Genre: Horror
Premise: Soon after moving into their new apartment, a young couple’s idyllic life begins to unravel in the most horrific ways due to the presence of a malevolent spirit.
Why you should read (from writer): I’ve been making a living as a screenwriter here in Mumbai for the last five years, before which I studied film in Los Angeles, and even worked on a few movies as a production assistant.

I’m a horror film connoisseur, and someone who swears by the holy trinity of horror cinema: “The Exorcist,” “The Shining,” and “Alien.” Although horror is my genre of choice, I’ve also secured paid gigs writing a crime-thriller, and a Hitchcockian suspense-thriller.

Following months of depression after failing to get my first horror screenplay produced, I went about writing a story which was far more contained, thereby cheaper to produce, and thus “Ghost Story” was born. “Ghost Story” is a slow burn horror-thriller in the vein of “The Shining” and “Paranormal Activity,” but without the latter’s found footage aesthetic. What sets “Ghost Story” apart is its matter-of-fact approach in presenting supernatural events in a real and believable way. Imagine “Insidious,” but with the real world aesthetics of “The Lunchbox.” It felt great when “Ghost Story” made the quarter-finals in Screencraft’s 2015 Horror Screenplay Contest.

For the past year, I’ve been paying the bills developing concepts — two action-thrillers, and one superhero-urban fantasy — for a local production company.

I’d sincerely appreciate your feedback on “Ghost Story” — not to mention feedback from the rest of the ScriptShadow community as well — because really I want to make it better. So fingers crossed, hoping this query email piques your interest!
Writer: Sarmad Khan
Details: 102 pages

Wow, so we got some interesting stuff to discuss today. We’ve got “quarter-finalist” of a screenwriting competition written on the title page. We’ve got a blueprint of the apartment the story takes place in on the first page. And we have a movie tagline (“Some secrets won’t stay buried.”).

If I’m being 100% honest? These are the kinds of things that get you tabbed as an amateur. They’re big red flags for readers.

Let’s say, for instance, that I received an e-mail from someone who said their script had made the semi-finals of the Nicholl. You know what my first thought is? “Okay, so this person isn’t a total newb. But if their script didn’t even make the top 5, it’s probably got its fair share of issues.”

Like we discussed the other day, even the scripts that win competitions have problems. So if your script didn’t even make the top 50, that’s saying something.

Now there are two sides to this argument. In a sea of competition, anything that proves you know what you’re doing helps. But there’s a certain point where it can work against you, and quarterfinaling or semi-finaling in smaller competitions may be that point. One thing we can all agree on is not to put any contest placement on your title page. Mention it in your query e-mail if you think it will help. But think long and hard about if your personal achievement will be seen as an achievement by professionals.

Moving on to Ghost Story!

36 year-old film editor Varum Desai has just moved into a new apartment in Mumbai with his retired party-girl wife, 27 year-old, Arya. The two seem to have a solid relationship except for a few snags underneath the surface. Arya wants to jump on the baby train immediately. Varum would rather wait until they’re financially ready.

While Varum spends his days in an editing suite, Arya keeps herself busy around the apartment with the help of her maid, who has an 18 month-old daughter. Almost immediately after moving in, Arya starts observing strange things. Cabinets being left open. Noises coming from the next room. At one point while napping, her phone mysteriously makes 13 calls to her husband.

Arya’s able to confide to fellow party-girl bestie, Kat, that something is up. But she’s afraid to tell her husband lest he thinks she’s crazy. That is until she finds the maid’s baby dead inside a running laundry machine. The cops blame the maid, but Arya’s fed up. She’s convinced this is an evil spirit.

So she heads over to the University of Mumbai and begs a local professor who specializes in spirits to come look at her apartment. The professor is skeptical, but eventually relents. Will she confirm that a ghost haunts the apartment? Or could their situation be a lot worse?

