Is this successful screenwriter’s first script better than the one he sold for a million dollars??

Genre: Drama
Premise: A former White House chef who’s fallen from grace and is now cooking for a North Carolina prison has his work cut out for him when a death row inmate enters the facility refusing to eat anything before his execution.
About: I was told by someone I trust that this was a great script. It was written by Justin PIasecki, who is best known for his million dollar spec sale of Stakehorse. He actually wrote this script BEFORE Stakehorse.
Writer: Justin Piasecki
Details: 103 pages

The 5 Loglines Showdown is 17 days away (details to enter here). I see that you guys are testing these loglines in the comments section, which I love. It’s taking all of my will power not to look at them. I want each entry to be fresh when it arrives in my Inbox.

Today is a great example of how to write a logline if you don’t have a high concept. If you’re writing a smaller character-driven story or more of a drama, do what Death of an Ortolan does. USE IRONY.

Look at that logline. A White House Chef falls from grace and becomes a prison chef. That is irony at its best and will hook a lot of potential readers. So don’t think you have to have time travel in your logline for me to pick it. Use irony. In fact, if you’re one of the writers coming up with 5 new loglines a day, do a day of just ironic concepts. You’ll learn a lot.

Okay, onto today’s script. Let’s find out if the execution is “cooked” to perfection.

Walter Karrat used to be the prestigious White House head chef. At just 26! The man was a superstar. But after a mysterious instance of pissing off the president, he’s fired. 23 years later and he’s the head chef… at Durham Corrections Department, aka prison.

Walter walks around with a chip on his shoulder. If even a single inmate doesn’t eat their meal, he stalks them and demands they eat it. Strangely, everyone does. Walter is so intimidating, even the prisoners fear him.

Randomly, one day, there’s a catastrophic water leak in another prison in the southern part of the state, which destroys their foundation of the Death Row prison cells. This means that the Death Row inmates will need to be sent to a new prison until they fix it. That prison? Durham Corrections Department.

This change gives Walter’s life new meaning. He encourages these death row inmates to order anything their heart desires for their final meal. And he delivers. It makes him feel like a real chef again.

Except when he meets Jeffrey Reed. Reed is blind (a result of him trying to kill himself) and on death row. He was a hospice nurse who pulled the plug on one of his patients then stole their money. Reed, who’s pickier than every New York food critic combined, refuses to eat any of Walter’s food. And that makes Walter… pissssssssed.

The two trade barbs every day, as we get closer and closer to Reed’s execution date, until it becomes clear that Reed’s resistance is not personal. He’s on a hunger strike to get the governor’s attention. Reed explains to Walter that he didn’t do it. There’s more to his murder that the state suppressed.

At first wary of Reed’s story, Walter gradually begins to believe him. He eventually ventures to the governor’s office to plead Reed’s case, inadvertently placing him back in the political arena he so adamantly resents. When it becomes clear that they’re not going to help him, Walter must rely on the thing he does best for his final hail mary – cook.

In the comments yesterday, one of you brought up this concept of an “easy read,” – that writers have become too focused on writing these easy-to-read screenplays – simple concepts, lots of white space so the eyes shoot down the page, low character count so the story’s easy to follow. It was this commenter’s belief that the best scripts are the opposite of that – scripts that have some complexity behind them.

I was thinking about that while reading Death of an Ortolan. It’s not a fast read. The themes are heavy. The description is occasionally thick. And it takes a while before you know what the story is about. To the credit of that commenter, the script does hit you harder.

This Friday, that Jamie Foxx Cameron Diaz action-comedy (Back in Action) hits Netflix. It is the epitome of an “easy read.” It is, also, not going to hit you like Death of an Ortolan does. So, is our commenter right? Should we be writing more scripts like Death of an Ortolan and less like Back in Action?

From my vast reading experience, here’s how I’d answer that. You must first learn to write an “easy read” before you can write a complex one. The reason being that “easy reads” are designed to make things move quickly. And the quicker things are moving, the less time the reader has to sit around and question them.

Complex reads turn off the big flashy bass-thumping tunes and turn into a slow-dance. The slower your story moves, the better at dramaturgy you must be. It takes more skill to keep readers invested when the plot beats are more spread out. It takes more skill to keep the reader up to speed when you’re cutting between multiple subplots and multiple characters. It takes more skill to build a story around the depth of a character.

So it’s not that you should favor “easy reads” over complex ones. It’s that you must be honest with yourself about if you have the skill level to pull a complex script off. Cause complex scripts written poorly fall apart faster than easy reads do.

The reader who recommended “Ortolan” to me was right. This is a good script. It’s the closest we’re going to get to a modern day Shawshank Redemption. This movie is about friendship at its core. It also has this mystery component of did Reed murder the victim or didn’t he? And it serves both of those plot lines with this fun little side-dish of cooking.

