You have until the end of today, Thursday, July 25th, 10pm Pacific Time, to submit your screenplay

Thank you to everyone for supporting this “Write a script in 6 months” project. It’s always helpful to go back to basics and remind myself how the sausage is made.

I know, for some people, putting your work out there is terrifying. You’re afraid that if you submit to a contest, like this one, and don’t get chosen, it’s some sort of referendum on you as a writer. That’s not true at all. Any script-choosing process is being done through a subjective lens. And even if your script is objectively lacking, that just means you have to learn from your mistakes and get better. You can’t do that if you hold onto your scripts forever. Get your writing out there! It’s a scary step but once you make it, your entire screenwriting trajectory will change for the better. I guarantee it.

You have until 10pm tonight, Thursday, to submit. Your script needs to be completed as the winner will get a script review on the site.

What: Mega-Showdown (Online Feature Screenplay Contest)
What I need from you: Title, genre, logline, your first five pages
Optional: movie tagline, movie-crossover pitch
Contest Date: Friday, July 26th
Deadline: Thursday, July 25th, 10pm Pacific Time
Send to: entries should be sent to carsonreeves3@gmail.com
How: Include “MEGA” in the subject line
Price: Free

The Mega-Showdown Screenplay Contest deadline is THIS THURSDAY. Go here for details on how to sign up!

Genre: Comedy/Supernatural/High School
Premise: A nerdy father secretly signs up to be the chaperone of his daughter’s high school field trip to an old Native American reservation, only to have a killer king take over the history teacher’s body and start killing people.
About: Verve is one of the few outlets that still cares about screenwriting so I’m typically encouraged when I open up one of their scripts. The writer, Sarah Rothschild, has one film credit, the 2020 movie, “The Sleepover,” for Netflix. Rothschild is also writing the remake of the 1984 film that made every young boy fall in love with Darryl Hannah, “Splash.” I have no doubt that it was today’s script that got her that job.
Writer: Sarah Rothschild
Details: 118 pages

A lot of times I’ll open a script, not with a sense of doom, but a sense of acceptance. I know this isn’t the kind of story I like. And so the next 90 minutes are going to be painful. They’re going to feel a lot more like 190 minutes.

I can’t even begin to describe the stupid stuff I, all of a sudden, need to look up on the internet when I’m struggling to read a script. Here’s a brief peek into what that looks like: “What page am I on? Seven? Hmm, I thought I was on page 30. (Stares at the wall) I haven’t bought almond butter in over two years. I used to love almond butter. What happened? Now that I think about it, during those two years, some new almond butter brands have probably entered the market. I should find out what the best new almond butter brands are.” I then proceed to, I kid you not, research new almond butter brands for half an hour.

But I’m also reminded, time and time again, that if you’re a good writer, you can override almond butter syndrome. Doesn’t matter how much a reader dislikes the genre you’re writing. Good writing trumps all.

And that’s exactly what happened with today’s script.

40-something Pete McGuire lives in Oak Park, Illinois, coincidentally the exact same town I grew up in – no that didn’t affect my review. The only thing he cares about these days is spending time with his 15 year old daughter, Cora. Which isn’t easy considering she stays with Pete’s ex-wife, who’s now married to a third baseman for the Chicago Cubs.

In a desperate bid to spend more time with Cora, Pete secretly signs up to be a chaperone on the school’s next big field trip, to the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, which once housed the biggest Native American city in all of North America, with 20,000 people. Then, one day, all those people disappeared.

One of the other chaperones, Cal, informs cluless Pete that these trips are often used by the teenagers to sneak away and have sex. This totally ruins Pete’s good vibes and now all he can think about is watching Cora like a hawk. But when they get to Cohokia Mounds, she immediately disappears with a group of other teens.

Meanwhile, two other kids stumble into an off limits dig site, find an old tablet, and accidentally drop it just as the history teacher, Mr. Truitt, arrives. A soul shoots out of the broken tablet, enters Mr. Truitt’s brain, and now all Mr. Truitt wants to do is kill people.

