Motherboy goes for the shockiest ending of the 2024 Black List. Does it succeed?

Genre: Thriller
Premise: A pregnant wife dreads spending the Thanksgiving holiday with her husband’s parents due to his odd mother, who continues to baby her son well into adulthood.
About: I got sold on this script due to its one line pitch. “BARBARIAN by way of an erotic, Hallmark holiday movie.” How brilliant is that!? Screenwriter Tess Brewer is originally from Australia. She is yet to secure her first writing credit.
Writer: Tess Brewer
Details: 94 pages

Mommy?

I love setups like this.

It’s simple setups like this that have led to classic movies such as Get Out.

Send two characters to a remote location where they encounter other characters that they are in conflict with in some way and then allow the drama that gestates from that clash to guide your story.

The reason I like this setup so much is because you can write a really cheap movie this way, which massively increases the chances of your script getting made. We just saw it with the great Speak No Evil.

The pitfall with these setups is that there aren’t as many places to take the story. Which means you gotta be a really good writer to make them work. I have a very structured way in which I judge these scripts. I’ll share that process with you after the plot breakdown.

33 year old Tatum Woodrow is pregnant. But that equates to 1/100th the anxiety she feels compared to her impending holiday hang-out session with her husband’s, Owen’s, mother. The two are headed to Owen’s parents’ remote cabin for the Thanksgiving holiday.

Owen’s obsessive mother, Amelia, has never quite accepted her son as anything other than a 10 year old child. She loves him, she babies him, she bathes with him, she sleeps in the same bed as him whenever they’re in the same house. Tatum has brought this up numerous times during their marriage counseling but it never seems to get through Owen’s thick skull.

They head to the house where we meet Amelia, along with her sick and fast-deteriorating husband, Neil. Right away, Amelia is babying Owen (she wants to get him into that warm bath ASAP!). On the first night, Tatum wakes up to find herself alone in her bed. She goes downstairs and see Amelia watching over Owen, who’s asleep on the couch. Creepy!

The next day, when Neil and Tatum are alone, he tells her he wants to do something that makes him feel independent again and heads off. Tatum feels weird about letting him go due to his dwindling physical state but what can she do? An hour later, Amelia finds Neil in his car in the garage, dead from carbon monoxide poisoning. Suicide.

Amelia is furious with Tatum for not watching over him more closely. She quickly has Owen turning on his wife as well. It’s not looking good for Tatum! But then, later, Tatum stumbles upon a secret so shocking, it will pit her against Amelia in a fight to the death.

One of the primary ways I grade screenplays is I look at the concept and I note what the average screenwriter would do with that concept. In other words, if you gave 100 screenwriters that concept, 75 of them are going to write a very similar version of that story.

That’s the version of the story you DON’T WANT TO WRITE. Because that version is the version that anyone could write. You want to write the version that only a few screenwriters could write. That’s the reason Hollywood pays screenwriters – to give them the version of the story they could not write themselves.

That’s a fancy way of saying: NEVER WRITE THE OBVIOUS VERSION OF YOUR CONCEPT.

Give us a version that’s unique in some way. That can be through the unique voice you use to tell the story. It can be in how you play with the structure. It can be through adding a couple of bold creative choices that send the story down non-traditional paths. It can be through the creation of unique characters we don’t typically see in this setup.

But whatever you do, don’t go into auto-pilot and give us exactly what we expect the movie to be. Cause, if you do that, why do we need to watch it? We’ve already seen that movie in our heads.

So, where did Motherboy land on that game board? The obvious version or the unique version?

A bit of both. The first half of the script was very by-the-numbers. Anybody could’ve written it. For example, there’s a scene where Tatum wakes up in the middle of the night, her husband gone. She hears giggling down the hallway. She creeps down it, she peeks inside the bathroom doorway where Tatum and Owen are naked kissing in the bathtub.

AND THEN OF COURSE it’s a nightmare.

I must read scenes like that a thousand times a year. They’re so cliche. They’re so obvious. That’s what I mean when I say, 75 out of 100 writers are going to write the same version of the story. That kind of writer will write that scene. Why? Cause it’s obvious. And it takes no work to come up with.

