So what’s the big news I was teasing on Twitter the other day? We’re going to write a screenplay! That is correct. Every Thursday over the next three months, I am going to take you through each step of the process, leaving you with a finished screenplay to go out into the world with. How cool is that??

What’s the idea here? A few things. First, to help those still trying to figure out how to write a script. Those of you in the beginning stages confused with all the jargon and the rules, I’m going to take you step by step through the process, making it as painless as possible.

Second, to give those of you with your own writing process a new way to look at things. I’m hoping that a fresh take on the process will allow you to see the craft in a whole new light. Even if you don’t adopt the process I lay out, I’m sure you’ll take a few things with you moving forward.

Third, and most importantly, I want you to have a finished screenplay. Writing is synonomous with procastination and we often find ourselves eight months into a script with no idea where to go next. With me breathing down your neck, you won’t be able to make excuses for not writing anymore. We’re going to have deadlines every week. And I’m going to make sure you meet them so that at the end of three months, you will have a 110 page screenplay.

To make this fun, at the end of the process, we’re going to have a tournament. I’m going to pick the top 40 or so loglines/pitches and stagger a series of Super Amateur Showdowns (10 scripts instead of five). We’ll have a quarter-finals, a semi-finals, and a finals, where you guys will vote the best scripts through.

During that time, you’ll be allowed to use the notes you get from each showdown to improve your script for the next round. This is what Scriptshadow does better than anywhere else – crowd-sourcing feedback. We’re going to take advantage of that to make these scripts the best they can possibly be.

Now I know a lot of you are rushing to meet that May 1st Nicholl Fellowship deadline. So we’re going to wait until that’s over and you’re free of any script commitments.

But that doesn’t mean you’re off the hook. Since we’ll be starting in two weeks, YOU NEED A CONCEPT. The concept is the most important part of the process. If you don’t have a good concept, nothing you write during those three months will matter.

So here’s the deal: start thinking of concepts. Start sharing concepts with your friends. You can share them here in the comments or if you’re a private person, ask people to share privately via e-mail. But I strongly encourage you to get feedback on your concept(s) before committing. If people don’t sound excited about your idea, come up with something else.

In fact, I’m going to allow you each to send me a single e-mail with up to 5 loglines (carsonreeves3@gmail.com) and I will give you a 1-10 rating on each. If your logline doesn’t at least get a 7, go with something else. And because I’m going to get a ton of e-mails, I WILL NOT be able to get into detail about why I gave your logline the rating I did. This is just meant as a way to give you a quick opinion on if your loglines are working.

We’ll get a little more into concept next week, and then the week after, WE BEGIN. So sharpen those pencils cause we’re going to write a F&%$ING SCREENPLAY!

Genre: Horror
Premise: Fifteen years after the witch trials, the scars of Salem are reopened when young women begin showing up dead. Desperate for answers, the town elders turn to a man of science to uncover the truth.
About: This one comes from flashy upstart studio/prodco STX, responsible for last year’s awesome, “The Gift,” and more recently, the bold first-person flick, “Hardcore Henry.” The script, which also landed on last year’s Black List, was penned by upstart writing team, Mark Bianculli and Jeff Richard.
Writers: Mark Bianculli & Jeff Richard
Details: 108 pages – 2nd Draft

A lot of people are comparing this project to the recently released hit indie film, The Witch. I’m about to get a little controversial here, but I just have to say it. The Witch sucked. That movie was garbage. Don’t get me wrong. It was wonderfully directed and the acting was great and the score was amazing, and the atmosphere was intense. But there was one, oh, minor problem. NOTHING EVER FUCKING HAPPENED!!!

I kept waiting for something to happen in that stupid movie and it never did. And finally, we get to the end where I’m hoping we’re going to finally get some sort of payoff for all this time and energy we’ve put into this. And instead we’re treated to the most vague b.s. nonsense climax in the history of cinema. It made me want to throw my TV into the ocean.

Yeah, but other than that, I loved it. :)

No, I bring this up because Salem Village taps into the same world as The Witch did. It just does so way better. There’s an actual story here. And it’s one of the better horror stories I’ve come across in awhile.

It’s the early 1700s. The town of Salem is slowly recovering from their witch trials, an event whereby the town clergy hanged a group of women believed to be witches. It’s been 15 years since, and Salem thinks of itself as a bit more progressive. So when a young woman in town starts exhibiting witch-like symptoms, they call in famous doctor, Robert Curtin, a man of science, to figure out what’s wrong.

