Genre: High School/Comedy/Romance
Premise: To revamp her self image, an arrogant but well-meaning high school socialite decides to help a former friend land the guy of her dreams… but in the process, realizes she wants her for herself.
About: This script finished Top 10 on the 2019 Black List. The writer, Sara Monge, wrote for the 2013 show, 101 Ways to Get Rejected.
Writer: Sara Monge
Details: 103 pages

I can appreciate a good high school flick.

Back in the day, the high school comedy was a staple on every studio’s film slate. But let’s be real. Nobody could ever live up to the John Hughes flicks. His films had that magical je ne sais quoi that all high school movies have since been striving to find. Even the vaunted “Easy A,” a script that everyone in Hollywood said was the best high school script they’d read in decades, landed in theaters with a big “meh.”

When a genre is this stale, the only thing you can do to revive it is reinvent it. Anything short of that will get you some polite “attaboys,” but that’s as far as the compliments go. Does “Glendale” reinvent the high school spec? It tries to. And, to some, it may have succeeded. But as much as I was rooting for this script, it never quite took off. Let’s take a look.

Six years ago. Flashback. 12 year old best friends Kate (beautiful and perfect) and Christine (awkward and unconventionally pretty) are playing that 7th grade game you both love and dread – Spin the Bottle. Kate is trying to pump Christine up for a rigged kiss with Ken doll perfect, Devon.

But while they’re getting ready, Christine inadvertently admits to Kate that she masturbates non-stop. This being 7th grade, Kate tells a couple of people, and all of a sudden Christine is the junior high leper. Everyone thinks she’s a perverted weirdo. This Scarlett letter follows her for six years, where we re-meet Christine and Kate, who no longer talk to one another.

Kate has always felt guilty about what she did so she decides to invite Christine to one of her big parties as a way to make amends before they go off into life and never talk again. Incidentally, the next day, when Christine is driving to school, she’s watching the beautiful Devon walk by (yes, the same guy from Spin the Bottle) and accidentally crashes into the side of Kate’s car.

The two are rushed to the school nurse and forced to talk to one another. Kate says she knows Christine likes Devon and she’s willing to help her get him. Christine calls her out, saying she’s only doing this cause she feels guilty, which Kate cops to. But she allows Kate’s help anyway, and soon she’s dressing better, make-upping better, and her IG game is on point. It starts to work. Devon starts liking her pictures! OMG.

However, the more Kate and Christine hang out, the more they rekindle their friendship. The more they rekindle their friendship, the more they realize this might be more than friendship. Yes, that’s right. Kate and Christine are into each other. In fact, THEY’VE ALWAYS BEEN INTO EACH OTHER. Christine is so down but for Kate, she has to think about her image. She isn’t sure that “gay” fits into it. Will Kate break Christine’s heart once again? Or will these two find love in the likeliest of unlikely places?

One thing I have to remind myself is that not everything can be a Carson movie. We can’t only have sci-fi, time travel, and contained thrillers, as much as I would love that to be a reality. You need variety in the movie market or else everything is the same. So, yes, I’d love an occasional great high school movie.

But Glendale is the Jamaican bobsledding team of screenplays. You really want them to do well but they just can’t keep up with the big countries.

For example, one of the differences between high-grade professional screenplays and younger writers is strong plot beats. When you need something to happen in your story, you don’t come up with a lazy way to do it. You think it through and you come up the best plot beat possible.

Christine crashing into Kate while watching Devon walk as a means to get the two talking again felt extremely over-the-top. You couldn’t just… have them start talking again? You don’t need some big silly plot thing to happen. And you may argue, “This is a movie and you do things more dramatically in movies.” That’s true in some cases but you have to choose your battles. With something as simple as talking, you could’ve had them both waiting for a ride outside the front of the school at the same time and that lead to a conversation.

Then there was the love story between Christine and Kate. Sometimes I believed it and sometimes I didn’t.

