Week 7 of the “2 Scripts in 2024” Challenge

Every Thursday, for the first six months of 2024, Scriptshadow will be guiding you through the process of writing a screenplay. In June, you’ll be able to enter this screenplay in the Mega Screenplay Showdown. The best 10 loglines, then the first ten pages of the top five of those loglines, will be in play as they compete for the top prize.

The first month and a half of these posts have gotten you to page 20 of your screenplay. But don’t worry if you’re just stumbling upon the challenge now. You can easily catch up. We’re writing an average of 1.5 pages a day. Which is nothing. So check out the previous posts, which I’ve included below, and spend 2 hours a day writing instead of 1. You should be caught up within two weeks. Here are those links…

Week 1 – Concept
Week 2 – Solidifying Your Concept
Week 3 – Building Your Characters
Week 4 – Outlining
Week 5 – The First 10 Pages
Week 6 – Inciting Incident

The major thing we’re going to focus on today is the “Turn Into Act 2.” But before we get there, we have to talk about page counts because your major plot beats are going to take place on different pages depending on how long your screenplay is.

The desired length of a spec screenplay in 2024 is between 100 and 110 pages. The more simplistic your concept is, and the less characters you have, the lower the page count will be. So if you’re writing a movie like Gerald’s Game, about one woman in a bedroom the whole movie, that’s a simple story with a tiny number of characters. So it probably won’t be more than 90 pages. If, however, you’re writing Napoleon, which may take place over 20 years and have a cast of 30 characters, your script could be as long as 130 pages.

Once you have your page count, you’re going to divide it into four sections. So, if you have a 100 page script, it’ll look like this…

Act 1 – Pages 1-25
Act 2 (First Half) – Pages 26-50
Act 2 (Second Half) – Pages 51-75
Act 3 – Pages 76-100

If it’s 110 pages, it’ll look like this…

Act 1 – Pages 1 – 27.5
Act 2 (First Half) – Pages 27.5-55
Act 2 (Second Half) – Pages 55 – 82.5
Act 3 – Pages 82.5-110

Don’t get your tighty-whiteys in a bunch and complain that this is too restrictive. These numbers are GUIDELINES. You don’t have to abide by them exactly. But the majority of scripts operate best with an Act 1 (Setup), an Act 2 (where all the conflict and struggle happens) and an Act 3 (Climax). So it’s nice to have an idea where those major plot beats occur.

The reason we divide Act 2 into halves is because Act 2 is large and we’re trying to make it more manageable. By dividing it in two, you create 4 equally long chunks of screenplay. And, also, something big usually happens at the midpoint of a story. So I like to use that as a divider between the first half of Act 2 and the second half of Act 2.

Bringing this back to today, we will be writing pages 21-30 this week. Which means that, for those of us writing 100 or 110 page screenplays, we’re going to be writing our “Turn into Act 2,” which is just a fancy way of saying: it’s the end of Act 1 and the beginning of Act 2.

Now, last week we left off at the inciting incident. Things got a little contentious in the comments section as people debated where the inciting incident was, particularly as it related to Star Wars. Don’t worry about that. Star Wars has a deceptively tricky inciting incident due to the fact that the main character doesn’t even show up until page 15.

It’s usually easy to identify the inciting incident, which is the incident that destroys the main character’s day-to-day life and forces them to address a problem. A simpler example would be Free Guy, when Ryan Reynolds puts on the glasses that show him that the real life he thought he was living in is actually one big video game.

We’re going to assume that you’re writing a 100 page screenplay. That means your Turn into Act 2 is going to occur at page 25 (exactly 25% of the way into your script). Since we’re starting this week on page 21, we first must know what to write BEFORE we get to the Second Act.

Well, remember what I said last week. Around page 15, you get the inciting incident. This creates a scenario by which a problem must be solved. Solving that problem is your hero’s goal for the movie. Barbie is having thoughts of death. She must go to the Real World to figure out why she’s having these thoughts.

But your hero is NOT YET READY to leave their normal life. As human beings, we are rarely told YOU MUST CHANGE NOW and then immediately we start changing. No. We resist it. We run away from it. We pretend it isn’t a problem. We ignore it. Whatever we have to do to NOT change, we do it. Which is how this section between pages 15-25 works. The character isn’t ready to go on their journey yet so they resist.

But a few of you are already thinking, “Wait a minute, Carson. So we’re supposed to write 10 full pages of resisting?” Good question. The answer is no. That would be a waste of space.

What I’ve found about pages 15-25 is that a number of things can be going on. Yes, resistance is one of them. Ryan Reynolds trying to ignore the fact that he’s just learned he’s living in a video game in Free Guy is an example of that.

