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MEGA!
New entries keep streaming in every day. If you are still putting the finishing touches on your script, here are a couple of tips. At this point, you should only be making minor scene changes, dialogue changes, and grammar and spelling fixes. To be honest, I wouldn’t do anything more than dialogue changes. Dialogue is something you can change right up to 3-4 days before you send your script out. Then, I would only spend the remaining days checking that new dialogue for grammar, spelling, and clarity issues. I’ve seen so many instances of last-second dialogue changes that are sloppy, confusing, and have grammar issues. That’s why you don’t want to make dialogue changes a day before you send your script off. You need those last few days to clean up.
Let’s see what you’ve got!
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
15 Days Left to the greatest screenwriting competition of the year 2024! Mega Showdown! Send in your submission now! It’s free!
Genre: Drama/Supernatural
Premise: After a married woman cheats on her husband with an old high school flame at her reunion, she later learns that the man she slept with has been dead for 12 years.
About: Today’s writer wrote 2016’s “Forest,” with Natalie Dormer. He also wrote and directed the remake of “River Wild” last year.
Writer: Ben Ketai
Details: 106 pages
I saw this idea on last year’s Black List and I thought to myself, “That’s going to be a problematic premise to work with.”
How could I possibly know this? Because I’ve written a version of this idea. I know half a dozen writers who have also written versions of this idea. It’s a fairly common idea.
But what I found with my own script, as well as everyone else’s, is that after you get past the inciting incident… WHAT THE HECK DO YOU DO NEXT???
30-something Fiona lives in Brooklyn. She’s married to this guy who is fine but he’s not exactly killing it on the career front and that’s causing Fiona to see him as… not very appealing. The former rocker-turned-stay-at-home-mommy has two kids, Emma and Oliver. And if you gave her truth serum, she would probably say they’re the reason she’s still in the marriage.
So, one weekend, Fiona heads back to her high school reunion, and that’s where she runs into Ian. She and Ian have a complicated past. He was the friend-zoned nerdy kid she would peripherally hang out with. But now he’s super hot! And charming. So, after a few drinks, they get cozy together.
That coziness morphs into extreme coziness, which is also known as sex. The next morning, Fiona obviously feels horrible about what she did and hurries back to Brooklyn to try and get back to normality.
But she can’t forget what happened that night. No, literally! She’s not allowed to because the song she made love to Ian during starts playing on her Bluetooth speaker. Don’t you hate when that happens? “Hey Carson, what is this random song that just started playing?” “Oh, nothing. Just the song my ghost lover and I always listen to.” In addition to this, anywhere she goes, anything she does, she FEELS Ian nearby. He’s lurking, not letting her forget this.
Eventually, Fiona heads to Ian’s mom’s home and asks her about him. She learns that Ian really liked her and Fiona wasn’t always nice to him. Later that week, Fiona’s daughter vomits blood on stage during a play. Fiona hurries her to the ER and decides enough is enough. She has to tell her husband what happened. Her husband is more weirded out than angry. But it’s now clear that Fiona must do everything within her power to cut things off with Ian.
I frequently discuss the issue of “problematic concepts” on this site but I don’t always get an opportunity to be specific. Today, I want to be specific because ‘Undying’ is one of those concepts that, at first glance, appears to be a good one. You sleep with someone only to later find out that that person’s been dead for years. There’s some high-concept residue in that setup.
But ideas like this are often fool’s gold and I’ll explain why.
The best thing about an idea like this is the moment when our main character realizes that the person they spent an intimate night with is dead. That’s the peak moment of the screenplay because it’s the hook. It’s the reason we came on board.
However, a good hook will give birth to all sorts of similarly compelling moments throughout the screenplay. For example, the hook in A Quiet Place is that you cannot make a noise or these sound-sensitive monsters hunt you down and kill you. You can build a lot of additional scenes out of that.
But what scenes can you build off of finding out that the person you slept with is dead?
Anyone?
There aren’t many.
You’re in bumpy waters because the best thing about your concept – that a mother of two, also a wife, slept with someone and now must come back to the real world of her family and mentally come to terms with what she did – you erase that once we learn that he’s dead. Cause it means she didn’t really cheat.