You should be writing scenes that DON’T COME TO YOU EASILY. Cause those are the ones that nobody’s thinking of.

But the second half of the script was less predictable. Lots of spoilers so you’ve been warned. First, Neil kills himself. I wasn’t expecting that. Then, not too long after, Amelia kills Tatum! That’s a bold creative choice right there, getting rid of one of the co-leads. Finally, you get this shocking twist. I’m not going to spoil it here but I’ll just say, the script wanted to give the Chinatown ending a run for its money.

Now, did it all work?

Ehhhhh… that’s not easy to answer. I suppose I was mildly entertained throughout that second half of the script. But I’m not sure pure shock earns you a ‘worth the read.’ I needed a more. So, it’s by no means a hard ‘wasn’t for me.’ But it didn’t quite climb enough rungs to get to recommendable.

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

What I learned: This is a great way to conceive of a concept. Take a known issue in society then extrapolate it to its extreme. So, if you have a mommy’s boy, make it the most inappropriate mother-son relationship ever. If you have a helicopter parent, make that parent so psycho that they’d kill to keep control over their kid. For an empty-nester, maybe they’ll do anything to lure their kids back to their home, lie, cheat, steal, kill. Something to consider for the Logline Showdown!

What I learned 2: Little details. Little details can be the difference between cliche and original. For example, I read more screenplays than you can possibly imagine with a miscarriage backstory. So that story choice has become cliche to me. But if you can add just one small differentiating detail, I won’t see it as cliche. That’s what Brewer did here. Tatum had a miscarriage but they were twins, not a single baby. It’s a small thing but it makes a difference. You know why? Because it shows that the writer is THINKING. They’re not going with the obvious. If a writer is constantly putting thought into their choices, their script usually ends up being good.

Million dollar sale for first-time screenwriter!

Genre: Thriller/Drama/Supernatural
Premise: A couple struggling to save their failing marriage take a risky step in their sex lives, igniting a chain of events that threatens to destroy everything they’ve built together.
About: Script sold for a million bucks once Robert Pattinson attached himself. It’s a great sign for screenwriters who believe that selling a script is impossible. Newbie Ross Evans doesn’t have a single credit to his name yet still pulled a 7 figure sale. It’s also a reminder that the people you have to win over to get a script sold these days are the high profile creatives. The name director or the name actor.
Writer: Ross Evans
Details: 101 pages

I still don’t know what to think of Robert Pattinson. He’s not very memorable in any of his performances. But he’s not bad either. The one thing I will give Robert Pattinson is that he seeks out incredibly talented people. Therefore, when he gets involved in a project, it’s usually, at least, interesting.

Let’s see if this continues that trend.

Jake and Emma have been married for 8 years and are incredibly unhappy. Unfortunately, instead of acknowledging that they’re unhappy, they either ignore it (Jake) or act out (Emma).

After Jake runs into his ex, Kate, he comes to realize that it’s finally time to cut his losses. That is until Emma suggests something radical to inject some spark back into their marriage – she’ll have sex with another man and he’ll watch.

Jake is reluctant at first but what does he have to lose at this point? So they hire some guy off the internet and he’s at their house the next night. Unbeknownst to Emma, the guy slips Jake a vile of mystery liquid. He then has sex with Emma.

But, during the sex, he starts chanting some weird language and the next thing you know, Jake is in Emma’s body and Emma is in Jake’s. WHAT THE HELL JUST HAPPENED!!?? Before they can ask Sex Guy, he disappears!

Uh oh. This is bad. The two are forced to continue their lives in each other’s bodies while they try and locate Sex Guy so he can give them the cure. But when Jake goes into Emma’s work the next day, her boss does some dirty sexual things to Emma (aka Jake), confirming that the two are having an affair.

Furious, Jake (as Emma) invites the boss up to their remote cabin under the premise of sex only to chop his penis off and kill him. Emma shows up not too long after, having caught on to Jake’s plan, and the two must work together to bury the body.

What we eventually learn is that the vile Sex Guy gave Jake is the cure and will change them back. But when Jake (as Emma) gets pregnant, they decide not to change back, since Emma (as Emma) could never get pregnant.  Something about Jake being in her body has changed that.