I actually e-mailed Sarmad ahead of posting this and told him my big worry – that everything here felt too generic. The logline – “Soon after moving into their new apartment, a young couple’s idyllic life begins to unravel in the most horrific ways due to the presence of a malevolent spirit” sounds like every haunted house movie ever. The tagline: “Some secrets won’t stay buried” may have literally been used on over 200 posters throughout time. Even the title is the most generic title you could possibly imagine:

“GHOST STORY”

So why did I put it in Amateur Offerings? Because Sarmad’s query was the most professional of anyone submitting a screenplay in the past three months. He may not have had the most original concept. But his writing was smooth, concise, clear, and made you want to believe in him. My hope was that THAT side of Sarmad would override the generic side. Did it?

Not for the first 60 pages it didn’t. I mean, we went through about every horror cliche we could possibly go through. Open cabinets? Noises in other rooms? Guys, when you’re writing in any genre, you have to find new ways to explore old ideas. You have to find new ways to make things go bump in the night. Otherwise you’re going to put us to sleep.

But then Ghost Story pulled off a hail mary. Once we start investigating WHY the haunting was happening, the story got a lot better. Whereas before, each scene felt like plug and play, now we were learning about an extremely unique backstory where Varum’s brother killed a little girl when they were kids, and that girl had become the ghost.

I couldn’t believe that in a script where 30 pages ago, I was wondering if it would beat the jump-scare record, I was now reading a carefully crafted character piece about a marriage that was on the rocks.

It’s so clear to me why this only made the quarter-finals. Those first 60 pages are a struggle. In fact, I would go so far as to say some readers never made it past page 60. They acknowledged that the writing was good, and that was enough to get the script through. Which is why I warn writers against the slow burn. If your script doesn’t start cooking til the halfway point, expect most readers to bail before they get there.

Regardless of what you thought of the first half of Ghost Story, the most important thing here is that this CAN BE A MOVIE. And 90% of the scripts I review on Amateur Friday can never become movies, no matter how much work the writer puts into them. This can.

But Sarmad needs to rethink those first 60 pages. He has to throw out every single scare he’s written and replace it with something better. He then needs to integrate the kind of character work and intrigue that he achieves in the last 40 pages in the first 60. More needs to be going on here than a woman wandering from room to room. Because that’s what I would’ve titled this script if I’d only read 60 pages of it: “Woman Walks From Room to Room.”

You might want to bring another character in to add some intrigue. Shit, I thought bringing the dangerous brother, Vikram, in would’ve spiked that whole section. Create a “ghost story” version of “Sex, Lies, and Videotape.” No worries if that complicates your story too much. The point is, MORE needs to happen in the first half, and MORE ORIGINAL scary shit needs to happen in the first half.

This script has serious potential despite its weaknesses, and because of that, I think it’s worth the read.

Script link: Ghost Story

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

What I learned: This script is proof-positive that when you delve into the characters (the histories, the cracks in relationships, the inner flaws, the secrets, the denial), scripts get better. It’s a tale of two halves here. The first half is completely superficial, where it’s all about ghosts and jump scares. Boring. The second half is about a dark ass history with these characters and how that’s gotten them into this mess. And yes, I know that you can’t unload all of your character shit right away. But you have to unload SOME of it. You have to hint at SOME of it. I didn’t even know these two were interesting people until page 60, when they started talking about what was really going on. Don’t make that mistake!

If you’re new to the Scriptshadow Script Challenge, here are all the previous posts…

WEEK 0
WEEK 1
WEEK 2
WEEK 3
WEEK 4
WEEK 5
WEEK 6
WEEK 7
WEEK 8
WEEK 9

Okay, this past week was all about identifying the main problems in your screenplay, coming up with solutions, then placing those solutions into your SECOND DRAFT OUTLINE.

For example, if one of your big problems was that your hero was boring, part of the solution may have been to give him a more powerful opening scene. Therefore you’d go into your second draft outline, find your hero’s opening scene (let’s say it was the second scene in the script) and write in a detailed synopsis of the scene you planned to write.

