Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: A rag-tag group of space pirates come together to travel to a mysterious planet to retrieve a technology that will help them defeat the alien presence that has annihilated earth.
About: Tab Murphy was rolling in 1996. He had just come out with the huge Disney hit, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He was writing what would become another Disney hit, in Tarzan. So he was poised to take a big step in his career by writing a Star Wars like movie, something with the potential to break out and become a massive box office phenomenon. Unfortunately, like many projects in Hollywood, it never made it to the finish line. But for a writer who not many people have heard of, Murphy has had that rare longevity in his screenwriting career. He’s still writing today!
Writer: Tab Murphy
Details: 126 pages – Sept. 10, 1997 draft

I’m in denial.

I feel like an alcoholic who swears that, starting tomorrow, I’m going to stop drinking.

I’m pretending like Star Wars still has a future even though everything about what’s happening with the franchise tells me we’re in a late-stage civilization collapse. It’s gotten to the point where we’re hanging our hopes on George Lucas’s teacher’s pet, who still believes the prequels were the pinnacle of Star Wars.

A tear falls sullenly down my cheek.

The prequels??

Do I have to remind you how bad the prequels were? They were bad, people! They had a Jamaican lizard and a five-year-old who could race a flying vehicle 400 mph.

A second tear trails.

Whereas, before, there was always one Star Wars project you could hold out hope for that was going to change the franchise’s fortunes, we don’t even have that anymore. Star Wars’s big promise, at the moment, is a Rey movie.

Full on weeping at this point.

So I always like to check out what else is going on in the sci-fi fantasy space. Maybe there’s a new Star Wars franchise itching to come to life. I’d never heard of Star Blazers. I’ve never heard of Tab Murphy (or his sidekick, CapsLock Olsen). So I have no idea what I’m getting into.

The year is 2098. The earth has been defeated by the Gamelons, a human-like species that has destroyed many a planet in the galaxy. There remain small pockets of resistance, one of which resides in caves behind, yes you’re about to read this right, Mount Rushmore.

20-something brothers Derrick and Alex are the best pilots left on earth and are pretty snazzy when it comes to dispatching the latest Gamelon attack. But when Alex heads off on a mission that goes very badly (“It’s a trap!”), he extends his last flap.

Brother Derrick is devastated. But his mourning is cut short when their radar notes a strange ship that has landed in the mostly-blown-up city of Chicago. Derrick shoots over there, finds the ship, and discovers a robot lady inside. He grabs her and takes her back to Mount Rushmore.

Once back at Mount Rushmore, robot lady sheds her skin and becomes… an alien lady! Whaaaaaaat??? She explains to the humans that she has a special technology back on her planet that will help the humans defeat the Gamelons. “But we don’t have a ship?” Derrick says. “We do, actually,” his superior says. The USS Arizona! Yes, they retrofitted one of their aircraft carriers to become a spaceship.

But now they need a crew! The only crew they have is a bunch of pirates who led a mutiny against their last captain. Welp, beggars can’t be choosers! They all jump on the ship and shoot out into space. Along the way, Robot Chick slash Alien Chick then transforms into ANOTHER person. She’s actually a Gamelon! Whaaaaaaaaat???

She tells Derrick not to freak out. She hates how violent her species is and still wants to help him. But now the goal has become more complicated. Ya see, we’re headed to Planet Gamelon, which means you guys are going to have to walk right through the planet to steal the special technology that will win the war. Will Derrick and the Pirates (sounds like a great 80s band name) be able to pull that off? We shall see.

Now, if you’re anything like me, you read that summary and you think, “That sounds like the dumbest movie ever.” But let’s be real here. If I summarized Star Wars for the first time to you, you’d think that was a dumb idea too.

So is Star Blazers the next Star Wars?

If by “the next Star Wars,” you mean the red-headed stepchild who’s allergic to everything and has just been diagnosed with sickle-cell anemia? Then yes.

As tempting as it is to just roast this thing like a Hawaiin pig, I want people to actually learn something here so let’s learn something.

You can’t start the adventure of your story at the midpoint. It’s just too late. And I’m not even allowing the year this was written to impede on this rule. Raiders of the Lost Ark came out 15 years before this script and Indy was off on his journey by minute 25.

So to not head into space until page 60 is a script killer. For two reasons. One, we feel like we’ve wasted too much time dicking around on earth attempting to find our story. And two, once we’re on our journey, we’re forced to truncate it, since we only have half a movie to explore it.

The journey – the adventure – needs to be your entire second act. That’s what second acts are for.