Oddly enough, all this energy has reinvigorated their marriage. The two are…happy? That is until Emma admits she liked the thrill of Jake’s murder and wants to kill someone else. This happens right as Kate (Jake’s ex) becomes suspicious that the two are up to no good. So she tries to bust them. What happens next changes all three of their lives forever.

Well that was……….. not what I was expecting.

I think after you watch a movie like The Brutalist, it’s hard to come back down to earth and read something this detached from reality.

My eyes might as well have been dice when Emma and Jake switched bodies cause they were rolling all over the place.

However, I quickly began to see what Pattinson saw in this. When Jake goes to Emma’s work (as Emma) and her boss does something sexual that Jake isn’t remotely prepared for, I realized that this was a good setup to explore gender roles.

Not only is the moment a shock for Jake in so far as, within seconds, he experiences the world through a woman’s eyes. But it opened the door to explore this genre in a bold, new, uncharted way. We always see this genre as a broad comedy, but making it Hard-R allowed us to push boundaries and reveal uncomfortable body-switch antics that have never been seen before.

In the ultra-competitive world of storytelling, where every story has been told a thousand times over, that’s the name of the game – finding new avenues that allow you to explore things in ways they haven’t been explored before.

In other words, this ain’t Freaky Friday.  This ain’t Tootsie.

The setup is also, clearly, why it sold for a million dollars. Robert Pattinson gets to play two parts for the price of one. He gets to play Jake and he gets to play Emma. Actors LOVE playing multiple roles in a movie. And oddballs like Pattinson love scripts like this especially because they get to play a woman. What better acting challenge is there than playing a member of the opposite sex?

The movie’s biggest challenge is going to be de-messifying the script. There’s a lot going on here. Our two leads are in each others’ bodies. There’s a serial killer subplot that comes into play. The “potion” is used as a way to switch other bodies throughout the story. So the two need to save enough liquid to switch themselves back. Then you have the pregnancy. Then you have Kate coming into the picture. It’s a lot.

But I give it to Evans because, unlike yesterday’s film, he landed the plane. There’s a wild scramble during the climax (spoilers) where characters are bouncing into other bodies and when the dust settles, we’re not sure who’s where. It’s really clever because, in those last scenes, two out of the three people die, and we don’t know which ones!

In the end, How to Save a Marriage is a great example of what happens when you take a big creative risk. That body-switching scene was a bridge too far for me. It was tonally inconsistent with the rest of the movie and felt beyond sloppy. But once we got past that, the darker body-switch dynamic – specifically placing our heroes into opposite-gendered bodies – allowed this script to feel much deeper than your average screenplay.

It’s still too messy. But I’m hearing they’re continuing to develop it so I hope they’re smoothing all these bumps out.

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

What I learned: Back in 2011, there was a Ryan Reynolds, Jason Bateman body-switch movie called “The Change-Up.” When Reynolds and Bateman were debating on whether to make the movie, they asked the same question I alluded to above. What’s different here than other body-switch movies? Reynolds argued that they were making the first R-rated body-switch movie. That was enough for Bateman and he signed on.

Years later, however, Bateman was asked about the failure of the film and Bateman noted that, yes, they were doing the first R-rated body-switch movie but they didn’t really do anything with it other than swear more. It wasn’t enough to truly explore the different path.

The reason How to Save a Marriage works is because they fully exploited the different path of their premise. They didn’t merely swear more. They explored uncomfortable territory that occurs when men and women switch bodies, stuff we’ve never seen before. That’s what every writer should be doing. When you come up with a premise, after you decide what your unique angle is, make sure to lean 100% into that unique angle. It’s the only way your script is going to be different. If you pull punches, like they did in The Change-Up, it’s going to be a forgettable screenplay.

The Brutalist reminds us what cinema is capable of

Did you see Oppenheimer?

If you did, chances are you thought, “Wow, Christopher Nolan is the best director in the world and it’s not even close.” That movie was so proficiently made and displayed so much skill, you wondered if anybody could ever make something that felt more like a movie ever again.

Well, that lasted about a year.

