Genre: Holiday Comedy
Premise: When Santa Claus’ protégé is killed in an avalanche, the next relative in line, a New York cop with no holiday spirit, is taken to the North Pole for his training until he must save Christmas from the grinch-like Krampus.
Why You Should Read: Apart from this script placing in the finals of both the Fresh Voices and Studio 32 screenplay competitions. It is a fresh new take, from two hungry writers, into the mythology of how to become the father of Christmas. It’s nostalgic, comedic and downright magical.
Writers: Matt Ritchey & Michael Onofri
Details: 101 pages
Merrrrrry Christmas everybody! I hope you get everything under the tree you wished for. I hope you don’t have to spend much time in airports over the holiday, what with all the sniffly flu-ridden travelers looking to spread their disease like candy canes. I luckily don’t have to take the worst Christmas flight ever this year (that would be LAX to O’HARE), as I’ll be working on my tan in good old Los Angeles. Praise St. Nick.
Now to our Holiday Amateur Offerings Battle. As much as I was rooting for Droid Rage to win due to its zany premise, it received two late suspicious votes that did not seem to be in the Christmas spirit. That’s okay because Christmas Academy sounds funner than a sleigh ride after the season’s first snow, like something Bruce Willis would’ve made after Die Hard 3 to poke fun at the genre. I’m loving the energy of the premise already. Let’s hope it’s more of a Lego Millennium Falcon gift than a pair of socks (which my brother got me last year. His rationale: “Everybody needs socks.”).
Every 200 years, Santa Claus must pass the baton to a new Santa, which is exactly what St. Nick is doing when we meet him. However, an unexpected avalanche obliterates the poor successor, leaving Santa to improvise. He decides to hold a Santa-Off for three distant relatives with the winner awarded the “Santa” title. But he’s going to have to move fast. Christmas is in less than a month!
Cut to New York City where we meet beat cop Chris Kimble. Chris is a bull in a china shop with attitude to spare, the kind of guy who will run up thousands of dollars of damage for every perp he brings in. After Chris does just that in his introductory scene, leaving a trail of Christmas carnage to catch a thief who he has to let go due to not properly reading him his Miranda Rights, his Captain suspends him for one month without pay.
This forces Chris, a Christmas hater, to take a Santa Department Store gig to pay the rent. While there, he’s approached by two store elves with suspiciously nice costumes. They tell him to follow them, and after going through some Narnia back closet, Chris finds himself in the North Pole! It’s there where he’s told he’s a distant relative to the Claus family, and will be participating in a competition to become the next Santa.
It shouldn’t be difficult. His competition is Melvin, an old dude who can barely walk straight. And Sandy, a hard-as-nails chick who’s so obsessed with winning she can’t see the forest through the Christmas trees. The thing is, Chris doesn’t care about winning. The only reason he participates is because Santa pays him to stay and compete.
Then a couple of things change. Chris starts to fall for Sandy. And some dude named Krampus starts stealing toys from the factory! Chris springs into cop mode to eliminate the threat. But when Krampus gets his hooves on Santa’s magic cloak, the thing that powers Christmas Eve, there’s a high probability there won’t be any Christmas this year. Unless, of course, Chris can stop him!
This is going to sound corny but I love the spirit of this script. Christmas is about letting go and having fun with the people you love, and there’s something undeniably fun about this premise. Every time I read the logline, I see the potential in it.
But here’s the thing. It’s really hard to write screenplays where the main character doesn’t care about achieving his goal. It’s not impossible. But it’s hard. And Christmas Academy is built around a protagonist who doesn’t care if he achieves his goal (winning the title of Santa Claus) or not.
This hurts comedies in particular. Jokes aren’t as funny if the character doesn’t care about succeeding. That’s because the character’s desire to succeed is what adds the stakes. And with stakes, it actually means something if the character fails. And failure (or the potential for failure) is where the funny is.
Look at Elf. Will Ferrel wants his father’s love more than anything. We know if he screws up, he could lose his dad. That’s what makes all his ridiculous mistakes so hilarious. Kevin must keep the burglars out of his house at all costs in Home Alone. We laugh because we care. Once you add the element of not caring, there aren’t as many jokes to be had. Or maybe I should say, you have to find your comedy somewhere else.
That was the strange thing about Christmas Academy. It felt like a comedy. But there were never enough jokes. Part of this is due to what I outlined. The other part is that there wasn’t any structure to the comedy. It was more of a “let’s put our character in generally funny situations and hope that comedy evolves somehow” approach. Like Chris’s opening scene. He chases the thief. Yeah, throwing snow globes at the thief is kind of funny. Yeah, stealing a Christmas horse and buggy with a couple inside is funny. But none of these were hard jokes. It was more of a “comedy adjacent” situation.