But, also, there can be education going on in this section. In Barbie, Barbie must go visit Weird Barbie, who educates her on what she must do. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones talks to Brody about what he must do before he officially sets off in search of the Ark. So education (aka “exposition) is one part of this section.

You may also wrap up certain storylines from the first act. If you have a young character going on a big journey, he might have a scene with his parents where he says goodbye.

You may also use this section to cut to the subplots of your secondary characters.  You see this in Barbie.  Before she heads off, we cut to Ken and figure out what’s going on with him.  If you have a major villain, like Kylo Ren, you might cut to him as well – see what he’s up to and push his story along a little further.

In other words, you’re not just gearing YOUR HERO up for this journey, you’re gearing YOUR ENTIRE STORY up for this journey. You’re putting everything in place so that the screenplay is prepared to move forward.

This brings us to page 25, which is our Turn Into Act 2 and this is going to be the simplest plot beat you write in your entire script. Your Turn Into Act 2 is just your hero leaving on the journey. They’ve officially accepted the fact that they must go off and do this. And so here they go.

Now, what if you don’t have a traditional “Hero’s Journey” screenplay where your hero leaves their “home world” and goes off on a larger adventure? What if you have a movie like Killers of the Flower Moon or Coda or Parasite or Silver Linings Playbook?

So, this is where things get tricky. But, generally speaking, the moment your main character begins pursuing the goal that will drive your entire screenplay is the moment the second act begins. I say “tricky” because take “Parasite.” In Parasite, the family acts as one character. So the second they decide that their goal is to take over this rich family’s home is when Act 2 begins. In Coda, the moment the main girl decides that she’s going to enter this singing competition is the moment Act 2 begins. With Silver Linings Playbook, Bradley Cooper wants to be in the dance competition because his ex-wife is going to be there and he hopes to use the opportunity to win her back. It’s not as strong of a goal as, say, Promising Young Woman (take everyone down involved in my friend’s sexual assault). But it does the job of giving the narrative a clear spine.

After that, you hit the most fun part of the entire screenplay which is the “Fun and Games” Section. This is where you get to show off your concept. For example, when Barbie goes to the Real World, you get to show her clashing with people who are the complete opposite of her. Or in Star Wars, you get to see Luke and Obi-Wan go into an alien bar.

As always, this is just a guideline. There’s no such thing as the perfect blueprint for a script. So, if you don’t know what to do, follow your gut. Or take some risks. One of the reasons I’m slowly pacing us is to allow you to make mistakes and still have time to go back and try something else.

Okay, here’s this week’s assignment…

Friday = write 1 scene (Your main character resists going after his goal)
Saturday = write 1 scene (Prepare the script for the Journey)
Sunday = write 1 scene (Turn Into Second Act)
Monday = write 1 scene (Fun and Games)
Tuesday = write 1 scene (Fun and Games)
Wednesday = go back and correct any issues with your five scenes
Thursday = go back and correct any issues with your five scenes

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Genre: Comedy
Premise: After his girlfriend dies, a guy who hates cats begins an unexpected bromance with her widowed cat, who reveals himself to be an alien that is here to save the world.
About: This one comes from a new screenwriter. The script made the Black List and is in development over at 21 Laps.
Writer: Andrew Nunnelly
Details: 107 pages

I was paws-itively looking forward to this one.

Whatever genre you’re writing in, you want to look for unique ways into it. We’ve got a quasi-rom-com here. Perfect for Valentine’s Day. But instead of some cliched boy meets girl rom-com clone, the movie is about a bromance between a guy and a cat. How much more unique can you get?

And to make matters better, Taylor Swift is in it! That automatically bumps the script up two notches.

But will the script be the cat’s meow? Or will it be claw-full?

Jeff, an assistant professor at UCLA, meets his dream woman in Emma. I mean check out this description: brunette, unconsciously pretty, unwittingly charming, infinitely empathetic. We’re all in love with this woman!

There’s one small issue. Emma is a giant cat-lady. She’s got her old black cat, Yugen. She’s got 10,000 cat toys and cat beds and cat pictures around the apartment. Jeff is not a cat person. It’s clear Yugen knows this. But Emma and Yugen are a package deal and there’s nothing Jeff can do about it.

Their relationship is built around their mutual obsession with finding alien life. Hey, I can relate to that. But before they can answer the eternal question of “Are we alone?” Jeff becomes alone cause Emma is killed in a car accident.

Jeff wallows in their apartment for weeks until, all of a sudden, Yugen talks to him. It takes Jeff a while before he believes he hasn’t gone crazy. That’s when Yugen hits him with a shocker: All cats are aliens. They are here to prevent humans from destroying the earth. Emma was The One and now that she’s dead, earth is doomed. UNLESS Jeff can take her place.