I would be willing to bet my life that Christopher Nolan watched The Brutalist and thought, “I have a long way to go as a director.” Because The Brutalist is 100x the movie that Oppenheimer is. It is pure cinema. It is the reason I got into this stuff. You watch this film and you get taken AWAY. Not just to a different world but to a different universe. It is so uniquely cinematic that it’s reinvigorated my hope for movies. Cause it shows what’s possible when you have this level of mastery over your profession.

The cinematography and score were magnificent. It’s like Terrance Malick but with purpose. You get these powerful couplings of image and sound, and they’re moving towards these sweeping moments that burrow inside of you, like bass in the loudest nightclub in the world.

If you haven’t seen the film, it starts in 1947 with a Jewish architect, Laszlo, who comes to America after having endured the concentration camps. He used to be famous back in Budapest. But now, he’s a nobody and has to work his way back into the fold, a task complicated by his pride and a worsening drug habit.

But he eventually gets a job redecorating a sitting room for a very rich man named Harrison Van Buren. The room so impresses Van Buren that he hires Laszlo to build an elaborate multi-purpose building for him, a job that will take years and require Laszlo to live on-site.

While this is happening, Van Buren’s lawyers move mountains to get Laszlo’s wife and niece to America (they were split up in the Holocaust). When she finally gets there, Laszlo learns that she’s permanently wheelchair-bound due to extreme malnutrition from the concentration camps.

The build is fraught with conflict as Laszlo refuses to compromise his vision. Later, when a huge shipment of materials is destroyed in a train crash, Van Buren is forced to scrap the project, leaving Laszlo without a job or a purpose. This forces him to finally face his wife and their marriage problems. He then must decide what is truly important in life.

I’ve already lauded the ‘movie’ side of this film. In addition to what I said earlier, this movie has you asking, “How the heck did an actor as amazing as Adrien Brody disappear for 20 years??” He’s soooooo good in this. This guy was made to help movies win Oscars. And I hope he wins his second Oscar for this one.

For anyone who loves the minutia of screenwriting, a film like The Brutalist is critical nirvana.

On the surface, this is an anti-script.

There is no true overarching goal. There are no stakes. And there definitely isn’t any urgency. So how does the film work so well? Because I suspect a lot of ignorant people are going to claim that this is why screenwriting doesn’t matter. That true cinema trumps the need to abide by a formula.

Well, The Brutalist actually uses a few screenwriting techniques to achieve its purpose. And it starts with character.

I’ve said this a million times. If you want to write a script that is offbeat or different or non-traditional or unorthodox, YOU MUST GIVE US A MAIN CHARACTER WE DESPERATELY WANT TO ROOT FOR.

If you don’t do that, YOU CANNOT go off book with your plotting and structure like The Brutalist does.

The reader WILL NOT FOLLOW YOU if you have an average main character and you’re bobbing and weaving around an unfocused narrative. They will only follow you, when going down these nontraditional paths, if they desperately like your hero.

Laszlo is established as a Holocaust survivor. Not just a Holocaust survivor. But one who’s been separated from his wife and niece. Oh, and, he has no idea if he’s ever going to see them again. Oh, and he used to be one of the most famous architects in his country but now nobody knows who he is.

All of this creates tons of sympathy. Sympathy makes us root for people.

Still, there is no initial goal for Laszlo when he makes it to the U.S. So, beyond us liking the guy, how do we remain entertained throughout the next hour of the film?

Well, Laszlo is TRYING TO MAKE IT IN AMERICA. Readers will follow characters who are TRYING TO BECOME BETTER. I learned this lesson in both American Beauty and Goodfellas. We like watching characters improve. We liked watching Lester Burnham try to become the best version of himself. We liked watching Henry Hill make his way up the mafia ladder.

When we like somebody, we want to see them do well. So we love watching them improve. We love when Laszlo gets that first job with Van Buren.

Once he finishes the room and it makes the magazines, Van Buren hires him to design and construct the building on his property. This happens about 90 minutes into the movie and it creates the most traditional feature of the script – a concrete goal that must be achieved.

However, interestingly enough, it does not come with stakes or urgency. We eventually come to realize that it doesn’t matter if Laszlo finishes the building or not. There’s nothing else dependent on him finishing it. He even waives his salary for some reason. So it’s not like he has to finish it to get the money.