The only path you have left is that this dead entity – Ian – still wants Fiona. Now you have a sort-of supernatual horror script. Which is the direction the writer went in. But he got gun-shy. He never truly committed to that direction, which left the script in the Genre-less Zone. It’s not quite a drama. It’s not quite horror. It’s somewhere in between.
This is what problematic concepts do to you. They place you in these difficult positions that are hard to write yourself out of.
Is there a version of this that could’ve worked? I don’t know. If he would’ve gone full-throttle horror with the concept… then MAYBE? Maybe Ian was some version of the devil. He was “temptation.” She took the bait and because she took the bait, the devil is going to punish her for it.
From there, though, you gotta go all in. You can’t half-step. A horror film where nobody gets killed until the very last page isn’t a horror film. Doesn’t matter if a daughter projectile vomits blood. If we don’t see an actual death, we will subconsciously think that the writer will always take the safe route. And that means we, the reader, feel safe.
Is there a version of this that works as a drama?
Yes but not a very good one. And, if you’re going to go that route, you at least need a goal within the character themself that pushes them forward. Yesterday’s script is a good example of this. The main character was working towards getting released from her conservatorship. The entire script was building toward a final presentation she had to give in order for her superiors to sign off on giving her her life back.
That’s a narrative right there. That gives the plot forward momentum and you don’t need a big flashy hook to tell that story. I wouldn’t write that story if I were you. Even if you knock the execution out of the part, it’s still a tough sell. But when you don’t have ANYTHING pushing the story forward – an overall plot or a personal character plot – you are a baby leaf dangling in the wind. You have no control over your script.
Final thoughts. I find “almost horror” to be one of the trickier genres to pull off. Cause the horror folks are always going to be frustrated that you’re not giving them enough horror. And the drama folks tend to get judgy when you introduce anything ‘horror’ into the screenplay.
I’m not saying it can’t be done. It’s just harder. It’s hard when you walk the line between any two genres.
This one wasn’t for me. It needed more teeth.
What about you guys? Could you come up with a better narrative for this flashy setup?
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Killing off characters in scripts is an interesting exercise because it’s always problematic for the logistics of the story if you do kill people off. Cause, let’s say you kill the dad character off at the midpoint of this story. Well, now you have to deal with the ramifications of that. You can’t just mosey on down to the next plot beat. No. The next – AT LEAST – four scenes must be dedicated to the fallout of that character’s death. On the flip side, if you don’t kill anyone, the story has no edge. We never feel that we’re in any true danger. So figure out if you’re going to commit to the intense version of the story or not. And, once you make that decision, go all in on it. Kill some motherf$%$rs.
16 days left to enter the Mega-Showdown Screenplay Contest! Head over to this post for details on how to enter. It’s easy!
Genre: Horror
Premise: A hacker tasked with looking into a strange suicide begins to find herself followed by random crowds of people who she suspects may want to kill her.
About: There are a lot of Jack Hellers. I think this is the producer Jack Heller, who’s produced all of S. Craig Zahler’s movies. This script of his finished on last year’s Black List and was one of the only scripts on the list to get a coveted “must read” rating from me.
Writer: Jack Heller
Details: 97 pages
In the comment section yesterday, we were talking about Eddie Murphy and how he went from the biggest comedic actor in the world to 35 years of missteps.
Here are some of the concepts he signed up for…
The Adventures of Pluto Nash – In the future, a man struggles to keep his lunar nightclub out of the hands of the Mafia.
Vampire in Brooklyn – A Caribbean vampire seduces a Brooklyn police officer who has no idea that she is half-vampire.
Metro – A hostage negotiator teams up with a sharpshooter to bring down a dangerous jewel thief.
Holy Man – An over-the-top television evangelist finds a way to turn television home shopping into a religious experience, and takes America by storm.
Norbit – A mild-mannered guy, who is married to a monstrous woman, meets the woman of his dreams, and schemes to find a way to be with her.
Meet Dave – A crew of miniature aliens operates a spaceship that has a human form. Their plans get messed up when the human form falls in love.