Jeff resists for a while but eventually comes on board. He must accomplish a series of steps that include things like rubbing Yugen’s belly, liking cat photos online, visiting cats at a Cat Cafe, and clipping Yugen’s claws. Once Yugen deems him “The One” ready, he reveals to Jeff that the final step is critical because if they can accomplish it, they will go back in time and save Emma’s life.

In order to explain my reaction to this script, I have to talk about another animal… Daaaaaa Bears.

As in, the Chicago Bears. Ditka. Sweetness. Da Fridge.

Don’t worry. This is all going to make sense.

The Chicago Bears are in a very unique position. They have this quarterback on their team named Justin Fields. Justin Fields is a solid quarterback who’s slowly getting better.

Now, due to a lucky break, the Bears have the number 1 pick in the draft this year. And the number 1 quarterback prospect, a guy named Caleb Williams, is, by all accounts very very good. Let me try and make some screenwriting analogies here. Caleb Williams is like a young Tarantino. Whereas Justin Fields is like Zak Penn (Ready Player One).

Just like lots of people in the NFL like Justin Fields, lots of production houses in Hollywood like Zak Penn. They would love to have him working on their scripts. However, if you have the option between getting Zak Penn or Quentin Tarantino, you go with Quentin Tarantino. Which is what it looks like the Bears are going to do. They like Justin. But they can’t pass up the opportunity of hiring a once-in-a-generation talent like Caleb Williams.

How does this relate back to today’s screenplay? Good question. I’m starting to wonder that myself.

Toxoplasmosis desperately wants to be Caleb Williams. But it can only muster up being Justin Fields. In other words, it so clearly wants to be great. But there’s a ceiling on the talent attempting to make it great.

The problem is that there’s an unhinged quality to the writing. It gets so untethered at times that you stop believing in what’s going on. Not in a “movie-logic” way, like we were talking about yesterday. This script is *supposed to be* zany. It’s supposed to push logic boundaries.

But in order for this approach to work, it still has to be clever. And having a cat drone on about the Cat Code and the Cat Planet and its 10-Step plan to bend time and space so that Jeff can travel back in time and prevent his girlfriend’s death — it’s just too goofy for its own good.

Luckily, we have the perfect comp for how to pull this concept off. It’s one of my favorite scripts of all time and it’s called Dogs of Babel. Here’s the logline for that one: “When a dog is the only witness to a woman’s death, her husband tries to teach the dog how to talk so he can find out what happened to her.”

Notice how even the logline promises a more structured story. There’s a mystery behind her death. So we have a goal: Find out what happened. That’s the impetus for him attempting to connect with the dog – so he can find out what happened.

In Toxoplasmosis, it’s more like Zach Galifianakis voicing a cat and just saying all this crazy weird stuff. “Jeff, you need to understand cats don’t socialize like humans. There is too much going on in our highly intelligent minds to just stop what we’re doing and have water-cooler chit-chat with someone using a fraction of their brain capacity.”

I remember, in Dogs of Babel, I wanted so desperately for the protagonist to succeed. Cause I could tell how heartbroken he was and how much he needed those answers in order to move on. In Toxoplasmosis, it didn’t really seem like it mattered.

That’s something we don’t usually talk about on the site: Just because you have a goal doesn’t mean that the reader will care or be invested in that goal. We technically have a great goal here. Jeff is trying to go back in time to save his girlfriend. But it’s dealt with in such a casual way that we never really care if he succeeds.

That’s why I always say, even if you’re writing a comedy, make sure you take the pillars of your story (Goal, Stakes, Urgency) seriously. You can have fun and get wild with everything else. But make sure those are solid. Go re-watch The Hangover if you want to see this done well. Some of the zaniest s**t you’ve ever seen happens in that movie. But the GSU is airtight.

Still, there were some funny things in this script. There’s this funny moment where Jeff wakes up out of a haze in the Petco line with 943 dollars worth of cat food in his cart. He has no idea how he got here. It turns out Yugen is controlling his mind now, making Jeff his own personal walking Amazon account. There’s an early scene where Jeff is still unsure if Yugen is talking to him. He goes to work and heads to a room filled with testing cats in cages, makes sure no one is around, and asks them if they can understand him.

I recently suffered a terrible tragedy, and… And since then, perhaps understandably, things have gotten a little… strange.
(beat)

Long story short: I need your help. You might know my cat Yugen? Well, he’s not really my cat, but… He started talking to me and I’m just a little worried that maybe I’m losing my mind so…
(pause)

If you can understand me, please just say something?
(beat)

And if you can’t — honestly I hope you can’t — then no worries at all and I can move on.
(beat)

Anyone? Anything? It doesn’t need to be anything profound.