Let me give you a more specific example. I was unlucky enough to catch one of the Meet The Parents sequels on TV the other day. The scene I landed on was Greg (Ben Stiller) and Jack (Robert DiNero) at a giant kid’s party. The writers decided that it would be funny if Greg and Jack got into a big fight during the party. And I agree that, in theory, this is funny. You have the irony of a couple of adults having a full out brawl at a kid’s party. But there was no structure to this sequence, nor was there structure to any of the jokes. It was more of, “We’ll take these guys through all the kid’s play stations and something funny will inevitably come from that.” So while the sequence was amusing. It wasn’t funny.
Contrast this against a more famous comedy scene, the dinner scene from the first Meet The Parents, and the difference is night and day. That scene was meticulously structured to mine the comedy built from Jack hating this dork who wasn’t good enough for his daughter, and Greg desperate to impress Jack in order to win his daughter. The conflict between the characters was so sharply crafted that the conceit of the scene – Greg was going to fail at every desperate attempt to get Jack to like him – essentially created a joke conveyer belt. It would’ve been hard to NOT write a funny scene here.
We don’t get anything like that in Christmas Academy. It’s more of a flow of humor-adjacent moments. Some of them are amusing. I liked Melvin’s bumbling around, for example. But there’s never enough scene structure to truly mine the kind of jokes that make us LOL.
I believe fixing the stakes will help this. If Chris wants to succeed, it makes every scene feel like it matters. If I were Matt and Michael, I would consider altering the concept. Someone’s been stealing Santa’s toys as Christmas approaches. This has never happened in the North Pole before so they don’t have a system in place to deal with it. So they recruit a real-life cop (Chris), to investigate. This way, Chris actually wants to achieve his goal.
Meanwhile, Krampus needs a bigger part. He can’t hide in the shadows for 70 pages and then become a semi-menace in the third act. We need to set him up sooner and establish that he’s going to stop Christmas this year. This ups the stakes considerably. Chris must first figure out who is stealing the presents, and then, of course, stop him.
You could still play up the contrast between character and setting here. Everybody in Christmas Land is happy and optimistic. Chris is serious and negative. He’s had a tough life and he sees this as a job. Not as saving Christmas. Of course, by the end, he will have found his Christmas spirit.
If you don’t want to do that, that’s understandable. But I would then look for another goal to drive Chris. We need him to care about whether he succeeds or not.
Hopefully this helps the writers and also some of you with similar script dilemmas. MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY HOLIDAY WRITING!!!
Script link: Christmas Academy
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Use fear to mine humor. In The Death of Stalin, the opening scene has a music director finishing up a concert. As everyone’s leaving, he speaks to a couple of co-workers who gossip about the fact that Stalin’s assassinating anyone who even mildly annoys him these days. RING RING. It’s the phone. The director picks it up and it’s Stalin. Stalin says he wants a recording of that night’s concert. The director, of course, nods and says okay. He hangs up and asks the assistants if they recorded the concert. No, they say. The director hilariously darts out of the room and starts screaming at the crowd to get back into their seats. He then tells all the musicians to get back in their places. They’re going to perform the concert all over again. The reason this scene is funny is because of how much fear we have for the director. We know if he can’t get everyone to stay here for another two hours, he will die. Without that fear, there is no joke.
We’ve had a wild year at the box office. We got the first ever Star Wars bomb (nooooooo!). A surprise giant hit that had half its audience debating whether it was possible for a family to never fart. We had two huge diversity-focused films, Black Panther and Crazy Rich Asians, that became mega-hits, as well as a couple others, A Wrinkle in Time and The Happytime Murders, which proved social message films still need a good story. Puppets, people. The Happytime Murders because of the lack of puppet representation.
We had a movie, Hereditary, that only became a thing due to a single scene. We had another, Venom, that proved critics don’t matter as much as they think they do. We got to see what many believe was the best Mission Impossible movie yet. We had Michael Myers introduce himself to millennials. We got a film, Ready Player One, that had many asking the question, has Steven Spielberg lost his touch? We had another entry that made us remember the power of marmalade (Paddington 2).
We had a documentary about Mr. Rogers (Mr. Freaking Rogers) rack up 20 million bucks at the box office. We had two of the most anticipated movies of the year, Deadpool 2 and Ant-Man 2, turn out to be only okay (sad face emoji). We found out Bradley Cooper could direct and The Rock should limit himself to less than 70 movies per calendar year. We learned that the suburbs aren’t the best setting for one of the most iconic alien creatures ever. We learned that shooting Ryan Gosling on 16mm with no professional lighting scares audiences away.
We learned all Kurt Russel needed was an impromptu chimney sweeping role to give his best performance in years. We learned that even in ocean super-hero movies, you will get the ubiquitous trailer shot of two giant armies racing towards each other. We learned that Fred Savage is awesome. But not awesome enough to get people to think a movie they already saw is new. And we learned, most importantly, that with over 500 movies produced this year, that it’s easier than ever to turn your screenplay into a movie. Why is everyone waiting for permission from someone else to make their movie? Go make it yourself, dammit!
