paid a single dime outside of his acting fee from the billion dollar franchise.

Still, the dude has 75+ IMDB credits. How are you struggling to pay your bills?? Seems like there’s some serious money mismanagement there.

The reason I wanted to bring up Stallone is that he recently revealed that his first draft of Rocky had a different kind of Rocky. Rocky was a brute. Rocky was a tough guy. Rocky beat you up and didn’t feel bad about it. It wasn’t until a lady friend of his read the script and cried to him that she hated Rocky because of how mean he was, that Stallone decided to change the character into the more lovable iconic character we know today.

His very first change, which was actually suggested by the friend, was that instead of beating up the guy who couldn’t pay his loan, he let him go. The guy even offers Rocky his coat to help pay but Rocky lets him keep it. From there, Stallone just paid more attention to how Rocky acted. He wanted him to be sweeter instead of meaner. As a result, an iconic character was created.

I wanted to highlight this because there’s this erroneous belief that you win “screenwriting street cred” by creating an unlikable character. But in this case, it is literally the thing that would’ve sent this movie down a path where we never would’ve heard of it, versus what it became, which is a billion dollar franchise.

And when we talk about likability, it doesn’t have to be like in Adam Sandler movies where the ten-cent screenwriters he uses have his character save 20 lives before he’s even reached the inciting incident to MAKE ABSOLUTELY SURE you love him. With Rocky, he’s just an understated nice guy who cares about people. He’s not over the top about it. That’s just who he is.

Remember that going forward. You don’t need to have your character save the world for us to like him. He can just be nice! It’s not complicated.

Shifting focus from the movie world over to the TV world, I stumbled upon the latest trailer for a Marvel TV show. It’s a show called, “Echo.” Before I get into my thoughts on the trailer, I know one of the writers on Echo (who’s an AWESOME writer by the way – one of my favorite unknown writers out there). I am not blaming him or any other writer who gets hired to write a Marvel show. I would cash that same check in a heartbeat.

My problem is more with the state of TV in general. Cause when I saw this trailer, I didn’t feel anything. There’s a woman. She had a tough childhood. Now she’s some sort of fighter as an adult. There’s an intensity behind the presentation of her story and it looks totally fine. There’s nothing wrong with this show at all. But it doesn’t stand out in any way. It doesn’t MAKE ME WANT TO WATCH IT.

Echo is a symbol for where the TV industry is today. We’ve gotten to the point where it’s nearly impossible to stand out from the pack. If Marvel, which can afford to put 100 million dollars behind a show like this, can’t get anyone excited about watching it, where are we? We are in the most saturated TV market ever where every show feels the same in the sense that there’s nothing exceptional enough that you actually label it a must-watch.

This begs the question: How do you write a TV pilot in 2023 that stands out? Is it even possible?

As far as I can tell, there are several show-types that get interest. The most prominent are the IP shows that have passionate fan bases. I’m talking Wednesday on Netflix or The Last of Us on HBO. These are useless to aspiring screenwriters, though, because we don’t have access to those properties.

Then you have the high-concept stuff, like Squid Game, Yellow Jackets, or Stranger Things. These are super-expensive but, if you can come up with one, they’re great because they’re the only ideas that can compete with those IP properties. Unfortunately, their cost scares a lot of potential suitors away.

And, finally, you have the word-of-mouth shows, the shows that become hits because of how incredibly well-written they are. I’m talking about the White Lotuses, the Successions, and the Bears. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to strategize around writing one of the greatest shows ever. So it’s yet another arrow we can’t add to our quiver.

But there is one final category which, I believe, is the one that best gives an aspiring screenwriter a shot at writing a show that stands out. And I call it, “The Voice Show.” No, I’m not talking about spinning chairs and overly charming country singers and golden tickets. I’m talking about a show that demonstrates your unique voice. Some recent examples would be Fleabag, Euphoria, Atlanta, Severance, and Beef.

There’s something unmistakably unique when you read these pilots and it’s not as difficult to pull off as you may think. Having a distinctive voice boils down to identifying what it is about how you see the world that’s unique and leaning into that as aggressively as possible. If I’m a Korean-American man who suffers from anger issues, that’s a great starting point for leaning into my voice. Which is how “Beef” was conceived. That show is less about the story than it is about its creator. And how that creator, Lee Sung Jin, sees the world.