Love stories are trickier than you think because there are two worlds involved. There is the character world where the two characters are unaware they’re in a movie. This is the world you want to be in as a writer. You want your characters saying and doing things only because they want to say and do them.

Then there’s the writer world where the characters are waiting for the writer to write their next line. Or to give them their next action. This is the world you don’t want to be in. Because when you start making the characters do things, IT READS LIKE SOMEONE IS MAKING THEM DO THINGS.

And that was my issue with their story. Sometimes their interactions felt natural. Other times it was obvious the writer was making things happen. For example, everything here is framed around Kate helping Christine attract Devon. But Christine is gay. She’s not into dudes. So why is she going after this guy? Because it’s a way for the writer to get her and Kate around each other.

I realize that when you’re writing a movie, you must move the plot along. You can’t pretend like it doesn’t exist. But that’s the ultimate goal of a screenwriter, is being able to move your plot invisibly so that it looks like things are happening and not that someone is making them happen. That’s the holy grail.

So when writing a dialogue scene, don’t try to make the characters say what you want them to say. SEE WHAT THEY SAY FIRST. Observe them speaking as an objective party. If they go off-book, let them go-off book. Then you can reel them in when you rewrite the scene. I’ve always found that better than trying to control the scene from the outset. That’s when you get scenes that feel forced.

To be honest, there wasn’t anything bad in this script. It was a light easy read. It was just little things here and there that kept reminding me I was reading a script. Like how the movie is built around, “Are Kate and Christine going to kiss or not?” It was a sweet way to frame the story. But then they finally do and the last 25 pages they’re having hardcore sex. It’s like…okay, so much for the sweetness. It just felt uneven, like it never quite knew what tone it was trying to achieve.

Then again, I’m not the demo for this script! And it’s harder to write these high school scripts than it looks. Taste will vary. Unfortunately, even with some of the good stuff I read, this one wasn’t for me.

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

What I learned: Look, material like this can get you a Netflix green light. But I still contend that if you want to write the next THEATRICAL high school movie, you need to reinvent the genre. That’s what John Hughes did with The Breakfast Club. Nobody had ever seen a high school movie that took place in one day with a handful of characters, that relied almost completely on dialogue. You have to be that forward-thinking today. Whatever you’re used to seeing in “high school movies,” don’t write that. Come up with something different. It’s actually a genre that’s primed to reinvent because it’s been stale for so long. So if you’ve got that idea, enter it into The Last Great Screenwriting Contest! :)

Genre: Comedy
Premise: Actor Nicolas Cage, spiraling and trapped in debt, makes an appearance at the birthday party of a Mexican billionaire. While there, he learns that the billionaire runs a drug cartel, and the CIA recruits Cage for intelligence.
About: Not only did this script finish Top 6 in the 2019 Black List, but it got Cage onboard! The movie will be made by Lionsgate. The writers created the TV series, Ghosted, which was a comedic take on The X-Files.
Writers: Kevin Etten & Tom Gormican
Details: 117 pages (but pretty much all dialogue so it reads fast)

I’ve always marveled at these famous actors who did great GREAT movies now doing a dozen sixth rate micro-indies a year. Take Bruce Willis, for example. Bruce Willis has all the money in the world. Maybe more than all of it. Yet he makes these awful 2 million dollar B-movies that nobody sees. It doesn’t make sense.

But you know what does make sense? Nicholas Cage doing a dozen sixth rate micro indies a year. Cage was a notoriously wild spender at his peak and supposedly had some big issues with the IRS at one point. You get the sense that Cage isn’t doing these movies for fun. At least not all of them. He’s doing them to pay off all the debt he’s accrued.

And the unfortunate thing about Hollywood is that when big stars start chasing these low-level movies to pay the bills, they start becoming associated with low-level movies. And it’s very hard to dig your way out from that. I don’t think any former star has dug themselves a deeper hole than Nicholas Cage.