You’d then do that for every problem and solution. Some of these solutions may have required changing one scene. Some of them may have required changing entire sequences. And some of them may have meant changing multiple scenes across three acts.

The reason you outline all of this ahead of time is so you can a) see how the script looks zoomed out. And b) do all the dirty work of placing everything where it needs to go so you can make the changes linearly when you go to write the draft.

And that’s the plan here. You’ve got your 2nd Draft Outline all laid out. All you have to do is go down the list, from Scene 1 to Scene 60, and replace the scenes that you decided to change in the problem-solving process.

Now some people don’t like to be this organized. Their approach is more general. They have some ideas on what changes they need to make. They may even write them down in a document. This is perfectly acceptable. But I’ve found that the less organized you are going into a rewrite, the harder it is to wrestle the rewrite into shape.

And rewriting is one of the hardest things there is to do. Cause unlike first drafts, where you’re writing in a somewhat linear manner, rewrites require more bouncing around. You’ll write a new scene, realize it requires you to change something 60 pages earlier, go back to make the necessary changes in that scene, realize that the secondary character in that scene doesn’t work anymore because of the tonal change, requiring you to go back to your problem-solving document, figure out how to approach that character, and so on and so forth.

So the more you can mitigate that haphazard process, the better.

Simon Kinberg, who runs like five of the biggest franchises in Hollywood at the moment, says that he spends way more time on his outline than he does writing the script. He wants to be confident in the direction of the script before he writes it and he can only do that if he’s mapped out as much of the story as possible ahead of time.

Now before you jump in and start writing, I want to make sure you’ve got the proper rewrite mindset. The biggest problem with first drafts is that they’re messy. They don’t make a lot of sense. So in addition to fixing all these problems, you’re going to want to clean the script up as much as you can. You won’t be able to do it all in one draft. But you definitely want everything as cohesive as you can make it. To achieve this, you’ll be doing three things.

SIMPLIFYING
STREAMLINING
FOCUSING

Simplify – One of the biggest mistakes screenwriters make is overcomplicating their plot. Movies have deceptively simple plots. If something is not moving your plot forward, you’ll want to get rid of it. Whatever your hero or heroes are attempting to do, only write scenes where people are pushing towards that. Simplifying is the difference between the original Hunger Games and Hunger Games 4. In Hunger Games, it was about kids getting ready for and competing in a death match (simple to understand!). In Hunger Games 4, it was about half-a-dozen things, none of which were very clear. Not surprisingly, that over-complication doomed the movie.

Streamline – In rewriting, you need to become a ruthless editor who’s willing to get rid of ANYTHING that doesn’t work. If a character is average and they’re not integral to the story, GET RID OF THEM! If you have a subplot about an investigator who researches where a unique bullet came from and it doesn’t affect your main plot? GET RID OF IT! If you have two characters who are both funny best friends of your main character, consider combining them. Think of each draft as a company. Figure out where all the excess spending is happening and cut it out. I want your second draft to be as lean and mean as possible. 110, AT MOST, pages unless you’re writing an epic period piece.

Focus – Movies are not places to explore a dozen different ideas. They work best when they’re exploring 1 or 2 ideas. These ideas often boil down to your theme and your main character’s flaw. And in most cases, those two things will be the same. So if your main character’s flaw is that she doesn’t believe in herself. Focus a lot of her scenes on exploring that flaw. If your theme is “Seize the day,” ask yourself if the scene you’re writing explores that theme (whether it be in a positive or negative way). A lot of scripts go south when the writer starts following every thought that pops into their head, regardless if Thought A and Thought B are natural extensions of each other. I remember an amateur script I read once where the female hero was an airline stewardess mired in an airline strike and also the story of her as an up-and-coming MMA fighter. There was no thematic overlap between these storylines on any level and when I asked her what she was thinking when she wrote it, she said, simply, she was inspired by Tarantino movies. Needless to say, this approach leads to hacky scripts that become unfocused and never recover.