There were moments like this throughout the script that made me laugh. But, in the end, the mythology of the cat world felt shaky and rushed, like the writer was making it up on the fly. I used to think you could do that as well when writing these wackier scripts. But nothing could be further from the truth. You have to create a strong mythology where you’ve thought through everything. Only then can you go nuts. I know it sounds like overkill but I promise you it makes a difference. The reader can tell when the writer knows their world intimately and when they’re just making s**t up on-the-fly, whether that be a movie about Napoleon during his greatest battle or a movie about talking cats from another galaxy.

I just wasn’t feline this one, guys.

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

What I learned: People! You have to stop spending 80% of your effort on your first scene. This is yet another script where the best scene is the first scene. It’s a clever scene. Nunnelly uses Carl Sagan’s pursuit of life in the universe to explain his love for Emma. It’s very well done. But then… there’s never a scene after that as clever or as good. Yes, your first scene is important so you want to put a ton of effort into it. But if every other scene you write, you put in 50% of that effort, we’re going to notice. I guarantee you we will notice. So, once again, use that opening scene as the bar. Don’t use it as your “SALE” sign to get us into your crummy clothing store on Melrose Boulevard.

With Valentine’s Day only 24 hours away, it’s only natural that we review a script about LOVE…. and killing.

Genre: Rom-Com/Action
Premise: (from Black List) After Liv, a world-class hitwoman, breaks up with her boyfriend, Martin, he puts out a massive contract on his own life to get her attention. What Martin doesn’t realize is that it’s an open contract with a 48-hour expiration, so now every assassin in the western hemisphere is coming after him. Liv makes a deal to keep him safe until the contract expires, if he pays her out the full bounty. With the clock ticking, the two must elude some of the world’s most prolific killers.
About: This finished Top 20 on last year’s Black List. The writer has one credit, which was pretty recent! Copshop!
Writer: Kurt McLeod
Details: 111 pages

Florence Pugh in a fun role for once?

It may not seem like it sometimes. But we here at Scriptshadow support LOVE.

TayTay and Travis? They’re like two giant halves of a heart in my eyes.

And so today, just 24 hours before the loviest day of love on the calendar, I present to you this Black List rom-com.

29 year old Martin is a software engineer who can count the amount of times he’s had sex on two hands. Not people, mind you. But ACTUAL TIMES. To put it mildly, Martin is not suave with da ladies.

MARTIN’S DATING PROFILE

PHOTO [harsh lighting, unflattering angle, same smile]
OCCUPATION: Software programmer, self-employed
LIKES: Romantic comedies, good wine, picnics in the park, spa days, quality time with family and friends
DISLIKES: Toxic masculinity, conspicuous consumption, heights, enclosed spaces, public swimming pools
LOOKING FOR: That perfect someone to spend the rest of my life with…

But due to a dating app screw-up, Martin has somehow been matched with the drop-dead gorgeous Lex. Lex does not hold back her disappointment when she arrives at the restaurant date, looking at Martin and saying, “Wait, who the f&%$ are you?”

LEX’S DATING PROFILE

PHOTO [sexy silhouette, sunglasses, bangs hiding pouty face]
OCCUPATION: work
LIKES: no
DISLIKES: yes
LOOKING FOR: no strings

For some reason (aka, because the writer needed a movie) Lex kind of likes Martin. So she sleeps with him that night and then starts sleeping with him on the regular. However, after several months, she ghosts him. And soon after is when we learn that Lex is a big game hitwoman. Which partially explains why she keeps her relationships short and surface-level.

Cut to a year later and Lex is following up a gigantic score – 2 million bucks. The reason it’s so big is because it’s an open target. Any assassin can collect. But when she gets to the target, she finds out it’s Martin, who’s been doing some development and looks a lot better. Martin says that he bought the contract on himself cause he’s since learned about her job and realized this was the only way to see her again.

Due to some complicated financials and a hit-man loophole, Lex concludes that she’ll make more money off the hit if she waits until it’s called off (or something). So she still plans to kill Martin. But, in the meantime, she has to help him evade all the other hitmen trying to kill him. However, when her handler, Francis, realizes she’s trying to game the system, she puts a separate hit out on Lex. So now Lex and Martin are running for their lives and, quite possibly, falling in love.

Let me start off by saying I’m noticing a trend in a lot of the scripts I’ve been reading.

Which is: THE FIRST SCENE (OR SEQUENCE) IS THE BEST SCENE IN THE ENTIRE SCRIPT.

The scene where Lex shows up for this date with Martin and Martin bumbles through it is really funny. Nothing ever quite reaches the perfect balance of awkwardness and humor as this date.

Writing a great scene is hard. So kudos if you can achieve it at any point in your script. But if your first scene is your best scene, that means that the reading experience gets worse the further through your script the reader gets. Which is not what you want.