All of a sudden, it starts raining, so all the kids are huddled into the central building, clueless to the fact that there’s now a demon running around trying to kill people. Oh, and the operating thesis is that it only wants to kill virgins. When the other chaperones find out what’s going on, they assure Pete that, wherever Cora is, she’s fine, because she’s definitely not a virgin.

Still, Pete must find his daughter. So he teams up with another chaperone, Lindy, who, coincidentally, is her boyfriend’s mom. They head off to find them, realizing, along the way, that they kind of like each other. So if they can somehow save their kids (and save them from having sex), maybe there’s a future romance that will blossom.

Today’s script is a great example of finding fresh angles into time-tested concepts. Kids going on a field trip. We’ve seen that before. But that doesn’t mean the subject matter is permanently closed off. If you can find a different way into a field trip, you can still write a unique entertaining movie.

These field trips are chaperoned. Why not tell the story from that point of view? Already, we’re starting to see a different movie. But there’s an amendment to this approach. And it’s one a lot of writers ignore. That amendment is: YOU MUST COMMIT TO IT.

In other words, you can’t write “chaperones” into your logline, have the 5 chaperones show up at the beginning of the story, then just write your average funny high school horror flick. No, you have to go all in on the chaperone thing.

You have to establish five chaperones, give us their backstories, tell us what their relationships are with their kids, figure out what’s uniquely funny about them. For example, Cal is a “worst-case scenario” guy. He tells you exactly how bad high school kids can get on these trips any chance he gets.

And you should tell the story almost exclusively from the chaperone POV. Which is what we get here. Which works out great. Rothschild fully commits to the idea. We even have a little mythology. Each chaperone is assigned a group “color”.

That might seem insignificant to the newbie writer. But that stuff resonates with readers. The reader knows they’re not phoning it in. They’ve thought this through. Cause a bad writer will easily assume that there’s nothing to chaperoning but showing up and winging it. I’ll read a lot of bad scripts where characters are winging it simply due to the fact that the writer has no idea what they’re writing about.

I’m sure some people are going to compare this to the movie, Blockers. But this is a WAAAAAAY BETTER SCRIPT than that. That script was awful. I was so confused when people actually liked it. This script is actually good and if you’re into these types of movies, read it. It’s a great template for how to approach this genre with just the right balance of humor, horror, character, and craft.

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

What I learned: I always love when writers SHOW as opposed to TELL in some clever way. Early in the script, Rothschild needs to convey to the reader that Cora doesn’t think about her father as much these days. The way most writers would handle that is through dialogue. NO! DON’T DO THAT! Figure out a way to SHOW IT. So, before I tell you what Rothschild does, you tell me how you would convey this by showing. ** I’m waiting. Have you thought something up? Okay… here’s what Rothschild did.

When Pete comes over to pick up his daughter from his ex-wife’s house, he realizes there was a scheduling mistake and Cora is going to hang out with friends tonight. Pete says no problem. They’ll do it next week. Here’s the ‘show don’t tell’ part from the script itself.

Cora hugs her mom. Pete holds his hand out for a handshake. Their special “thing.” Cora smiles, uncertain. After a few flubbed movements, it’s clear she doesn’t remember it. Pete laughs, hiding his disappointment.

What I learned 2: What I’m learning from a lot of these scripts that make the Black List is that they often get the writer chances at rewrites for old franchises. My friend Leah got a shot at Grease after writing Voicemails for Isabelle. Rothschild got a shot at Splash. And I’ve heard of lots of other cases where that’s happened as well. So, whatever franchise you want to reboot, write something in the same vein.

Actually, now I’m curious. If you could reboot one franchise, what would it be?

The Mega-Showdown Screenplay Contest deadline is THIS THURSDAY. Go here for details on how to sign up!