Even though I just went on this entire rant about “easy reads” vs. complex ones, you can still use “easy read” tools in your complex stories. For example, this script has a great ticking time bomb – Reed’s looming execution. This adds our urgency. It adds our stakes. And it also gives us our goal – Walter must convince his political contacts to let Reed go free.

This is basic dramaturgy and it works! It’s a very compelling premise.

My only issue with the script is the same issue I remember having with Justin’s other script, Stakehorse. Which is that the ending got messy. Spoilers follow. Walter is recruited by the newly elected president to cook for her and her team. This pulls him away from the prison during Reed’s execution and uses his big moment to screw over the president.

Meanwhile, Walter’s assistant brings Reed his last meal. I’m not convinced at all that that’s the right way to go. For maximum emotional impact, we should’ve seen Walter make and bring Reed his last meal. We should’ve also shown him watch Reed’s execution. That’s way more important, based on what the movie set up, than screwing over the president.

That seems like a pretty obvious choice to me.

Despite that, I thought the script was really well crafted and it was successful in the main thing it was trying to do – which was make us fall in love with Reed, make us care about Reed and Walter’s friendship, and make us want to keep turning the pages to find out what happened to them.

Here’s the script if you want to check it out yourself! – Death of an Ortolan

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

What I learned: With endings, we tend to have two options. Deliver the ending that the audience expects, which contains the biggest emotional punch. Or go against the audience’s expectation, deliver a more surprising ending, but lose out on some of that emotional punch. Today’s script went with the latter and I think that’s the wrong way to go. What matters most in an ending is emotional catharsis for the audience. They want to feel a resolution to the conflict that the main characters have endured the whole movie. You should look for an ending that, first and foremost, maximizes that catharsis. Even if it’s a little obvious, the audience will be more satisfied by that than if you use some shocking expectation-subverting choice.

What I learend 2: Don’t take your foot off the gas with your climax.  Do the opposite.  Slam your foot on the gas as hard as you can and keep it there until the last page.

Everybody who wants to be a screenwriter should watch this movie!

I was wearing my new shoes that I got for Christmas today. I hopped over to the corner store to grab a drink, and while waiting in line, heard a guy behind me say, “Those shoes are fire.”

“Too soon,” I said. “Too soon.”

What a weird week.

It’s the beginning of the year. You want to start things off with a bang.

And then… fires.

Fires fires everywhere. You can check out my mini-blogging about the fires in the comments section of the previous post.

Suffice it to say, I might have to end my relationship with fire.

But, since it looks like things are finally calming down, I can focus on the site again.

So I checked the box office numbers over the weekend and, oh boy. What a dumpster fire.

TOO SOON, CARSON!

Sorry, sorry.

Truthfully, there’s nothing wrong with Den of Thieves 2 being the top movie of the weekend. It just doesn’t inspire a lot of passion. You now? So, I finally bit the bullet and paid 20 freaking dollars to rent Heretic. The way I justified it is that that’s what it would’ve cost me to go see it in the theater. So why not?

Best 20 dollars I’ve spent all year.

As someone who loves great screenwriting, there is a particular brand of script that I’m always looking for. It’s the script where the writer has developed a captivating story within an inexpensive scenario.

The reason I’m so obsessed with that setup is that the writer is relying on nothing more than good dramatic storytelling to keep the reader engaged. That’s the purest form of screenwriting. I see so many screenwriters – especially young ones – try to win over the reader with rampant GSU and crazy shootouts and wild car chases and shocking plot twists.

Once you learn the basics of drama, you can put three characters in a room and have the reader on the edge of their seat. Which is exactly what happens here. Two Mormon girls come to a man’s house to pitch their religion. He turns the tables on them, pushing them to convince him their religion is worth joining. And the next thing you know, they’re in danger.

So, what are these basic storytelling elements that are at play in Heretic?

Let’s start with building the initial premise around tension and suspense. Tension and suspense will get you VERY FAR as a storyteller. It doesn’t do everything. You still have to create characters we’re interested in and build a plot that pushes those characters in interesting story directions. But tension and suspense alone can keep many a story exciting.

When Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton arrive at Mr. Reed’s house, we know immediately something is up with him. That’s where the tension begins. We’re suspicious of this guy.

In a way, the scenario works as dramatic irony even if it’s not technically dramatic irony. Dramatic irony is when we know more than the characters do. It works best when we know our heroes are in danger but they don’t know it yet.

So, if we would’ve met Mr. Reed chopping up a body in the back room AND THEN had him greet Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton, that would be a textbook case of dramatic irony, as we would know they were in deep shit.