Of course, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Cage really does love making these movies. He’s just one of those actors that always needs to be on a set. I get the feeling this script is going to shed some light on this aspect of the eccentric actor’s career. Let’s take a look.

Nicholas Cage is having dinner with Quentin Tarantino, who’s really close to giving him the starring role in his latest film. But then word comes back from Cage’s agent. Tarantino is going with someone else. Devastated and broke, Cage doubts when his next big chance is going to come, so much so that he considers QUITTING ACTING.

But then his agent calls. There’s a Nicholas Cage superfan in Mexico who’s willing to pay Cage 1 million dollars to come to his birthday party. Cage hems and haws before ultimately going and is surprised when the 45 year old man who invited him, Javi, is a cool dude. In actuality, Javi is a closet screenwriter and he’s hoping to get Cage to read his stuff.

But then Cage is approached by a mysterious man who tells him he’s working for the United States government and that Javi is responsible for 30 billion dollars worth of drug trade and that he’s killed thousands of people. They need Cage to do his best acting job yet – convince Javi that he’s interested in his screenplay, work on it together, and, in the meantime, gather intel on Javi.

Cage doesn’t know what’s going on but at this point, he doesn’t really have a choice, so both Cage and Javi start putting a script together, with both of them in starring roles. Funnily enough, Cage starts to like the script and feels like it might be his best character piece yet. So they keep working on it but run into the same problem all screenwriters run into. They don’t have an ending!

Cage’s CIA connection tells Cage to use the screenwriting suggestion of having Cage’s character’s family kidnapped in order to figure out where Javi is hiding his latest kidnapped subject. But Javi gets so into the idea of bringing a family relationship into the plot that, unbeknownst to Nick, he flies Nick’s ex-wife and daughter down to Mexico for inspiration. Of course, not long after, Javi realizes Nick is working for the government, and therefore really does kidnap Nick’s ex-wife and daughter. Nick finds himself REALLY IN one of his movies. Does he have what it takes to get out alive? We’ll find out.

I came into this one skeptical.

Nicholas Cage is one of those actors who’s been made fun of so much by this point that he may have passed his sell by date. And that’s the vibe I was getting early on in the script. Cage would have these conversations with his younger cooler self about Cage’s plummeting career and Young Cage keeps pushing him to get back on top. The scenes were okay and will definitely play better onscreen than on the page. But they felt predictable. You guys know me. Whenever I read choices that feel like a lot of different writers could’ve come up with the same thing, I lose faith in the writer.

But then the invitation to Mexico shows up (our inciting incident). Going into this, I had not read the logline so I didn’t know that was coming. I thought I was going to get some boring “Nicholas Cage tries to get back on top in Hollywood” plot. It shows you the power of a hook. You’re immediately thinking – some weirdo inviting a struggling movie star to his birthday in another country – there’s a lot of comedy to mine from that. So that kept me reading.

Then Gormican and Etten surprise me again when it turns out Javi is a normal guy. Actually, we get some scenes of Javi talking to his business partners away from Nic Cage that paint him as this normal everyday person. So I’m thinking to myself – hmmmm, he’s not going to be some weirdo freak? Where is this going? I’m intrigued.

Then they hit us with the second big hook, which is that Javi is a drug kingpin. I feel a little stupid that I didn’t see that coming but, again, I hadn’t read the logline and the writers did a good job making him look like a normal guy. I thought maybe he’d brought Cage here to convince him to be in his movie. This new plot point, however, was much juicier. Now we’re putting Cage in a bunch of dramatic irony scenes – we know he’s trying to incriminate Javi but Javi doesn’t.

But probably the best thing about this script is that it’s about a broken family. Pretty much the entire first act sets up Cage’s problems with his ex-wife and his 16 year old daughter. It’s rare that writers do this these days. Most people think there’s no need to “waste” pages on character development in the first act of a comedy or an action film because people go to those movies to laugh and see things get blown up.