And there’s no time when it needs to be finished by. Typically in a movie, you want urgency because urgency creates pressure. And pressure creates drama.  But I’ve found that true “auteurs” hate urgency.  They think of it as artificial, which I get.  But there’s always a way to add urgency invisibly.  It doesn’t have to feel like Taken, where it’s a hard 72 hours before his daughter disappears forever.

Now, what’s good about this job is that it creates enough structure that when the rest of the narrative bobs and weaves, the story still has focus. We know that everything will eventually come back to finishing this job.

That is a VERY IMPORTANT POINT because some writers believe they can write artsy independent narratives without a central goal. For example, someone else might write an immigrant story where the hero isn’t an architect. He’s just some guy trying to survive. But, if there isn’t a looming goal representing some aspect of his life, then it’s just a dude stumbling around New York without purpose. So it was smart to create this building. It brings this as close to a traditional narrative as Corbet is comfortable with.

But what about those four hours?

Did the movie really need to be that long?

Probably not 4 hours. But it needed to be long to work.

I’ll give you a specific example of why.

This script is not a straight line. We don’t go directly from the bottom of the graph to the top. There are a lot of dips along the way. Laszlo will have a big success. But it will be followed by a big failure.

For example, when Laszlo first gets the Van Buren job, it’s secured through Van Buren’s son, who is planning to surprise his father when he comes back from a trip. So Laszlo creates this stunning reading room. We can see that he’s alive again for the first time in years. Then Van Buren drives up, storms in the room, and starts screaming at him. Who are they? What are they doing? They’ve ruined his house! He not only kicks Laszlo out but he doesn’t pay him either. Which forces him to go right back to construction work.

There are a lot of these rises followed by falls in the script, which make you feel like you’re on a roller coaster. Which is exactly what you want to do in a story. You don’t want everything to be positive. You want to bring the reader up, then down, then up, then down. That sort of emotional volatility is like crack to audiences.

I realized that you can do more of that with a 4 hour movie than you can a 2 hour movie. A 2 hour movie has to be so lean that you don’t have time to include many falls. I mean do we NEED the scene of Van Buren kicking him out? No. Technically, we do not. He’ll later come back to hire Laszlo again. So why not just jump straight to Van Buren liking the room and hiring him for the bigger job?

In the 2 hour version, that’s probably what you’re doing. But when you have this extra time, you can add a lot of these falls. And they work to create more of that volatility, which leads to a more riveting emotional experience.

I was ready to grant this movie ‘masterpiece’ status throughout the majority of its running time. But it sort of loses its way towards the end. This happens a lot when you’re working with non-traditional narratives.

One of the benefits of the traditional three-act structure is that the first and second acts are designed to set up a clear climax. If you establish in act 1 that the cat is struck at the top of the tree, then we know the climax is going to be the attempt to save him.

But if there’s only a tree, how do you know where to end the story?  While it’s true that Laszlo is building this building, the building has such low stakes attached to it, it doesn’t really matter if he finishes it or not.

So, then, what’s your ending?

(Major spoilers) Corbet realizes this and injects a rape storyline into the final act that felt manufactured and inorganic. Which, again, is always going to happen when you aren’t using a traditional narrative. You will struggle to figure out how to end your story. I just know that when writers are building rape into the narrative this late, it’s usually a desperate move made to add “gravitas” to the story. Ironically, it achieves the opposite. It feels cheap.

But there’s so much good in this movie that I can overlook that. I can’t emphasize enough how often I go to the movies these days and the script is so weak that I’m analyzing the writing within two minutes. Whereas, with The Brutalist, I got completely lost in this story for hours. Everything was so well done — I mean, I can’t remember the last time I teared up in a theater and I, as well as everyone else around me, was weeping when Laszlo’s wife showed up from Europe. It was a testament to how authentic the storytelling was.

I know this movie isn’t going to be for everyone. But if you miss the experience of going to the theater and losing yourself in a movie, go see this movie ASAP. It will give you that experience again.