So why does this happen?

Writers want to show off the coolness of their concept right away. So they come up with an early scene that sells their concept. Also, the earlier you are in your script, the less dependent you are on the plot, which hasn’t locked you into any scenes yet. So you have more freedom to play around and have fun.

But you can’t allow that to be the best scene in your script. You just can’t.

When you write a great scene early, consider that THE BAR. And then, every subsequent major scene, try to clear that bar. If you can’t honestly say that your later scenes are better than that first scene, rewrite them.

This all comes down to laziness. Lazy writers start strong then fizzle out. Strong writers start strong then keep getting better. Yes, it will require more effort on your part. But embrace that challenge! Don’t be Mr. Lazy Pants.

Especially if you’re allowing your alter ego, Movie Logic A-Hole, to do your writing.
Movie Logic A-Hole is your lazy alter-ego. If it were up to him, he wouldn’t do any outlining, he wouldn’t do any research, when he ran into a script problem he wouldn’t try to figure it out. Instead, Movie Logic A-Hole barrels through the script regardless of whether what he’s writing makes real-world sense or not. As long as it makes “movie logic” sense, that’s all that matters to him.

Love!

Movie Logic A-Hole makes a big appearance in today’s script, destroying any legitimate chance the script has of working. This entire movie is based on the idea that a man who’s trying to get his assassin girlfriend back puts a 2 million dollar blanket hit out on himself. Let me reiterate that. A man knowingly pays money to have every major hitman in the world try to kill him in the hopes that his hit-woman ex-girlfriend will get to him first and he can try to get back together with her.

Movie Logic A-Hole is very persuasive. When Real World Writer says to him, “But no one would ever really do that,” Movie Logic A-Hole replies, “Chillllll dude. It’s a commmeddy. Comedies are funny. They don’t have to make sense.” When Real World Writer says to him, “But how could he know that another hitman wouldn’t find him first and kill him?” Movie Logic A-Hole replies, “Because she’s like, the best. She would get to him before any other hitman.” When Real World Writer says, “But how would he know that she was the best? I’m not sure you can go on a guess when you’re putting your life on the line.” Movie Logic A-Hole replies, “You’re thinking way too deep, man. Nobody cares about that stuff when they’re watching a movie.”

While it’s true that audiences never think of the word “logic,” when watching a movie, they do know when something feels off. If they sense that the storytelling is lazy, they stop being engaged. That’s the primary effect of movie-logic. If you use it enough, your story takes on a general feeling of laziness.

If you want to see how this looks in practice, go watch “Lift” on Netflix. Notice how quickly you stop caring about what’s happening. That’s because many of the creative choices (especially the sequence that opens the movie) reek of movie logic. It feels LAZY.

With that said, there is room for Movie Logic A-Hole to be involved in your screenwriting journey. Especially in comedy, where, if you have to make a choice between funny or logic, you pick ‘funny.’  BUT ONLY OUTSIDE THE MAIN PILLARS OF YOUR PLOT. You don’t want to hammer movie-logic nails into the pillars of your story. Those pillars need to be as logically strong as possible. This entire movie rests on the idea that a guy would put a contract on his life in the hopes that his hitwoman ex-girlfriend will get to him before the other killers. That’s the aspect of the story that needs to be the most convincing. Yet it’s the least convincing.

Save your movie logic for stupid stuff like a killer has your heroes trapped in the back of an alley and then a crazed cat leaps out of nowhere onto the killer’s head, allowing them to get away. I’d prefer you *not* write this scene. But if you’re going to use movie logic, that’s where you want to use it – on stuff that isn’t directly tied to major plot points.

The most dangerous thing about Movie Logic A-Hole is that he’s super convincing. Especially late at night. Especially deep into a writing session. Especially when a deadline is coming up and you’re running out of time. Movie Logic A-Hole starts whispering all types of nonsense in your ear and, unfortunately, he’s persuasive.

So watch out for him. Because he’s the difference between a solid well-constructed story and a messy weak one.

Ever since pure rom-coms became excommunicato, these “rom-coms with an edge” took their place. So I wouldn’t be surprised if this became a movie. It would make for a fun trailer. But the script wasn’t for me. Does this mean love loses?

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

What I learned: Okay, let’s take a look at the disastrous logline the Black List included…

After Liv, a world-class hitwoman, breaks up with her boyfriend, Martin, he puts out a massive contract on his own life to get her attention. What Martin doesn’t realize is that it’s an open contract with a 48-hour expiration, so now every assassin in the western hemisphere is coming after him. Liv makes a deal to keep him safe until the contract expires, if he pays her out the full bounty. With the clock ticking, the two must elude some of the world’s most prolific killers.