But it’s a smart move because it pays dividends in the third act. I still contend a big reason Taken worked was because its entire first act was character development. People don’t care about a daughter being taken from your hero when you’ve only known her for two minutes. They needed to be around that relationship between the father and the daughter to care about it. Same thing here.

And it wasn’t just that. The writers did this really cleverly. Javi had kidnapped a big rival’s daughter. The CIA wanted to know where he was hiding her. So they told Cage to add a kidnapping plot to the script Cage and Javi were working on and then innocently ask Javi, “Where would we keep the daughter character if the bad guy kidnapped her?” This then led to Javi flying the ex-wife and daughter in for inspiration, and now you have a way to really kidnap these two without it seeming forced.

That’s the problem with every script where the bad guy kidnaps the girl in distress. It’s added in a blunt and cliche manner. This script, however, used its unique setup to bring them in organically. For me, that’s what made this script more than a garden variety “worth the read.” It’s a fun script but it’s also cleverly plotted. Props to the writing team!

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

What I learned: One of the best places to find comedy ideas is “Ripped from the headlines” articles that aren’t comedic. This concept was clearly inspired by the Sean Penn – El Chapo incident. The writers then asked, “What actor could we put in Penn’s role that would make it hilarious?” And they wisely came up with Nicholas Cage.

I have one question for you before I get to today’s article. Is the key to getting an original script turned into a wide release movie one single shot? I know it’s a small sample size but after 1917 made a shocking 36 million this weekend (when was the last time a World War 1 movie made 36 million in a weekend???), we have to ask the question. Cause there was that OTHER original idea – a little movie called Gravity – that was a single-shot film (for the most part) and that became a surprise hit also. Coincidence?

I’m asking the question half-jokingly but it’s an intriguing discussion. It’s so hard to get any original movie released these days. So if you can find any trend out there, you run with it. Now both these movies were writer directors. But I think a spec writer could do an even better job because they wouldn’t be worried about pulling off certain shots and whether something would be too difficult or not. They could write whatever came to mind.

Why does the single shot movie work? Well, obviously, it’s hard to pull off so it’s easy to build buzz around a one-shot movie. But from a screenwriting perspective, if you’re doing something in one shot, you have to create a sense of urgency or else there’ll be a bunch of slow spots in the movie. So, in a way, it forces you to create a really tight exciting story. Might we now get a few single-shot spec scripts in The Last Great Screenwriting Contest? Maybe a single shot social horror thriller even? We’ll see!

Moving on, I’m going to talk about producing today because that’s where my mind is at. This past week, I stumbled onto a movie called “Sweetheart” on Netflix. The film is about a shipwrecked girl who wakes up on an island only to learn that a monster lives on it as well. The movie follows her journey both trying to survive on an island and trying not to get killed by this monster.

The main reason I watched this movie is because it’s a movie I would’ve made. You’ve got a contained thriller. You’ve got a supernatural threat. That combination has been responsible for a lot of movies that have made a lot of money. You’ve also got a hot young director coming off a hit movie at Sundance. I would’ve seen all these elements and thought, “Slam dunk.”

Unfortunately, as I hit the 30 minute mark of the movie, I was struggling to stay invested. I kept asking myself, “Why? This is a movie you would make. Why isn’t it working!?” As if being able to answer the question would ensure that every future movie I made wouldn’t suffer the same fate. Gradually, after I was able to take my emotion out of it, I realized it came back to script problems. More specifically, it reminded me that contained thrillers are incredibly hard to pull off. And Sweetheart shows you why.

When we come with a contained idea, the first thing we think about is the cool moments. For example, in the big spec contained thriller, “Shut In,” you would think of the moment where the main character nailed the bad guy’s hand into the floor to keep him there. Or, with this movie, you might imagine the first time our heroine sees the monster. These moments are the moments that get us excited to write a script.

