Everything Everywhere All at Once meets Time Crimes meets Mulholland Drive

Genre: Drama/Supernatural/Trippy
Premise: Burdened by the loss of his wife to a suicide cult, an embittered investigative journalist infiltrates an elite secret society, only to find something far more sinister.
About: This script finished with 14 votes on last year’s Black list. The writer, Jonathan Easley, is on the cusp of having his first produced credit with the film, Red Right Hand, coming out soon and starring Orlando Bloom.
Writer: Jonathan Easley
Details: 112 pages

Garfield for Johnny?

Just yesterday I said I hated cult backstories. But for some reason, I like cult present stories. Don’t ask me why. Actually, I know why. Because the past is the past. And movies work best in the present. So, I can pretty much get on board with anything as long as it’s happening RIGHT NOW.

And right now, we’re going to jump into the midnight pool!

Johnny is the best writer at his Los Angeles magazine, Corrosion. But Johnny’s been distracted lately. His wife, Mary, ran off to join a cult called the Golgotha Saints. Like a lot of cults, it’s just an excuse for the leader, Dhanna Purandara, to do ayahuasca, have sex with people, and spout a lot of new age nonsense.

Because of this, Johnny wants to do a profile on the cult, but that profile gets upended when his wife leaves a voicemail saying she’s going to the other side. Johnny tries to get to the compound to stop her but it’s too late. Everyone in the cult commits suicide.

Cut to three years later and Johnny wrote a book about it that’s gotten him a lot of attention. One day, he receives some photos of a man standing on a beach in cult clothing. The man is him. Confused, Johnny has his tech guy analyze the photos to see if he can find anything, and the tech discovers metadata that they were taken in a small town north of San Francisco.

So off Johnny goes, and when he gets to the town, he starts meeting all these weird characters. Some burly twins. A MAGA type dude. A prostitute who loves to take off her clothes in front of Johnny within 30 seconds of meeting him. Through these new contacts, he learns about Bethel Horizon, a secret yearly party with billionaires that involves black magic, which he gets invited to.

Once inside, he starts hobnobbing with billionaires and is told by the party’s handlers that he can write about this 2023 Wicker Man party afterwards. Cool.  Another story!  Almost immediately, strange things start happening. The leader of the party, Beatrix Belladonna, paralyzes him with black magic then communicates with him without speaking. It’s trippy city here.

(Spoiler) Eventually, Johnny finds his way down to a secret pool in the basement of the central castle and hops in. Inside, he “finds God,” and when he emerges, he’s told that it’s actually 15 days in the past. Beatrix doesn’t even know who he is. After he finds his bearings, he agrees to team up with Beatrix to lure the other version of him here, the version of him that’s still back in Los Angeles. From there, they’ll figure out how to make these two Johnnies coexist together.

Noooooo!

This one started out sooooooo good. For 20 pages, my eyes were shaped like the word “impressive.”

But then I had to remind myself of a lesson I learned when I was a wee little boy. It occurred when I saw the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, “The Sixth Day.” That moment where Arnold comes home only to find ANOTHER Arnold with his family was one of the all time great movie moments for me. I was so pumped to find out what would happen next!

I then spent the next 100 minutes bored out of my mind.

This script reminded me of that. When Johnny sees those pictures of himself in a cult robe despite never having participated in a cult, I was deeply intrigued by how that was going to play out.

The reason I had more faith in this situation than that one was that today’s writer is exceptionally good at adding detail and specificity to his writing. That usually indicates a lot more effort has been put into the plot as well.

But as soon as we get to this manor, the story becomes a cornucopia of randomness. We got drugged out girls walking into rooms and tossing off their dresses, white horses that hang out in hallways, lumberjack twins, black magic paralysis, people who are dead one second but alive the next, time travel, multiple universes.

Even if you treat the randomness like you would a David Lynch film, I still felt that the writer missed some opportunities. What originally drew me in was the devastation this man went through losing his wife to this cult psychopath. Easily could’ve started the script with the wife already dead. But he created so much more impact by having us witness her death, especially with how pointless it was. After that, I was so connected to Johnny that I was willing to go anywhere with him.

So I thought Johnny was going to investigate and expose a similar type of cult. That way, even if he didn’t save his wife, he at least would find some peace in stopping another, similar, cult. But that’s not what this movie does at all. The Bethel Horizon is a totally different monster. They’re much grander in scope. They recruit billionaires. They seem to only meet once a year. They’re not even a cult, really.

Once we established that that was the movie, I grew less and less invested in the story. Cause I wanted to connect what happened to his wife to the experiences he was going through now.

To the writer’s credit, once we get into the midnight pool, which happened around page 80, the script finds its structure again. Post-Pool Johnny is determined to recruit his past self to come up to the manor. It’s here where we learn that all of the photos Original Johnny was sent and the mysterious messages he got came from himself in the future. This Johnny is sending him these messages.