How to come up with better movie ideas

We’re about two weeks away from our first showdown of the year, the 5 Loglines Showdown. You come up with 5 loglines, submit them to me. If any of them are awesome, they will be featured during Showdown weekend, where your writing peers will vote for the best logline and hopefully crown you the winner. Wanna compete? Here’s how…

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

You better come correct because there are a lot of writers taking this assignment seriously. They’ve been generating ideas EVERY DAY so that they send in 5 strong contenders.

If coming up with movie ideas isn’t easy for you, don’t worry. We still have plenty of time. So, today, I’m going to give you some tools that will help you generate the best ideas possible.

We’re going to start by going over a list of the best original movie concepts that have come out over the last several years.

Keep in mind, I’m not factoring ‘execution’ into this. Just because you come up with a good idea doesn’t mean you’re going to write it well. Or that the director will direct it well. But these are all the ideas I felt had the potential to be good movies due to their strong concepts.

They are….

Heretic
65
Red One
Here
The Zone of Interest
Cocaine Bear
The Last Voyage of the Detemer
Sisu
The Menu
The Platform
Don’t Worry Darling
Speak No Evil
Free Guy
Old
Promising Young Woman
Leave The World Behind
Copshop
Nine Days

Now, I can already hear some of you moaning, ready to attack my choices. But I would challenge you to look back through the last few years and find more than three original movie ideas that you think were great concepts. It’s hard because the industry has moved so aggressively towards IP, leaving less original ideas out there.

So, after you’re done confirming that I’m right, let’s look at why these ideas are good.

Heretic gameifies the concept of selling religion via a contained horror setting that packs a ton of tension and surprises. 65, which sends its characters to earth 65 million years ago, with less than 24 hours before the infamous ‘dinosaur-killer’ asteroid crashes into the planet, is about as high concept an idea as one can come up with.

Red One mixes spy movies with saving Santa Claus. Genius. “Here” makes the incredibly bold choice of locking its characters into one room over the course of their entire lives. That’s a creative concept if I’ve ever heard one.

The Zone of Interest shows us the power of irony. A movie about a happy care-free family living five feet away from Auschwitz during the height of World War 2. Cocaine Bear shows us what happens when you mix ‘fun’ and ‘bananas,’ going all in on its wild concept.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter is one of the best uses of a contained horror location that I’ve ever come across. Sisu shows us that you can adjust the John Wick equation (make the hero older, set it in a popular time period) in a way that gives you an unexpectedly kick-ass action premise.

The Menu builds mystery around a subject matter that doesn’t typically engage in mystery (high end restaurants and chefs). Not only is The Platform the most inventive high concept on this list, but it somehow manages to say the most about humanity.

Don’t Worry Darling uses time and technology to explore the patriarchy in a unique way. Speak No Evil is what I call “stealth high concept.” It’s a small idea that feels huge due to its nifty setup and continuous reveals.

Free Guy shows us that concepts fly highest when they’re simple. A programmed character inside a game wants free choice in his life and will risk anything to get it. “Old” uses the dependable high-concept variable of time to explore aging, placing a bunch of people on a beach where they’re all aging 20 times faster than the rest of the world.

Promising Young Woman shows us what the intersection between high concept and character-driven looks like. A young woman pretends to be blackout drunk at bars in order to expose rapists, part of a bigger plan to take down those responsible for her friends’ rape and subsequent suicide.

Leave The World Behind has the best ‘end of the world’ premise I’ve come across in five years. A mystery country is attacking the U.S. in a manner that makes it turn against itself.

Copshop is a clever little action movie idea that asks, what happens when bad guys chasing other bad guys end up in the jail cells right across from each other one night. And finally, the thinking man’s high concept, Nine Days, which pits 9 people against one another, all of whom are vying to prove their worthiness to be born and live a life on earth.

These are all good movie ideas. But how do writers come up with them? Unfortunately, we don’t know the answer to that because everyone has their own methods for coming up with ideas.

But the most common method I’ve heard, and one that I’ve found to be true with myself, is an “when inspiration strikes” idea. You’re doing something and the idea just hits you, like a bolt of lightning.

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to rely on random moments of inspiration. You can actively generate them by keeping your ‘movie idea generator’ running in the background of your brain wherever you go.