Okay, now for some roasting. Halfway to their destination, our team has to stop at another planet for refueling or something. And we meet the aliens on this planet and guess what they look like? Insects. INSECTS! Even back in 1997 this was the most cliche most obvious choice for aliens you could’ve gone with. You have to come up with something unique.

Because, if I had to guess why this movie wasn’t made – and I’m going to extrapolate this to represent all big budget screenplays that weren’t able to get made – the most likely reason is that you haven’t given us that one big thing that sets your script apart from all the other scripts out there. There isn’t a single original idea in this script.

And, sadly, that’s the case for most screenplays. The writers don’t ask that question and then wonder why nobody e-mails them back after reading their script. It’s because you’re not bringing anything new, or original, or fresh to the table. Insect aliens? Your 7-year-old son could’ve come up with that idea. So why are you using it? You’re supposed to be the professional, the guy who comes up with ideas the average person cannot.

But what it really comes to – and this is how Star Wars separated itself – is the characters. We have to love and care about the characters. And every character in this script was so basic and formulaic and cliche and thin. Derrick has a “save the cat” scene early on where he kisses his little sister and tells her everything’s going to be okay. Again, it’s as if someone writing a 7th grade short story came up with that choice. That’s how on-the-nose and common it is. It doesn’t feel like the writer is even trying.

That’s what drives me the most crazy. When I can tell that the writer isn’t trying their hardest. It is soooooooooooo hard to write something good EVEN WHEN YOU’RE PUTTING EVERY OUNCE OF YOURSELF INTO IT. So how likely do you think it is that you’re going to write something good by half-assing it?

I’ll give you a hint. About as likely as me watching the final episode of Ahsoka.

The good news is, you guys can form your own opinions. Here’s a link to the script!

Script link: Star Blazers

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

What I learned: Beware “fake humor.” Oh boy. I can’t stand fake humor. Fake humor is when you have your character say something that’s not actually funny but presents itself as funny and, as such, gets a polite laugh form the audience. So, when Derrick and crew first show up to the Gamelon planet, they see that the whole planet is a city (another cliché). When Derrick sees this, he says, “No wonder you people conquer other planets. You’ve run out of parking spaces.” This line is the definition of fake humor. The writer is not actually trying to make anyone laugh. He’s merely presenting a line that is designed to be laughed at. Please, for the love of all that is Bib Fortuna, don’t use fake humor in your scripts. Use real humor.

Don’t you go sleeping on this movie. Don’t you dare!

Genre: Drama
Premise: A single mom eeking out a living in Dublin starts taking online guitar lessons on a whim, unexpectedly falling in love with music in the process.
About: An immediate hit at Sundance, Flora and Son is “Once” director, John Carney’s, newest musical treat. He came up with the idea by imagining a girl finding a guitar in a dumpster. He thought that was a great starting point for a movie.
Writer: John Carney
Details: About 100 minutes

For the last couple of months, I’ve been looking forward to The Creator.

With one caveat. Gareth Edwards wrote the script.

I know what happens when Garth Edwards writes scripts. It’s called, “Monsters.” His first film.

Him writing? Equals not good.

But it’s been a decade since that film. So I thought maybe he’s improved. But then I saw some of you Scriptshadow readers post your reactions. And I saw the RT score dwindle down with every successive refresh. Everybody seemed to be saying the same thing: The script let the movie down.

So, at the last second, I decided The Creator was not worth my 20 bucks.

But what to watch instead? I could watch Reptile. But I’d read the script already and found it average. The only other movie that had an inkling of potential was Flora and Son. John Carney, the director, wrote and directed one of the most powerful “do-it-yourself” movies ever made in, “Once.”

But then he made that glossy soulless Hollywood movie with Kiera Whatshername that looked the exact opposite of Once. It had zero soul. So I sort of gave up on the guy.

Well guess what? After watching this movie, I just might be John Carney’s number one fan.

Flora and Son follows 30-something Flora and her teenage son, Max, who live in Dublin. Flora spends most nights getting drunk and finding a warm body to regrettably wake up to the next morning. Flora drinks a lot of wine. Smokes a lot of cigarettes. And while she loves Max, he’s a troubled child who’s always stealing from local stores, making her life miserable.

Walking home one day, Flora finds an old guitar in a dumpster and gets it restrung at the local guitar shop. She mucks around online, trying to learn to play, until she finds a cute guy named Jeff from Los Angeles who gives online guitar lessons. She signs up purely out of attraction but when they start their lessons, she realizes Jeff is kinda broken and sad about the fact that he was never able to “become something” in the music world, and their lessons become just as much about her encouraging him as him helping her.