Still, I didn’t really understand the stakes of this. Why do we need to bring this other Johnny here? And then we get a double trippy plot development where we find out we’re not in our past but we’re in another universe’s past. In this separate universe, the other Johnny got married and moved on.

Which is cool, I guess. You’re capitalizing on the Everything Everywhere All At Once train. But to what end? Now I’m just confused. I don’t know why we need the other Johnny to come up here. And it doesn’t feel like the writer knows either.

Usually, when you’re writing a script like this, you’re trying to find the character arc that ends the story on the highest emotional note. Like in Everything Everywhere All At Once, Evelyn must finally accept her family. That’s the whole point of the movie, is that character arc. I don’t know what Johnny is trying to accomplish here. He gets mad at the other Johnny for moving on from Mary. But what does that mean? Where’s the emotional catharsis in that?

Look, screenwriting is hard. Not only writing a great story but writing an arc for your character that works on its own and also effortlessly weaves in the plot, is tough stuff. But you have to keep rewriting until you get there or else you get scripts like this. Scripts that have good moments but that, ultimately, don’t come together in a satisfying way.

With that said, if you like absurdist stuff – David Lynch and those types of movies – you might dig this. It certainly has its charms. It just gets too messy in places.

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

What I learned: This script reminded me of the power of seeing a death and the way it affects our hero as opposed to the death happening before the movie started. I think sometimes you don’t have a choice other than to place the death in the backstory, especially if you want to start your script with the plot already moving. But as an extended “cold open,” a family related death really makes us sympathetic to our hero. Easley nails that here in The Midnight Pool.

Yesterday, we took a look at a screenplay covering the famous Betty and Barney Hill UFO sighting. This, naturally, led to some discussion in the comments about the greatest UFO movie ever made, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

I don’t need a reason to get me to watch Close Encounters again. Just a passing mention of it and my TV is already firing up because who doesn’t want to watch an iconic film about UFOs? While watching Spielberg’s near-perfect movie, I discovered something that shocked me. It’s something you don’t see anymore.

That something is: THE HEIGHTENED MOVIE MOMENT.

These are the moments in his movies that Spielberg basically writes himself.  Or, if he doesn’t write them, he conceives of the sequence and tells the writer exactly what he wants.  His screenwriters may write the scenes whole cloth where the government explains to Indiana Jones where the Ark of the Covenant might be.  But the scene where Indiana is dragged by a truck before eventually overcoming the truck and beating up everyone on it?  That’s all Spielberg.

Basically, what the heightened movie moment is, is a big moment that is meant to be captivating all on its own. Some people might call these “set pieces,” which they can be. But they’re more than that. They’re clever imaginative dramatized scenarios that pack a punch and are highly memorable.

Close Encounters is PACKED with these moments. And the more of these moments I saw, the more I wondered why this art has been abandoned.

I would argue that Spielberg himself doesn’t even do it anymore.

So what are these moments specifically?

The first occurs with some scientists showing up in a blustery dust storm in the middle of Mexico. They’re being frantically led somewhere, the suspense building as to where and what’s going on. Then they finally come around a bend and see that there are two dozen World War 2 planes just parked out in the desert, which we quickly learn all went missing during a mission over 30 years ago.

This is followed by a really smart scene where a plane nearly hits a UFO at night. But we’re never in the plane. We see this happen back in the air traffic control tower. Our featured controller helplessly watches as an object is hurtling towards one of the planes on his screen. Again, the suspense is high. Is it going to hit this plane and kill 200 people? Then, at the last second, it disappears.

In the very next scene, we get what is, probably, the most famous image from the movie, which is when the little child is woken up by all the flashing moving electronic toys, and then follows the noises out of the house.

That’s three scenes in a row that all work individually. In other words, you don’t need to know anything about what’s going on in the movie to enjoy the scenes. Because they’re creative, imaginative, heightened, suspenseful, and are constructed as if they are their own little story with a beginning, middle, and end.

Just a few scenes later, we get another famous heightened movie moment. This is the one where Roy, our protagonist, stops his car at night, another car pulls up behind him, but then that “car” rises up and hovers above him because it’s not a car, it’s a UFO. And this UFO then proceeds to magnetically lift up everything in his car.

What’s amazing is that all four of these great scenes happen BEFORE THE 20 MINUTE MARK.

Think about that for a second. Most writers can write 5-6 movies before writing one truly memorable heightened movie moment. Spielberg had four of them within twenty minutes!! That’s INSANE!!