So, you’re going to move quickly here. Every week, you’re going to be covering 25-30 pages. Now all of those pages won’t need to be rewritten. You may only need to rewrite three scenes in a particular act. So don’t freak out. But if we’re going to finish a second draft in a month, we need to get through a quarter of the script each week.

Rewrite Goal (Week 10): End of first act! (pages 25-30)

Genre: Comedy
Premise: On the cusp of gaining independence from the British, George Washington, Ben Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson lose the only draft of the Declaration of Independence in the world, putting the future of the United States in doubt.
About: A script about our founding fathers. I’m a couple of days late on this. But what creed do us Americans live by? BETTER LATE THAN NEVER! Yeah! Murica!! Actually, if these guys were smart, they’d change the title to “Murica,” and run away with a sale. United States of Fuckin’ Awesome is one of the few comedy scripts to have won the Nicholl Fellowship, which it accomplished in 2014.
Writers: Alisha Brophy & Scott Miles
Details: 98 pages

Screenwriting contests are funny. And I’m not excluding my own experiences running them from this observation. They’re basically competitions for writers who don’t really know what they’re doing yet. Therefore, the person who wins has rarely written the perfect screenplay. They’ve written something that has wonderful moments mixed with amateurish moments, with the determining factor being there’s more good than bad.

This can be frustrating for losing contestants who then read the scripts, as they expect them to be amazing. When they aren’t, they immediately focus on the fact that their screenplays aren’t amazing either. So why did THAT imperfect screenplay beat out THEIR imperfect screenplay?

Often, these writers are using the principle of Everything That’s Not Amazing Is The Same. And this couldn’t be less true. Whereas the winning script may have nailed important screenwriting elements such as concept and character, the losing writer may not even grasp the basics, like how to get into a scene late and get out of it early. Or how to use every scene to push the story forward.

Of course, the real problem is that they don’t know these things yet because nobody who knows anything has ever read their script, sat down, and explained these problems to them. If you’re unaware that you’re doing anything wrong, you’re going to think your script deserves to win every contest it enters.

And this is another misconception that people who don’t understand screenwriting have. That storytelling is this subjective thing. Like the only reason “The Killer Eagle” beat out “Recon Assassin” is because the reader loves eagles or something. That’s not true. There are storytelling basics you need to incorporate just to GET to the point where you’re being judged subjectively. And most aspiring screenwriters have been at this for so little time, they haven’t learned these things yet.

So when their third ever script doesn’t ellicit oohs and ahs, they convince themselves that it’s because the world of art is “subjective” and people just aren’t “getting” their script. You wanna know what smart screenwriters do? They figure out why their story isn’t landing, and improve on the things they have control over.

I can tell you right now that United States of Fuckin’ Awesome achieved in its first five pages something that 99% of aspiring screenwriters have no idea even exists. Irony. We talk about “red flags” on this site a lot. A reader is constantly red-flagging rookie mistakes to clue them in on if this writer knows their shit. But we don’t ever talk about GREEN FLAGS – ways you can tell a screenwriter knows what he’s doing. And irony is a big green flag.

Seeing several of history’s most iconic figures introduced banging whores, whining like cowards, and swearing like sailors, plays against our expectations and intrigues us. That’s a green flag.

Speaking of flags, it’s July 3rd, 1776, and we’re about to watch the story that the history books never told us. Ben Franklin, who it turns out is a borderline moron with an addiction to whores, has teamed up with Thomas Jefferson, the country’s biggest nerd, to finish the most important document in history, The Declaration of Independence.

They grab their good buddy, George Washington, obsessed with reclaiming the party lifestyle that defined his youth, to celebrate at a local pub. Unfortunately, the group get really trashed, and after Franklin heads to a whore house, wakes up to discover that his whore, Claire, has stolen the document!