Instead, we only sense that Mr. Reed is bad, something the girls, at first, do not. That’s what’s creating tension. And it also creates suspense. Now we have to keep reading to reach the moment where the heroes realize what’s going on. It’s very hard for a reader not to want to read until the heroes catch up with the rest of us. Dare I say it’s impossible. So that’s a very powerful tool to use as a screenwriter.

But that’s not all that’s going on here. Beck and Woods understand that setting up dramatic irony (or ‘shadow dramatic irony’ in this case) is just the beginning. As a writer, you want to then play with the tool.

For example, as their initial conversation about religion in the living room proceeds, Sister Barnes becomes suspicious about Mr. Reed. But Sister Paxton is still totally oblivious to it. She’s way too trusting. So now, you’ve split the dramatic irony between the heroes. One senses something is wrong. The other doesn’t. This advances the dynamic in the room, keeping the interaction fresh.

That’s not by accident. Good writers know that every writing tool has an expiration point in the story. You can only use the suspense of a certain situation for so long before the audience demands it come to a head. Therefore, if you want to keep using that dramatically ironic scenario, you must find ways to advance the dynamic of the interaction.

However, let’s say that that’s all Beck and Woods did here. They just used this creepy guy and these scared girls and played ONLY THAT NOTE the whole way through the script. Would it work? No. As writers, you must also expand the context of the scenario, which is exactly what they do.

One of the big early beats in the story has Mr. Reed pulling out a Mormon bible, complete with hundreds of tabs and notes in it. It’s clear that he’s studied the Mormon religion extensively. He then uses that knowledge to challenge the girls. He brings up lots of details about the religion, ultimately landing on Mormonism supporting men taking more than one wife. Do they support this?

The reason this deeper knowledge is important is because it establishes the writers are committed to going beyond a surface-level thriller. They’ve done that extra research which will allow them to make this just as much of a mental exercise as a thrilling one. Which is what happens. The girls are forced to defend their religion, which takes us even deeper into the themes of the story, which amount to faith and trust in one’s religion.

Most of the scripts I read don’t do that second part. The writers would not have done extensive research on Mormonism. They wouldn’t be able to write about it specifically. Instead, they’d focus on the fun stuff, like, what’s Mr. Reed going to do next? Don’t get me wrong. That stuff will still work. But when you bring in specificity and detail, it supercharges the dramatic elements of the story.

Once the writers milk all they can from that first scenario (a full 30 minutes!), they change locations, pulling the characters into a new room, this one with two doors on the far side, which we understand will represent choices the characters will have to make.

Just putting the doors there alone creates suspense. We will now keep watching to see which doors the girls choose. Once you’ve set up a scenario like this, it allows you to play around. That’s an important screenwriting tip so let me repeat it: Once you’ve set up a strong suspenseful scenario, it allows you to play around.

Think about it. If you’ve promised the reader a treat at the end of the scene, they’ll be willing to sit with you in the meantime and hear what you have to say. The mistake many writers make is they never create the suspenseful scenario in the first place. Which means there is no treat at the end. If you then try and play around, it will feel random, purposeless, and the reader will become anxious quickly. Why would they keep reading if there’s no release?

The ‘playing around’ is really fun here. Mr. Reed goes on a long monologue about the nature of “iterations.” He uses props, explaining that Monopoly was once another board game called The Landlord’s Game. He then plays an oldie record and points out that it’s the tune that would later inspire Radiohead’s “Creep.” Iterations, he explains, is all religions are – repurposed old religions, new and improved. And Mormonism is the newest of them all.

That’s all fun stuff to learn, but if there weren’t two looming doors at the back of the room, I’m not sure I would’ve cared to listen to Mr. Reed’s 12 minute monologue about iterations.

After another 30 minutes, Beck and Woods take you to a third location. It’s a minor thing but an important one. Readers will get bored if they’re in one place for too long. Provide us with new locations that lead to new challenges and it’s like getting a new caffeine hit from a cup of coffee. We’re excited again.

They really do everything right here, the writers.

Probably the most impressive thing they did (warning, spoilers ahead) is making their deus ex machina ending work. A deus ex machina ending is when your hero is dead to rights and then something shows up at the last second to save them. It’s one of those things that SEEMS like it should work, because your hero survives in a surprising way. But it’s an empty feeling because the hero didn’t have to do anything to earn their survival.

However, Beck and Woods cleverly set up a minor rule earlier that ensures when our heroine is saved at the last second, it makes complete and total sense.

If you couldn’t tell, I REALLY liked this movie. I would put it up there with Anora as best script of the year. I knew these two could write their butts off when I read that birth scene in A Quiet Place. They had the misstep with “65” but, as Harry Dunne from Dumb and Dumber would say, “Then you go do this and TOTALLLLLY REDEEM YOURSELVES.” What a good movie! I’ll retroactively add it to my top 10 of 2024.