Meanwhile, in order to impress a girl out of his league, Max starts making dance/rap music on his computer, and when Flora finds out, she sees an opportunity to connect with him. After a while, they’re making music with each other, even bringing in Max’s deadbeat dad (once a musician himself) to help. They may not be a real family but this is better than nothing. Any future family may rest in the hands of Jeff. But will Flora ever be able to connect with him in the real world?

Before I get to the movie itself, holy effing garbanzo beans, this actress is a freaking mega-star! This is easily the best performance I’ve watched all year. And I don’t mean that in an Oscar way, where the performances they reward are more showy. It’s more that she’s so effortless in the role. I rarely see that anymore. Meryl Streep’s able to do it. Daniel-Day Lewis was able to do it.

There are several scenes where she’s just staring at the computer that I could’ve watched for another three hours. I don’t know what she did to prepare for this role. I don’t know why this woman isn’t already the lead actress in every Hollywood movie. She’s so godammned good. Wow.

Okay, now that I’ve got that out of the way, Flora and Son is the feel-good movie of 2023. And the primary reason it works is because Carney doesn’t follow Hollywood structure. There isn’t a man who hates Hollywood more than John Carney, actually.

(Spoilers) I figured out, halfway through, that Flora and Jeff weren’t going to meet. I was both sad about this creative choice, but also thought it was genius. Because a lot can go wrong once you begin a love story. Once the two kiss and, later, sleep together, the sexual tension that was powering the relationship is gone and you have to move to other forms of relationship propulsion that are harder to pull off.

A movie like Titanic can do it because, after they’ve kissed and slept together, they still have to deal with an armed incensed fiancé and a giant sinking boat. There’s plenty there to keep us entertained. But with Flora and Son, if Flora goes to Los Angeles, you have to deal with that whole scene and you have to build the relationship within that unique world, all in half a movie? – lots of choppy waters there.

By never physically beginning the romance, you keep the audience in a perpetual state of hope and excitement. Is something going to happen between these two? How is it going to work?

It was a brave choice and specifically why Carney is so vocal about never working in Hollywood. It’s because he wouldn’t have been able to do that. A studio would’ve wanted Flora to go to Los Angeles.

Outside of the romance plot, we had the Flora and Son plot. This one was a little bumpier but it won me over in the end. The movie is about this woman who had her son way too young. She’s a partier. She’s a drinker. She’s a smoker. Her young husband was even less ready for a kid so he’s a mess too. For these reasons, she’s never been close to her kid. She’s open about the fact that he’s a burden to her.

So music helps her and her son connect. It’s cool the way Carney does it. On the one end, you have this woman who is learning acoustic guitar. On the other, you have this kid who’s more into rapping and dance beats. So to see them come together in the middle and find a sound was fun to watch.

But the star was the online relationship. Nobody has ever captured long-distance like Carney has here. Nobody. Not even close. The dialogue, in particular, was awesome! Maybe it was because Eve Hewson is such an amazing actress but watching these two connect with one another felt so authentic.

One screenwriting thing I learned via this romance was how using a separate topic makes the dialogue sooooooo much easier. For one, it gives the dialogue purpose. Each zoom session is a music lesson. So they have a goal (to teach her how to play). This makes it so much more fun when the two break from the lesson (usually instigated by Flora) because it interrupts what’s supposed to be happening and segues into conversations that “aren’t supposed to happen.” It’s specifically because they’re not supposed to happen that we enjoy them so much.

And, also, there’s so much more subtext when you do it this way. If these two would’ve been online dating and solely using their Zoom sessions to get to know each other, there’s zero subtext. It’s because they’re talking under the pretense of a music lesson that their budding romance is so fun to watch.

I can’t say enough about this movie. I thought it was great. It’s probably too light, in more ways than one, to get any Academy recognition. But Apple should do everything in their power to try and get Eve Hewson nominated. This girl is a superstar and one of my new favorite actresses. Right up there with Andie McDowel’s daughter, the Sweenster and Pew-Pew.

Oh, and one more thing. THIS MOVIE IS HILARIOUS! I laughed out loud LITERALLY 20 times. That’s 19 more times than I usually laugh out loud during a movie. Carney loves taking the piss out of every moment. Spoiler. After this heart-wrenching final performance, where every character has bared their soul in this song they came up with together, there are a lot of cheers in the crowd, but the very last line of the movie is a random crowd person yelling, “That was SHITE!” Clearly, Carney had fun here. And I was there for every second of it.

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

What I learned: Use meaty subplots to subvert the romantic comedy genre. Flora and Son is, essentially, a rom-com. Two people falling in love. Romantic comedies are the most cliched movies in the genre business. So you have to subvert them to stand out. One way to do that is to add a big subplot, usually involving another character. You saw this, for example, in Jerry Maguire, with Rod Tidwell (Jerry’s lone client). And here, you see it with Max, the son. If you take out Rod Tidwell and Max from these movies, they are much more traditional and, therefore, more cliched.

