This week, we are highlighting the top 4 vote-getters in the Mega-Showdown Screenwriting Contest. Monday through Thursday, I will post the first five pages of one of the finalists and all you have to do is read the pages and gauge how you feel.

What we’re trying to do differently from past showdowns is to give every writer their own day so that people actually read their pages as opposed to evaluating the entry on a logline or a first page. We’re trying to find the best writing, the best storytelling, in the bunch.

Also, this is a great opportunity for all screenwriters to learn. A lot of screenwriters still don’t read scripts. It’s hard to know if what you’re writing is good when you don’t have anything to compare it to. This week, you’re going to read 20 pages total. Take note of what you like, what you don’t like, and try to figure out why. If you do that, I guarantee that you’ll learn something about your own writing.

No votes yet.  We’ll reconvene voting this weekend.

Okay, let’s get to our first finalist who submitted one of the more high concept scripts to the competition, Danny Albie.

Title: The Best and Brightest
Genre: Mystery
Logline: After the president of the United States is poisoned aboard Air Force One, a no-nonsense Secret Service agent reluctantly teams up with a hotshot White House staffer to investigate a flight of high-maintenance VIP suspects and solve the murder before the plane lands.
Tagline: If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.
Crossover: Knives Out meets Air Force One

Don’t leave this post without voting for your favorite entry!

Before we get to the entries, I want to thank everyone who worked so hard to write an entire screenplay in time to enter this contest. I know it’s not easy. I love all you guys and, from the bottom of my heart, I wanted to include every single entry here today.

If you didn’t make the Showdown, do not despair. We’re going to have another Mega-Showdown at the end of the year. I’d say about 85-90% of the entries that didn’t make the cut were because of bad loglines that had multiple problems. So I recommend you get some feedback on your logline before the next contest. I do logline consultations for $25. Just e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com.

Here’s how the 10-day adventure of Mega-Showdown will play out. This weekend, your job, as the readers of the site, is to look through all the below entries and vote for your favorite in the comments. You have until 11:59pm Sunday evening, Pacific Time.

The FOUR entries that have the most votes will continue onto next week. Each of those entries will get its own day, Monday-Thursday, to display its first five pages. Next Friday, the four finalists will then go up for a second round of voting where, whoever gets the most votes, wins. I will then review the winning script that very Monday.

Unlike in previous showdowns where one script could run away with the title and, therefore, there was no reason to vote anymore, EVERY VOTE IS GOING TO MATTER this time around. The fourth finalist will probably be decided by a single vote. So make sure you vote!

As has been tradition around here for showdowns, if you feel like you’ve been done dirty and your submission is on par with these entries, post a comment with your title, genre, and logline, and if enough people upvote it, I will add it to the official competition. But post fast cause this comments section is going to be busy.

Okay, with that now said, it is time to introduce the ten official entries into the first ever… MEGA-SHOWDOWN.

Good luck to everyone!

Title: Noah’s Choice
Logline: Halfway through its 120-year journey to save mankind, the hypersleeping passengers of the spaceship A.R.K. begin to fall victim to a serial killer.
Tagline: One killer – no mankind
Movie Crossover Pitch: Knives Out meets Passengers

Title: I Love Dogs
Genre: Comedy
Logline: After his father passes and leaves the multi million dollar inheritance to the family dog, a lazy burn out of a son must prove he’s responsible enough to take care of the dog for two weeks or lose it all.
Movie Crossover Pitch: Billy Madison meets Beethoven

Title: Rocket Girl
Genre: Fantasy/Sci-fi
Logline: When a 12-year-old aspiring astronaut discovers an alien cybernetic lifeform stuck inside her toy robot, she must steal a rocket from her father’s company to save the species from extinction.

Title: Dead Man’s Dust
Genre: Horror/Thriller
Logline: While a despondent widow struggles to keep her two children safe during the catastrophic 1930’s Dust Bowl in Oklahoma, a deranged killer shows up at their isolated farm right before a massive dust storm hits, forcing them to battle both to survive.
Tagline: From dust you were formed to dust you shall return. Genesis 3:19
Movie Crossover Pirch: Grapes of Wrath meets Seven’s John Doe

Title: Hellbent
Genre: Western
Logline: After killing their brother, a desperate woman convinces a pair of ruthless outlaws to spare her life if she helps them collect the bounty on their dead brother’s head. But the long road into town leads the trio to unspeakable horrors.

Title: The Renewal
Genre: Horror/Thriller
Logline: An ambitious social media influencer encounters a deadly cult masquerading as a new age commune when she joins a group of influencers on a retreat to the desert.

Title: Outpace the Dawn
Genre: Science Fiction
Logline: The crew of a ramshackle starship, stranded lightyears from the rest of humanity, stages a daring heist to infiltrate a rogue luxury transport, steal the spare warp drive it hoards, and escape the gaze of Eos — a volatile star tumbling toward supernova.
Tagline: Lightyears from safety. One hope to reach it.

Title: Bedford
Genre: Thriller / Sci-Fi
Logline: During a graveyard shift in a local air traffic control tower, a passenger flight goes missing, setting off a series of unexplained occurrences in the sky and leaving it up to a single determined tower operator to untangle the mystery.

Title: Crypto-Zoo
Genre: Adventure/Sci-Fi
Logline: An expedition to an island preserve containing the world’s legendary cryptids- Bigfoot, Nessie, Mothman, and others- becomes a struggle for survival when the creatures stage a prison break and begin preying upon the researchers who are attempting to solve the riddle of their existence.

Title: The Best and Brightest
Genre: Mystery
Logline: After the president of the United States is poisoned aboard Air Force One, a no-nonsense Secret Service agent reluctantly teams up with a hotshot White House staffer to investigate a flight of high-maintenance VIP suspects and solve the murder before the plane lands.
Tagline: If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.
Crossover: Knives Out meets Air Force One

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).”