Number 1 Black List script!

Genre: Romantic Comedy
Premise: Two strangers scramble to find someone to sleep with on the one night of the
year when premarital sex is legal.
About: Travis Braun wrote one of my favorite scripts last year, Dying For You. The guy’s a great writer. So it should come as no surprise that another one of his scripts finished number 1 on the Black List.
Writer: Travis Braun
Details: 98 pages

Pugh for Hannah?

Is this the new rom-com template?

Create a big flashy high-concept way into the genre?

I wouldn’t bet against it. Even though rom-coms have had these little victories over the years, the genre is still nowhere near its former glory. Travis Braun had the idea that, maybe, if you guss it up with a fanciful foundation, it won’t be seen as just another excuse to watch pretty people smile at each other.

Let’s find out if he’s onto something.

In a not-so-slight dig at conservative culture, we now live in a world where, in order to promote family values again, the government has made it illegal to have pre-marital sex. Except for one 12 hour period a year.

Twenty-something pizza-cook, Owen, just got dumped by his girlfriend not only because she doesn’t see a future for them but also because she really really really really wants to have sex with this one guy and since this is the only night to do it, she has to dump Owen NOW.

Cut to Hannah, a personal assistant, who races across town to meet her hot Spanish date for their crazy sex night. They did a Before Sunset thing where they met last year on this day and agreed not to exchange names. Instead, they would meet in this exact spot tonight, a year later. Except Spanish Hottie’s a no-show!

Hannah and Owen both stumble into the night, aware that their only chance to have sex all year just evaporated. You’re probably thinking they’ll bump into each other, right? Correct! They do! And Owen proceeds to throw up all over Hannah’s shoes. It’s what we call, in the business, a “Meet Barf” moment.

They go their own ways. But after Hannah gets arrested for almost having sex with an all-year sex violator guy and Owen falls for a digital honeytrap sending him into Central Park where he’s summarily robbed, the two end up at the police station together.

It’s clear these two are not into each other but when Hannah says she’s starving for some pizza and Owen announces that he’s a pizza chef, there is a slight bit of hope that sex is still on the dough-filled table tonight!

However, just as things are looking up, some too-cool-for-school chick named Nia pulls Hannah off to an exclusive party where she has a chance to not only hook up. But hook up with her celebrity crush! Owen is left alone once again. But only momentarily. He coincidentally ends up at the same party, giving these two one final chance to make sex happen.

I call these ideas “speculative hook” ideas. A world where you can murder one night a year (The Purge). A world where all books are illegal (Fahrenheit 451).

They’re a subset of high concept ideas that focus on creating one shocking societal rule and building a story around it.

I’ve never been the biggest fan of speculative hooks. This type of speculation is so writer-driven, they come off as fake.

But Carson. Aren’t all movie ideas fake? Isn’t Jurassic World fake? Actually, no. That idea makes sense to me. Science has evolved to a point where we can clone animals. So why wouldn’t we be able to clone dinosaurs?

That’s the thing about high-concept ideas. There has to be a line of logic that leads up to their birth. Otherwise, it’s just a writer coming up with an idea and forcing it upon reality.

And yes, I know you can get into the weeds with this stuff. Why do I believe a man can fly around and have super-strength and x-ray vision but not believe the government would limit pre-marital sex to one day a year?

I can’t explain that logically. I can only say that the mythology of Superman, and other superheroes for that matter, is so well-established within our culture that I believe it in the same way that I believe Tom Cruise can cling to the side of a flying airplane.

The result of ideas that don’t immediately meet the ‘suspension of disbelief bar’ is that the reader must climb a steeper hill to get hooked. And other problems in the script become magnified due to the fact that the reader isn’t immediately immersed.

For example, where are the stakes? Why do I care if two adults can’t have sex? What happens to these characters if they don’t succeed? They have to wait a year? Okay. So? There are people in this world, the real one mind you, who haven’t had sex in years. They’re still living their lives.

So, yeah, with every page, I was losing hope.

However…

The script gradually began to win me over with its charm.

Once I realized that, at its heart, it was a romantic comedy, I stopped judging it so harshly. All I care about with romantic comedies is that they meet three criteria. Do I like the guy? Do I like the girl? Do I want to see them end up together?

One Night Only meets all three of those criteria.

A low-key thing that Braun does well is he creates these characters that are fallible. They know they’re imperfect but they still try their best.

I’ll tell you why this is important. I recently watched this show called “Laid.” It’s a high-concept idea as well. This main female character starts to realize that every man she’s slept with is dying. So the show is about her going off and warning all these guys.

In that show, the main character is very dismissive of others, particularly men.  She thinks the world of herself, unable to notice any of her flaws.  She innately believes she deserves Channing Tatum when she’s more on the level of Jonah Hill. She looks down on most of the guys she runs into. They’re always wrong. She’s always right.