Plus RIGHT HERE I announce the new Logline Showdown

I’ve got a car-raaaaaaaaa-zay newsletter for you guys. Check this out. I GO BACK IN TIME! This is what I do for you guys. I secured myself a time machine and went back in time to do a script review. I was told there was a 17% chance of dying and I still did it. FOR YOU. So you better be appreciative. And I’m totally serious here. I swear on my life I went back in time. But that’s just one part of the newsletter. I also give out some final advice on first pages, a realization I had only after the First Page Showdown had ended. But it’s an invaluable tip, so you’re going to want to check it out. I also realized there are some really cool looking shows coming out that I hadn’t heard of. Why didn’t any of you tell me about these shows?!! I also review the trailer for the worst TV show that’s ever been made, based on a gigantic book and starring a controversial actress. I may get cancelled for my review of that one so you’ve been warned.

Okay, onto October’s Logline Showdown…

IT IS HALLOWEEN LOGLINE SHOWDOWN!

It’s Halloween month, people. You know what that means. It means Scott isn’t going to be happy and we’re going to try and discover the next great horror or thriller script. But really, if the script is even peripherally related to horror, you can submit it. Here’s what I need…

What: Halloween Logline Showdown
Send me: Logline for either your Horror or Thriller script (Pilot scripts are okay!)
I need: The title, genre, and logline
Also: Your script must be written because I’ll be reviewing the winning entry the following week
When: Deadline is Thursday, October 19th, by 10:00pm Pacific Time
Send entries to: carsonreeves3@gmail.com

Last week over 250 writers sent me the first page of their screenplay. Only 6 of those made it to the First Page Showdown. Here are 10 that didn’t make it. I explain why.

***SUPER DEAL*** I’ve decided to give out four SUPER-DEALS this weekend. If you’ve got a feature script or a pilot, I can give you 4 pages of stellar notes (with an emphasis on the first page if you want!) for $200. I’m giving out 2 of these with this post and 2 in the newsletter. To get one of the 2 slots here, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the promo code: SUPER DEAL. Hurry up. They’ll disappear quickly! ***SUPER DEAL***

Okay, an update on the First Page Showdown. Our winner, Neobiata, it turns out, doesn’t have a full screenplay for his entry. I told him to write it over the next two months and I would review the script when he’s finished. But this is not going to become a regular thing. So don’t think you can start entering loglines into Logline Showdown and write the script later if you win. I’m allowing this because it’s the first time it’s happened and I’m feeling nice!

So I’ll review the second place script next week. I’m putting all of my focus on the newsletter right now, which is going to be a blast. After my Ripple review, someone contacted me who has access to a time machine, which they’re sending to me. It can only be used once and I have a really fun way to use it that I’m going to save for the newsletter. If you want to be on my newsletter list, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line, “NEWSLETTER.”

Okay, let’s take a look at some first page entries that didn’t make the cut. I want to take you through my thought process as to why they didn’t make the top six. Hopefully, you can learn something from the analysis. And feel free to tell me that I’m wrong and that one or more of these deserved to be in the competition!

TITLE: BELIEVER

This one lost me at the very first line. “KRYSTAL, 20, heavily tattooed on all but her angelic face, soaks eyes closed in a steaming bath.” It’s too clunky of a sentence. There should be commas surrounding “eyes closed,” but there are not, which makes us read it as “soaks eyes,” which, of course, doesn’t make sense once you get to the trailing, “closed.” So you then have to reset to read the sentence correctly. If you’re making your reader do that on the first line, you’re effed. Very few readers are going to forgive you for that.

The scene actually has a potentially interesting situation going on. You’ve got a mysterious, maybe even threatening, person at the door. A suspenseful beat follows.  But then things get confusing. It’s implied that whoever was at the door has left in the elevator. However, we also meet the tenant across from her with a clunky line of its own – “An eye dances with excitement…” – plus I’m not sure if we’re in his apartment (since “APARTMENT ACROSS THE HALL” is presented as a slugline) or we’re still in the hallway. This page could be smoother.

Logline (Thriller): An alcoholic with a history of mental illness escapes a murderer and then fights to make sense of her fragmented “visions” in order to save the next victim before the killer’s twelve-hour deadline.