Some of these concepts are misguided (why is the vampire, oddly, Caribbean?), some bland (hostage negotiator tries to take down a jewel thief??), some forced (aliens piloting a person), some lacking a clear comedic angle (Pluto Nash).
The reason I bring these up today, of all days, is to remind everyone HOW IMPORTANT CONCEPTS ARE. When you have a great concept, the majority of the script writes itself. When you don’t, you spend 90% of your time forcing things to work. And they never quite work because the concept itself never worked.
This is why, when you stumble upon a good idea, you must cherish it, like a rare Pokemon. It is worth more than you could possibly imagine. I mean that. A good idea could conceivably last CENTURIES.
I would place today’s concept in that category. Well, it’s maybe not centuries-lasting good but it’s one of the first concepts I noticed when last year’s Black List came out. I wanted to save it for a rainy day. It’s not exactly raining out but I’m in the mood to read something awesome.
Let’s check it out.
We start off by seeing a girl, Tabitha, hurry into a subway with a giant crowd slowly following her. The crowd of people eventually surrounds her and positions her head in the path of an oncoming train and she’s beheaded.
Cut to several days later, where we meet Lou. Lou is one of those “Girl with the dragon tattoo” types. She’s a hacker who does occasional jobs for an insurance company. The company is trying to prove that a girl (Tabitha) killed herself so it doesn’t have to pay out her life insurance.
Lou, who’s at the tail end of a long journey to end her conservatorship for, presumably, mental instability, starts looking into the video of Tabitha’s death, which shows… NO CROWD. Only Tabitha. But Lou curiously finds a strange blur moving towards Tabitha that warrants more investigation.
So she goes to the last person who saw Tabitha before she died, the subway ticket guy. That guy doesn’t want anything to do with Lou’s questions and goes home. Lou follows him and oddly sees the guy screaming to random nothingness, “Get away from me!” 20 minutes later, back at his home, he kills himself.
Lou then begins having dreams of a crowd of people in her bedroom watching her while she sleeps. It creeps her out enough that she reconnects with her ex-boyfriend, Wes, who assures her she’ll be fine.
But as Lou starts to move around the city, she notices crowds starting to form, sometimes following her, sometimes just looking at her. It becomes apparent that she is in some sort of chain of people who are killed by a crowd. She must figure out how to stop this crowd before it makes her its latest victim.
The first question that pops into a reader’s head after a script is, “Is this script good enough to recommend?” If the answer is yes, the writer is in a very good place. Because it’s hard as hell to get people to recommend a script.
The section question that enters a reader’s mind is: “Could this be a movie?” A screenplay is a proposed blueprint for a movie. So readers want to know if the blueprint could be successful.
Now here’s the part that drives aspiring writers crazy. You can get a “no” on the first question, a “yes” to the second question, and people will still want to buy your script. That’s because “Can it be a movie?” is the only question that really matters.
The Crowd is a movie. Potentially a very successful one. It’s as if someone combined It Follows and Smile and injected the offspring with several performance-enhancing drugs.
Crowds are scary. The fact that nobody has thought to make a horror movie about one is shocking. And the writer knows exactly how to milk fear from a crowd.
I love how the crowd kills. It keeps following you and following you until it’s surrounding you. Then, it keeps moving in, moving in, and soon, it’s crushing you. And it doesn’t let up. It keeps crushing and crushing til bones start snapping, til eyeballs start popping. The crowd is ruthless.
And I love how the writer didn’t stop there. In addition to the crowd, there’s an individual within the crowd – a sort of alpha demon of sorts – and as the crowd holds you in place, the demon weaves through the crowd, getting closer and closer. It’s another scary element within an already terrifying element.
The crowd can also appear momentarily. You can be walking somewhere in the city and then, all of a sudden, everybody stops and turns to you. In this iteration, the crowd only wants to watch. Or to warn.
It’s genuinely spooky stuff.
And I liked what the writer did with the main character as well. We meet Lou at the end of a long journey where she’s been trying to get herself out of a protective conservatorship (think what Britney Spears parents were doing to her), which gives her a personal goal that works, concurrently, with the plot goal (find out what this crowd is before it kills you).