After the movie cools down a little bit, we then get another classic heightened movie moment where hundreds of Indians chant a strange little hymn while praying in a remote city. We get Roy going nuts, collecting items around the neighborhood in a deranged state so he can build his rendition of the mountain he keeps seeing in his dreams. And then you get that amazing final set piece where the military makes official contact with the aliens.

When do we ever get sequences like this anymore? Truly creative thoughtful suspenseful moments that are so impactful that you talk about them with people immediately afterwards? You don’t. Most of today’s “heightened movie moments” are just superheroes fighting each other.

I suspect the problem is that the special effects technology has gotten so good that people don’t have to think creatively anymore. If you can do anything, you end up doing the obvious thing. Captain America vs. Captain America. Sure, it’s a fun scene. But does it require the thoughtful energy and creativity it takes to come up with any of the Close Encounters moments? Not even close. It’s the kind of scene that Chat GPT would come up with. There’s no heart, no soul.

As I started to think about Spielberg, I realized that he built his entire career on this. He built his career on a guy running from a boulder in a cave. He built his career on people wrestling back an angry caged velociraptor. He built his career on kids flying on bikes with an alien and a full moon in the background.

Every movie he used to make, he would think of those individual powerful movie moments that work all on their own. And we just don’t see that anymore. And, again, NOT EVEN SPIELBERG does it anymore. It’s like he’s forgotten what made him great.

I think you know where this is going.

I want you to start incorporating this secret old Spielbergian philosophy into your own scripts. Think about five magical moments that take advantage of your specific premise and then incorporate them into your script, even if it means building your narrative around them. Because if there’s anything today’s taught me, it’s that a script is worthless if it doesn’t have any memorable moments.

How do you achieve this?

I know that Spielberg did a ton of research in Close Encounters. He hired J. Allen Hynek, the number one UFO authority in the world at the time. And Hynek just bombarded Spielberg with all these crazy UFO stories he’d investigated.

Spielberg then took the ones he liked the best and he built little mini-movie scenes around them. Just like any artist should do, he took the root of the real-life experience and he looked for ways to make it more dramatic and impactful.

For example, when it comes to the famous scene of a UFO appearing above a car and turning everything in the car off, I suspect that Spielberg may have added the idea of the UFO first coming up behind them and looking like headlights. And then I’m guessing he added the magnetism pulling everything in the car upwards.

So look to real-life events in the subject matter you’re writing about to find the foundation of your heightened movie moments. For example, if you’re writing a plane crash movie, research 10 famous plane crashes. I’m sure you’ll find one you can use as the foundation for an amazing movie moment (which actually happened, by the way – John Gatins, who wrote “Flight,” heard about a plane that got inverted once in flight and used that as the basis for his movie’s crash).

You should also be drawing from experiences in your own life and looking for ways to dramatize them. I think of all those toys going berserk at once. I’m guessing that wasn’t something Allen Hynek offered. Spielberg probably had a memory from his childhood of a few of his electronic toys moving around and realized it would make for a highly dramatic moment if he could exaggerate it and have a bunch of toys moving around at the same time.

So use those moments from your life that really affected you and build scenes around them. Oh, and DON’T USE MOMENTS FROM MOVIES YOU’VE SEEN. Then you’re just copying.

Also, use suspense! Notice how Spielberg doesn’t just come into these scenes and give you the information. He draws it out for as long as he can in order to get the most entertainment value out of the scene. So, when they get to Mexico, in the opening, we don’t plop down in front of all the missing planes right away. We meet people beforehand. We see their excitement and confusion. We want to know what they’re excited and confused about. The planes aren’t clear at first. They are hiding amongst swirling dust (more suspense! What are we looking at??).

Even when the planes do become clear, we’re not even sure why we should we be freaking out about planes. We have to go a few more beats into the scene before we find out that these are lost planes from World War 2. It’s a clinic in writing an entertaining scene.

Since writers aren’t doing this anymore, everyone reading this article has just been given a golden ticket to writing awesome screenplays. Because if you can bring this practice back effectively, your scripts are going to be so much more entertaining than the stuff everybody else is writing. Personally, I can’t wait to see what you come up with.

Genre: Horror/Dark Comedy
Premise: A prolific serial killer struggles to suppress her desire to kill during a weekend-long engagement party hosted by her new fiance’s wealthy, obnoxious family.
About: Our Showdown-winning logline! Rosemary won the contest with 33 and a half votes. That was 35% of the total votes.
Writer: Sam Van Meter
Details: 100 pages

Winner winner In-N-Out Dinner!

“Rosemary” is the winner of the February Logline Showdown.

Congratulations to Sam Van Meter.

Next Logline Showdown is Friday, March 24th.