TITLE: 10 CENT BEER NIGHT

This was actually a pretty good page. Something is going on. The writer does a solid job creating a visual scenario. But as I attempted to consider whether to post it, I read it again and I noticed that something was missing. I couldn’t figure out what it was, at first, but it finally came to me. There was no character to latch onto in the scene. I felt like I was watching everything from a thousand feet above. Later on the page, we do get a dad and his son. But, still, we don’t know these people. They’re not even given a name. So I still feel nothing in a scenario where I should feel everything. This is an interesting premise, though. I would encourage the writer to rewrite this first page and use a character to put us into the mix so that we FEEL what’s happening.

Logline (Comedy): When a well-meaning father tries to celebrate his rebellious son’s 18th birthday, they incidentally attend the most disastrous event in baseball history — Cleveland’s 10¢ Beer Night — and must contend with a crowd of streakers, drunks, and all-out barbarians to survive the night.”).

TITLE: NASTY NEW YEAR

Sometimes it’s one mistake that does you in. That was the case with this page. Here’s where I officially gave up on the entry: “In the first row, Hannah notices a CHATTY GIRL (14) with a bulging PIMPLE on her chin. Becomes obsessed with it.” What does this have to do with anything? You’ve just shown a character lose her focus, then hurriedly regain it in a basketball game… why the random shot of a girl with a pimple and our heroine obsessed with her? I’m now imagining a scene where my heroine is standing in the middle of a game staring at a girl with a pimple in the stands. Maybe if there was a reflective windowed door and our heroine caught her own reflection and saw a pimple on her own face, maybe I could see her becoming obsessed with that. But becoming obsessed with a random fan’s lack of a skin care routine makes me think there are going to be a ton of random moments in this script. I have no interest in that. I like focused narratives with clear plots. This doesn’t appear like it’s going to be that.

Logline (Horror): An anxious young woman whose body has been secretly prepared since childhood to become another mind’s host on New Year‘s Eve must outsmart the devious parasite-to-be – her anti-aging obsessed mother.

TITLE: DERANGED

I don’t know what a Mercedes W124 is. So I’m already behind the writer. I don’t know what “skinned vehicles” means. Like their paint is stripped off? I don’t know what, “sits like if the seat is tickling his butthole” looks like. Does that mean he’s having an uncomfortable experience? A joyful experience? Either way, it’s not a good description. To the writer’s credit, they’re creating a bit of suspense here. We want to see who these guys are waiting for. But a lack of clarity in the writing followed by an ill-informed line of description told me that I was going to be getting a lot more of those things if I kept reading.

Logline: A quiet, vengeful husband puts his family in a life-or-death situation when he targets the prime suspect in his wife’s murder: a ruthless Mafia hitman.

TITLE: HALL OF FAME

When I see, “Hall of Fame,” I’m thinking ‘sports.’ So I didn’t understand where I was or what was going on at first. In all of my life, I’ve never read the word ‘cloche’ before. You can get away with that sort of thing sometimes, if the word doesn’t matter. But this word is pivotal to the reader understanding what’s going on and since no reader will ever give you the courtesy of looking a word up, you’re pretty much screwed right there.

I was still willing to give the page a chance but then we get “sparing” instead of the proper word, “sparring.” And now you’re really dead. I’ve gone from confused to never seen that word before to wrong word. This is why feedback is so important, guys. You need somebody telling you these things so that you’re not killing your opportunities. Cause a screenwriter can spend five years getting to the point where a legitimate person agrees to read their script and they come into that opportunity like the Chicago Bears, down 31-0 in the first quarter. You can’t recover from that.

Logline (Horror/Thriller): When a popular news anchor is abducted and imprisoned in a macabre gallery filled with celebrity exhibits, she must exploit her own fame as both a weapon and a means of escape.

TITLE: HEMMVILLE CREEK

Sometimes, writing just isn’t easy to read. This has nothing to do with screenwriting per se. It’s more about writing in general. If I’m doing double-takes on basic sentences, that’s a problem. This second sentence here: …“as a PICK-UP TRUCK with GLOWING HEADLIGHTS also rumbles out…” Why, “also?” “Also” shouldn’t be a part of this sentence. “…from the woods dirt road…”. That doesn’t make sense. Later on the page we get, “He was healthy who had potential to become something in his life.” That’s a massive writing error on your first page! If this is what we’re going to get on page 1, the page that the writer pays the most attention to, then we, as readers, know that we’re going to get a lot more of that if we keep reading. So you gotta clear things up. Because, other than that, there’s something big going on here. There’s some potential to grab the reader with this opening. But if they’re fighting through the sentences, they can’t appreciate the story.

Logline (Whodunnit/Thriller/Drama): After her innocent 18-year-old son becomes the prime suspect to a Halloween party massacre in their small town, a Sheriff only has 13 hours to find the real killer before the FBI arrive and take over.