Here are the movies I have not seen this year: I still haven’t seen A Star Is Born (tried to a million times but still hasn’t happened). I haven’t seen Bohemian Rhapsody (but want to). I haven’t seen Blackkklansman (been burned too many times by Spike to make another mistake), Vice (why did they make this movie?), The Favourite (anyone who’s read my Lobster script review knows why I won’t see this), Green Book (might as well have subtitled their film, “For Your Consideration”), Mary Poppins Returns (they should’ve titled it Mary Poppins Returns to Where She Returned from and never made the movie), Can You Ever Forgive Me (I really want to see this), or Roma (I will watch this at some point. I’m just not in a hurry).
Of the above, I suspect that A Star Is Born, Bohemian Rhapsody, and Can You Ever Forgive Me had a chance of making my Top 10. And now, without further ado, let’s see the movies that DID make it!
NUMBER TEN – “A QUIET PLACE”
Writers: Bryan Woods, Scott Beck, and John Krasinski
Why: Oh yeah, baby. It’s one of the most controversial films of the year. If you liked it, you’re an insane person who doesn’t understand how stupid the premise is. If you hated it, you don’t appreciate the cinematic genius of the first silent horror film of this century. There’s a screenwriting lesson to be learned here, my friends. Every idea will have weaknesses that people point out. “It’s impossible that they’ve never made a noise.” “Why didn’t they just move to the waterfall so they didn’t have to worry about making noise?” “Audiences aren’t going to see a silent film in this day and age.” There is no such thing as the perfect concept. They all have weaknesses. But if you believe in your idea, commit to it. Don’t doubt it. You’re going to need that confidence to ride it out to a sale.
NUMBER NINE – “THE DEATH OF STALIN”
Writers: Armando Iannucci, David Schneider, Ian Martin, and Peter Fellows (comic book created by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin)
Why: I never would’ve checked this out if it wasn’t advertised for 99 cents on Itunes. But once I started the film, I couldn’t stop laughing. The opening scene, when a Russian concert director gets a call from an assassination-obsessed Stalin saying he wants a recording made of that night’s performance, AND THE PERFORMANCE IS ALREADY OVER, you know you’re in for a fun ride. Everything about this was so zany. The characters, including Steve Buschemi, all spoke with their given accents. They were supposed to be Russian! I don’t know how to categorize this other than to say it was the biggest surprise of the year.
NUMBER EIGHT – “THE RITUAL”
Writers: Joe Barton (based on the novel by Adam Nevill)
Why: Along with A Quiet Place, The Ritual is one of the best representations of how to approach spec screenwriting. You’ve got a character-piece built around four friends who are thrust into a terrifying situation that can be easily marketed. The big lesson with The Ritual is that when you write a premise that places your characters in a redundant situation (in this case, a forest), you need a strong character conflict to keep coming back to. Without the exploration of that character’s inner dimension, the plot will become stale.
NUMBER SEVEN – “THELMA”
Writers: Eskil Vogt and Joachim Trier
Why: I didn’t see a movie all year that haunted me as much as this one. As someone who promotes structure and traditional storytelling, you’re probably confused as to why this flowy thought-experiment made my list. I don’t know, to be honest. I know I was drawn to this girl’s brokenness. I wanted to know how she became this way. Sometimes, that’s all you need. Is an interesting character with a big question mark hanging above their head. Tread lightly, though. Thelma has one hell of a disturbing ending.
NUMBER SIX – “AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR”
Writers: Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely
Why: I can give this one high marks solely due to the amazing job the writers did of keeping a movie with so many characters focused. While I certainly had better experiences at the theater this year, I didn’t see a better MOVIE than Infinity War. This is what happens when you get all the best people at their respective jobs together to make a film. Pure spectacle. And it’s not like the script didn’t take chances either. To, essentially, make its big bad villain the protagonist gave this comic book movie a flavor unlike any other. Can’t wait to see part 2!
NUMBER FIVE – “REVENGE”
Writer: Carolie Fargeat
Why: This movie will wow you. It will tantalize you. It will make you feel uncomfortable. And it all exists inside the most efficient screenplay package there is – the revenge film. Revenge films are both deceptively easy and difficult to execute. The clear goal and even clearer motivation means zero exposition. Just pure story. But that simplicity can make the format boring unless you know how to keep evolving your plot. Look no further than Bruce Willis’s Death Wish to see how to screw this up. However, Revenge is so cool and so stylistic, it makes you forget your story gripes as you focus on one singular thing: Kill the asshole that left our heroine to die.