The second ingredient to writing one of these shows is to be weird. To be awkward. It’s fine to cover your everyday existence in these shows. You just can’t do it in an expected fashion. Every interaction Fleabag gets into in her show is awkward. There’s one point where she’s in a job interview and inadvertently propositions the interviewer, then is forced to backtrack. We’re all weirdos deep down. We have weird thoughts. We get in weird situations. LEAN INTO THAT WEIRD. That’s how you’re going to make your pages read different from everyone else’s.

The third ingredient to these shows is to take from your own life. You should be using your own life to power all of your writing, of course. But it’s especially important in this type of script because one of the easiest ways to stand out is to chronicle things that nobody else has seen before. And since your unique experiences contain a myriad of specific moments, you want to mine those moments as much as possible. In Fleabag, that heartbreaking Phoebe Waller-Bridge miscarriage dinner with her sister was, supposedly, based on real life with someone she knew.

The final ingredient to writing these shows is to be achingly truthful. When you’re writing big Hollywood movies, you’re often a slave to the plot. You have to have that big twist at the midpoint for example, so you dance around in your mind for a few days until you come up with that twist. You don’t do that here. You lean into the truth. If a character in the throes of drug addiction is confronted by her friends and family, you better have that drug-addicted character act truthfully. That approach led to one of the best episodes of Euphoria when Rue was confronted and she did what any addict would do in that moment. She RAN.

There has to be an element of rawness and realness on the page to truly stand out from the pack. And, unlike movies, which work better within the construct of sexy concepts, TV is more about character and, therefore, more conducive to this sort of writing. By the way, I’m not saying you can’t succeed by writing the next CSI or the next Stranger Things. All I’m saying is that if you want to write something that has the best chance at standing out from all the other scripts that these production houses and studios read? The Voice Script is the number one way to go.

Do you have one in you?

Waaaaahoooooooo!

Greetings, you potion-brewing witches. The hour for spilling blood is upon us! I’ve done the hard work of decapitating a hundred-plus potential loglines so that only the eight best remain in the crimson-soaked moonlight. Now don your spookiest Halloween attire and choose which four loglines are your tricks, and which cherished logline is your treat.

By the way, if anyone wants to reward me for all my hard work, my favorite Halloween candy is Reeses Peanut Butter Cups. If all goes well, I will be spread eagle on the floor of my abode, too sick to move after inhaling an ungodly number of these incantations. Thank you in advance.

If my uber spooky language is too coded for you, THIS is Logline Showdown. A bunch of writers sent in their loglines. I picked the best eight. It’s now up to you to choose your favorite. Simply read all the loglines and log your vote by writing it in a comment.

If you have extra time, it’s helpful to writers if you explain why you passed over their logline, as well as why you liked the one you picked. As fun as these showdowns are, they’re ultimately about helping everyone become better writers by learning which concepts work and why.

Don’t worry if you missed this month’s showdown. We do a logline showdown every month so you can still enter in November or December. I’ll be announcing the theme of the next showdown in the newsletter which should hit your inboxes by the 27th. Just four TERRIFYING days before Halloween. If you want to get on the newsletter mailing list, send me an e-mail at Carsonreeves1@gmail.com.

Good luck to this month’s contestants. Voting closes at 11:59pm Pacific Time this Sunday night.

Title: Bacchantes
Genre: Folk Horror
Logline: Two competing brothers from a vintner lineage find themselves entrapped in a secluded vineyard. There, enigmatic women, under the guise of adoration, manipulate and intensify their rivalry, all to crown the brother who survives as the chosen vessel for Bacchus, the god of wine. Set in the misty mountains of Georgia, a country in the Caucasus.

Title: SERIAL KILLER SLUMBER PARTY
Genre: Horror
Logline: A high school outcast attending a Halloween party in a secluded mansion where the guests cosplay as history’s most notorious serial killers finds himself under attack when a real killer begins taking out the guests one by one.