Why would I like that character? Why would I want to root for that character?

Hannah wants the best guy she can get, similar to the protagonist in Laid. But she’s not blind to her own weaknesses. She is fallible and knows it. She realizes that if she had her life together, she wouldn’t be in this position. It makes her a lot more likable so that, when Owen shows interest, I was rooting for her to like him back.

The science of character likability may be the most important component in all of screenwriting. It’s so delicate yet so important. If we don’t like your character, we don’t care about anything else. If you go overboard and make them too likable, they don’t feel like a real person.

It’s a fragile balancing act but it’s worth spending a lot of time on to get right. One of the main questions I would ask anybody who reads your script is, “Did you like my main characters?” Cause if they say “no,” or, just as bad, say, “They were okay,” then you have work to do. Stop worrying about your plot and your twists and your dialogue and get back in there and figure out how to make us love your characters. Cause if we don’t. You’re basically f*&%d.

One Night Only is not as good as Dying for You. That script fired on all cylinders. But it’s still good. And it’s a rare example of somebody in the business writing a funny script. After Hollywood sent the comedy genre to the death camps, all the good comedy writers disappeared. Travis Braun is one of the only few left.

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

What I learned: When you meet the three romantic comedy criteria I mentioned above, you can activate the “pull-apart” method. That’s what Braun did here. He kept pulling Hannah and Owen apart. They would meet, they would be pulled apart, they would run into each other again, then get pulled apart. When readers see characters they like pulled apart, they stick around until they come together again. This isn’t just true for romantic comedies. You can use it in any genre. One of the reasons The Empire Strikes Back is considered to be such a good film is because we are anxiously waiting until all the characters come back together again. Up until that point, due to their separation, all we feel is anxiety. But, again, this only works if we actually like the characters.

Bust out your Trapper Keepers and get this all down in your calanders!

This year, we’re going to have 11 showdowns at Scriptshadow. If you’re new to the site, a Showdown is when you send me a writing sample, I pick the best entries and post them on the site, then you guys spend the weekend voting on your favorite entry. The winning entry then gets reviewed on the site.

Normally, I’d announce each Showdown the month before. But I want everyone to have that information ahead of time so that you can prepare the best submissions possible.

We’re going to start off with one of my favorite showdowns to run, the LOGLINE SHOWDOWN. Except there’s a little twist! Instead of only submitting one logline, you must submit FIVE loglines. I will choose your best logline. That logline will be officially entered into the competition. I will then choose ten loglines to compete in the showdown.

As a bonus, even if you don’t make the cut, I will tell every single person who enters what their best logline was. The secondary goal of this showdown is to find your next script to write. So, at the very least, I’m going to tell you which of your five ideas you should turn into a script.

JANUARY – 5 LOGLINES SHOWDOWN

What: 5 Loglines Showdown
When: Friday, January 30
Deadline: Thursday, January 31, 11pm Pacific Time
Submit: 5 loglines, each with a title and a genre
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com

Okay, let’s move on to the rest of the showdowns

FEBRUARY – FIRST PAGE SHOWDOWN

Not enough writers understand the art of keeping the reader’s attention. They write for themselves rather than placing themselves in the minds of their readers and asking what would entertain them. That first page tells the reader SO MUCH about you. Namely, it poses the question: Would you keep reading? Would we?

MARCH – SCENE SHOWDOWN

Scene-writing is script-writing. You cannot write a script until you first understand how to write a dramatically compelling scene with a beginning, middle, and end. Something that conveys character wants. Something that shows you understand how to inject conflict into a scenario. Most of all, a scene displays whether you know how to be entertaining. This is your chance to prove all that.

APRIL – TWIST ENDING SHOWDOWN

I felt like we needed to have fun with a couple of these showdowns so these next two are, admittedly, different. You will write a short script that MUST HAVE a twist ending. Twist endings are super hard to write but when they work, they turn a script into a must-read.

MAY – CHARACTER INTRO SHOWDOWN

I thought we all knew how important introducing a character was. Yet I continue to read scripts with weak character intros! This is your chance to change that. If I told you that you had to create the best character in cinema history, what kind of first scene would you write for them? I’d imagine it would be amazing. Well, that’s how you should approach every one of your protagonist intros.

JUNE – MEGA-SHOWDOWN RETURNS!!!

Mega-Showdown returns! 10 uninterrupted days of showdown madness on the site. This was my favorite two weeks on Scriptshadow last year so I’m excited to see what happens next. If you haven’t already started on something, you should start the SECOND you get my reply e-mail about which of your five loglines is best.