NUMBER FOUR – “ANNIHILATION”
Writers: Alex Garland (based on the novel by Jeff VanderMeer)
Why: It’s easy to see why this didn’t kill at the box office. It targeted the mind over the eyes. That eliminated anybody under 25. But those who were left were treated to a trippy dream (some might say nightmare) of a group of women taking on an unknown entity that was re-working the biochemistry of the planet. The best thing about Annihilation is that it provided that rare treat for seasoned moviegoers of us having no idea where it was headed. If you’d told me that the climax would be a dance-off with a biological robot, I would’ve told you you were nuts. Alex Garland remains one of my favorite five screenwriters working today.
NUMBER THREE – “THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS”
Writers: Ethan and Joel Coen
Why: I can’t stop thinking about this movie. What’s so great about it is that each time I look back at it, my favorite segment changes. The one I love best now is the Oregon Trail. I still can’t believe how much the Coens made me fall in love with Alice Longabaugh. I want to spend an entire day watching that episode to learn what devices they implemented to pull it off. Cause if you could learn to write characters like that (that lovable), you’d be unstoppable.
NUMBER TWO – “SEARCHING”
Writers: Aneesh Chaganty and Sev Ohanian
Why: This script embodies my philosophy on screenwriting: KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID! There isn’t a single wasted moment in this entire film. The writers do an amazing job setting up our two main characters so we care about them. They then use a fresh package for the “missing girl” story. That’s the biggest lesson here. I read tons of missing girls stories. But nobody bothers to find a new way to tell them. So we keep getting the same story told over and over, just with a different voice. This format allows a well-worn concept to feel new.
NUMBER ONE – “EIGHTH GRADE”
Writer: Bo Burnham
Why: Notice a theme in this Top 10? Eighth Grade, Searching, Revenge, The Ritual, A Quiet Place. All of these are SIMPLE stories TOLD WELL. You want to become a great storyteller? Learn how to do that. Doesn’t mean you can’t grow your unique voice and experiment on future screenplays. But learn how to tell a simple story first. — I loved hearing how Bo Burnham wrote his dialogue for this movie. He watched endless Youtube videos of preteens talking. I don’t think writers realize how important this is. When you are writing a person so outside of the realm of your everyday existence and you believe that you can riff out their dialogue? You’re crazy. Just like you have to do research for world-building, you gotta do research for dialogue as well. Listen to it. Tune your ears to it. Write down what you think is right then listen to what actual eighth graders say and chart the differences. Use that to keep improving the dialogue. Every movie is going to have its own dialogue challenges. You need to spend the time necessary to overcome those challenges. Because there’s nothing worse than reading dialogue you know that character would never say in the real world.
Genre: Thriller/Contained Horror/Drama
Premise: When renowned interventionist Warren Man’s daughter, Christy, suffers a relapse and her family is forced to deal with their inner demons at the site of a tragedy that tore them apart, it slowly becomes clear that this is no ordinary relapse, but something much more sinister.
About: This script made this year’s Black List, an annual list of the best screenplays of the year, with 7 votes. I normally wouldn’t review a script this low on the list so early. But I saw a few of you talking about it in the comments section and was intrigued. The script is being produced by Hopscotch Pictures. This appears to be the writer’s breakthrough screenplay.
Writer: Colin Bannon
Details: 91 pages
I used to watch Intervention, aka one of the most frustrating shows ever produced. You’d meet someone who was addicted to drugs, watch their horrifying daily routine where they did everything in their power to find their next high. You’d see these helpless parents and family members who couldn’t do anything to stop them. Many of them would actually pay for their daughter’s drugs because they knew if they didn’t, they would go prostitute themselves to pay for them. You’d finally go through this incredibly emotional intervention where everyone tells the addict how much they love them.
The addict would then accept help to go to a rehab facility. Then, after all of that, they’d give you a 5 second closing title card updating you on what happened. Most of them would read something like this: “Amy lasted three days in rehab before they caught her sneaking in dope. She was kicked out and now lives on the streets. Her family hasn’t seen her in months and fear that she might be dead.” There are only so many episodes of that you can take before you say, “NO THANKS!” So I quit Intervention.
However, this leads us to our first screenwriting tip of the day. I love the idea of taking popular reality TV shows, or reality docudramas, and looking for a feature film spin on them. You can always do that with horror, which is what our writer did today. You could do the same with Hoarders (has anyone done a hoarder horror movie yet?) or that Bear Grills show, where he takes regular people out in the middle of nowhere and tries to survive. What if you wrote a movie where the Bear Grills character died early on and the hero had to survive all by himself? This is just off the top of my head. I’m sure there are tons of other shows you could do this for.
But as we always say here on Scriptshadow, coming up with the idea is only half the battle. The other half is doing something with it. Let’s see if this Black List newcomer was able to intervene himself to an impressive execution.
50-something Warren is one of the best interventionists in the world, due in part to the enormous success of his book, “The Interventionist: A Story of Addiction and Redemption.” That’s right. Part of the reason Warren is so good at his job is that he used to be an addict himself.