This is not good, since Jefferson included every single name in the document who would be running America. This would act as a de facto assassination list if this got into the redcoats’ hands! So off the three go, Hangover-style, in search of the elusive document.

Along the way they run into Jefferson’s boss, Sam Adams, the biggest asshole in the world, Benedict Arnold, the nerd who’s only ever wanted to sit at the cool kids’ table, and Andrew Jackson, a bully of a man who only cares about kicking ass, specifically the nerdy ass of Jefferson.

The chase takes them all over town, only for them to realize Claire is at the biggest redcoat party of the year! Our trio will need to secure a canoe, paddle across the river while wasted, and infiltrate the party to get that Declaration! Cause if they don’t? We’ll never declare “Murica!”

Even though United States of Murica borrows liberally from The Hangover, it’s still a well-constructed screenplay that moves quickly. I liked the McGuffin (the lost Declaration of Independence), but what I liked more were the consequences of not getting the McGuffin. The British would have a Kill List which would allow them to destabilize the already shaky colonies and win the war. The stakes were high!

My main issue with the script is that, from there, it went on cruise control. This happens a lot during second acts in comedies. The writers have used most of their jokes up by the early part of the second act, leaving them to repeat story beats.

It takes a lot of work to make a second act great. And one of the challenges is not settling for those repetitive story beats. You have to sit down and do the dirty work of saying, “There are too many sequences like the one I just wrote. I need to come up with something better.” Newer writers and lazy writers never do this. And their second acts suffer for it.

But I’ll tell you where this script eventually won me over.

The climax.

One of the tried-and-true ways of writing a good ending is sending your heroes into the belly of the beast. In general, you want to look for scenarios that are conflict-heavy and do the bulk of the writing for you. When you send your heroes into the villain’s den (Silence of the Lambs anybody?), a lot of those scenes will write themselves.

I’m sure everyone reading this review can think of half-a-dozen funny scenes born from disguising our heroes as redcoats and forcing them to infiltrate a giant redcoat party. And those are the scenarios you’re always searching for as a writer – the ones where scene ideas pop up without you having to think.

United States of Fuckin’ Awesome does operate on a gimmicky premise. And the founding fathers swearing nonstop definitely gets old after awhile. But the writers add just enough creative and funny ideas to keep the script entertaining. It’s worth a read if you’re a comedy writer for sure, especially one who plans to enter the Nicholl.

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

What I learned: Identifying milkable scenes. There’s a great setup here at the redcoat party where Washington, disguised as a redcoat, comes upon a group of British soldiers who are making fun of, you guessed it, George Washington. Washington must sit and endure this, and at the end, one of the soldiers looks at him and asks, “Enoying the party?” And that’s the scene. This so could’ve been a show-stopper scene had the writers identified it as milkable. Washington should’ve been forced to get in a full-blown conversation with the redcoats, to the extent where he’s using a terrible fake English accent. He should’ve been encouraged to tell his best “Washington is a loser” joke. There’s so much more that could’ve been done here that was missed. When you got those scenes staring you in the face guys, make sure you take advantage of them!

Genre: Thriller
Premise: A paralyzed man who can only communicate by blinking is kidnapped by a nurse who knows his secret, that he robbed a bank eight years ago and has hidden the money.
About: Blink finished on the Black List a couple of years ago and managed to pull in Jamie Foxx to play the lead, with 300: Rise of an Empire director Noam Murro helming. Screenwriter Hernany Perla has spent most of his career producing, with his most well-known film being The Last Stand, starring Arnold Schwarzenneger.
Writer: Hernany Perla
Details: 90 pages

Can you believe what happened this weekend? Spielberg gets beat by The Purge 3? What kind of alternate universe am I living in? Everybody has their theories on why The BFG didn’t do well. Some say the title caused confusion. Others say the marketing was generic. I have my own theory. And it’s going to get me ripped in the comments, but I’m okay with that.