Send me: Title, Genre, Logline
E-mail: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
Rules: Script must be written
Deadline: Thursday, March 23rd, at 10pm Pacific Time
Cost: Free

The big theme of today’s review is execution-dependent concepts. Some concepts are harder to pull off than others. Today is one of those concepts. In general, any time you’re working in the satire or black comedy department, it’s harder to make your screenplay work because tonal consistency is tricky in these genres.

All right, let’s get into…. ROSEMARY!

When we meet 30 year old Rosemary, she’s in the park reading a book, upside-down I may add – the book, not the person (she’s a bit of an odd duck) – when a guy comes up to her and starts chatting her up. We’re keen enough to gather this isn’t the first time she’s done this. Especially after she murders the guy, along with a biker who witnessed the kill.  Yup, Rosemary is a serial killer.

Cut to some time later and we meet 33 year old Charlie Page. Charlie is a normal dude. Possibly a bit nerdy. He’s got a fun little description that sums him up: “Charlie is short, slightly scrawny. He moves with an awkwardness that is endearing to some and annoying to others.” You wouldn’t suspect that he’d be able to bag a looker like Rosemary. And yet, as it turns out, he has.

Charlie knows that he’s got a good thing going so he proposes to Rosemary. She’s unsure at first because, unbeknownst to Charlie, she realizes that if she goes down this road, she’ll have to give up reading books upside-down and, oh yeah, serial killing. But after some deliberation, she chooses Charlie.

Once Charlie’s douchebag brother, Zach, finds out about this, he tells the family, and the next thing you know, an engagement party that Charlie does not endorse has been announced. Rosemary is surprised to find that Charlie’s family is mega-rich and lives on a sprawling estate.

Right away, Rosemary doesn’t like anyone. Zach makes fun of his brother non-stop. Robyn, Charlie’s mother, can’t stop putting her son down. Rick, the father, seems like one of those self-important rich people who demand that the world revolve around them. All of these people are stirring up Rosemary’s killer tendencies.

After Rosemary discovers something about herself that changes everything, Charlie learns that his family is involved in some shady business practices and that some equally shady people will be showing up at the party to collect the money they’re owed.  After Rosemary can’t hold it in any longer and starts killing people, she meets her match: A guy named Pablo who has killed a lot more people than she has.  Will she survive this unforeseen predicament?

The first thing that struck me about this script was how easy it was to read. The first scene is nearly all dialogue, which helps.  I always forget how important this is until I read a script like Rosemary! Only then do I look back at the last eight scripts I read and think, “Oh, that’s why those scripts were such chores.”

It’s a smart little trick in screenwriting if you find yourself writing something character-driven. Start your script off with pure dialogue and it creates this illusion that the script is flying by. Not only that, but Sam smartly adds very little description. So your eyes REALLY fly down the page.

Even beyond that, Sam has a very easy-to-read writing style. Sparse. To the point. But still with just enough flare to keep it entertaining. This is how screenwriting is supposed to be!

But while the read was always easy, the content of the read was challenging. The opening scene has Rosemary reading a book in a park. A guy approaches her. They chat. She starts walking with him. She finds out he’s married, kills him, then kills a biker who witnessed the murder.

We’ve talked about this so many times on the site that I’m tempted not to belabor the issue. But your protagonist’s first scene has such an outsized impact on how your reader sees them that if we don’t like their actions enough that we don’t want to root for them, your script is done right there. Seriously. Not a single word you write after that matters.

Rosemary kills a married guy who was hitting on her and then, also, a witness. Is the potential infidelity of a random person merit for murdering them? Of course not. It’s not the classiest move on the guy’s part. But do they deserve death? No. So that’s a strike against Rosemary. But I think I could’ve gone along with that, in a movie logic way, if that was all she did. The fact that she also killed this totally innocent biker dude who was riding by. That’s when I decided I despised this woman.

From that point forward, I just couldn’t get on board with the fun part that I was promised in the logline, which was that Rosemary would try and resist killing the most obnoxious people in the world at her engagement party. Didn’t matter how bad they were. I knew she was worse.

We actually have a great comp for this to see how to do it right. Promising Young Woman had a similar opening to Rosemary and it feels like a spiritual influence. But what was different about the famous Promising Young Woman opening? Well, for one, she doesn’t kill anyone. She actually does something both worse and more palatable. She threatens to destroy their reputation – to force them to live the rest of their life in shame. That to me, at least philosophically, is a far worse punishment.  And yet it doesn’t leave us disliking the character.

Also, she had a logical motivation for doing this to people. She was striking fear in the type of guys who raped her friend, which led to that friend’s suicide, in the hopes that they wouldn’t do the same to some other girl. So she has a noble cause. And I know that cause isn’t given in the first scene. But we can tell that she’s doing this for a reason. She’s not doing this cause she’s bored. And, unfortunately, that’s the vibe I got from Rosemary. That she kills people because she’s bored.