TITLE: DON’T SEND HELP

This is, actually, a solid page. I had about 250 entries. I’d put this in the top 40. Maybe top 30.  We are establishing something interesting – which is that this woman is stranded on an island. That alone is worthy of getting people to turn the page. But is it the best opening Steph could’ve gone with? That’s debatable. Cause there’s nothing going in the scene. It’s a scene that is, solely, establishing information. It’s not doing so via any kind of dramatic situation. For example, if we started on this character sprinting through the jungle as we try and figure out why she’s doing so (Is she running towards something? Running away from something?). Then we hear a noise (a boat horn or a plane, maybe) and she emerges onto the beach (and this is where we realize she’s stranded on an island), she runs to the water to try and signal the passing vehicle. You’ve established the same thing you’ve established on the page you already have. But you’ve added a dramatic element.  Or you can pull a reversal.  Start on our heroine tanning in paradise.  Establish the peaceful beauty.  Then, ever-so-slowly, pull away from her, gradually establishing the beaten-up beach, the SOS sign, some remnants of former temper tantrums, until we realize she’s stranded on an island. Way more interesting than an on-the-nose, “FU” to the world for being stranded here.

Logline (Survival Drama): When a devoted wife and mother is rescued after being marooned on a deserted island for six months, her family is forced to reassess old behaviors, given that she’s lost her taste for living a normal, civilized life.

TITLE: HARD DOLLAR

A couple of issues stick out to me right away. You’ve got three blocks of 4-line paragraphs. That’s going to agitate a lot of readers. Readers like to see white space. Not big chunky blocks of text right away. Another issue is one I see a lot, which occurs in the very first line: “Unlocking a door labeled Legion Detective Service across its cracked glass, VIC LEGION (40s) tosses a horse-racing program
on…” Notice how this line reads backwards. An action occurs before we’ve met the person performing the action. If you do that enough, it’s uncomfortable to read because we’re only forming an image AFTER the sentence, instead of right away. Instead, keep it basic. “VIC LEGION (40s) unlocks a door labeled ‘Legion Detective Service’ across its cracked glass.” It’s simple changes like this that make a big difference. I’d also try and give us a more unique opening. A guy shows up to a private eye cause his wife is cheating. That’s the most obvious possible way to start a script in this genre. Instead, look for ways to subvert the reader’s expectations. Give them an opening scene they wouldn’t expect to see in a detective noir.

Logline (Detective Noir): After narrowly surviving a brutal beating by his client, a private detective wakes up with achromatopsia, a condition where he can only see in black and white, and the voice of a drunken Humphrey Bogart offering him unsolicited advice on how to solve his cases.

TITLE: DO YOU FEAR WHAT I FEAR

This is where screenwriting gets tricky. Here’s the writer’s pitch: “This is a Christmas horror comedy… I kinda love it… it’s like SCREAM meets ELF, but also a tribute to the fun 80’s horror movies I loved growing up like Night of the Demons, Return of the Living Dead, Night of the Creeps and Gremlins. It’s full of sex and violence and wrongness and fun.” It’s a fun pitch but the second I read this part — “Ah, f**k it. He’s a little a$$hole anyway.” They laugh. And cough. And laugh. And cough.” — I checked out. I hate these two people. It’s no different from a first impression. A girl could meet the man of her dreams but, if within the first five seconds, he accidentally spits on her while he’s talking, that’s all she sees. Any little mistake during a first impression has an outsized impact on the other person. Another thing to keep in mind is that comedy only starts working once you’ve established that type of comedy. If you have your highly sarcastic characters start off on page one saying sarcastic funny things, the reader doesn’t know they’re sarcastic yet! How could they? It’s the first page. So they may take their lines seriously. It’s only after being with the characters for 15-20 pages that we understand their sense of humor. So starting with a mean joke before you’ve established that as the dominant type of humor could turn off a lot of readers.

Logline (Horror/Comedy): After being fired by her not-so-jolly dad on Christmas Eve, a heartbroken Karen Claus discovers she’s the target of a masked killer grinch seeking revenge against Santa for the coal he received as a child.

TITLE: TRUTH, JUSTICE, AND THE AMERICAN WAY

One thing you just can’t do is start your script with nothing happening then jump into a flashback. Why not just start in the flashback already????? What’s the point of seeing a person writing random words? Why is that worthy of creating a gummed up first scene with two time periods? It’s not. You don’t have time to mess around with screenplays. You’re always looking to get to the meat ASAP. Any time you’re not in the meat, you’re wasting the reader’s time. So if you are going to start with something before jumping into a flashback, make it a really big something where a lot is going on, not a small unimportant visual beat that leaves zero impression on the reader. Cause this is one of the few biopics I would probably be interested in. It’s the ultimate David vs. Goliath scenario. So use that first scene to grab us, not waste our time. You have freaking SUPERMAN for goodness sake. You’ll do yourself a huge favor by starting your first scene with Superman in it.