As someone who’s read a million and one characters, I don’t remember a single script where a character was trying to get out of a conservatorship. I love writers who go the extra mile and come up with unique angles like that.
But I do have one beef with The Crowd.
There isn’t enough crowd!
When you have an idea this original, you want to take advantage of it! So much of this script is about the investigation into how the crowd came to be and how it ended up with her. I don’t go to a movie about scary crowds to spend 75% of the time watching characters look at computer screens and say stuff like, “Yeah, that person in that video clip DOES look strange.”
I want my character in CROWD SITUATIONS!
I actually thought this script was going to be one long real-time story where the main character must make it through the city with crowds moving in on her wherever she goes.
I’m fine that that’s not the case but, at least give me 25% of that!
I’m guessing the writer thought that if there was too much crowd stuff, it would lose its impact. I suppose that’s an okay argument. But not if you get inventive. I already liked this rule he created where sometimes the crowd just watches. It doesn’t move in on you. So I know the writer has the creative ability to come up with different variations of the crowd. I would like to see more of that variety.
I’ve said it once, I’ll say it a million more times: GIVE US WHAT’S UNIQUE ABOUT YOUR MOVIE. That’s the one thing of value you possess – that unique asset.
Any time you are not focusing on that asset, you are focusing on things MOVIEGOERS HAVE SEEN BILLIONS OF TIMES ALREADY. You know how many investigations I’ve seen in movies? 11 billion.
That’s my only issue here. More crowd. Cause crowds are scary and the writer did a great job showing that. So show it more.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Don’t overthink verbs – “Tabitha strolls her eyes to a confusing sight.” If the reader has to stop to try and figure out what “strolling” one’s eyes means, you’ve written a clunky sentence. Just use normal words! “Tabitha notices something confusing.”
What I learned 2: Horror writers. Yeah, I’m speaking to you. YOU ARE NO LONGER ALLOWED TO WRITE SCENES IN BATHROOMS ANYMORE! STAY. AWAY. FROM BATHROOMS. No bloody sink scenes. No mirrors with monsters behind you in the reflection scenes. No foggy messages in the mirrors. Stop! Stop stop stop! You are writing things that a reader has read in 4 other horror scripts JUST THAT WEEK. If you’re going to write something in a bathroom, it must be something truly original.
18 days left to enter the Mega-Showdown Screenplay Contest! Head over to this post for details on how to enter. It’s easy!
Genre: Cop/Action/Comedy
Premise: When his lawyer daughter gets mixed up in a deadly gang-related case, Detroit cop Axel Foley will have to, once again, travel to Beverly Hills and save the day.
About: Axel is back! Newbie Aussie director Mark Molloy came into the film with one directive: Do everything practically. That’s why when you watch Beverly Hills Cop 4, it truly does look like turning back the clock and a film from a different era. It looks from the writing credits that Will Beall, who usually writes dramas, fortified the cop stuff and the dramatic elements of the screenplay. And then writing team Gormicon and Etten came in to add the funny.
Writers: Tom Gormicon & Kevin Etten rewrote cop-writing whisperer Will Beall
Details: exactly 2 hours
If you guys have been reading my posts and my newsletters, you know I’ve been looking forward to this movie.
The cop-comedy, which was a studio staple in the 1980s, has always been primed for a comeback. I’m hoping this movie can start that comeback.
Let’s find out how it did!
Axel Foley is still out there on the streets of Detroit, taking down the bad guys. After a particularly elaborate takedown of an attempted Detroit Red Wings stadium heist, he gets a call from his old friend in Beverly Hills, Billy, who tells him that his estranged lawyer daughter, Jane, who also lives in Beverly Hills, is involved in a gang-related case and was nearly killed by the gang recently.
So Axel gets on the next flight to Los Angeles and, when he lands, immediately starts fishing around for who’s coming after his daughter. To be honest, I’m not sure I ever figured out what was going on there. But what I do know is that the new Captain of the Los Angeles police, Cade Grant (Kevin Bacon), is somehow involved.