Genre: Mystery
Premise: A mommy vlogger’s child goes missing but when the detective assigned to the case starts looking into it, she suspects that the missing child may not exist.
About: Not much is known about this writer. She seems to be new on the scene. This script finished with 13 votes, placing it in the top third of the list.
Writer: Brenna Galvin
Details: 104 pages

Somebody has gone missing.

It’s one of the most tried-and-true setups in storytelling. You’ve got a clear goal, clear stakes, and clear urgency, right out of the gate.

There is a funny quirk about the sub-genre, though. It tends to do a lot better in the literary world than the movie world.

I looked up movies about missing people and there aren’t as many as you’d think there would be. Gone Girl, Missing, The Black Phone, Prisoners, Taken. But with books, it seems like every other book is about a woman who’s gone missing.

I suspect that’s because the audience for missing person’s stories is women. And when it comes to fiction books, that audience is mainly women. Whereas, with movies, the demographic is slightly skewed towards men.

Therefore, the only breakout missing-person’s movies have to be these gigantic mega-selling books, like Gone Girl or The Lovely Bones.

It’s surprising that’s the case, though. Cause, like I pointed out, it’s got all of the main ingredients built into the setup. I’m guessing one of the reasons we don’t see it as much is because it’s hard to make these movies feel different.

Japanese-American 20-something MARIE OKADA-GREEN is a mommy vlogger for her 4 year old daughter, Daisy. She also has a 4 year old son, Henry, who she doesn’t talk about on the vlog.

Marie is not one of these super vloggers who pretend to know everything about raising a child. She’s figuring it out and sharing her journey along the way. But she’s amassed a pretty big following, with a quarter of a million people who watch her vlog.

By the way, we don’t see Henry or Daisy when the movie starts other than seeing Daisy through pictures and videos on the vlog. Marie goes to pick Henry up after his first day of preschool and is told that he never showed up. That’s impossible, Marie says. I dropped him off myself. But they don’t have any record of him being present that day.

The cops are immediately called and a female detective is assigned to the case. Marie also brings in her sister, Autumn, who, by the way, has never seen Henry in her life. Marie didn’t want Henry to have contact with Autumn because Autumn is close with their mother, Kiki, and Marie hates her mom.

This is when we learn that there is no Daisy. There was only Henry. When Marie first started the vlog, she made a snap decision to protect her son’s identity and make him a girl. When the cops learn this, they think Marie is a little bananas and start wondering if there is a “Henry.” Because nobody’s actually seen Henry.

After a good 30 pages goes by with everyone scrambling to find out the truth, Henry is eventually found! A woman named Kat has Henry. She claims that she adopted Henry from Marie and has the adoption papers to prove it. At this point, the cop doesn’t have any idea what’s going on. But the documents look legit so she closes the case. But Marie still insists that Henry is her son. So she puts on her big thinking cap to figure out how to get her son back.  Things only get crazier from there.

One of the harder things for me to reconcile is that the Black List is no longer a “Best of” list. It’s a “Here are The Best Writers At The Beginning of Their Screenwriting Journey” list. The difference between now and those older lists is, now, you can really see the writer working out how to write a screenplay as you’re reading it.

They don’t quite know what they’re doing yet. But they’re trying the best they can. For instance, in order to construct this storyline, the writer has to create so many extreme coincidences that it’s just not believable what’s happening.

Marie has never shown her child to a single person? Not even her sister, who she’s close with? Not even her mother? Four years and nobody has ever since this kid? Maybe you could get away with that in 1980 if Marie lived in some remote part of Alabama. But in 2024, in the city?

Something I occasionally talk about here is “buy in.” When the buy in is cheap, the reader will always go along with it. But when the buy in gets expensive, you run into readers who’ll take their business elsewhere. This is an expensive buy in – that nobody has ever seen this child.

The problem with expensive buy in – even for readers who reluctantly pay and keep reading – is that the reader is now less trustful of the writer. Their thinking is, “They tried to pull one fast one on me. What else are they going to try to pull?”