Title: Sus
Genre: Thriller
Logline: A washed-up former child star who once played an iconic scream queen battles a psychopathic killer while filming Stalk Slash Repeat, a throwback horror movie intended to revive her career.

Title: Scaring Shelley
Genre: Horror
Logline: Up-and-coming, untrained actress Shelley Duvall flies to England to star in eccentric and obsessive Stanley Kubrick’s, “The Shining”. What starts as a potentially career-making role turns into a fight for sanity as a despotic Kubrick gaslights and emotionally tortures Shelley until her on-camera fear is justifiably and frighteningly real.

Title: Surrogate
Genre: Sci-Fi/Thriller
Logline: With the promise of a huge payday, a penniless woman agrees to be a surrogate mother for a renowned physician, only to discover she’s the first test subject of a diabolical medical experiment to raise the dead.

Title: Id
Genre: Horror
Logline: A burnt-out, aging novelist finds the inspiration to write again with an antique typewriter only to learn that every evil subconscious thought he writes on it comes to life.

Title: The Feast
Genre: Horror/Dark Comedy
Logline: When an orphaned social worker finally gets to meet her boyfriend’s wealthy meatpacking family at their annual reunion, she discovers that she and the other guests aren’t there for a feast, they are the feast, and must band together to try and survive the night as they’re hunted by famished vampires.

Title: LAST TO LIVE
Genre: Horror
Logline: When six influencers perform a stunt that inadvertently kills the daughter of a cartel boss, he forces them to undertake a deadly series of their own YouTube challenges. SAW meets MR BEAST

DEALS DEALS DEALS! – This weekend, I’m offering a $150 discount on both my feature script consultations and pilot script consultations.  I’m also offering a 3-pack of logline consultations for just $50!  If you’re interested, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com and mention this article! 

Genre: Sci-Fi/Horror/Drama
Premise: Amid a rash of cattle mutilations in the ‘80s, a rural veterinarian holds an alien captive with the desperate hope that its miraculous healing biology can save his terminally ill wife.
About: This is the runner-up in the First Page Showdown. If you’re wondering why we’re reviewing the runner-up and not the winner, it’s a long complicated story but the gist of it is, the winner hadn’t finished his script yet and so we’re waiting on that before we can review it. Actually, that wasn’t long or complicated. It was pretty straightforward. Okay, let’s get to the review. Oh! And remember that we have Halloween Logline Showdown coming up next week. Get those loglines in!
Writer: Mark James
Details: 94 pages

Here’s the first page if you want to reacquaint yourself with it.

Lucky us.

We got a horror script just a week before Halloween Showdown! Sometimes the script gods shine down on us.

BUT!

The script still needs to be good. And the whole reason I picked this first page to compete was because it felt like a different kind of alien movie.

Let’s see if my instincts were right.

The year is 1985. We’re in Nebraska. We meet 30 year-old Dr. Lee Crutchfield as he is elbow deep inside of a dead cow’s rectum. Lee is a vet and although he’s seen a lot, this is not a normal Tuesday night for him. This is actually quite rare.

Word on the street is that cows from all over the local area have been getting mutilated. But Lee’s not buying it. He thinks an animal did this and is vindicated when a rabid badger pops up and he shoots it dead. He tells the rancher he has nothing to worry about, grabs the dead badger and heads back to the clinic to do tests.

Before he does that, though, he heads over to the hospital to see his late 20-s wife, Blair (who he calls “Mother Bear”), who has some sort of weird disease that causes dementia. Her situation is getting worse by the day but Lee is not giving up.

Back at the clinic, Lee spots the dead badger levitating, only to realize it’s being shuttled away by a cloaked 8 foot alien. Lee is able to neutralize the alien with a cattle prod and chain it up. Although the alien is coy at first, it eventually comes clean regarding having the magical ability to cure.

While all this is happening, an Omaha FBI agent named Annabelle Sable shows up who seems to have some knowledge about these aliens. She tells Lee that these off-worlders are not to be trusted! Everything they say is a lie. But all Lee hears is “healing.” So when his wife goes into a coma, Lee decides he’s using the alien cure to save her. But at what cost? And what happens if it doesn’t work?