Despite his career success, Warren’s a big fat failure in the family department. He and his wife, Marie, divorced a long time ago. And his adult daughter, Christy, is a hardcore heroin addict. When Marie comes back into Warren’s life to ask him to save their daughter, the decision is both easy and difficult. Of course he wants to save his daughter. There’s only one problem – she hates him.
Marie picks Warren up and brings him up to their old lake house, where the intervention will take place. Christy’s boyfriend is bringing her up here under the guise of spending a romantic weekend together. Joining the pack is Richard, Marie’s perfect new husband.
When Christy finally shows up, she’s furious at being tricked. And while everyone tries to get the intervention started, slices of the past are injected into the proceedings that add context to their situation. It turns out Warren’s negligence led to Christy’s little sister drowning when she was four years old – a big reason why Christy has turned to a life of drugs. But as the intervention continues, we realize just how deep the negligence goes. Maybe the interventionist wasn’t as clean, at the time, as he’d led everyone to believe. Until he can admit that to himself, Christy will never find peace.
There are a lot of good things about this script.
I love the setting. Place your characters in a house in the middle of nowhere and you’ve got yourself a movie that can be made. That’s huge. So many of the decisions that color how someone reads your script revolve around, “Can this be made?” If you can come up with a NEW HOOK (not an old one!) that utilizes this setup, your script is going to have an advantage over tons of other more expensive screenplays, even if those scripts are better than yours.
And I like that there’s a clear objective with this concept. We’re going to this house TO GET A JOB DONE. It’s not like all of these weak movies where a group of teenagers drive out to a remote house then horror shenanigans begin. This setup is structured. And when you have that structure built into your concept, the chances of you writing a good screenplay increase dramatically.
I also like how much emphasis Bannon puts on the characters and the relationships. This movie is all about character development and conflict resolution, which ensures that it’s going to connect more deeply with the audience. And it should be noted that this is INHERENT in the concept. If you write a movie about intervention and drug addiction, you’re organically going to be be exploring characters.
All of this makes it frustrating that the script doesn’t deliver on its premise. And it’s a classic screenwriting problem that occurs with this specific setup. After the first 45 minutes of these contained setting stories, the writer starts feeling boxed in and resorts to gimmicks, scary imagery and reality-questioning (What’s real?? What isn’t??). These things are fine in small doses. But when you start depending on them every other page, you’re pressing. Whenever I encounter this, I can tell the writer is losing confidence in his story.
The breaking point for me was when Warren successfully convinced Christy to go to rehab. They drive out that very moment (to a rehab that’s, what, 1000 miles away??), Christy turns into a psycho zombie and steers the car into a lake, Warren almost drowns, survives, walks back to the house, and we continue the intervention like nothing happened, then two pages later Christy is levitating in the air.
I’m like, “Okay, that’s it. I’m out.” It was too much.
And I know that there were reasons for these things happening (Christy was, essentially, being possessed by her dead sister at this point). But even that didn’t make complete sense. I mean, your daughter is floating in the middle of the room and everybody’s focused on continuing the intervention? At that point I’m thinking the objective has changed.
This became the big issue with the end of the movie, as it got messier and messier. While there’s an argument to be made that you want things to get crazier as we move towards our climax, there has to be some structure to it. Like with The Exorcist. There was some crazy-ass shit going on there at the end. But we were never confused about what was going on or what the priest needed to do to succeed. Whereas here, there was more of an “anything goes” mentality. And that’s too bad because, like I said, there’s a lot here to celebrate.
A big pet peeve of mine is messiness. Once I sense things getting too messy, I check out. And, unfortunately, that was the case here. At least for me. What did you think?
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: This is a great example of building a story around an ironic main character. Irony in your main character almost always works. Warren is an interventionist who’s a drug addict.
Genre: Biopic
Premise: While a student at Stanford University, Evan Spiegel creates the American multinational technology and social media company Snapchat.
About: This is the number 1 script on the 2018 Black List, which was released yesterday. The writer, Elissa Karasik attended Stansford, and would later work as an assistant to two showrunners, on both Backstrom and Bones (according to The Hit List, which had Frat Boy Genius as its number 13 script).
Writer: Elissa Karasik
Details: 116 pages
The Black List is here and already the complaining has begun! I know the Black List has its issues, but Barky put up a great comment yesterday and I echo everything he had to say in it: “I hate to say it, but most who complain about the quality of the scripts in these lists just have sour grapes. Generally, if you spend any time reading the scripts, it’s pretty easy to tell why there was interest in them. No script is perfect, but there is always SOMETHING, be it concept, voice, character work, etc, that stands out in these scripts. I guarantee you, no matter whose script is up there, someone is going to say it doesn’t deserve to be there. Instead of griping and tearing these scripts down, we should be asking ourselves what it might have been that got interest in the first place, and how we can add such elements to our own scripts.” Well put!