I think the reason nobody showed up to this movie is because the main character looked like a mini Lena Dunham. There, I said it. They took one look at that girl and went, “Nuh-uh.” And before you go nuts, remember that the face of a story is the person we have to relate to and care about. And I don’t relate to or care about a mini-feminazi.

Anyway, segueing to today’s unrelated topic: Gimmick scripts. While the word “gimmick” exudes a negative connotation, gimmick scripts are a legitimate option for the spec screenwriting crowd.

We don’t have many avenues to drive down as screenwriters, since Hollywood blocks the majority of them with their “IP or Die” rally cry. And for whatever reason, something about this quirky format encourages a good gimmick. Which leads us to the question: How do you write a good gimmick script? We’ll get to that after the synopsis…

Eddie Locke is paralyzed. The only thing he can move are his eyelids, leaving him with a binary communication process of “yeses” (two blinks) and “no’s” (one blink). Eddie’s been this way for eight years. Lying in the same hospital room staring at the same ceiling and the same stupid ass TV reruns. His nurses are pleasant but you get the feeling that if Eddie had the use of his hands for just 30 seconds one more time in life, he’d use that time to strangle them.

But Eddie’s life is about to get more exciting. A new nurse, country bumpkin, Moe, seems to know a thing or two about Eddie’s past. Like that he was paralyzed by a stray bullet during a bank robbery. A bank robbery where three men made off with a safety deposit box and were never seen again.

Moe, who’s clearly done his homework, is convinced that Eddie was the unknown fourth member of that team, and that he knows what they grabbed from that safety deposit box – a series of access numbers to an offshore account containing 40 million dollars.

Moe forces Eddie to answer all of his questions with blinks. And maybe now’s a good time to tell you, we never see Eddie. The whole movie takes place from his point-of-view. This allows us to experience the blinks from Eddie’s perspective, as well as all the other shit that happens. And a lot happens.

Moe kidnaps Eddie, brings him to his fellow bank-robbing brother’s house, only to find out his bro is dead, but that his daughter, Hayley (Eddie’s grown-up niece), knows a thing or two about the heist. Moe grabs Hayley and the three of them go on adventure to find those account numbers, which have been re-hidden.

With Eddie observing the whole ordeal helplessly, he’ll need to depend on Hayley to get him out of the mess alive. That’s assuming Eddie wants to be alive after this is all over.

So, the gimmick script. How do you write one? First, you gotta find the gimmick. I famously loved the gimmicky coffin contained-thriller, “Buried.” I reviewed a gimmicker not long ago, “The Shave,” about a cop who kills a man then goes to get a shave from the man’s father, where each side will make their case for whether the killing was justified. And it seems like every year we get a couple of “Balls Out” scripts, which are built on making fun of screenwriting conventions.

The big pitfall with gimmick scripts is that the audience is onto the gimmick quickly, usually between 10-30 pages. Once that happens, what’s left? Because if all you’ve got is a gimmick, and we’re onto your gimmick, boredom sets in.

The secret to writing a good gimmick script is NOT RESTING ON THE GIMMICK. Yes, you want to exploit your gimmick. That’s what’s going to set your script apart. Find everything you can that’s specific to your gimmick and make sure you write a scene that exploits that.

In “Buried,” for example, you better put a snake or some other freaky animal into that coffin at some point. That choice specifically takes advantage of your unique setup.

But after that, you need to make sure you’re doing two things. Going back to storytelling basics.

1) Always move your story forward
2) Always explore your characters.

If you’re not doing those, we’re not going to care. Your gimmick can only keep our interest for so long before we need more. And those two things are your “more.”

Blink achieved the first half of that equation. Unfortunately, it didn’t do enough of the second, and that’s where it fell short for me.

And this is an EXTREMELY common problem with scripts – moving the story but not the characters. I think it’s because the one thing that’s drilled into your head early on as a screenwriter is: KEEP THE STORY MOVING KEEP THE STORY MOVING KEEP THE STORY MOVING.