Here’s the problem though. There are only about four of five of these big exciting moments in your head when you’re putting an idea together. In the best case scenario, these moments take up fifteen minutes of screen time. In addition to this, you’re likely going to have a big climax, so we can add another 10-15 minutes of screen time on top of that. This means you have 30 minutes figured out. Which means you still have 70 MORE MINUTES TO FILL.

Now filling up 70 minutes in a Star Wars or James Bond movie isn’t that difficult. You just go to a new planet or a new country and throw in a car chase. But 70 minutes in a CONTAINED THRILLER??? Even screenwriting aces have trouble making those minutes interesting. Usually, all you have is a few characters and a small space. What do you do with 70 minutes of that?

That’s clearly where Sweetheart fell apart. It didn’t have a plan for those 70 minutes. It made the fatal mistake of assuming the concept alone was going to do the work for it. That we’d be so excited in the moments between the monster attacks to see it again that we’d wait through anything. Watching a character washed up on an island try to survive on page 10 is interesting. Not so much on page 60, when we’re bored of it.

It’s the writer’s job, then, to come up with plot beats that keep the story moving. And, to their credit, they try. For example, a couple of other shipwrecked characters (from her ship) show up about 50 minutes in. And that, at least, gives us some new scenarios, like characters being able to have a conversation. However, the plot beats were lazy. In fact, there’s another girl washed up on a deserted island with a monster spec that was written at the same time as Sweetheart. What happens at the 50 page mark of that script? A couple of shipwrecked characters show up. In other words, your story choice was so predictable that the only other person writing this idea came up with the same plot beat.

It is IMPERATIVE as a screenwriter to always check yourself on these things. When you come up with a plot development, one of the first things you should ask yourself is, “Would someone else come up with this as well?” And if the answer is yes, don’t write it. Come up with something else. The counter-argument to this is, “Well how many plot options are there in this scenario? Bringing in new characters is one of the only things you can do.” There’s never a situation where there’s only one thing to do. There are always options. It’s definitely harder to come up with the options that nobody’s thought of yet. But those are the ones that are going to make your script great.

Another issue was that there was no sense of danger in a script about a woman stuck on an island with a monster. She and the monster routinely see each other and nothing happens. She’s easily able to hide under a log or behind a tree. It gets to the point where you’re wondering if the monster is even interested in killing her. If the only person in your thriller script isn’t in danger, you don’t have a thriller.

In retrospect, I think I know why they did this. If the monster is too aggressive and powerful, the movie’s over in five minutes. The only way to make the movie last was to make him passive. But then where’s the movie? The last time I checked, the alien in “Alien” doesn’t occasionally walk by the characters, uninterested in them. It aggressively hunts them down one by one. And I’m not bashing Sweetheart for not living up to the greatest sci-fi horror film ever. I get that these are tough script problems to figure out. But if the audience isn’t feeling fear for your hero, we don’t have anything to work with.

I bring this up in the hopes that those of you writing contained thrillers for The Last Great Screenwriting Contest approach these dangerous 70 minutes strategically. You might want to watch Sweetheart and read Shut In back-to-back. In Shut In, we have two children in danger outside the room our hero is stuck in the entire movie. That alone adds a sense of urgency and tension that Sweetheart never had. It ensured that we were always rooting for our hero to escape the room so she could rescue her kids.

And that’s probably the best lesson to learn for a contained thriller – personal character-driven stories give you the best chance at surviving those big gaps of screen time where you don’t have a set-piece. I’m still on the edge of my seat for the Shut In heroine when all the noise died down because I still want her to save her kids. I’m not scared for the Sweetheart heroine at all because, from what I can tell, this monster isn’t interested in killing her.

Did you guys see Sweetheart? If so, what did you think?

First off, I want to thank everyone who’s congratulated me both in the comments section and personally. The response has been overwhelming and one of the themes I’ve spotted in the aftermath of my producing announcement is that people respect when you follow your dreams.