And that’s the real problem. Because once you’ve informed the reader that you don’t play by the rules, they’re looking for you to cheat again. And the second you do, they’re out. So, what happens next in this story? Well, they discover that Marie gave Henry up for adoption and this other woman, Kat, adopted him. She had no idea people were even looking for Henry.

But wait. Kat wasn’t aware of a national story about a missing child named Henry? The name of her child? Who looks EXACTLY like her child? No, apparently not. Kat tells us she was offline for three weeks so she didn’t know this was going on. I mean, come on. This is when you start insulting the reader’s intelligence.

I’m not going to go into this too much but a common thing that happens with new writers is they easily convince themselves that flimsy story threads are solid.

I recently saw this screenwriter’s tweet that went something like this: “If you want to drive yourself crazy, write a mystery.” I get what he’s saying. A mystery requires you to create this elaborate jumbled puzzle. And piecing that puzzle together in both a pleasing and challenging way is hard. Cause it puts you in these situations like the above – where you have to explain something that doesn’t make sense. Kat has been off the grid for 3 weeks and had no idea the world was looking for her child?  It’s not easy to explain that away.  But that doesn’t mean you can just hope the reader goes with it.

It’s stuff like this that makes me question the Black List’s criteria. Cause that isn’t even the last twist. There are three more major twists, all of which make the story less and less believable. It’s not lost on me that the script is Benchedel Test friendly. There isn’t a single xy chromosome in the screenplay and I know the Black List loves that. Is that the reason this script made the list?

Who knows? Cause, like I said, this is more of a “writers to watch out for” list now than it is a series of scripts that are ready to be movies.

Did I like anything about this script?

I liked the idea of a woman creating a fake child in order to become a mommy blogger. That is a great commentary on our society today. I can actually imagine that happening. If the story would’ve stuck with that and that alone, this script could’ve been good. But it just got too complicated.

Which is one more opportunity for me to remind you of the most important screenwriting advice you’ll ever hear: KEEP IT SIMPLE. The more complex you make your plot, the more likely it is that the script will fall apart.

It’s not that complex plots can’t be done. But they’re not something that a screenwriter writing one of their first five sceenplays should bother themselves with. I can pretty much guarantee that if you’re a writer writing one of your first five scripts and you try to make it super complex, it will fall apart.

It takes time to learn how to navigate complex plotting. It’s much trickier than it looks. It’s better to learn how to tell a great simple story. Only once you’ve mastered that should you start layering complexity into your scripts.

Not for me, guys. Just wasn’t believable.

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

What I learned: Sometimes you have to introduce a character but you don’t have time to stop and properly describe them because, for whatever reason, the scene needs to keep moving. This is a great way to do that. You just add some parentheses and informally tell the reader that more details are forthcoming.

“She takes special care with a PHOTO of herself and a handsome guy (we’ll come to know as late husband PAUL).”

We’ll talk Twisters in a moment but first we have to remind everyone about the local tornado that’s hitting Scriptshadow this Friday: MEGA-SHOWDOWN. It’s a free online screenwriting contest. You send in your title, genre, logline, and first page and the ten best entries will go head-to-head this weekend. Your script needs to be finished because the winner will get a script review. Here’s how to enter…

What: Mega-Showdown (Online Feature Screenplay Contest)
What I need from you: Title, genre, logline, your first five pages
Optional: movie tagline, movie-crossover pitch
Contest Date: Friday, July 26th
Deadline: Thursday, July 25th, 10pm Pacific Time
Send to: entries should be sent to carsonreeves3@gmail.com
How: Include “MEGA” in the subject line
Price: Free

Onto the weekend!

As often happens on the weekend, Friday rolls around and I say, “I’ve got to go see this new movie!” And then ALL THE WORK I didn’t get done during the week rears its head, with script after script still to read, and I say, “Guess there will be no movie this weekend!”

MAYBE if Twisters had scored higher than 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, I would’ve found a way to get to The Grove. But one of my prerequisites for going to the theater is that the movie has to look like it’s offering SOMETHING new. And no matter how far you ducked your head in the cellar to avoid that whirling dervish of Glen Powell hype, this movie looked as formulaic as it gets.