Now, there’s a counter-argument to this that I would suspect Sam would make. Which is that Rosemary is a serial killer. She kills people. That’s how psychopaths operate. If you start giving her too much motivation, are we being truthful to her compulsion?

This is why I was musing in the comments section yesterday how execution-dependent these scripts are. It’s because there are all these fractions of tonal directions you can go in, each of which can change the entire feel of your script. We don’t have to bring a biker into this opening scene, for example. That’s a small creative choice that ends up having an outsized influence on how we perceive Rosemary.

But even beyond that, this particular setup where we have to root for a serial killer is always tricky. Cause think about it. You are asking us to ROOT FOR SOMEONE WHO KILLS PEOPLE. The variations of this that are successful have writers who put an inordinate amount of time into figuring how to make that scenario work. Serial killer Dexter kills other serial killers. So it’s easy to root for him.

I’m guessing Sam was inspired by the recent success of “You,” and that’s probably the best tonal comparison for this script. Cause Joel is a cold-hearted killer and I had no problem rooting for him. I have found that, when you write bad people, it can be helpful to give us a running-commentary of what’s going on in their head through voice over narration. It helps us better understand why they’re doing what they’re doing. Joel benefits from that for sure.

But if I was Sam’s screenplay lawyer, I would tell this Scriptshadow review guy that Joel and Rosemary are cut from the same cloth. If you’re going to root for him, why can’t you root for her? Which is what makes screenwriting and scripts like this so interesting to discuss. There are no simple answers. Plus, everybody has a different threshold for what they’re willing to accept out of a character.

The script does rebound once it hits the second act due to the fact that we don’t like these family members. So we’re curious if Rosemary’s going to dispose of them. Then it’s a fun game of waiting to see what she’s going to do. And, for the most part, I thought that worked.  The climax is also worth getting to.  It takes the script in a different direction than I was expecting.

My issue with it, though, was that the badness of these family characters seemed to be set up as too obvious. Zach is so over the top douchey. The mother is so needlessly cruel to her son. The dad embodies everything that is wrong with the 1-percenters. It never felt like these were real people. They felt more like caricatures designed specifically so that we would want to see them die.

Ultimately, it was that combination that didn’t work for me. A main character I didn’t like because she initially kills people who don’t deserve to die. And family victims who were so overtly designed to die that it didn’t feel like she was killing people. She was killing archetypes.

There’s one final example I wanted to highlight that exemplified my problem with the character of Rosemary. When Charlie proposes to her, her first reaction is a daydream. She imagines bashing him over the head and throwing him off a building to his death. This guy, who loves this woman. Who is in his most vulnerable moment, seeing if she’ll share the rest of her life with him, and that’s her first thought?? Why would I want to root for that person?

For “Rosemary” to work, I think Sam needs to find a way to make us care about Rosemary. The good news is, Sam is a very good writer. So I suspect that even if he can’t make this tricky story work, that his future scripts are going to be worth looking out for.

Script Link: Rosemary

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

What I learned: Remember that a comma, or lack of a comma, can make a line read differently. “Charles! How are you handsome?” is the line used in the script. It should be, “Charles! How are you, handsome?” Otherwise, you’re asking Charles how is it that he could possibly be handsome.

GET A PRIVATE SCRIPT CONSULTATION FROM CARSON!: Don’t like the idea of your logline or script being reviewed by the public?  Get a private consult with me!  I consult on loglines ($25), feature screenplays ($499) and everything in between.  If you’re unsure what it is you need, e-mail me.  I’ll answer everything you want to know and help you come up with a consultation that works for you.  Just this past week I consulted on a synopsis, an outline, a first act, and a writer who sent me five loglines and wanted to know which one he should write as a script!  So there’s a lot of flexibility if you need advice.  You can set up a consult with me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com.

Is Victoria Pedretti our Rosemary?

I get a lot of e-mails after these Logline Showdowns from writers who are miffed that their loglines didn’t make the big show. While I don’t have time to respond to every one of these inquiries (I can respond to anyone who gets a logline consultation – they’re $25 – e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com), I can tell you why the loglines from this last showdown that did well, did well.  And why the ones that didn’t, didn’t. In doing so, I can help you better understand why loglines get picked.   

Thanks to Scott, we have a clear breakdown of the voting…

Rosemary: 33 ½ votes (35%)
A prolific serial killer struggles to suppress her desire to kill during a weekend-long engagement party hosted by her new fiance’s wealthy, obnoxious family.

Fear City: 28 votes (29%)
A serial killer has an entire city living in fear – until he is kidnapped by three petty crooks looking to make their big score. The ransom demand they make to City Hall is chillingly simple: “Give us a million dollars or we’ll let him go again”…

Proven: 18 ½ votes (19%)
When three, poverty-stricken best friends attempt to strike it rich by retrieving a dead Bigfoot from a remote river, their plan is endangered by a rapidly rising tide and the team of vicious hunters who killed the beast.