It’s easy to accept that comfortable safe route in life. And there’s nothing wrong with it. Especially if you have a family you’re supporting and lots of responsibilities. But I didn’t have that excuse and my life was definitely missing something. After a lot of introspection, I realized that what was missing was doing something I really wanted to do. Even if it scared me. Fear is a strong deterrent but the reality is, fear is where all the fun is. That’s where the best things in life happen, when you do the stuff that scares you. If that inspires any of you to make changes in your own life, great. Even after one week, I can confirm that it’s a lot more exciting on this side of the curtain.

Moving on to today’s showdown, I didn’t get that huge glut of final day submissions I usually do before a showdown. But I did get a lot of contained thriller submissions for The Last Great Screenwriting Contest. So I think what a lot of people did was shift their Contained Thriller script over to the big contest. Which I understand. In a Showdown, you’re not guaranteed I’ll read any of your script, whereas with the contest, you know I’ll read at least the first 10 pages. I’m not sure what this means for future showdowns but we’ll figure it out.

In the meantime, I’m hoping that one of these five scripts is awesome and we’ll have found our first big producible script of the year.

For those new to the site, Amateur Showdown is a bi-weekly tournament where I pick five screenplays that were submitted to me. Then you, the readers of this site, read as much of each script as possible and vote for your favorite in the comments section. The winner will receive a review the following Friday that could result in props from your peers, representation, a spot on one of the big end-of-the-year screenwriting lists, a partnership with yours truly, and in rare cases, a SALE!

In order to participate, e-mail me at carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Include your script title, the genre, a logline, and a pitch to myself and potential readers why you believe your script deserves a shot. It could be long, short, passionate, to-the-point. Whatever you think will convince someone your script is worth opening, make your case. Just like Hollywood, the Scriptshadow readers are a fickle bunch. So be convincing!

Good luck to all the writers this week!

Title: Deathbed
Genre: Contained thriller/horror
Logline: A young nurse must fight for her life when the bed she ordered for a back injury turns out to be haunted by the victims of a serial killer.
Why you should read: When Carson announced the contained thriller/horror AOW I was super stoked. I’ve been a fan of the genre ever since I saw Buried. Coming up with an entertaining feature length script with a single location and minimal cast is arguably the toughest writing challenge of all. Deathbed is my attempt. It takes a big risk in that it attempts to combine two sub-genres: Supernatural with Home Invasion. I hope you enjoy it!

Title: Hunny Pig
Genre: Contained Thriller / Dark Comedy
Logline: A recreational poker player, unemployed, abandoned by his family, and desperate for a big win, is slowly driven to the brink of madness by an unbeatable online nemesis who may be Satan himself.
Why You Should Read: Sometimes we write trying to fix the things that are broken in our lives. Well, on-line poker nearly broke me. The drug I never knew I needed became the thing I couldn’t live without. It took hold of me in ways that cocaine or alcohol never could. With a career in free-fall and cursed with endless free time, I would play long into the night, burning through cash and literally SCREAMING into the cyber-void, unable to cope with my constant losses. The more I lost, the angrier I got. It became so bad, my wife threatened to leave me.

Luckily, salvation came from an unlikely source; the US Justice Department — who shut down legal on-line play in 2011. And although I reclaimed my sanity and patched things up with my wife, I never forgot how that crack in time made me feel: UNLUCKY. WORTHLESS. CURSED.

Years passed, and I thought — why waste all those juicy negative feelings? Turn them into a ultra-low-budget, darkly comic screenplay instead! So I did! I hope you enjoy… HUNNY PIG.

Title: The Album
Genre: Contained thriller
Logline: After being kidnapped by a psychotic music producer, a guitarist and her drummer boyfriend are forced to record an album in chains while they try to escape his studio prison.
Why you should read: We were shooting for Misery meets Green Room. Would love to see what the people here at SS think. It’s a quick read too at 85 pages.