And you’re so focused on that, that you don’t think about anything else. You just care about getting to the next story goal or the next plot twist or the next deception.

And while that’s good advice. If that’s all you’re doing, and you’re not working to create a bond between us and the characters, we’re not going to care. It’s like the difference between me telling you that a man in Thailand got in a car accident and your best friend from high school got in a car accident. The first one you don’t even think about. Why would you care about some random man in another country getting in an accident? But as soon as I tell you it’s someone you know, you’re affected on a deep level.

To achieve this in screenwriting, go back to basics. Create an unresolved struggle WITHIN your characters and create an unresolved struggle BETWEEN your characters.

One of the unique attributes of Blink is that we don’t see the main character. So it’s hard to connect with him. That leaves us with Moe and Hayley. Moe is only about moving the story forward. There isn’t a single thing going on underneath the surface. He just wants money and that’s it. And while that’s great for the plot, it doesn’t help us FEEL anything in relation to his character.

I was just rewatching The Bourne Identity and the girl character that Jason Bourne picks up – we meet her in a very vulnerable place financially, where she’s just trying to get from paycheck to paycheck. It’s a small thing, but it creates some level of sympathy in us for the character. So we care about her on a deeper level.

With Hayley’s character, it’s a little better, since she seems to be more of an emotional person in general. But Eddie never really knew this girl. There’s no unresolved issues between them, outside of her belief that her father is dead because of Eddie. And she gets over that quickly, leaving us with nothing to resolve.

We do experience some internal strife with Eddie during his memories, and this is where the character exploration had the most potential, since Eddie was a terrible human being before he became paralyzed. But all exploration of that came late and it wasn’t very deep.

All this resulted in a fun setup and and an interesting gimmick (watching everything take place from a helpless POV). But that’s it. There wasn’t much more. And this is a great reminder for you guys. A good gimmick script can you get noticed. But if you write a gimmick script with a solid story THAT GENUINELY EXPLORES ITS CHARACTERS, that’s the kind of script that changes writers’ lives.

Blink isn’t a bad script by any means. It just didn’t have enough emotional juice to pull me in.

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

What I learned: If the only thing that’s getting resolved in your screenplay is your plot, you’re not doing enough. You need to resolve internal characters issues and you need to resolve broken relationships. That’s how you add dimension to your screenplay.

THE SCRIPTSHADOW NEWSLETTER HAS BEEN SENT! And it has a new TOP 25 script review inside. Holy Moses was this script good. If you didn’t receive the newsletter, check your SPAM and PROMOTIONS folders. If you still can’t find it, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com with subject line: “NO NEWSLETTER.” If you want to be added to the newsletter, e-mail me at that same address with the subject line: “NEWSLETTER.” Enjoy!

Read each script and vote for your favorite in the comments! Winner gets a review next Friday. Let’s find something great! Monday is a holiday here in the U.S. so I’ll be back on Tuesday…

Title: The Lone Ambassador
Genre: Sci-fi/Thriller
Logline: After a mysterious alien spaceship crash-lands near area fifty one, a ridiculed ufologist is forced to go rogue and uncover over sixty years of government secrecy.
Why You Should Read: I honestly never thought I’d be submitting one of my screenplays to script shadow, but here it is. The majority of my youth was spent in my imagination navigating beyond our world, hoping that the myth of another planet just like ours, was true. My dream was to write a story about a young-naive boy, abandoned by the naysayers who roam our society in hopes to deny our truth. Enjoy, and beat me down with brutal honesty. Thank You.

Title: The Inept
Genre: Dark Humor
Logline: Chaos ensues in quiet suburbia after Eddy finds a lost wallet and obsesses over how to return it and then win over its owner, the beautiful Lindsy Rocker.
Why You Should Read: Enter a world where dueling dildo fights, threats by midget bookies, baristas posing as psychiatrists, and mistaken identity over strippers with stomas simply represents a “bad week” for Eddy, a socially inept virgin obsessed with a photo found in a woman’s lost wallet.