After Axel gets in a car chase with a parking cart up the famous Rodeo walkway in the center of Beverly Hills, he’s brought back to the Beverly Hills police department where he gets yelled at by some of his old friends.
That’s also where he meets Bobby Abbot, a buttoned-up cop who just happened to date Axel’s daughter not long ago. Bobby becomes Axel’s informal chaperone around town and the two try and figure out what the bad guys are trying to cover up. When all roads lead to Captain Cade, there’s a big showdown at his Beverly Hills mansion where not everyone survives.
Believe it or not, there are a ton of screenwriting topics to discuss with Beverly Hills Cop 4. To understand why, you have to understand that this was considered the perfect screenplay formula in the 1980s.
A good fish-out-of-water comedy concept was gold back then. And the concepts always lent themselves to plots that could be easily constructed in 3 acts. In fact, it’s movies like Beverly Hills Cop that inspired the most successful screenwriting book ever, Save The Cat.
The juxtaposition of a Detroit Cop showing up in Beverly Hills may be the most perfect scenario for a “Fun and Games” section that has ever been conceived.
Beverly Hills Cop 4 doesn’t mess with that formula much. And why should it? If something works, don’t mess with it. Speaking of another 80s icon, Rocky, the reason that Rocky 5 sucked was because they messed with what worked and took the big fight out of the ring and put it in the streets.
If you’re ever tasked with working with a successful formula and you’re worried, by following it, your script will be predictable and cliched, you address that issue the same way that Beverly Hills Cop 4 addressed it. You build a new central character dynamic.
That is your story within the story and what allows the reader to experience something new. In this case, the new 3-way conflict is between Axel, his estranged daughter, Jane, and the buttoned-up young cop he has to work with in Beverly Hills this time around, Bobby Abbot.
The twist on this new relationship is that Jane and Bobby used to be in a relationship, which, theoretically, adds an extra layer of conflict between Axel and Bobby.
You’ll notice that while I said this is the way you want to approach these things, I did not say that it worked. In fact, the “working” part is the hardest part to get right. Because while I understand why the writers came up with this dynamic, the end result only occasionally paid off. Had it worked, the movie would’ve been gangbusters. But because it was so weak, it left the movie feeling ho-hum.
Let’s look at it piece by piece so we can understand what happened.
We’ll start with Axel and his daughter Jane. The reason the writers chose this dynamic is because it would create obvious conflict. You want conflict in every major relationship in your script. So, by the letter of the screenwriting law, it was the “right” choice.
But the choice had a complex hurdle to overcome. This is a comedy. If the conflict is too intense, too serious, their scenes will drag the story down. We don’t come to comedy movies to get serious. We come to laugh. With Jane being so serious, there was no spark between her and Axel. Their scenes felt like drama scenes and were the worst in the script.
How do you fix that? You find a way to make Jane funnier or you get rid of the Jane storyline and replace it with something funnier.
Next up we had Bobby. Again, Bobby was the “right” thing to do as a screenwriter. Here you have Axel Foley, one of the most over-the-top comedic characters in cinema history. You need a straight man to play against him so ultra-buttoned-up Bobby was a perfect choice ON THE PAGE.
But outside of the best scene in the movie – the helicopter scene – this pairing was a dud that generated little comedy. Why?
This is where screenwriting gets hard, guys. Cause not everything is within your power and if the director or actors interpret things differently than the writer intended, it can cause a cataclysmic chain reaction that can take the whole movie down.
The reason the Axel-Bobby pairing was a dud was because the writer assumed that Eddie Murphy was going to be playing the 1980s version of Axel Foley, the guy with an unlimited amount of energy and who chews up every scene he’s in.
But that’s not how Murphy chose to play it. And, to his credit, his choice makes sense. But Murphy figured that it’s been 30 years since we’ve seen Axel. He’s probably calmer. So Axel isn’t this crazy outlandish guy anymore. At one point, when he’s trying to pull one of his silly scams to get a better hotel room, he stops, mid-sentence, and says, “You know what, I’m too tired for this. Just give me whatever room you want.” That’s the Axel we get here.