JULY – HIGH CONCEPT LOGLINE SHOWDOWN

After you finish a script, the very first thing you need to do is COME UP WITH YOUR NEXT IDEA. Hollywood waits for no one. You must keep generating material. This logline competition, however, is going to be high concept only. No sad Alaskan coming-of-age concepts. Only stuff that results in anime eyes from any producer who looks at it.

AUGUST – DIALOGUE SHOWDOWN

Write a scene that is dialogue-driven! I might even impose limitations of allowing a minimal amount of description. The scene’s value must exist solely on the ability to write great dialogue. Better get that Scriptshadow Dialogue book if you hope to stand a chance!

SEPTEMBER – OPEN SHOWDOWN

I’m still not sure what I’m going to do for this month yet. A couple of options are a Second Chance Showdown (for entries that were solid but didn’t make the Mega-Showdown cut). Short Story Showdown. Interpretation Showdown (I post a short script idea and everyone writes their version of it). I’m open to other ideas so feel free to suggest stuff in the comments!

OCTOBER – HORROR SHOWDOWN

It’s been a while since we’ve had a genre-specific showdown and what better month to bring it back than October! When Halloween is in the air. Poe will be thrilled. Scott will be furious. But, in the end, we’ll all be happy if we find a great horror script. :)

NOVEMBER – AI PITCH SHOWDOWN

A part of me doesn’t want to do this showdown but I think it’s necessary if we don’t want to be left behind. By the end of this year, I believe screenwriting will begin to heavily incorporate AI to bring in a more visual element when pitching our stories. So, I want to do a showdown where you pitch your movie idea using the available AI tools out there (image generation, video generation). Whoever wins, I will review their script (yes, this can include scripts that didn’t make the Mega-Showdown). I know there will be a lot of questions about this one. We’ll answer those questions as we get closer to November.

And there we have it. A year’s worth of screenwriting battles. I can’t wait! Can you??

Welcome to 2025!

Tomorrow, I will list the 11 SHOWDOWNS that we’re going to have this year on the site. Because I know how impatient you all are, I’ll give you a quick preview.

Our first showdown, which will happen on January 23rd, is going to be LOGLINE SHOWDOWN.

But it comes with a twist. You are not going to send in a single logline. You are going to send in FIVE loglines. I’ll decide which one is best. I will then post the 10 best loglines (from those top choices) that were submitted and all of you will vote.

Now, there’s a reason I’m doing this. We often get obsessed with a single idea. So much so that it’s impossible for us to receive criticism regarding that idea. We see it all the time in the comments. Someone posts a logline. Others don’t like it. The writer becomes fiercely defensive and everyone goes home angry.

I understand defending one’s idea. If we weren’t personally attached to what we wrote, what we wrote would probably suck.

But, the other day, I saw that one of you posted how John Hughes used to come up with hundreds of ideas a year so that he was only picking the best of the best to make movies from.

I want to use that same approach here. Instead of becoming attached to one idea that may be bad, I want you to generate multiple ideas. This will create less of an attachment and allow you to be okay with others judging them. Also, a lot of times what will happen is that a throwaway idea will end up being your best one.

This happens all the time in pitch meetings. The writer comes into the studio to pitch his slam-dunk idea. It’s immediately clear the executives aren’t into it. He pivots to another idea. They don’t like that one either. He then pitches some throwaway idea he came up with a couple of weeks ago and, bam, the execs are hooked.

So, if I were you, I would start generating five loglines A DAY leading up to January 23rd, Logline Showdown Day. Send me the top 5 of those 100 loglines. If you do that, you should have one good movie concept in there. If all this goes as planned, we’ll have the most competitive Logline Showdown ever.

And this is all part of a bigger plan. I will tell EVERYBODY who submits loglines, whether they get chosen or not, which logline was their best one. There will be a major Script Showdown announced tomorrow. I would then prefer that the entry for that showdown be your best logline.

I always say never to use flashbacks so I don’t know what it says that I’m violating my own rule.

BUT…

I did catch up on the last few movies that I missed last year and I wanted to give you my thoughts about them. Keep in mind that I saw faults in all of these movies from afar, which is why I didn’t see them when they came out. Therefore, I was predisposed to disliking them. I’ll start with the worst and move my way up to the best.

Elevation

What’s interesting about this movie is that this is the type of script I tell you guys to write. In fact, there’s a good chance this logline would’ve finished high on this month’s Logline Showdown. After a worldwide invasion by mysterious monsters, humanity’s only safety is to move up to a higher elevation, where the monsters can’t survive. In this case, that’s 8000 feet.

It comes from the same producers of A Quiet Place so it has that same high concept feel to it. But this movie was no Quiet Place.

I knew it was in trouble when the main plot revealed itself. This community lives in a safety zone above 8000 feet. The main character’s son has health issues. They run out of medicine for him so they have to head to the city to get more. The city, of course, is below 8000 feet. That’s your movie.