So what are my thoughts on this year’s scripts? For starters, I’m ecstatic that Michael Voyer made the Top 10 with The Broodmare. It wasn’t long ago he wrote me an e-mail confessing he was thinking about giving up. Just goes to show, you gotta keep at it. Normally, I would turn my nose up at the number 2 script, King Richard, as it is yet another member of the tiresome genre known as the biopic. However, a lot of you know my previous life was tennis-centric and Richard Williams was one of the strangest, most controversial figures in tennis for a long time. I’m interested to see if the writer can bring us anything new about him.
Harry’s All Night Hamburgers is a great title and since it’s science-fiction, I’ll definitely check it out. Of course Get Home Safe is in the top 3. The script and its 2-page (or 100 page, depending on how you look at it) FU to white males may have turned a lot of people in the industry off. But the important thing is that it GOT PEOPLE TALKING IN THE FIRST PLACE. It’s hard to stand out when all you have is paper and ink, and Christy Hall figured out how to do it. I’m shocked Cobweb is ranked so high. It’s a very average script. It reads fast, though.
“In Retrospect” reminds me of the old days with its mind-bending high concept. I always felt that like-minded “The Cell” could’ve been a great movie. They didn’t do enough rewrites on the script though. This concept (going into other people’s minds to get something done) is still there for the taking. I feel bad for perennial Black Lister, Gary Spinelli. His script, Rub & Tug was on the fast track to getting made before the trans community shamed Scarlett Johansson for daring to portray them. That baffling play has ensured the movie will never be made (or, if it does, the budget will be 1 million and no one will see it). Not sure what the endgame was there.
Queens of the Stoned Age sounds decent at best, but Elyse Hollander has ensured I’ll read anything of hers after Blonde Ambition. A Vanilla Ice biopic might be too much for me to handle. Unless I light up a stage and wax a chump like a candle. The Fastest Game sounds interesting. I like when writers find a new angle into old subject matter. I’ve heard of gambling before. But I’ve never heard of the sport “Jai Alai.” I want to know more. There was another script about Bob Ross a few years back. This one, Happy Little Trees, with its conflict-heavy logline, sounds a lot better. A logline without conflict is like a burger without fries.
Good to see The Beast made the list as it proves The Black List can still have fun. “Dark” sounds cool. Oil rigs and creatures hidden away for hundreds of years? Count me in. Kill the Leopard has the single most confusing logline I’ve ever read in my life. There may be 17 movies going on in that sucker. “Mamba” is one to keep an eye on. Kobe’s sexual assault case came during a time when that sort of thing could be buried. If it resurfaces as a “thing” in this era, especially with Bryant moving into movie production himself, it could get ugly.
It’s EXCELLENT to see Nicholas Mariani back on the Black List. The Defender doesn’t sound like my cup of tea. But if it’s from Mariani, I’ll read it. For those who don’t know, Mariani wrote the number 1 script on my Scriptshadow Top 25 list, Desperate Hours. I don’t know if I’m reading this right. But I’m pretty sure there’s a thriller on the list about a rabbit. Former Black List topper Graham Moore is back with a new script. His last project about Tesla got buried due to a similar project. Good to see him back in the saddle.
I find it baffling that every year on the Black List, there are two scripts with similar concepts that end up suspiciously close to each other in the vote tally. This year we have both The Second Life of Ben Haskins and The 29th Accident, both about dead partners who come back to life. There’s got to be a glitch in the voting process due to how often this happens.
Inhuman Nature sounds like a comedy set up but I think it’s being sold as serious? Nobody Nothing Nowhere sounds like one of those trippy ideas that could be either really good… or really bad. Wendi sounds okay. I didn’t know that Murdoch’s second wife came from the slums of China.
So, yeah, there’s a lot of good reading ahead. And, no doubt, there will also be some surprises. If you read anything on the list before me, please share your thoughts in the comments section. I’d rather go off recommendations from people I know than randoms. In the meantime, let’s check out the number 1 script on the list!!!
Evan Spiegel, as our title implies, is a frat boy. He is not, however, a genius. At least according to our story’s narrator, Lily, who uses the majority of her voice-overing to paint Evan as an entitled douchebag idiot. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. One day in college Evan hears a student discussing accidentally sending an embarrassing photo to his mom, which gives him the idea for Snapchat (then titled Picaboo). Snapchat deletes photos several seconds after they’re sent.
Evan teams up with his two best pals, Bobby (who handles coding), and Reggie (who handles day to day operations) and moves to California where they desperately try and get their app off the ground, all while Lily offers her unfiltered thoughts on how dumb Evan is. Eventually, Evan realizes he should be targeting high school kids, and that’s when his app blows up. One of those kids ends up being the daughter of Michael Lynton, then CEO of Sony Entertainment. Michael gives Evan the money to take Snapchat into the stratosphere, and that’s exactly where it goes. The app is worth 13 billion dollars within a couple of years.