Title: In The Night Garden
Genre: Psychological Horror
Logline: After a pregnant sleepwalker kills her husband and daughter, she is transferred to a mysterious facility for treatment, only to suspect the overseers are after her unborn child.
Why You Should Read: Can a conversation be terrifying? The psychological horror genre has always fascinated me, and for years I tried to pursue it, only to fall back into cheap tropes: jumps, gore, monsters, and haunted-house scares. And while I can’t promise that this screenplay avoids these completely, the core of its horror runs far deeper. The unholy lovechild of Ex Machina and Rosemary’s Baby, In The Night Garden explores motherhood in ways that will shock, disturb, and stay with you long after the final page has turned.

Title: The Fire Tower
Genre: Contained Thriller
Logline: When a family on vacation to a remote fire lookout tower rescues an injured female hitchhiker, they wind up in a battle for their lives.
Why You Should Read: When I was 10, we went on a cross-country camping trip out west. One night we got horribly lost on a winding road, high in the mountains. Out of the darkness a hitchhiker jumped in front of our car asking for a lift. We gave her some water and snacks (but my mom wouldn’t let my dad give her a ride). Later, I was told that a whole family had disappeared without a trace not far from there. That was the seed of the story. But I needed a contained space to trap my family.

Lookout towers have been used in the United States for 100 years. At the peak of their popularity in the ‘40s, the U.S. had about 8,000. Today, there remain about 85 fire lookout towers in the U.S. in extremely remote mountain areas in the National Forests which you can rent for $25-$75 a night.

As those of you who saw my beginning of the week post know, Scriptshadow is holding one last giant screenplay contest, and it’s going to be competitive. I expect tons of entries. Especially since it’s FREE. So how do you write something that’ll stand out from all the other entries? Well, unlike a lot of contests out there, you know the person reading your script. Me. And therefore, all you need to do is go back through my review history to see what kinds of scripts I like and what kinds of scripts I detest. For example, if you’re writing a biopic, this contest isn’t for you. And if you’re writing a music biopic, you’re actively trying to make me hate your screenplay.

My first piece of advice is NAIL THE FIRST 10 PAGES. In case you didn’t read, I’m only promising to read the first 10 pages of every entry. If your scripts doesn’t interest me by then, I will not continue reading. What I personally look for in the first ten pages is: Can the writer tell a story? Are they giving me a scene or a sequence that has its own beginning, middle, and end? Like a little mini movie. You hook me on that first page so I have to keep reading to find out what happens next. The opening scene in Scream is a good example. Opening scene in Inglorious Basterds. Raiders of the Lost Ark. If your script isn’t the kind of script that works with a full-on mini-story at the beginning, make sure you have another plan to hook me in those first 10 pages.

As for the actual scripts, I’m going to be the most excited about high concept reasonably budgeted ideas that can be made for under 5 million dollars. Horror, sci-fi, contained thriller – the kind of stuff that can be easily marketed. As cliche as it sounds, if you can’t envision the poster, it’s probably not marketable. If you can’t envision a trailer that would make everyone want to see the movie right away, it’s probably not that great of an idea. Try to imagine you’re in my position. You’ve got a small production company. You want to make a big splash with your first film. But nobody’s going to give you a lot of money when you’re just starting out. What kind of project would you commission under those circumstances? And, by the way, that’s how 80% of the production houses in Los Angeles work. So this is a good approach to have regardless of if you’re entering my contest or not.