Which is BAD when it comes to someone who’s spent thousands of hours of their life dissecting screenplays.

But it’s GOOD, as proven by the 80 million dollars Twisters took in this weekend, for the average moviegoer. I think a lot of us forget that the average person sees 1 or 2 movies a year at the theater. Those audiences don’t have any idea what formula is. Nor do they care.

So, if you know the 3-Act structure, you can write one of these big Hollywood films. And if you really want to separate yourselves from the pack, learn to execute the 3-Act structure INVISIBLY. What that means is, when the major story beats show up, they don’t announce themselves. “HERE’S THE INCITING INCIDENT!” “HERE’S THE FIRST ACT TURN!” “HERE’S THE CULMINATION OF MY HERO’S ARC!” Once you become an expert at delivering these big moments invisibly, you become a screenwriting gale-force (hey, I’m trying to stay on-theme here, work with me).

In fact, if there’s anything that the success of these reboots like Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun, and Twisters has taught us, it’s that formula stands the test of time. I suspect that one of the reasons these gigantic ensemble franchises, like Marvel, like Fast and Furious, and like Star Wars, are starting to crumble is because they screw with a key ingredient in the screenplay formula, which is that they throw away the single protag in favor of 10 of them. So the audience doesn’t have that one person to relate to and connect with.

Let’s not forget that, as those franchises grew, like Marvel, they were utilizing the more traditional formula with small character counts. But they made a deal with the devil once they started including multiple superheroes in each movie. Cause you can’t go backwards after that. Not only does it mean that we don’t have that one character to connect with anymore. But the structure gets uncomfortably stretched out when you’re covering ten character storylines instead of one.

Ryan Coogler played the good soldier in Black Panther 2 but, every once in a while, he couldn’t contain how frustrated he was that Marvel was making him include characters like Iron Heart. The narrative had to go completely out of its way to get her into its story and that broke the formula. Once you break the formula, the formula stops working. You either have to commit to it or don’t use it at all. You can’t straddle the fence.

Another screenwriting win this week comes in the form of the 5 year old Bryan Cranston Showtime show, “Your Honor.” The show did middling numbers on the old-timey cable network. But now that it’s on Netflix, it’s doing INSANE numbers. How insane? On Nielson’s OVERALL ratings, it’s beating out The Boys and House of the Dragon.

If you remember, Cranston’s breakout show, Breaking Bad, didn’t initially have huge numbers on AMC. It was only once the show got to Netflix that it became this huge bonanza. So they’re obviously using the same strategy here. And it goes to show that how well a show is received has a lot to do with what network it’s on.

So, why is it a win for screenwriting? Because it’s a show with one of the better concepts of the last five years. A judge’s son hits and kills someone with his car. The judge then uses his power to protect him and cover it up. But problems arise when the victim turns out to be the son of a mob boss. That’s a really good premise for a show!

If only the execution was as good as that concept! I watched three episodes and the writing wasn’t as crisp as Breaking Bad. But, again, this is why concept is king. It can absolutely override average execution. Cause everybody is watching this show now even though the execution isn’t superb.

Speaking of Nielson ratings, there was another surprising placement on the list. Or, in this case, you could say non-placement. Not only did The Acolyte not make the Overall Top 10 in ratings. It didn’t even make the Originals Top 10! That’s straight-up embarrassing. Some of you might contest that. But if you’re honest with yourselves, there’s no way around it. This is a 180 million dollar show. That’s on par with Game of Thrones. To fall below Sweetooth, Mayor of Kingstown, and even America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, is a catastrophic failure.

Is that the hatch?? Wait a minute, does Qimir live on the Lost Island???