Armed with this weapon, everything you see or experience throughout the day will automatically pass through the “could this be a movie?” filter, allowing you to spot potential stories in even the most ordinary places.

In other words, you should never just see a building. You should see a building that could be taken over by terrorists on Christmas Eve. You should never just see a man acting strangely in the park. You should see an alien from another planet attempting to acclimate to the oddities of his new human body.

If you’re someone who travels a lot, you often find yourself in the most tense anxiety-ridden spaces in the world. There are movie ideas everywhere you look. We just saw one, with “Carry-On” on Netflix. Or “Plane” with Gerard Butler. Or “Hijack” with Idris Elba.

You even want to take this generator into your movie and TV watching experience. A lot of times I’ll be watching a bad movie only to come up with an adjacent movie idea that’s much better. Or an idea that improves upon the many tropes that that genre typically gets trapped in.

For example, what if you were watching a cliched heist film only to come up with the idea of: what if it wasn’t the heist itself that was the difficult part, but rather transporting the money that you stole afterwards (Triple Frontier).

Movie ideas are everywhere! You just have to have your movie generator running in the background to find them. The 2022 Best Picture winner? That idea was literally built on top of an everything bagel (Everything Everywhere All At Once). Yes, you might have won an Oscar the last time you ordered a pastrami sandwich had you been a little more attentive.

So, keep testing those loglines out in the comments. The bigger picture here is to find your next script, which I’m hoping you’ll enter in June’s Mega-Showdown. So, this isn’t just about finding a fun little logline. It’s about writing a script to win a contest, which will get you representation, which will lead to your script getting sent around town, which will lead to directors and actors signing on, which will lead to your movie getting made.

It all starts with a great logline. So, what are you waiting for?

P.S. Feel free to share some good movie concepts that came out over the past five years that you felt I overlooked.

Things get crazy with the #2 script on the 2024 Black List!

Genre: Drama/Thriller
Premise: When taking her daughter to a playdate at a new friend’s house, Alice suddenly comes face to face with her childhood bully, Katrine. An evening of seemingly polite dinner conversation and catching up turns into a night of psychological warfare as the two women reveal the scars of their past while their two young daughters play.
About: This was the #2 script on last year’s Black List. I just reviewed the #1 script last week, if you’re interested. Marie Østerbye is a Danish screenwriter with a ton of TV experience in that industry.
Writer: Marie Østerbye
Details: 97 pages

A lot of times what happens is that a writer writes a killer first two acts then lays an egg with their third act.

This happens for a number of reasons but the main one is that the writer is too “in the moment” while writing those first two acts. They aren’t thinking about how all of this stuff is going to come together in the end. Which is why we here at Scriptsahdow Inc. encourage you to outline. The best way to prep for that third act is to outline because then you’ll be writing those first two acts with a purpose.

Today’s script, however, has the opposite problem. Marie writes an amazing third act. But forgets to give the first two acts the same amount of attention.

That’s what we’re going to discuss today. So let’s get rolling!

50 year old Alice got started late in life. She’s got an 8 year old daughter, Sofie, who she moves back to her old hometown with. This is causing a lot of consternation in the small apartment the two live in since Sofie misses all her old friends.

Luckily for Sofie, another girl at school, Ida, takes a liking to her and asks her to come over for a playdate. Alice is thrilled that her daughter is making friends, espeically because she’s concerned about her daughter’s chubbiness (something she dealt with as a child, too). She knows it’s harder to make friends if you don’t look thin and pretty.

When Alice takes Sofie to the big expensive house she’ll be spending the night at, she’s shocked when Katrine opens the door. Katrine is tall and thin and pretty. She was also Alice’s bully back when they were in third grade.

Katrine doesn’t seem to recognize Alice, invites her in, and Alice must decide what to do. Does she leave? Does she take her daughter and leave? Does she confront Katrine about that fateful year when Katrine made her life miserable?

Before Alice can decide, Katrine invites her in for a drink, and then later, dinner. As the alchohol starts flowing, Alice stops pretending, and confronts Katrine on what she did to her back then, which amounted to forcing her to eat an entire cake in front of all the other kids at lunchtime as a way to emphasize how fat she was.