Despite it being increasingly unclear why Lily is in the movie, she continues her verbal voice over assault on Evan. The journey culminates in the infamous Sony Hack of 2014, where Michael Lynton’s e-mails are exposed, some of which expose how stupid he thinks Evan is. Evan is furious, goes on a retreat to get his mind straight, then comes back promising to be a better listener. Unfortunately, the damage has been done, and Snapchat is now worth 14 billion dollars instead of 29 billion. We’re left with the now infamous quote from Kylie Jenner, who, with one tweet, temporarily sank Snapchat’s worth by 15 percent: ““Sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me… ugh this is so sad.”
Frat Boy Genius has an unsympathetic hero and an even more unsympathetic narrator, which makes for a tough read. When you don’t have anyone to root for, why would you keep reading? In the case of Frat Boy Genius, the answer is you want to see how all of this ends. When this much success is attained, when this much money is made, you know you’re cruising towards a wreck. And I wanted to be on the highway when that wreck happened so I could slow down and gawk at the carnage.
But holy hell was the ride tough. Lily, our narrator, is the equivalent of a five year old child who keeps asking if we’re there yet. Except instead of asking if we’re there, she’s making quip after redundant quip about how awful Evan is. Here she is after Evan hits on a random girl. “I don’t have words for this interaction. It’s like you don’t even have to be attractive to be a fuccboi anymore.” There are lots of lines like that.
It’s no surprise, then, that the script picks up considerably during the stretches where Lily disappears. There’s actually a really interesting story here about a guy fresh out of college with a weak app idea who’s in way over his head. Where The Social Network was about the CEO’s control, Frat Boy Genius is about a guy who has no idea what he’s doing having to navigate shark-infested waters, making life-changing decisions on the fly and somehow, impossibly, making just the right combination of moves to create a 29 billion dollar company. When we’re focused on that, Frat Boy Genius is borderline awesome.
Unfortunately, Lily comes back to rain on the 3rd Act’s parade, and the story must weather her irritating Mystery Science Theater’esque opinion on everything. Eventually, we learn why Lily is so angry, which is that she came up with the “Stories” portion of the app and Evan gave her idea to someone else in the company more qualified to work on it. The problem is it’s too little, too late. We already hated Lily with a passion. So the fact that her hatred of Evan is finally explained has no bearing on us.
This is something that could’ve been corrected with a couple of changes. Karasik needed Lily to tell us up front – possibly with a flash-forward – that Evan screwed her over. It’s kind of in there now, but it’s vague. It needs to be clear. That way, we understand why she’s so angry and judge her less for it. The second thing Karasik needed to do was tone down the jealousy and over-the-top anger of Lily. It made Lily come off as a grade-A bitch.
Had she done that, Lily becomes someone we root for, which is something this script needed. Again, there are no heroes in Frat Boy Genius and that makes the story hollow. One of the reasons The Social Network resonated with audiences was that Eduardo, Mark Zuckerberg’s business partner, was once his best friend. We understood how hurt he was by being ousted, which gave the script a stronger emotional through-line. Frat Boy Genius does’t have that because it’s too wrapped up in its own anger.
But I will say this – I wanted to get to the end. I wanted to see what happened to these people. And that’s still a rarity when I read a script. Mostly, I finish scripts because I’m obligated to (we’re going to be exploring this in the First 10 Pages Challenge in the new year so stay tuned!). This one I finished because I wanted to. Which was just enough for me to rate it worth the read.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Have at least ONE PERSON to root for in your screenplay. It doesn’t have to be the hero. It doesn’t even have to be the second biggest character. But we do need SOMEONE. Or else the script ends up feeling sad.
What I learned 2: Vendetta Writing. If you’re writing something with some sort of vendetta, your writing comes across as cruel and one-sided. To write a good screenplay, you need to find the humanity in everyone. We’re all shades of gray. One could argue that the whole point of making movies is to explore that gray area. I would’ve loved to have seen that here.
That most merry of times is finally here. I asked for your holiday scripts and YOU DELIVERED. While there weren’t as many entries as the Halloween Amateur Offerings, there were a lot more than I thought there’d be. Hell, I even received a script from a reindeer (no seriously, a reindeer submitted an autobiographical screenplay). This means, unfortunately, Ebereeveser Scrooge cannot post them all. It doesn’t mean I don’t love you. It doesn’t mean you aren’t in my Christmas dreams. Only that your holiday script must live to fight another Christmas. Hey, what did our parents used to tell us whenever we asked for that expensive present? “You don’t always get what you want.”
Not to worry, though! For those who didn’t make it, I have good news. One of the first contests of the new year will be the “First Ten Pages Challenge.” I was reading a script the other day and I realized something. Too many screenwriters take script pages for granted. They think that as long as there’s an approximation of a story moving forward, the reader “owes” it to them to keep reading until they get to “the good part.” That’s not how the real world works, homie. In the real screenwriting world, you have to write a script that if you were to rip that script away from the reader as they were reading it, they would become furious and demand the script back. I don’t think writers write like that. They write like, “Ohh, I’ll have my cool little plot point on page 20 and in the meantime I’ll do a slow burn and set things up…” The Ten Page Challenge is designed to make you write a first 10 pages SO GOOD, that the reader would get physical if you tried to stop them from reading. So get started. I’ll have more on this once the new year starts.