The “go get medicine” trope is so played out that you can’t use it as a main plotline. You can use it as a subplot in, say, a TV show, which shows like The Walking Dead do all the time. But it can’t be your main plot. That’s about as lazy of a creative choice as you can come up with. You need to be more original.

But the bigger issue here is that you could tell they didn’t have enough story. There were tons of scenes with characters sitting around, sharing difficult moments from their pasts, or talking about their feelings. A good script should never feel like it’s biding time. It should feel like there isn’t enough time. When you have to write scenes to stretch your script out to an acceptable length, your script is dead in the water.

But are you ready to get mind-f*%&ed?  I would still tell you to write this script.  You know why?  Because you’re reading a review of the movie.  Which means it got made.  Which means that EVEN THOUGH they had a bad script, they still made it.  Why?  Because it was a high concept.  High concept stuff is more likely to get made, which means you don’t need to execute the script perfectly to get traction with it.

Saturday Night

There is NOBODY who likes a real-time concept more than me. I’m of the belief that the tighter you make your timeframe, the more urgency and tension you pack into your script. You do yourself so many favors with this format cause it hides a lot of the problems that come up in a script otherwise.

Jason Reitman has me rethinking that opinion.

Saturday Night has to be one of the more frustrating movies I’ve seen in a while because, with every scene, I thought, “I *should* be liking this.” Yet I wasn’t.

You have the insane pressure of putting on a show with only minutes left to get ready and everything is going wrong. It’s complete chaos. Nobody likes each other. That’s the recipe for a tension-filled movie!

But I think I know why it didn’t work. For one, the driving force for liking this movie is understanding who’s who. It’s understanding who Dan Akroyd is. Who Chevy Chase is. Who John Belushi is.

The movie does a terrible job of conveying this. None of the actors look like their real-life counterparts. This means that older people who grew up with Saturday Night Live come away frustrated.

Then you have the younger audience watching this movie. If you don’t have any idea who these people are at all, I don’t know why you would have any interest in the film. I suppose if you made the characters fun to watch onscreen, anybody would like them, regardless of whether they’d heard of SNL or not. But neither Chevy Chase, Dan Akroyd, or John Belushi, stand out. None of them have a moment where you think, “Ooh, this character is interesting. I want to know more about them.”

But the bigger issue is that the movie decides to make Lorne Michaels (the creator of Saturday Night Live) the main character and he is the single most uninteresting character I watched in movies all year.

A good protagonist should be ACTIVE. They should be exerting themselves on the plot. This does two things. It makes us like the main character (we like people who take action) and it injects life into the plot. If the protagonist is trying to do things, he will be met with obstacles and conflict, which create drama and entertainment.

All the Lorne Michaels’ character does in this movie is stumble from scene to scene and observe what’s going on. He never does anything. He never exerts himself on the production. He does so little, in fact, that I would not have faulted a viewer for assuming he was a production assistant.

On top of this, the movie isn’t funny. I didn’t laugh once. Much of the dialogue is Sorkin’esque, the walking-and-talking million-words-a-minute style that made Aaron famous. The problem is, it’s third-rate Sorkin at best. This goes back to my complaint about The Franchise. If you’re making a comedy, you need funny people in the key positions – director, writer, actor. There were no comedians in any of those positions here. So you reap what you sow.

Nightbitch

Nightbitch is one of those movies that would’ve finished top 5 on the Black List. Why? CAUSE IT’S A GIANT METAPHOR. A suburban mother who’s going insane due to her stay-at-home duties starts turning into a dog.

It’s a metaphor for… something.

The point is, scripts like this are always celebrated because intellectual types think they’re smart. They also contain an x-factor that elevates them above your typical movies that examine life.

But the script fails due to a basic problem – no plot. I see this all the time in character examinations. The writer becomes so focused on examining their main character that they forget to create a story for them to move through.

All Nightbitch does is drop us into unconnected scenes of our heroine either a) doing something with her kid, or b) doing something with her husband.

To the writer’s credit, there is a significant amount of conflict. There is conflict within our main character. And there is conflict between our main character and her husband. But you still need a plot. You still need a destination. If you don’t give the reader a destination and they, therefore, don’t know where they’re headed, it becomes very difficult for them to stay engaged.

This is Screenwriting 101. Build some GSU into your story. You may have been able to save the film.

The Order

I have begun to trust IMDB ratings much more than Rotten Tomatoes ratings. Rotten Tomatoes has this movie at 91%. IMDB has it at a 6.8. In general, a 7.0 on IMDB means it’s an average movie. A 7.1 is a little better. And a 7.2 usually means it’s good. Every point higher than that means the movie is genuinely good. A 7.6, for example would equate to a genuinely awesome flick.