Look. We can talk all day about the failure of Star Wars shows. And I do. But between the ratings for this, Andor, Obi-Wan, Boba Fett, and Ahsoka, this is proof that Star Wars was not made for television. It doesn’t work without a) spectacle and b) giant stakes. People don’t care if two Star Wars characters who have minor conflict with each other are talking in a room. And that’s TV’s bread and butter – two people talking in a room. So, Acolyte may not only have doomed itself. It may have doomed Star Wars television for good.

As you all know, this week is not just Mega-Showdown mania but also the release of the biggest movie of the year: Deadpool vs. Wolverine. I just realized now I’m not going to be able to review this film because it debuts on the same day as Mega-Showdown. And Mega-Showdown is like Love Island. It lasts ten days. Actually, you know what? I can just review it in my newsletter. Yeah, I’ll do that!

I feel bad for the Deadpool team. They’re doing EVERYTHING they can to generate publicity, something Ryan Reynolds is a master of. But they’re doing it during the two wildest weeks in American political history. It’s hard to gain any media attention with the craziness that’s going on right now. So a lot of these Ryan and Hugh posts that would normally go viral are disappearing faster than a High School freshman after a Thanos snap.

It’ll be interesting to see how they adapt to this because, so far, in all the trailers, they’ve only been giving us the first act of the movie. There are said to be a lot of big cameos in the film. I wouldn’t be surprised if they started announcing some of those cameos this week in order to get SOME media traction.

As for my excitement level for the film, I’m at a 7 out of 10. There has been nothing in any of the trailers that’s gotten me dancing the Macarena on top of my bed. And the movie definitely has a weak link, which is the director, Shawn Levy. Shawn’s only directed one R-rated movie in his life (This is Where I Leave You). He cut his teeth on inoffensive material, like Night at the Museum and Cheaper by the Dozen. And he directed one of the worst movies I’ve seen in a while, in The Adam Project.

To expand on that, when you look at this trailer, you do not see “vision.” Sabertooth was one of my favorite comic book characters growing up and he just looked so vanilla here. I felt nothing when he was revealed.

So I’m not going to lie. I’m worried. But it’s still going to be better than 95% of the big studio movies this year. Without question that will be the case. The franchise has too many weapons at its disposal to fail. I just want it to live up to the hype. This is the kind of movie that could galvanize the moviegoing public. We need it to kick butt.

Anybody else worried?

Mega-Showdown.

Get those scripts in!

You have until Thursday, July 25th, to send your entry in!

We are nearly at the finish line!

The Mega-Showdown Screenplay Contest activates in 7 days. Next Friday, 12:01 AM, the top ten entries go up on the site.

But you can only be one of those entries if you enter. So get that script finished and send it over to me!

Now, since we’re just a week away, you’ve only got 4 [suggested] days left to clean up any of the dialogue throughout your script. You should not be making any major scene changes this late. You don’t have the time to see how a major scene change will affect the script. So don’t do it.

Once you get down to 3 days, you’re ONLY DOING spelling and grammar.

And guys, please – PLEASE – do not keep rewriting your first page. Everybody rewrites the heck out of that first page and, as a result, there’s a lot of new text on there, which means there are almost always errors. And even if there aren’t, parts of it will read sloppy since it’s so new.

Remember, I’m posting the first page of each entry that makes the showdown. Therefore, if I read your first page and there’s an error, you’re out. You won’t make the showdown. So only fix grammar and spelling! Stop rewriting everything.

One of the harder things to do in screenwriting is to trust your former self – the you who wrote those earlier pages. That person had a reason for doing that. You are at the point in the process where you have to trust that they did their job.

I’m very hopeful we’re going to find a great script.

ONE MORE WEEK TIL THE CONTEST!

Here’s how to enter…

What: Mega-Showdown (Online Feature Screenplay Contest)
What I need from you: Title, genre, logline, your first five pages
Optional: movie tagline, movie-crossover pitch
Contest Date: Friday, July 26th
Deadline: Thursday, July 25th, 10pm Pacific Time
Send to: entries should be sent to carsonreeves3@gmail.com
How: Include “MEGA” in the subject line
Price: Free