Ninestein: 11 votes (11%)
Scientists attempt to clone Albert Einstein to save the earth from an incoming asteroid, but when the process goes awry they are left with nine clones, each just a fraction as smart as the original.

Olympus Park: 3 votes (3%)
When a naive businessman unveils a theme park of reincarnated historical figures, he must convince a ruthless FBI agent that his attractions are safe when a clone of Elvis Presley appears violent.

Tide Pool: 3 votes (3%)
Two good Samaritans, with their relationship on the brink of collapse, find themselves in a fight for survival while attempting to rescue a juvenile great white shark that has become stranded in a rock pool during low tide.

Rosemary
Rosemary was the very first logline I found in the submissions that I knew would make the Showdown. And, after picking the rest of the loglines, I knew it was the best logline of the bunch. Why was it the best logline? A few reasons. One, loglines tend to pop more when they have irony. You have a serial killer at an engagement party. Serial killers are supposed to slink around the dark rainy streets of the worst parts of town, scouting potential victims. They’re not supposed to be in happy fun places like engagement parties. The serial killer is also a woman, which is not traditional. So that further helps the idea feel different. But the aspect of the logline that puts it over the top are the words “struggles” and “obnoxious.” We’ve all had those dark not entirely authentic thoughts, at some point in our lives, of offing the really obnoxious people we encounter. So to be in a party full of these people? And to have this serial killer act as our wish-fulfillment vessel?  Just like that you’ve made your serial killer protagonist sympathetic. It’s, by far, the most clever setup of the bunch. And, if it’s executed well, you’ve got a slam-dunk movie on your hands. We’ll find out tomorrow if the execution is as strong as the logline when I review the script.

Fear City
Fear City was the sexiest concept of the bunch. So I knew it was going to do well. It had that big flashy “high concept” pitch that more writers used to know how to construct during the days of weekly million dollar spec sales. However, I understand why it lost to Rosemary. The logline isn’t nearly as elegant. You’ve got two sentences instead of one. While it’s not required that your logline be only one sentence, the best writers tend to know how to distill their idea down to one sentence. I definitely feel that those two sentences gave the logline a slightly clunkier feel, which I can attest to personally since I had to read it twice to make sure I got it. Without fail, whenever a logline is clunky, the script is clunky as well. So there may have been some hesitation to vote for the script for that reason. I might still review the script at some point and be proven wrong. We’ll see.

Proven
Proven was the biggest wild card of the bunch. I knew that Rosemary and Fear City were probably going to beat it but I didn’t know where it would land in the remaining four. I do think you get a leg up in your concept if you’re dealing with these popular culture legends. Bigfoot. Atlantis. The Bermuda Triangle. The Loch Ness monster. They’re IP-gold. They give your concept an immediate shine. But as I told the writer via e-mail, it’s a tough sell to build your movie around a dead Bigfoot. He’s such an iconic figure that when you present a story around him that provides no hope – he’s dead and that’s it – a portion of your potential audience won’t be onboard. The writer was adamant that doing so wasn’t right for his movie (he pointed out that there’s a dead young boy in Stand By Me and we went along with it) and I respect every writer’s right to write the story they want to write. But I suspect that if there was a twist, after they pick up Bigfoot, that he’s actually clinging to life? And that their initial motivation – to make money off the dead body – changes to trying to save its life?  That this logline would’ve won the competition. Feel free to offer your thoughts on whether I’m right or wrong in the comments!

Ninestein
Ninetstein was my little underdog pick for the Showdown. When it comes to comedy loglines, you want the reader to physically laugh when they read your logline. And that’s exactly what happened in the case of Ninestein. But my big fear was that Ninestein was an idea that only worked as a logline and not as a movie. Which I noticed several of you picked up on. Cause when you think about it, how do you create 9 dumbed-down Einsteins that are all unique? Usually in these “multiple versions of the same character” movies, there’s one super dumb version. But here, you’d need nine super-dumb versions, and then you’d need to somehow make them all different form one another. I just don’t know how you do that. I’m still curious about this logline though and I may review the script at some point.

Olympus Park
I went back and forth about whether to include Olympus Park. The writer’s been persistent but never annoying, which is something I admire. And there is something potentially interesting about a park full of cloned historical figures. But the reason I’ve resisted this logline for so many other showdowns is because of the Elvis part. As soon as Elvis is mentioned, the reader has a big fat “WTF??” reaction. As tons of you have pointed out, it’s a bizarre non-sequitur that feels disconnected from the first part of the logline. Why not have Genghis Khan go crazy? Isn’t that a much more logical conflict? I sensed that the writer was going to get beat up on that and he did. I noticed that he’s since stated that focusing on Elvis in the logline was a mistake because the story is more nuanced than that. But I don’t know. I still think he’s taking a fun idea and not focusing on the right elements to bring out that fun. Which is what all of us should be doing. When we come up with a fun idea, ask ourselves how to best take advantage of that idea.