Katrine plays ignorant at first but, eventually fesses up to remembering. She argues, however, that it wasn’t nearly as bad as Alice remembers, which triggers Alice even more. Alice becomes more aggressive, demanding the apology she never got. But Katrine won’t give it to her, forcing Alice to go to the most extreme measure of all.

Do you love dessert?

What if I told you that you could go to a restaurant where the main course was going to be terrible but the dessert was amazing?

Oh, and you weren’t able to skip the main course. You would have to sit through it, even if you didn’t eat it, before you could order the dessert?

Would you still do it?
That’s today’s script. In more ways than one.

Cause the whole story is built around cake, strangely enough. And I was struggling with it. I would go so far as to say, for 70% of this script, I was convinced the Black List voters were brain dead. That some virus had infected their bodies, preventing them from being able to identify good writing.

There was one moment in particular where, if I had been reading a hard copy of the script, as opposed to a PDF document on my laptop, I would’ve hurled it across the room.

That moment occurs near the halfway point, when Alice and Katrine are going through their old elementary school yearbook (they had those??) and Katrine leans in and kisses Alice.

When I see moments like this, I smell desperation. Writers tend to only break out shocking moments when the script isn’t working. I’ve been guilty of this myself. You can tell your script isn’t firing on all cylinders. You’re not sure why. So, you think, maybe if I make something shocking happen, it will fix it.

It never fixes it. It only ends up confusing the reader. There is nothing in the story or characters that have been set up whereby Katrine trying to kiss Alice is authentically motivated. It’s all writer-created.

So, I pushed on, begrudgingly, trying to get to page 97 as quickly as I could so I could call it a day.

But then the writer finally started writing.

What do I mean by this?

One of the ways to make your script stand out is to do things that you’re not supposed to do. You move off of the main road and implore the readers to follow you. Once the writer started to use the children as pawns and placed them in serious danger, I understood why the script made the Black List.

Cause that’s a risky thing to do. And to be a good writer, you must take risks. Here you have your protagonist, someone we’re supposed to be rooting for, and she’s holding Katrine’s child’s life in her hands and using it to force Katrine to confess.

It’s done in a very clever way. If Alice had held a gun to Ida’s head, that’d be too much. Ida injured herself on her own. Alice is a nurse. She has the ability to save her or the ability to let her succumb to her wounds. It’s an off-the-nose way to threaten Katrine.

What I thought was going to happen was that we get this “chaotic” ending that wasn’t really chaotic. It’s only chaotic in the “writing” sense, whereby you could argue it was chaotic in a book club meeting. For these stories to work, you have to go beyond that. You have to make them genuinely chaotic, which likely means going further than you’re comfortable going as a writer.

That’s an important detail right there. We all have our pre-established boundaries that we won’t cross as writers. Maybe we don’t want to be too silly, or too violent, or too serious, or too quirky, or too structured, or too weird, or too emotional, or too wild. But how do you grow if you’re never pushing beyond those boundaries into uncomfortable places? Nobody’s ever grown by standing in the same place.

I’m just having a hard time reconciling reading through 70 pages of YUCK to get to 30 pages of WOW. Is that a ‘worth the read’ if I’m sending you guys to the sarlacc pit for the first three-quarters of this script?

I guess I’ll say it is. But this is another example of the Black List 3.0, where the list is more about scripts with potential than scripts that are finished products. And this script does have potential. It just needs some sprucing up in those first two acts.

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

What I learned: If there’s a lesson to this script, it’s that, if you have a great third act, that does not give you permission to “bide time” throughout your first two acts. If you don’t know whether you’re biding time or not, pay attention to how many scenes are setting up that third act as opposed to being entertaining in their own right. There are too many scenes here setting up the relationship between Katrine and Alice, as well as what happened in their past. We get it by the halfway point. You don’t need to tell us seven different ways to Sunday that Katrine was mean to Alice in elementary school. Trust me. We got it after the first eight times. Check out Speak No Evil for how to do this correctly. There’s a scene near the midpoint, for example, where our evil couple takes our ‘good’ couple out to dinner and it becomes very uncomfortable due to how the evil couple acts. That’s how to entertain readers before your big third act.