That is more of a mini-summary than it is a logline. With loglines, it’s about conveying the concept, the main character, the goal, and the major source of conflict. You should aim for 30 words or less. With that in mind, we get my rewrite…

After his hitwoman girlfriend ghosts him, a lovesick introvert takes out a 2 million dollar contract on himself in the hopes of luring her back into his life.

I do basic logline analysis for $25. E-mail me if you want to get your logline in shape! carsonreeves1@gmail.com

Today, I discuss literary agents and how to know if they really like you. Also, is death by shin guard possible?

Genre: Thriller
Premise: A woman who’s moved into a new home and is buying a lot of things from a giant delivery company learns that she is being used for a new delivery scam.
About: Today we have a director who directed a short film and used that film to create buzz for the feature script, which allowed him to get 25 votes on last year’s Black List, which was good enough for a Top 10 finish. I did not watch the short film because I didn’t want to spoil the script. I wanted the writing to do all the work.
Writer: Russell Goldman
Details: 94 pages

Gillian Jacobs for Julia?

Time to take a small detour to talk about something we don’t typically talk about on the site. This has come up because I’ve talked to several repped writers recently who are frustrated with their reps.

I want writers who think the end all be all is securing an agent to know that it’s more complex than you think. Here’s how it typically works. When you sign up with a rep, they will be your best friend. They will parade your script – the one that got them to sign you – out to the entire industry.

How that script is received will determine how your rep treats you from that point forward. If the script gets a lukewarm response around town (no sale, no options, no assignments), the rep will cool on you *a little bit*. But, you still have one more script to prove your worth to them. So the next script you write is super important. It needs to get sold or secure a big option or lead to an assignment or get genuine A-B level talent attached if they’re going to keep promoting you going forward.

But if that script also fails to make a dent in the industry, your rep isn’t going to do much for you going forward. You will have to do all the work yourself. There is one exception to this, which I’ll share with you in a minute. But first, we’ve got a script to review!

38 year-old Julia Day seems to have just lost her father and has bought a new house. I say “seems” because a lot of details in this script are vague. Julia is a recovering alcoholic and spends the majority of her time trying to fix up her house.

As a result, she’s constantly buying ‘building stuff’ online from an Amazon stand-in called “Smirk.” One of her early packages contains a ski mask by accident. But she’s a self-admitted weirdo and likes it. So she adds it to the many decorations she’s making for her home.

Julia tries to get a job (what that job is is unclear) while occasionally hanging out with her brother or sister, Tat (the gender is unclear), and developing a little crush on her Smirk delivery man, Charlie.

Things get weird when Julia starts receiving things that she didn’t buy – a blender, protein powder, a corkscrew – and she complains to the Smirk people. She’s eventually told that this is a developing scam where people send stuff to customers in order to game the Smirk review system. She should just send the stuff and not worry about it.

But Julia isn’t letting it go that easy. She thinks this is the beginning of an identity theft scam. She starts telling everyone she knows that she’s being targeted but there isn’t enough evidence for her claims to be convincing. One of her windows is broken, for example. She claims someone was trying to get in. But it looks like a harmless accident. As she dives deeper into online delivery scams, Julia becomes obsessed with proving she’s right. But at what point does she accept that this may all be in her head?

Okay, back to the secret to getting a rep who will ALWAYS fight for you.

The one exception to the “2 Script Rep Rule” is if the rep genuinely loves you as a writer. If they really really love your writing, they’ll keep pushing every script you write because they believe in you. Most reps only sign people because they think they can move that script. But if that script doesn’t move, they sour on them quickly.

So always gauge a potential rep to see how much they like your writing. Ask them questions about what they liked in your script(s) and gauge how genuine and thoughtful their responses are. If there’s real enthusiasm and attention to detail in the way they respond, that’s a good indication that they believe in you as a writer. Those are the reps you want. Cause those are the reps who are going to stick with you even if you’re not a shooting star right out of the gate.

I’ll talk about this more in the next newsletter if you guys want me to. Just give me a heads up in the comments.

Back to today’s script.

I’m not going to lie. This one was tough to get through.

I wasn’t surprised to learn that the writer is a director. Cause I sense they’re a director first and they only write because they have to.

Go ahead and take a look at this script. It’s that kind of writing where if you even drift off for a second, you have no idea where you are or what’s going on, forcing you to go back to the top of the page and start reading all over again. The problem is, that the writing isn’t clear enough to prevent you from drifting off again. Which means you keep having to go back to read the pages all over again. As anyone who’s read anything knows, after doing this five or six times, you just give up on trying to re-understand the page and charge forward, accepting you’re going to be ignorant about some things.