Also, I would avoid genres and story-types that are highly unmarketable, even if you’re a good writer. In my last contest, the winner was “The Savage.” Here’s the logline – “The incredible true story behind one of America’s founding myths. After being kidnapped from his lands as a child, the Patuxet Indian Squanto spends his life fighting impossible odds to return home, setting in motion a series of events that changes the course of history.” The writing was great. The research was strong. The script had a lot of good moments. It was better than any other script in the contest, hands down. However, when I went to pitch it to people, everyone’s eyes glazed over. You have to see it from the producer’s or financier’s point of view. The only way a movie like this can exist is if it gets one of the top 10 directors in the world and a studio puts 75 million dollars behind it and another 50 million down for an Oscar campaign. Everyone in town knows that’s a pipe dream scenario. It can be done. But the odds are so astronomically small that nobody wants to take the chance. Not when the next John Wick is out there. Or, if they’re looking for an Oscar, they’re going to grab a drama that costs 25 million or 40 million. Not 75-85 million. So keep that in mind if you’re thinking of writing about the birth of the Ottoman Empire.

If you’re not a high concept person, you need to have a unique voice. The way you view the world needs to be unique. Your writing style needs to be unique. Your sense of humor needs to be unique. Essentially YOUR VOICE BECOMES THE HOOK. Nightcrawler, Birdman, American Beauty, Three Billboards, The Big Lebowski, Daddio. A couple of these scripts are scripts I didn’t connect with when I first read them but it was clear the writers had a unique voice. And when all concepts fail, agents, managers, producers, studios, will gravitate towards the writer who doesn’t sound like everyone else. And, by the way, that doesn’t mean copying your favorite writer with a unique voice. Doing your version of Quentin Tarantino is just going to make you a not-as-good Quentin Tarantino. The trick with voice is that it truly is YOUR voice. I would stay away from trying to write one of these scripts unless you’ve been told by people that you have a unique way of seeing the world and writing about it.

Another good strategy to employ is to find old successful movies that people have forgotten about and give them a fresh new horror or sci-fi twist. That’s what Get Out was. It was, “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner” with a horror twist. Star Wars was a western set in space. San Andreas is an update of “Earthquake.” People in Hollywood have a 5 year memory. So you can find all sorts of gold in old movie concepts.

Selfishly, I want to make the 2020 version of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off as well as Back to the Future. I want to bring back the 90s spec craze. I want the next Seven, Basic Instinct, The Sixth Sense, Scream. I also want to bring back high-concept big-budget original concepts, like The Matrix. Like everyone in the business, I’d like to find the next Ghostbusters or Goonies. Just remember, the higher the budget, the better the script has to be. With lower budget scripts, I may overlook problems on a good concept because I know I can help the writer fix them. But with these big-budget scripts, it’s not worth it for me to spend three years with a writer trying to get it in just the right shape so that MAYBE a studio makes it their ONE original big-budget movie that year. An example of a good big-budget script I’d take a chance on is The Traveler.

And finally, some miscellaneous thoughts. Social thrillers (Get Out, Get Home Safe, The Hunt) are hot. But everyone is writing them. So you better have a good idea. Horror always sells. I would love to start a horror franchise. I’m open to all horror sub-genres. I’m keen on finding a new twist for the zombie genre. I have a few ideas myself but maybe you have one that’s better. I’m obsessed with sci-fi so I would love to find the next Inception, Source Code, or The Martian. I absolutely LOVE plane disaster or plane in danger concepts. One of my goals is to make the best plane movie ever. New technology is one of the last frontiers for new ideas. You want to be the guy who writes “Stuber” two months after Uber becomes a phenomenon. If you’re a TV writer, I’m open to anything, comedy or drama, but my favorite show ever is Lost. I want to bring that mythology and that high-concept feel to a show in 2020. My other favorite TV shows are The Office, Fargo, Modern Family, Fleabag (a show PURELY BASED ON VOICE!), Succession, Breaking Bad, The Good Wife, Barry, and Community.

And if all else fails, just go with simple story and a complex main character. Rocky, Joker, Nightcrawler, Psycho, Terminator, Source Code.

You now know the blueprint for winning your reader over. What are you waiting for?? You only have until June 15 to write your script. GET STARTED!