The confident, and at times, arrogant, Curtin, arrives at the town Inn, run by a beautiful pregnant young woman named Anna, who’s been forced to run the Inn by herself as her husband has been away at sea.

Curtin goes to inspect the supposedly afflicted young woman, who lays in bed all day and acts possessed n shit. And just when he thinks he’s figured out what’s wrong with her (she’s been eating rotten grain), she dies. This is followed by the mysterious deaths of two other women, one of whom was plastered to her ceiling via a pitchfork. Sweet.

Some townspeople think nasty spirits are at work here. Others find it suspicious that these women started dying right when Curtin arrived in town. Curtin does his best to preach the gospel of science – that there has to be a logical answer to all this. But when a few more women turn up dead, his pleas fall on deaf ears.

Eventually we realize what all these women had in common – they were accusers of the witches who were executed. And Anna, the Inn Keeper and Curtin’s closest ally, reveals to him a secret – that she provided an off-the-record accusation of the witches as well. Which means she could be next.

As the town is whipped further into a frenzy, Curtin will have to decide whether they are too far gone to accept a logical explanation for all this. Then again, Curtin is starting to have his own doubts about logic. Could there really be otherworldly forces at play here?

I’m about to blow your collective geek minds here. And I don’t want to oversell this. But Salem Village was like The Wicker Man meets Seven meets The Exorcist. There, I said it. Expectations have been set. But I’m serious. On the Seven front, some of the death scenes in here were amazeballs. There’s a scene where rats eat a woman alive. How awesome is that?

So what makes this so good? I always tell you guys that the scripts that impress me the most are the ones where I don’t know where the story is going next, yet when the story goes there, it still makes sense.

Let me explain that in more detail. Anybody can write a screenplay where we don’t know where you’re going with it. I can write some stream-of-conscious bullshit that starts with a man stealing a car and ends with that same man turning into an alien and running a burger joint on the moon. You would have had no idea I was going there, but the lack of connective tissue between where I started and where I ended results in the experience feeling random and unsatisfying.

What’s MUCH harder to do is to create a series of unexpected plot choices that still make sense. So for example, I thought this was going to be a possession movie. Our doctor was going to come in try and figure out what was wrong with this woman. But then the woman dies at the end of the first act and it’s like, “What now?” And “what now” is that women start getting murdered. So now we’ve moved from a possession movie to a serial killer movie. And yet, the writers manage to keep it all under the same roof. Explanations eventually come up that allow all of this to make sense.

To find that balance and to pull those bold plot changes off seamlessly is hard to do.

Another strength here was the scene-writing and I want to highlight one scene in particular that really sold me on these writers. It had to do with tension. You want to create tension in your scenes wherever possible. But it’s practically required in a horror script.

So the large majority of the people in Salem don’t want Dr. Curtin here. They think science is bullshit and want him gone. One of the first scenes, then, has Dr. Curtin going to inspect the possessed girl. Of course, all the major town players (the reverend, the Mayor, the judge) all come with him as they want to see what he’s going to do.

We’d previously established that this woman attacked and maimed a young nurse. So we know she’s dangerous.

Now here she is, laying on this bed, staring at the ceiling, completely still. Dr. Curtin is forced to lean down over her, get very close to her face, so he can examine her. It’s a classic horror set up. You know that at any moment this woman could leap up and attack Dr. Curtin. So each moment his face is down there, inches from hers, you’re on the edge of your seat. There’s tension oozing out of every pour of the page.

And you know what? If the writers would’ve kept it at that, it would’ve been a fine scene. But what makes the scene great is all the men behind Curtin. None of them believe in him. They think science is bullshit – that otherworldly factors are at play here. So you feel THEIR TENSION as well.

And so you had this great moment where there’s tension IN FRONT of Dr. Curtin and BEHIND Dr. Curtin. And even though it’s one of the quieter scenes in the movie, that SQUEEZE provides the moment with tons of energy. It’s just so intense.

The one strike against Salem Village, and the thing that almost stole an “impressive” from it was the ending. Now there’s a twist here. It’s pretty good. It maybe could’ve been better. But it wasn’t the twist itself that was the issue. It was the explanation afterwards that I had an issue with. It was one of those “good but not great” moments. And really, it’s a victim of its own awesomeness. The rest of the script was so damn good that the ending had a lot to live up to. I’m still happy with it. I guess I wanted a little bit more though.