For those who don’t know how Amateur Offerings works, it’s as simple as hanging a stocking. All you have to do is read as much of the 5 screenplays below as possible and vote for your favorite in the comments section. Voting closes on Sunday night, 11:59pm Pacific Time. Winner gets a review next Friday. — If you’d like to submit your own script to compete in Amateur Offerings, send a PDF of your script to carsonreeves3@gmail.com with the title, genre, logline, and why you think your script should get a shot.
P.S. Review of Spiderverse on Monday. Go see it so you can participate in the discussion!
Title: TAKING XMAS
Genre: Romantic Comedy
Logline: After bluffing her way into a repo job, a single girl must repossess the prized roadster of the town’s most eligible and dysfunctional bachelor before Christmas.
Why You Should Read: Since 2013, the Hallmark Channel has tripled the amount of original Christmas movies they produce each year (12 to 36). Couple this with the runaway success of “The Christmas Chronicles” on Netflix (20 million views opening week) and it’s clear there’s a family friendly holiday-themed path to breaking into the industry. Even one of our very own from Scriptshadow is a co-producer on “I’ll be Next Door for Christmas”, which is kicking butt on Amazon Prime as I type! It’s my Christmas wish to have the SS faithful help me and my co-writer thread this proverbial marketing needle with their insights. Thanks so much for taking any time you can spare during the busy holiday season to check out our script!
Title: SECRET SANTRESS
Genre: Comedy
Logline: The wife of a cop fears some conspiracy is brewing around the department’s “Secret Santa” gift exchange when her husband’s name is pulled by all his female co-workers.
Why You Should Read: It’s “Girls Gone Wild” meets “Murder She Wrote” meets every sappy Christmas movie you ever saw. In the spirit of Christmas we present this unabashedly irreverent and pull at the heartstrings swipe at all that embodies Christmas tradition, gift giving and grief. We’ve aimed for that vision of Christmas morning after the gifts have all be unwrapped. Just kick the trash under the tree and have another spiked eggnog. Hope you enjoy!
Title: NORTHERN LIGHTS
Genre: Science Fiction
Logline: When aliens attack a small town on Christmas Eve, a conservative yet strained family is forced to fight for their survival while also dealing with their different beliefs — or lack thereof — head on.
Why You Should Read: “INDEPENDENCE DAY” at Christmas time is the quick pitch… but beyond that, the heart of the story is inspired from my own childhood growing up in a conservative home that absolutely refused to accept the idea that aliens could be real as it would completely negate the “Nativity” message, yet the idea of believing in Santa Claus was joyfully encouraged. (An irony that I definitely didn’t understand as a child.) I wanted to create a potential family friendly holiday blockbuster that tackles how the “greatest time of the year” brings both discussions and family problems to the forefront, all while being backdrop to a simple story of a family trying to survive an alien invasion.
Title: Christmas Academy
Genre: Holiday Comedy
Logline: When Santa Claus’ protégé is killed in an avalanche, the next relative in line, a New York cop with no holiday spirit, is taken to the North Pole for his training until he must save Christmas from the grinch-like Krampus.
Why You Should Read: Apart from this script placing in the finals of both the Fresh Voices and Studio 32 screenplay competitions. It is a fresh new take, from two hungry writers, into the mythology of how to become the father of Christmas. It’s nostalgic, comedic and downright magical.
Title: Droid Rage
Genre: Holiday Action Comedy
Logline: A mild mannered android salesman is forced to team up with his trainwreck of a sister-in-law after they become the target of a top secret android killing machine.
Why You Should Read: Planes, Trains and Automobiles meets The Terminator, that’s what we’re dealing with here. Droid Rage has got it all, big set pieces, quirky characters, Santa, and a pregnant android killing machine. And the beauty is that it’s all wrapped up in an elegantly crafted three act structure. We’ve got big ass goals, huge stakes and shitload of urgency. Some people say Hollywood comedies are dead and those people can go suck a big long candy cane cause once Droid Rage hits the scene the only thing Hollywood will want to make are holiday themed action comedies. Here are some quotes from people that have read it, “twice as good as the bible” “you’ll never look at pregnant women the same again” “I shit my pants, but it had nothing to do with your script. I think it was from something I ate at Zankou Chicken.” Move over Die Hard cause there’s a new Christmas classic in town, and thy name be Droid Rage. So if you want to make $10,000 a month only working part time, if you want to meet that special someone, or if you’re just waiting for speed weed to drop off your dope and you’ve got an hour to kill this the script for you. Thank you for your time and consideration. Sincerely, The motherfuckers that wrote Droid Rage.