I mean, I wasn’t even sure why Julia was home throughout the first half of the script. I wasn’t sure if she had a job or not. When you’re not a screenwriter first, you make the mistake of assuming too much. You assume the reader is in your head with you so you don’t have to make things clear. You may know the protagonist is a teacher so you just *assume* that the reader will figure it out as well.

There *were* some interesting ideas in here. For example, the script covers something called “brushing,” which is a scam where Amazon users will send you an item you didn’t order so that it ships as a “verified” purchase and then they use your account to write up reviews for those products they shipped, since verified purchases push you up higher on Amazon’s “featured” list.

But it isn’t explored in an interesting way. It’s mentioned. Characters seem upset. Julia complains. But it was more annoying than curiosity-inducing. In other words, it didn’t make me want to keep reading to find out what happened next. All it did was make me think, “Oh, I’d never heard of that scam before.”

This is how a lot of things played out in the script. Julia gets a mask in the mail from Smirk. So we think that’s going to be important. But nothing happens with it for half the script until another one shows up. And that one’s just as impotent as the first. We keep waiting for something to HAPPEN in this story and nothing ever does.

Ironically, the best scene in the script is the opening scene. It’s a cold open where this woman receives shin guards in the mail and proceeds to shove one down her throat and use the other one to try and choke herself to death. I’d never read a scene like that before. So it definitely pulled me in.

But then we just get 50 pages of Julia being annoyed. You promised us something and then completely backed away from it.

I see this mistake a lot where writers write their best scene as the first scene. They do this because they don’t need to connect it to anything and, therefore, they can do whatever they want. Which is why it’s so good. But you need to keep the spirit of that first scene in the writing of the rest of your script. Sure, it’s tougher to write engaging material like that if you’re setting up characters and a plot and having to make everything connect. But you have to try!

There may be something to the idea of random stuff being delivered to you. Each item is increasingly weirder. You don’t know how they connect but there’s clearly some message to them. That could be a movie. But the script I just read doesn’t have that clarity of purpose. It’s murky. It stumbles. It has moments but those moments are followed by ten pages that put you to sleep. It needs a writer-writer to come in and add that definition.

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

What I learned: If you give a reader a wall of text, they will revolt. Readers don’t have the patience. So, please, going forward, pages like this should be condensed to 1/4 of the space. Paragraphs, also, should be a lot slimmer.

As a means of comparison, here’s a page from Mercy, which got Chris Pratt to sign on and sold to Amazon. By the way, Mercy is a script that has 10 times the amount of mythology it needs to explain to the reader. So, if anything, Mercy should be the script that’s overwritten. Instead, the writer understands how important it is to keep the reader’s eyes moving down the page.

The first Logline Showdown winning script of the year!

Genre: Dramedy
Winning Logline: An ambitious journalist for a cheap tabloid returns to his hometown where he’s forced to cross previously burned bridges with friends and family while investigating claims of a giant frog creature terrorizing the town.
About: Thanks again to Scott for doing all the hard work tallying votes for January Logline Showdown.  Frog Boy pulled in 24 and a half votes, which was 32% of the vote, besting The Rhythm Police at number 2, which received 17 and a half votes (23%).
Writer: Zach Jansen
Details: 101 pages

For a while there, I didn’t know who was going to win. Rhythm Police was getting a lot of love. That would’ve been fun to review. But you know what? I thought The Glades (3rd place – 16 votes) was going to win the weekend when I put the loglines out. That one felt the most like a movie to me. But I’m kinda glad you guys went with something unique. That gives me hope that not every movie produced going forward is going to have iron man suits in it. Let’s see how the first winning logline of the year turned out…

20-something James works in the big city. Well, if you can call “Cleveland” a proper city. They do have the only lake in the United States that catches on fire. Sorry, Midwestern in-joke there.

James works at one of those tabloid papers that need to fit aliens into every headline. Personally, I don’t know why that’s considered “tabloid.” Aliens are real. It’s been proven on Twitter. Duh. Sorry, I’m getting distracted again.

After pissing off the city mayor, James’ boss wants to get him out of town and, by pure chance, there’s a story that would be perfect for their paper in James’ hometown – One of the city’s workers was recently attacked by a giant frog.

James hems and haws because he hates his small podunk town but agrees to go there when his boss threatens to fire him if he doesn’t. Immediately upon arrival, James runs into all the usual suspects – the reformed town bully, the angry ex-girlfriend, the father he can’t stand. But James is a professional. He’s not here for drama. He wants to solve the Frog Boy case. Or, more precisely, he wants to prove it’s nonsense.

Upon doing some research, James learns that the Frog Boy sightings date back decades, specifically around the town’s central lake. Could this frog boy phenomenon be true?? And then there’s the bigger question in all of this: Is anything true? James became a skeptic all the way back when he was a kid and decided there was no God. Which is why he and his religious father don’t talk anymore. James finally teams up with his ex to get the definitive answer on the frog. But what he ultimately finds just may ribbet his whole reality.