Tide Pool
The reason I picked this logline was three-fold. One, sharks always sell. They will never stop making shark movies. Two, the writer was doing something different with his shark concept. And three, I liked the irony. Instead of trying to avoid a shark, we’re trying to help a shark. With all that being said, I knew this was going to finish last for several reasons. One, can we please stop capitalizing words that don’t require capitalization (Samaritans). That’s a huge red flag right there. Two, it sounds like we have a kid shark here? In other words, you’ve made your shark *less* dangerous? That’s typically not a good strategy when coming up with a movie idea. Third, a lot of you pointed out this was happening in a little miniature pool, giving it a very low-stakes feel. And finally, it’s not clear why they’re in a fight for survival. I’m not even clear on if this shark is dangerous since it’s a young and, therefore, smaller shark. It also sounds like it’s easy to stand in this area? So wouldn’t maneuvering away from the shark be easy? I could keep going. But the point is, when this many questions pop up during a logline, potential readers end up bailing. Their attitude is, “If you can’t even be clear in a 30-word logline, why would I expect you to be clear telling a 20,000 word story?” This is why it’s so important to get feedback on your loglines because people like me can tell you this before you burn opportunities!

So what are the lessons learned today?

1. Irony is your friend when it comes to loglines.
2. The sexier the concept, the more people will overlook the weaknesses in your logline.
3. When it comes to beloved anything (in this case, Bigfoot), the audience wants there to be hope involved.
4. Beware of loglines that work great as loglines but start to break down when imagined as movies.
5. Avoid pulling plot points out of left field. Just cause it makes sense to you doesn’t mean it will make sense to others.  Get feedback so you know it makes sense!
6. If you have a dangerous and, therefore, compelling situation, don’t look for ways to make it less dangerous.

I will see you back here tomorrow for my script review of winning logline, Rosemary!!!

NEXT LOGLINE SHOWDOWN

The next Logline Showdown is happening on Friday, March 24th. If you want to enter you need to get me your loglines by Thursday, March 23rd, 10pm Pacific Time.

Send me: Title, Genre, Logline
E-mail: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
Rules: Script must be written
Deadline: Thursday, March 23rd, at 10pm Pacific Time
Cost: Free

GET A PRIVATE SCRIPT CONSULTATION FROM CARSON!: Don’t like the idea of your logline or script being reviewed by the public?  Get a private consult with me!  I consult on loglines ($25), feature screenplays ($499) and everything in between.  If you’re unsure what it is you need, e-mail me.  I’ll answer everything you want to know and help you come up with a consultation that works for you.  Just this past week I consulted on a synopsis, an outline, a first act, and a writer who sent me five loglines and wanted to know which one he should write as a script!  So there’s a lot of flexibility if you need advice.  You can set up a consult with me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com.

Genre: Satire/Comedy
Premise: Shunned by elite society as a member of the gig economy, a sociopathic dog walker infiltrates an exclusive L.A. community with designs of reaching the top of the neighborhood’s social ladder.
About: This script finished in the top 10 of last year’s Black List with 20 votes. This appears to be the brothers’ first big screenplay.
Writers: Briggs and Wes Watkins
Details: 100 pages

Lili Reinhart for Dylan?

A few people told me this wasn’t very good. But it does come from a sub-genre that I like. So we’ll see what happens. Oh yeah, a quick note. This script has a lot of twists and turns. It is best enjoyed reading it yourself rather than reading my synopsis. Because my synopsis WILL reveal spoilers.

24 year old Dylan is squatting in a Hollywood apartment, not doing anything with her life that I could discern other than her hobby of sneaking into rich peoples’ houses and pretending that she lives there until the owners come home and she has to sneak out.

One night, while hanging out in a Beachwood house, a dog-walker comes in and catches her there. The dog-walker doesn’t report her though. Instead, she tells Dylan that if she wants to sneak into peoples’ houses, she should walk dogs.

This is a lightbulb moment for Dylan, who immediately visits a dog park the next day and notices a beautiful woman named Jessica walking an even more beautiful dog. Jessica’s dog is the clear star of this dog park and so Dylan tries to befriend her to see if she can work for her.

When Jessica blows her off, Dylan follows her up to a Griffith Park hill trail, kills her, then kicks her dead body over the cliff. She takes the dog, heads back to the owners home, and informs the couple living there, Shira and Jacob, that Jessica has moved on and she will now be walking the dog.