Title: Damaged
Genre: Drama/Thriller
Logline: A violent ex-con is hired as an investigative crime reporter under the agreement that he will perpetrate the crimes in order to write about them.
Why You Should Read: I’ve been trying for six months now to get this script read on Scriptshadow’s Amateur Fridays. If I had to pinpoint the reason that I keep failing, I would obviously turn to my logline. I know this one comes of as generic and vague. I’ve tried re-writing it a hundred times and short of lying completely and re-vamping it to feature robots and super-hero’s, there’s not much I can do. This is the story that I have and I do truly believe that it is a good one. I was aware going in how pedestrian the subject matter could be, so I concentrated primarily on scene construction, trying to make each scene as unique and memorable as possible.

Since finishing this script I have started on something new, something more high concept and reader friendly. But I still believe that all scripts are important as they all help us to improve. This is something that I can’t do until someone reads this and tears it apart for me.

So please, I’m at the mercy of the Scriptshadow community. To paraphrase Tyler Durden, tear me down so I can build something better out of myself.

Title: Ghost Story
Genre: Horror
Logline: Soon after moving into their new apartment, a young couple’s idyllic life begins to unravel in the most horrific ways due to the presence of a malevolent spirit.
Why You Should Read: I’ve been making a living as a screenwriter here in Mumbai for the last five years, before which I studied film in Los Angeles, and even worked on a few movies as a production assistant.

I’m a horror film connoisseur, and someone who swears by the holy trinity of horror cinema: “The Exorcist,” “The Shining,” and “Alien.” Although horror is my genre of choice, I’ve also secured paid gigs writing a crime-thriller, and a Hitchcockian suspense-thriller.

Following months of depression after failing to get my first horror screenplay produced, I went about writing a story which was far more contained, thereby cheaper to produce, and thus “Ghost Story” was born. “Ghost Story” is a slow burn horror-thriller in the vein of “The Shining” and “Paranormal Activity,” but without the latter’s found footage aesthetic. What sets “Ghost Story” apart is its matter-of-fact approach in presenting supernatural events in a real and believable way. Imagine “Insidious,” but with the real world aesthetics of “The Lunchbox.” It felt great when “Ghost Story” made the quarter-finals in Screencraft’s 2015 Horror Screenplay Contest.

For the past year, I’ve been paying the bills developing concepts — two action-thrillers, and one superhero-urban fantasy — for a local production company.

I’d sincerely appreciate your feedback on “Ghost Story” — not to mention feedback from the rest of the ScriptShadow community as well — because really I want to make it better. So fingers crossed, hoping this query email piques your interest!

Title: A Falling Knife
Genre: Crime Drama
Logline: When a war erupts between two Philadelphia mob factions, a gang enforcer becomes a police informant – and falls in love with the the officer he’s feeding information. It’s THE DEPARTED meets BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN.
About Me: I started my career as a writer for a variety comedy show, but my heart was always in drama. Last year I mustered the courage to quit my comedy job and do a career pivot into drama. It’s been a challenging transition, but something I’m really happy I’ve done. It’s been tough getting noticed in a new genre, and I’ve been quite humbled by starting from scratch. So in that sense, I very much consider myself an amateur.
Why You Should Read: I think it’s a very unique twist on an evergreen world. We’ll always want gangster movies, but the same old story won’t do anymore. It needs to go somewhere new. One thing I noticed about almost every one of these movies is that the energy between these intense male characters only ever manifests itself in violence. I saw a real opening to explore the emotional side of these violent, masculine guys by creating a love story between a cop and his informant. They’re in this forbidden relationship, a star-crossed love where they are enemies and lovers at once — they have to rely on and confide in each other, while at the same time struggling to fully trust one another. It lends an inherent tension to the script that to me feels fresh. It’s not all bombs and guns (though of course, there is plenty of that) but also something deeper and wholly unexpected in this genre.