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

What I learned: Look to create tension in a scene from multiple angles. Tension in front of your character works great. But if you can add tension behind them or to the side of them, or even from within them, that’s going to make the scene even better.

Today’s pilot comes from one of the most successful spec writers of the decade and stars the biggest TV action star in the universe!

Genre: TV Pilot Thriller/Drama
Premise: When the president of the United States and his immediate chain of command are killed in a terrorist attack, the Secretary of State, a man ill-suited for the job, is thrust into the position.
About: David Guggenheim burst onto the scene when his spec, Safe House, went nuclear, garnering the rare “fast track” green light from the studio and nabbing Denzel Washington in the process. The success of the sale as well as the film allowed Guggenheim to follow up with several high-profile spec sales, and I’m sure untold lucrative writing assignments. Guggenheim has turned his focus to TV now, and Designated Survivor was probably the highest profile sale of the season, opening up a huge bidding war, no doubt helped by the addition of Keifer Sutherland in the lead role
Writer: David Guggenheim
Details: 69 pages (undated – no title page so I’m not sure what draft this is)

I swore it would never happen again. I was so disappointed with the straight-down-the-middle product that the Big 4 networks were churning out that I refused to ever read a Big 4 pilot again. Allow me to paddle down the stream of a Netflix adventure. Allow me to Hulu-hoop my way through a Hulu original. But one more of these cringe-worthy by-the-book eye-closers on a Big 4? I’d rather wrap my face inside of a Brisket Burrito (inside Twitter joke).

So let me tell you why I lifted my moratorium on these shows today. One, because I’m too tired to read a feature. Two, this is a very feature-like premise. Three, it’s written by one of the most successful spec writers of the last five years. And four, because it sparked a major bidding war. Now does any of this mean the pilot will actually be good? Probably not. But we can hope!

Man, can Tim Kirkman catch a break? The 41 year-old Secretary of State is seen by just about everyone as a governmental liability. His main issue? He isn’t strong enough. When the going gets tough, the tough may get going, but Tim Kirkman gets going in the other direction.

So it isn’t much of a surprise when the President of the United States calls him in and asks him to demote himself to a Canadian Advisory position. Kirkman tells the prez he needs a night to think about it (translation: I’ll do what you ask but pretend to think about it overnight to save face). And that’s when shit go cray-cray.

While giving a speech, someone blows the president and several other high-ranking government officers up, leaving guess-who as the successor to the presidential throne? None other than the guy who just got fired earlier in the day.

Kirkman is sworn in and, with the country on a high state of alert, immediately faces a whirlwind of problems. Is this just the first of many attacks? What’s coming next? What do they do? All eyes are on Kirkman, and not a single person in the White House believes in him.

Shit gets real when an oil tanker heading into an East Coast port won’t respond to a ‘stand down’ order. The tanker is just 60 seconds away from being capable of blowing up an entire East Coast City if, indeed, it’s being operated by terrorists. Everyone turns to Kirkman. Can they blow it up? Give the word. Their missiles are waiting. At the last second, the tanker stops, apologizing for a radio malfunction. Whoa, Kirkman thinks. A couple more seconds and he would’ve killed 250 innocent people. This job is hard!

Next up is the most important presidential speech in the history of the country. Kirkman must work hand in hand with a young speech writer to convince not just the United States that he’s capable of leading them, but every single man and woman working underneath him here at the White House. Will he succeed? We’ll have to see.

Straight up truth? This was good. A lot better than I thought it would be. And was it straight-down-the-middle Big 4 generic TV? Kind of. But what Guggenheim brings from his feature spec roots is an ability to MOVE THE STORY FORWARD QUICKLY. This pilot had a ton of urgency, preventing even the tiniest slivers of boredom to creep in.

You can usually spot a good writer by what they do after the setup. Because the setup of these shows/movies is always easy. Who’s going to screw up the president of the United States getting killed? Or our next-in-line being ushered by the Secret Service to get sworn in at the White House? Those scenes write themselves.

But once Kirkman becomes the president, what now? And Guggenheim immediately moves into a problem – the oil tanker. Our protagonist is immediately being tested.

And once that problem is solved, a new one arrives. Iran takes advantage of the U.S.’s distraction to secure the Strait of Hormuz, effectively choking off our access to oil. Kirkman now has to figure that problem out as well.

And while these scenes seem obvious in retrospect, most writers don’t know to write them. They’d rather deal with the mundane directionless details of “What happens when a new person becomes president?” You have an entire series to explore that. Right now, you need to place your protagonist in DRAMATIC SITUATIONS that test him. You’re going to find urgency in these moments and you’re going to find drama. I’d much rather watch that than a scene where Kirkman meets with his staff and discusses the do’s and don’ts of being a president.