I had a lot of thoughts swimming through my brain when I finished this script. I knew I could take the review in a familiar direction.

But since this all started with a First Page contest, the question that seemed the most relevant was, “Did I get the script I expected to get from the first page?”

The answer is no.

That’s not a bad thing. It’s just that when I read that first page, I imagined this thoughtful interesting take on aliens where the writer approached things from an angle that we hadn’t seen before. Cause this is a movie about aliens. And most movies about aliens start out with an on-the-nose scene that screams from the mountaintops that the movie is about aliens (i.e. a spaceship in the sky).

By approaching it via a dead cow’s rectum, you told us that this was going to be a different kind of journey (not unlike how we started in Adam Sandler’s rectum in Uncut Gems and got a totally different movie).

And while I suppose you could argue the script does turn out to be different, it ended up feeling too familiar when it was all said and done.

To the writer’s credit, he takes creative risks, the most visual being the alien’s dialogue. This is how all the alien dialogue looks:

What I liked about this choice was that an alien is going to look weird. It’s going to look different. This dialogue style captured that difference in a visual way. When we saw how different it was from normal dialogue, we subconsciously imagined the alien. Which was cool.

But the dialogue was hard to read. The middle part often covered the regular text on either side, which meant I had to squint and move the page around to see what the alien was saying. James also fades the regular text out as the script goes on until it’s practically invisible. So I wasn’t sure if that text even mattered?

Finally, I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to interpret the dialogue. The middle section always contradicted the ends so… I guess that meant the alien was always lying. But it’s still spoken dialogue so didn’t that mean Lee could hear it? All in all, as creative as it was, I felt it was more trouble than it was worth.

The script’s strongest suit is its emotional core – the relationship between Lee and Blair. But I’ll be honest, I had trouble giving in to it. For starters, they’re both late 20s, early 30s. And Blair has dementia. It didn’t read right. A 28 year old with dementia? I’m sure it happens but it happens rarely enough that it creates that dreaded “reading hiccup.” And then the characters called each other Mama Bear and Papa Bear, the kind of nicknames old people use for each other, which confused me, because these characters were young. It just created this clunky vibe to the proceedings that prohibited me from fully enjoying what I was reading.

And while I don’t mean to pile on, this script doesn’t resolve my belief that you can make aliens scary in the way that you can make traditional earthbound creatures and monsters scary.

What happens in The Harvester – and what happens in a lot of these scripts that try to combine horror and aliens – is that, at a certain point, the writer learns that making them scary doesn’t make sense. So it always turns out the the alien is helpful instead of hurtful. We see that here with the alien offering his magical medicine that can heal anything. And, at that point, what are we scared of? We’re not. In retrospect, I’m not sure I was ever scared. And I’m someone who routinely watches scary movies through my fingers.

I mean how scary of an alien can you be when you’re easily restrained by handcuffs? It just didn’t make sense. And I don’t want to dog James because I’ve been down this road before myself. With my own alien-horror scripts which ran into this same problem, and with scripts from other writers that I’ve tried to shepherd. But none of them can ever quite figure out this “aliens being scary” thing. You can do it in flashes. But over the course of the story, it doesn’t make sense for aliens to be scary. Why come 100 light years if you’re going to hide underneath beds and say “boo?”

Overall, as hard as I tried, I couldn’t connect with this script. The horror wasn’t horrifying enough. The sci-fi hit a wall. And the drama was affected by little choices that resulted in an unnecessarily clunky relationship journey.

It wasn’t for me but I’m curious what all of you think. Check out the script below.

Script link: The Harvester

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

What I learned: Whenever I see a writer offer three genres for their script, the first thing I think is, “This writer doesn’t know what kind of story he’s telling.”  And that’s how I felt when I read this.  “I’m not sure this script knows what it wants to be.”  It leans most heavily into the drama side of things.  That’s when it’s most comfortable.  Cause I think James understood that storyline the best.  But this alien who’s sort of dangerous but not really dangerous dictating the majority of the narrative had me scratching my head.  It just felt like there was a better story that could be told here.  And my gut tells me simplifying the genre is a good place to start.