The Order is a 6.8 movie. It’s watchable but weak in too many key areas. It’s a confused premise. It presents as a “based on a true story” movie, set in the 70s following domestic terrorists. But it’s not true. It’s all made up. Which is strange.

Why set some fictional movie in the 70s for such a random topic? Idaho (where the movie is set) has some domestic terrorist issues NOW. So, why not set it now? It would’ve been a million times more interesting.

The seriousness with which the movie presents itself prevents any sort of excitement from unfolding. And it seems to deliberately make choices that make the movie worse as opposed to better.

For example, in an early bank robbery scene, our crew steals money from a bank and shoot off in the getaway car, celebrating their victory. Then, out of nowhere, you hear a BANG and blood splatters across everyone’s face. There’s momentary confusion as to what happened and who got shot.

But instead of telling you, the director cuts to the next scene, our bank-robbing leader arriving home with the money, covered in blood. His girlfriend says, “What happened!?” “Nothing, just an ink explosion.”

So nobody got hurt then. Oh and, also, all the money they stole was wrapped in plastic. So none of the money got hit with the ink explosion. Nobody got hurt. The ink explosion didn’t mark the money, meaning it can still be used. WHAT WAS THE POINT OF THE INK EXPLOSION THEN!!??

The movie’s shining light was its bank robbery scenes. They were the best bank robbery scenes I’ve seen in years. But there were only a few of them. Everything else about this movie plods along boringly.

Gladiator 2

Oh, Gladiator 2. This is a tough movie to talk about because it’s so decidedly average and we don’t have a community to discuss average movies anymore. Movies either need to be great or terrible. There’s no in-between.

The biggest award I can give this film is that it takes a rather elaborate plot and manages to keep it on the tracks. There’s a lot going on here. You have these co-emperors of Rome and they defeat some country in battle and they make that country slaves and they bring them to Rome and yet one of those defeated men, our hero, used to be Roman and he falls under the tutelage of some “vice” emperor played by Denzel, who turns him into a gladiator and, oh yeah, it turns out (spoiler) that he’s actually Maximus’s secret son and then Denzel takes out the brother emperors and becomes emperor himself and now he and our gladiator are enemies.

There’s a LOT going on in this plot. It’s the opposite of Nightbitch.

Despite Denzel being the best thing about the movie, the decision to hire him ultimately hurt it. Because Denzel blows everyone out of the water in every scene that he’s in in every movie. Here, he’s pitted against an actor, Paul Mescal, who’s still raw. He doesn’t yet have gravitas onscreen. The reason the first movie worked so well was because Russell Crowe was always the biggest thing onscreen. Mescal is no Crowe. And, therefore, it’s the villain, Denzel, who comes away as the biggest character in the movie as opposed to who it should’ve been – our hero.

I still think this movie is worth checking out. I liked the unique choice to make the emperor a two-headed monster. And I liked the weirdness of those characters. And, unlike a lot of the movies listed above, Gladiator 2 never gets boring. It only fails to achieve what you want it to. And maybe that’s because our expectations were too high to begin with.

Wicked

Wicked wins the “Best of the Missed Movies” list by a hair over Gladiator 2. You can always tell if a movie is “working” within the first scene. That doesn’t mean you’ll like it. But there are so many movies where the elements don’t come together in a harmonious way, leaving the movie feeling disjointed and unsure of itself.

I’m thinking of movies like The Fall Guy and If and Fly Me To The Moon and Borderlands and Megalopolis. The ingredients of these movies are all fighting against the overall product.

Not the case with Wicked. You can feel a certainty behind the film. The director, the actors, the production designers – they all knew exactly the film they were making and that confidence comes across on screen.

The actor I was most worried about was the big revelation in the film – Ariana Grande. This is because I assumed she was playing the good guy. Ariana Grande is not good! Therefore, when we learn that she actually plays the villain, everything falls into place. She is the most villainous villain of the year, both in real life and in the film. And the movie shines because of it.

The script shines the brightest by utilizing one of the most tried-and-true devices in screenwriting – a pair of characters (Glinda and Elphaba) who despise each other. Forcing two people who don’t like each other to be around one another is the dramatic gift that keeps on giving. It’s so simple yet so effective and, for me, it was what made the movie so fun. In fact, whenever the two were apart, I would eagerly wait for them to reunite. The movie was always best when they shared the screen.

That doesn’t mean there weren’t issues. The movie was way too long, an unapologetic 2 hours and 40 minutes. It certainly took its time through some sections. But I thought the movie was good overall.

Did you see any of these movies? Or did you catch up on any 2024 films that surprised you? If so, share your thoughts below!  And if you want to start pitching loglines for community feedback, go for it!