Logline (Biopic/Drama): The creators of Superman achieve the American dream, have it stolen, and fight like hell to regain it.

As always, I do logline consultations for $25!  E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail to make sure you’re going into any e-mail query with your best logline.

Genre: Comedy
Premise: Two teenage feminists struggle to create the perfect boyfriend, only to watch their experiment deteriorate as he succumbs to the ultimate perpetrator of casual high school misogyny: the football team.
About: Screenwriter Julie Mandel Folly is building a nice resume. She wrote on the underrated half-hour comedy, “Welcome to Flatch,” which I enjoyed (the actress who plays the main character is hilarious). She also wrote on the well-received HBO show, Minx. Here, she’s teamed up with Hannah Murphy, who she worked with on the short comedy-horror film, The Spookening. Their script made the 2022 Black List with 7 votes.
Writers: Julie Mandel Folly & Hannah Murphy
Details: 100 pages

Peyton List for Lizzie?

As I come to terms with the unfortunate reality that we are nearly at the time change and that it’s going to start getting dark at 1pm and that LA gas is now at 15 dollars a gallon, I turn to screenplays to lift me out of my mini-depression. Please, oh screenplay Gods, provide me with a great screenplay to read.

It’ll be up to a couple of TV writers to catapult me out of my funk.

What I always worry about with TV writers writing features is the “solidness” of their writing. Everything in feature writing needs to be harder and clearer. The characters need clearly defined flaws. Act turns must be solid. Goals must be as clear as the Maui ocean. Cause unlike TV shows, features have ENDINGS.

Whereas, in the TV world, you’re constantly existing in this “soft” shapeless environment where there are no endings in sight. So you can drift in TV shows and not be so defined all the time.

Will today’s writers circumvent that trap? Admiral Ackbar, what do you say?

Caroline and Lizzie are 17 year olds who aren’t really nerds but they’re nowhere near the top of the high school pecking order. Lizzie is obsessed with losing her virginity to a hot boy she’ll never get and Caroline is gifted with smarts, so much so that she’s aiming to go to MIT.

After the two traverse over to the latest high school party and Lizzie fails, once again, to land her crush, Caroline pitches her an idea. What if she could bring a hot dead guy back to life? By doing so, not only will Lizzie finally lose her virginity (which would allow her to focus on more important things) but she’ll have a hot boyfriend to boot!

They dig up a recently dead hot guy, shock him back to life, and name him Leo Seacrest before informing him that he’ll be dating Lizzie. He gives no resistance to the idea whatsoever and, just like that, Lizzie loses her virginity. As a bonus, everyone in high school is enamored with Lizzie’s new boy toy.

But then Lizzie realizes that hanging out with the zombie version of Ken isn’t that interesting and breaks up with him. Caroline later comes to Leo to see if he’s okay, only to realize that she kind of likes him. And he likes her. Unexpectedly, the two become an item. Maybe this wasn’t such a bad idea after all!

Except then Leo starts hanging out with the dudest bros in dude-bro-land, Goose and Richie, both on the dreaded football team and DEFINITELY not feminists. Goose and Richie are shocked when they find out Leo hasn’t banged Caroline yet and construct a plan to get her drunk at the next party so that sexy times can happen.

When Caroline realizes that Leo is now a dude-bro and potential date-rapist, she regrets bringing him to life and proposes that they send him back six feet under. Lizzie wonders if that’d be murder, something the two cannot come to a consensus on, but they decide to do it anyway. So it’s goodbye, Leo. Unless he can somehow some way, be pulled out of his dude-bro tailspin.

Remember that time when I said TV writers have to be clear and defined.

Like, at the beginning of this review.

Yeah, well, our writers weren’t listening.

You see it right away in regards to motivation.

In any script, the reasons your characters are doing things needs to be as strong as possible. The weaker their motivation is, the less we’ll care.

Take a simple story. A cat is stuck in a tree.

In our first scenario, our hero is the cat’s owner. This has been his cat for fifteen years. Our owner loves this cat more than life itself. In our second scenario, this is not our hero’s cat. In fact, it’s the neighbor’s highly mean, highly annoying cat that hisses at our hero every morning.

Which scenario has the stronger motivation for our hero?

I don’t even need to write it, it’s so obvious.