Another smart move was not telling us who killed the president. There’s a tendency from TV writers to cram all the plot into the pilot. But remember, you have to give us reasons to come back. And you do that through big unanswered questions. The fact that who killed the president is going to be an ongoing mystery is a reason for me to come back. Otherwise, I’ve just a TV sized feature.

One of the more amusing discoveries from the script was when Kirkman was sitting with his wife, at a low point, thinking he couldn’t do this, and his wife takes him by the hand and says, “Do you remember STORY ABOUT HIS EARLY DAYS OF POLITICS?” As in, literally, that’s what’s written. And I just found it funny that even the top screenwriters don’t always know what to write and will put up a placeholder to figure it out later.

It’s a small thing but I know a lot of writers will refuse to keep writing until they figure out that problem. And what happens is, because they can’t figure it out, they’re not writing anything. One day of not writing turns into two. Two into four. Four into a week. A week into a month. Sometimes it’s best to leave a problem alone for now and keep writing so you’re getting pages down. Often what will happen is the solution to your problem will come while you’re exploring some other part of the story.

Look, is Designated Survivor going to be able to do what House of Cards did? Probably not. I don’t see Kirkman and his wife having a three-way with their security detail. But it’s a nice West Wing slash 24 hybrid that should satiate the wind-down-from-work crowd. I’ll probably check out the pilot this fall.

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

What I learned: When in doubt, present your hero with a problem. The more elaborate the problem, the higher the stakes the problem, the better. I loved the oil tanker scene here. I loved the Iran scene here. And all Guggenheim did was present our protagonist with a problem. When you think about it, this is the lifeblood of television. You place problems in front of your protagonist. If you can make those problems unique, if you can make them DIFFICULT, chances are you’re going to keep the audience entertained.

Genre: True Story/Comedy
Premise: Facing financial ruin, auteur filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola is forced to direct the adaptation of Mario Puzo’s pulp novel, The Godfather.
About: Andrew Farotte is another fresh-faced writer no one knew about until he landed on the low end of last year’s Black List with this script. He’d done a few shorts, a tiny TV series, but this is first big breakthrough moment.
Writer: Andrew Farotte
Details: 107 pages (undated)

Personally, I’m not a fan of these “making of movies” scripts. My issue with them is that the writer is piggy-backing on top of something so gigantic, so successful, that all they have to do is stand around and let the story tell itself. They don’t have to display any skills of their own, which feels like a cheat.

Plus, let’s face it, these “making of movies” scripts are getting out of control. We’ve seen it with Star Wars. We’ve seen it with Jaws. I could’ve sworn one was written about Apocalypse Now. We’re teetering on the next biopic-era craze here.

But a script about the making of The Godfather has an ace up its sleeve. Robert Evans. Talk about a personality. He’s like the male version of Carrie Fischer. I figured, if there was any “making of” script that had a shot at entertaining me, it would be one with this guy. And so away I read…

It’s 1970 and director Francis Ford Coppola, as many of you know, was in the midst of his experimental hippy-ish studio project, Zoetrope (whose members included, among others, George Lucas). The idea was to move away from the corrupt profits-obsessed studio system and have a place where everyone just, like, shared, man.

Well sharing didn’t turn into caring as everyone in Zoetrope did a lot more taking than giving. As a result, Zoetrope was in some financial dire straits, which brings us to Paramount’s upcoming adaptation of the popular novel, The Godfather. Legendary weirdo/studio-head Robert Evans was ready to turn this into a hit, but nobody wanted to direct it for him. Reluctantly, then, he called up Coppola.

The funny thing? Coppola didn’t want to do it either! In one of the many surprising tidbits you learn from this script, The Godfather novel was considered trashy smut. Which is exactly why Coppola didn’t want anything to do with it. But with Lucas chirping in his ear about Zoetrope bills needing to be paid, Coppola finally relented.

Once committed, that’s when the real fun began, starting with who they were going to cast as the star, Michael Corleone. Evans was set on pretty boy, Ryan O’Neal. But Coppola wanted an unknown, a little mumbling troll of an actor named Al Pacino. This war would be fought viciously throughout pre-production.