It took me a long time to understand why investigations were perfect storytelling vessels. The goal is built right there into the premise! Your main character’s activity is built right into the premise! This is why they can make 50,000 TV shows about cops. It’s because the cops always have an investigation, and those investigations effortlessly power stories.

But where the real fun in investigatory storytelling comes from is when you go off-road. You don’t just give us another murder to investigate. You have some fun with the investigative format. Which is why this logline was chosen. It gives us an investigation we don’t typically get to see. It’s different.

But even if you have a powerful engine pushing your story along, you still need some exciting sights and stops along the way. I didn’t see enough of those in Frog Boy.

One of the most common mistakes I see in screenwriting is assuming too much familiarity on the reader’s end. You think they know what’s going on but you haven’t given them enough information for them to understand the scene. Here’s an early example of that in Frog Boy…

Jansen assumes we know that the boss character is thinking about sending him to his hometown for this frog story. But I don’t know this boss character. I don’t know what he knows about the frog story. I don’t know that he knows James lives in Loveland. I didn’t even know James lived in Loveland at this point in the story.

So when we come into the scene with the boss asking James where he lives, we’re confused. The only indication of what’s going on occurs in a parenthetical (“realizes”). But I didn’t catch the meaning of that at first. I had to re-read the scene to understand it.

All of this could’ve been cleared up by simply being in the room with the boss as he’s looking at the frog story online before James walks in. Now we know why he’s called James in and we can enjoy the process of the boss yanking him around.

Too often, we writers assume the reader knows more than they do. They don’t know anything UNLESS YOU TELL THEM. Keep that in mind every time you write a scene, ESPECIALLY early on in the script when you hold TONS MORE information about your story than the reader. Those first 30 pages are when they need you holding their hand the most.

There were also some mistakes made on the dialogue end. Dialogue isn’t always about the words being said. It’s about the situation you create around the words to give them the most impact. In the middle of the screenplay, James goes to jail. He has no other choice than to call his father, whom he despises, to get him to bail him out.

The dad comes, bails him out, and on the car ride home, the dad starts making demands. “I want you to stay at home while you’re here instead of at the hotel.” But the demands hold no weight because the dad HAS ALREADY BAILED JAMES OUT.

This conversation would’ve had a lot more impact had the dad visited James while he was still behind bars and made the demands THERE. Now, the demands actually hold weight because James has to decide which is worse, staying in jail or staying with his dad. These are little things but they add up. They make a difference. There were several more scenes in the script where there was zero conflict or zero stakes so the conversations just sat there.

What the script does get right is its tone. It’s a fun little screenplay. It’s a fun investigation. It’s got charm. Some of the scenes of James investigating the loonier people in town made me giggle. Here’s an early exchange between James and his former bully from school.

The script had this dependable spine that always had you smiling, which stemmed from its quirky investigatory center. And it even had some character relationship depth. I thought the stuff with James and his dad about faith, which tied into the frog storyline nicely, was solid.

I would even react positively to anyone who asked me what I thought about the script. I would say, “It was cute.” That’s positive, right? But I just had this conversation with a writer the other day, who also had a cute script. I reminded him, “Cute is better than average. Cute is a lot better than ugly. But cute isn’t hot.” In the ultra-competitive world of screenwriting, cute gets you a smile. Hot gets you a date.

How do you make Frog Boy hot? The best way to make a script like this hot is to make it darker, weirder, or funnier. “Funnier” can be tough because it’s hard to write a consistently LOL script. But you can always make creative choices that are darker and weirder. You have a Frog Boy. You can push that into some risky areas.

But, in fairness to Jansen, I don’t think he’s interested in that. He wants this to be light. And movies like this *do* get made. This reminds me of a lot of films such as Welcome to Mooseport or Swing Vote. I think I imagined something a little wilder, though, something weirder. Which is why I can’t quite recommend the script. But it was right on the cusp of “worth the read.”

Script link: Frog Boy

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

What I learned: Show and Tell.  When it comes to your hero’s flaw, you want to use a two-pronged approach. The first thing you want to do is SHOW the flaw. So if your hero runs away whenever things get tough, write a scene where we see him run away when things get tough. Then, what I encourage screenwriters to do, is to add a flaw “tell” somewhere in the script. For a variety of reasons, readers may not pick up on the flaw when you showed it. So you can tell it to the reader as well, just to make sure everyone gets it. Here, we have our “tell” moment when James is talking to someone from town to get information on the story.

The problem in Frog Boy is that we never got the SHOW. We only get the TELL. And when you do that, the reader always feels it less. So make sure you first show us and only then, later, tell us.