That’s why motivation matters. So if you get motivation wrong, the reader detaches. They don’t care as much. I don’t care if the hero saves the mean cat who always hisses at him.

In Life of the Party, Lizzie’s motivation is to get laid. But it’s not clear how this is going to improve her life. She never makes it clear why getting laid is such a priority. We’re just supposed to accept that she wants it really bad. Caroline’s motivation is even murkier. She wants to get into MIT. If she can bring someone back to life, it improves her chances. We know this isn’t a real motivation, though, because she achieves her goal by page 30 (she brings a guy back to life). So her goal is over. What’s left to do? Why is she still so invested in Lizzie and Leo’s relationship? It’s all murky.

Another problem is the characters don’t act consistently. This is a huge one. You can’t make characters do things that they would never do just to move your story forward. Their actions must remain consistent with who they are. Once you betray your character’s reality, that character is dead in the reader’s eyes.

Here, Caroline is pitching bringing Leo back to life and Lizzie losing her viriginity to him as well as getting in a relationship with him. This is an absolutely crazy idea that no one in their right mind would do, of course. Which is exactly how Lizzie reacts. No way. She’s not going to bring someone back to life!

But then, a couple pages later, since the writers need Lizzie on board to make their story work, they have her change her mind and go along with it.

That’s not how screenwriting works. You have to stay consistent with your characters’ actions.

The thing is, there were creative ways around this problem. What they could’ve done is have Lizzie outright refuse: “I’m not digging up a dead guy, bringing him back to life, and having sex with him, Caroline. It’s out of the question!” Lizzie goes her own way and we stay with Caroline. Caroline then goes and does it all herself. She digs up Leo. She brings him back to life. She makes him look amazing. Then she shows up at Lizzie’s house and now Lizzie, who loves hot guys, is only reacting to what’s in front of her (a gorgeous guy). So she changes her mind and says she’s in.

Unfortunately, there were even more screenwriting errors in the script. The way they bring Leo back to life isn’t even believable in the confines of a comedy. They wheel him out of a garage during a storm and hope lightning strikes him (which it does) and then he’s magically alive? I can handle mistakes in scripts. But the one thing I cannot handle is laziness. If I feel like the writer is half-a$$ing it, I am done. I don’t have the time for someone who isn’t giving me their best.

And you’re trying to tell us that Caroline is a genius. How genius does that look? If you’re going to tell us someone is a genius, you gotta show them doing genius things. This is a show-don’t-tell medium. Like when Doc is explaining the time machine to Marty in Back to the Future. It’s really clever how the time machine operates. We believe what we’ve been told about Doc once he explains it to us (that he’s both crazy and a genius).

Unfortunately, this results in a story that’s mostly muck. We’re not really sure what we’re supposed to be doing here. Lizzie breaks up with the boring Leo at the midpoint. That was the entire objective of the story, getting them together. So why am I still turning the pages?

I guess you can make the argument that we’re curious to see what happens to Leo. But Leo is supposed to be the third most important character behind Caroline and Lizzie. So he shouldn’t be the engine for the screenplay. He should be more like the transmission. There’s some charm to Caroline’s pursuit of Leo and some cute moments when Leo turns to the dark side. But 1% of cute and charm isn’t enough to push me through an entire screenplay.

I know some of you get mad when I take a script off the Black List and don’t have anything positive to say about it because it made the Black List. So, obviously, it must be doing something right. Can you tell us what’s right so we can at least use that information to improve our own scripts?

I do like this concept. I think it’s fun. I like that, yet another pair of writers have wisely deconstructed a conceptual trope that used to be associated with guys (The “Weird Science” set up). If you’re a Barbie person, this script explores some similar themes in the way that Leo (aka “Ken”) has a spiritual awakening. So if you liked that film, there might be something for you here.

I just couldn’t get past all the technical errors, like the motivation, character inconsistency, the writers making things too easy for our heroes. And I just thought more could’ve been done with the story. This is a juicy premise. It’s got a lot of potential. I don’t feel like these writers sat down for a month and went through every possible avenue they could’ve taken this idea before picking the best one. It was more like, pick the most obvious direction, write the script in a month, we’re done. At least that’s how it felt to me. I need more than that from a script.

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

What I learned: You don’t want agreement in screenplays. You want resistance. When they bring Leo back to life and tell him he’ll be Lizzie’s boyfriend, he agrees immediately. How interesting is that? Resistance breeds conflict. Conflict breeds drama. Drama leads to audience entertainment. So a simple fix here would’ve been to have Leo initially refuse to be Lizzie’s boyfriend and they have to convince him. Which, by the way, would’ve been a funny scene. So always lean towards resistance in storytelling. It’s more interesting 99% of the time.