In addition to worrying about Pacino, the local New York Italian League, fresh off being smeared in the media, was set on erasing Italian stereotypes, and when they found out about the mafia-sensationalizing Godfather, stopping the production became their number 1 priority. If Coppola and Evans even thought about filming in New York, they would feel the full wrath of the Italian community. It was ironic, to say the least, since this league also happened to be a front for a major Italian crime syndicate.

And who could forget Brando? Needing that big splashy name to sell tickets, Coppola went after Brando hard, who’d only recently started his descent into madness. At the time, Brando was set on giving the land back to its rightful owners, the Native Americans, and had scheduled regular Native American ritualistic dances at his Hollywood Hills home, which he procured by promising said Native Americans SAG cards (of which he had no sway to actually deliver).

After getting the mob off their back by promising them roles in the film, the final battle was whether Pacino or O’Neal would win the role. It would be a race that went down to the wire, and one that would end up affecting the history of film forevermore.

So what’s the first thing I noticed about “Francis & The Godfather?” The TIGHT SPACING feature on Final Draft!!! Guys, you think we can’t tell that the bottom of the letters and the top of the letters on the next line aren’t touching??? We know you want your page count to be low, but this attempted gimmick never gets past savvy readers and actually infuriates them.

Moving on from there, I have to admit that this is the best “making of movie” script I’ve read so far. Part of that is due to me not knowing much about the production. So when I read fellow Black Lister, Chewie, there wasn’t a single Star Wars production fact I hadn’t heard before. Here, I was learning something new on every page.

But it wasn’t just that. When you write these scripts, it’s important that you’re not just transcribing, but rather ELEVATING the material. And Farrote elevates. I’ll give you an example. This easily could’ve been a straight-forward facts-driven “making-of” project. But Farotte appears to bypass some of the hard facts in favor of humor, which gives the story a point-of-view, which makes it feel like more than a wikipedia entry.

The Italian League subplot was the perfect embodiment of this. That these guys were fuming about being portrayed as gangsters when they were, in fact, gangsters.

On top of that, there’s a nice theme woven into the story about art versus commerce. We tend to look back at the 70s as this “golden era” where people made movies without money in mind. But going off of this script, the argument was just as intense back then as it is now. I loved Mario Puzo’s (the author of the book) monologue that he’d tried to stay true to himself for his first three books and barely made 15 thousand dollars. Then he sold out, wrote The Godfather, and became rich. And his takeaway? So the fuck what.

If there’s a weak link in the script, it’s probably Francis himself. This is the risk you run when you have so many big characters in your story and your main character has to play the straight man. How do they not get swept away in the tornado of personalities? Especially since Francis didn’t want to make the movie in the first place.

I always have an issue with that – protagonists who don’t want to achieve their goal. Because then you can say, “Well if he fails, he gets exactly what he wants.” And if that’s the case, why would we care if he successfully directs the film?

But I realized through reading this that there’s an addendum to that rule: NEED. Francis may not have wanted to make the movie, but he NEEDED to make the movie because his business, with all his friends’ livelihoods, was at stake. My only issue is that they didn’t make this need powerful enough. If we would’ve felt Zoetrope’s potential collapse as inevitable without the success of The Godfather, we may have been more invested in Francis’s journey.

This was a really amusing screenplay nonetheless and of all the “making of movies” projects out there, this is the one I’d pay for in the theater. Definitely worth checking out.

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

What I learned: So just this week, I was giving notes on a script where there was an ensemble of characters, two of whom (both major), I kept mixing up. Didn’t matter if I was on page 20 or 80. Every time we’d cut back to them, I had to go back to my notes to remember who was who. And I wondered, “Why am I having such a hard time differentiating these two??” And I realized that both characters spoke EXACTLY THE SAME. There weren’t any differences in their cadence, speech patterns, vocabulary, demeanor. While it’s not a necessity, if we can identify a character through their dialogue alone, it’s a huge advantage. It doesn’t just make it easier to read, it makes the script better. I noticed here with Robert Evans, that he always spoke in the third person: “Robert doesn’t like that.” It was such a simple thing, and yet I could instantly identify him solely through his dialogue. Look for ways to differentiate your own characters through dialogue alone.

I just sent the newsletter out seconds ago. It’s got the Max Landis “Deeper” review, which is a VERY interesting review if I do say so myself. If you didn’t get the newsletter, check your SPAM and PROMOTIONS folders. If you still didn’t get it, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com and let me know. If you’re not on the newsletter mailing list and want to be, also e-mail me at that address with the subject line: NEWSLETTER. Enjoy everybody!