The reason this is relevant from a screenwriting perspective is because the screenwriter wrote Bobby as bland as possible so that he’d be as polar opposite from Axel as possible. That contrast would create a ton of comedy.
But because Foley is more calm in this one, there’s less contrast between the two characters, and that lack of contrast makes them bland together.
Now, good screenwriters will look for additional ways to combat these possibilities and that’s exactly what happens here. They add an additional element of conflict with Bobby having had sex with Axel’s daughter. This gives Axel even more reason to dislike Bobby, which gives us more opportunities for the two to butt heads.
The problem is, Axel’s okay with it almost immediately. He makes one quip about it then it never comes up again. Not only that, but the sexual relationship ended months ago. So it’s not even happening now.
I have a good idea why they chose to do that despite it hurting the screenplay. Once again, this is why screenwriting is hard so pay attention. I’ll bet money that in earlier drafts, Bobby and Jane WERE DATING NOW. But, at some point, someone realized that their relationship might be more interesting if they were apart. Which I understand. If they’re apart, then the audience will want to keep watching to see if they end up together.
But what often happens in these re-drafts of key elements in the screenplay, is that the screenwriter forgets why it was so important for Jane and Bobby to be dating now, which was that it created more conflict with Axel. When you’re with a screenplay for a long time, you don’t remember why you did certain things and therefore, changing them, doesn’t seem like it would cause any problems.
But changing anything central to your story will always cause issues. And that was a big one that they missed. Cause think about it. Why are we here to watch this movie? Is it to see if two former lovers get back together again? Or is to see Axel Foley be as funny as possible? It’s the latter. So any choices you make need to support that direction.
Look, this movie wasn’t bad. It was pretty fun. But the two main characters you placed in Axel’s orbit weren’t good enough to make this movie stand out. And Axel needed to be bigger. I know the character is older. But he doesn’t look that much older. If Eddie had the energy and played the role a lot bigger, I think this film would’ve worked.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me (if you’re bored, I’d still say watch it)
[ ] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Before you make a change to the core of your screenplay (major characters or major plot beats) ask yourself why you made the original choice. Then ask, from the change you’re about to make, is the upside you’re going to gain from that new direction big enough to supplant whatever you’re going to lose by eliminating the old direction? Everything affects everything in a screenplay. So a seemingly minor change usually has bigger ramifications than you think. Do your due diligence and figure out what’s going to be lost before you make that change.
The contest runs at the end of the month so start sending your entries in now!
In this field, it’s rare that your screenplay ever gets any exposure. Even if you manage to get an agent and that agent sends your script out, you’ll be lucky if 20 people read your script from cover to cover. Scriptshadow is the only place in the world where people actually get to see and experience your writing on a large-scale level. And we’re on the cusp of celebrating your writing in a more visible way than ever before.
At the end of this month, we are having our first Mega-Showdown, a 2-week screenwriting competition for feature screenplays that anybody can enter, and it’s absolutely free. You will send me the title of your script, your genre, your logline, and the first 5 pages of your screenplay. From all the submissions, I will post the Top 10 loglines along with your screenplay’s first page. You, the readers of the site, will vote for your favorite. The top 4 will move on to week 2, where they will each get their own individual featured day, with their first five pages posted. Then, at the end of the week, we’ll have a second voting round and you will pick your favorite script of the 4. I will review the winning script that Monday.
All of it will play out in real time so you don’t have to spend months waiting for that e-mail from the contest-runners that may or may not come. This contest is a living breathing organism from the second we post the loglines until I review the winning script. And guess what? You can start entering your scripts RIGHT NOW. Here are the submission details…
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
I’m giving out TWO July 4th Screenplay Consult Deals (notes on your script). These deals are half-off the full price. E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line “JULY4” to get the deal. Also, if you suck at writing loglines, I’m here to help. My Deluxe Logline Consult involves me helping you craft your logline until it’s perfect. It’s 50 bucks. If you only want to know if your concept is good or not, I offer a basic logline analysis for 25 bucks. E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com to get either!