Dylan does this for a while until the dog attacks and nearly kills another dog who happens to be walked by… the very girl who caught her in the first house and told her about this whole dog-walking gig. Dylan makes a run for it but eventually, our initial dog-walker, whose name is Anna, finds her.

She makes casual chit-chat with Dylan BEFORE KILLING HER!!! That’s right. Another murder. Who wrote this? Bing ChatGPT? And we’re only on page 45! With Dylan now dead, we start following Anna, who wants to do what Dylan was doing who wanted to do what Jessica was doing.

Anna makes friends with some other dog-walkers but when they suspect that she may have some information on the death of Jessica, she goes into self-preservation mode.  She then makes a bold move, blackmailing Shira and Jacob, knowing that if they don’t consider her dangerous, she’s done. Will Anna’s plan work?  Or will she end up like her predecessors?

In the words of the great Iggy Pop, “I’m a real wild one. And I like a wild fun. In a world gone crazy. Everything seems hazy. I’m a wild one. Oh yeah, I’m a wild one.”

This was a wild one, folks.

I’m still not even sure what I read. But I wouldn’t call it un-entertaining. Maybe uneven.

Whenever you’re trying to write sophisticated satire – which I’m pretty sure is what this script is – you have to be smarter than everyone in the room. There can’t be any clunky moments or frayed edges. We really have to feel, as the reader, that you are in total command of this commentary.

I didn’t feel that way. It started with the opening page.

The “whatever” is unnecessary. “Green as cash” is not a great visual simile. The road “slims and winds.” “Slims” is an awkward word to use there. Hidden behind walls of “Indian Laurel.” I don’t know what that means. Is there a famous Indian girl named Laurel who’s cloned herself and stands outside every house in Beachwood? “Gain a zero on their price tags” is an, arguably, try-hard line. “As we smear by them” is a strange description. I have to strain to imagine it.

I’m probably being too hard on this page but it definitely prioritizes style over clarity and that’s something I never endorse. Clarity must always come first in screenwriting. So, right from the start, I was wary.

Another problem is that I could never figure Dylan out. Since her whole life was a lie, I didn’t have anything to grab onto, relate to, or care about. There was so much distance between me and her that I never felt close enough to her story.

Why is she doing this? Where did this compulsion come from? Why is she squatting around in Hollywood and sneaking into peoples’ houses? We don’t know. We’re asked to buy that at face value and that’s not how storytelling works. We have to know why humans are doing the things they’re doing in order to become invested and interested.

A good example is the movie, Emily The Criminal. In that screenplay, the writer makes sure to take us through Emily’s struggles of trying to get a job, subsequently working a job she hates. So that when she’s given this opportunity to make money by stealing, we know why she’s doing it.

Meanwhile, I barely know Dylan and, out of nowhere, she kills this dog-walker and kicks her off a cliff and I’m just supposed to go with it?

Of course, I eventually realized why this was the case. Dylan wasn’t written to make it through the story. She gets killed. Which was a huge shock. But it would’ve resonated more had we felt some attachment to her.

To the Watkins credit, there’s some fun stuff going on here with the way the characters feed into the story. We meet this random dog-walker in that opening scene – the one who catches Dylan in the home, then we forget about her. Only to meet her again, 50 pages later, and then she becomes the main character.

Dylan also meets this character named Noah in the dog park early on the story. He disappears. But then, when Anna takes the lead role in the story, she meets Noah as well and also befriends him. So it was cool how these characters were woven into this weird tapestry of a screenplay.

But I just don’t know what to make of this thing. There are so many creative choices that make you go, “hmmmmm….” There’s an entire scene dedicated to expressing a dog’s anal glands in front of a small audience that felt more like it belonged in a 1998 Farrelly Brothers movie than in this sophisticated satire.

And then there are only really short dialogue scenes the whole movie before 80 pages in where we get this gigantic six page dialogue scene that comes out nowhere. Some of you might not think that’s a big deal. But screenplays have a rhythm. And if you establish that rhythm only to completely upend it, it’s jarring. The reader isn’t sure what to make of it.

However, I will say this. This script is the most unpredictable script in the Top 10 of last year’s Black List. It’s weird. It’s kinda fun. Even though it has problems, it does leave an impression on you. For those reasons, I think it’s worth reading.

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

What I learned: I like when writers keep their character in a state of desperation. It forces the character to constantly act and solve problems, which often results in interesting dramatic situations. Just as Dylan gets the dog-walking job with Jacob and Shira, she gets kicked out of the apartment she’s squatting at. So now she doesn’t have any place to live. This places a question in the reader’s mind – What is she going to do now? – that compels them to keep reading to find out the answer. If she never would’ve gotten kicked out, that’s one less reason to care what happens next.