Today’s big 90s spec sale is part The Fugitive, part Shawshank, and part Hell or High Water.

Genre: Thriller
Premise: After a daring prison break, a bank robber forced to work with two problematic fellow prisoners, heads back to his home town to make things right.
About: Shout out to Scott for making me aware of this one. The script sold in 1995 for 600,000 against 1 million. It was written by Ken Nolan, who penned Black Hawk Down and Transformers 5. The movie looks like it was shelved once competing rain project “Hard Rain” rained on its parade. Blame it on the rain. I swear, I have to reign this lame rain jokes in. Rain or shine, I can’t stop using them.
Writer: Ken Nolan
Details: 127 pages

Henry Cavill is looking for a new job, right?

One of the most common fears we screenwriters have is that while we’re dutifully writing our latest screenplay, a movie with a similar concept will get released and our script becomes irrelevant.

It’s a legitimate concern and the reason today’s script never got made, despite selling for so much money. Another rain-centered crime movie, Hard Rain, made it to theaters first, taking all the wind out of “The Long Rain’s” sails.

The reason this happens so often is because we’re all pulling water from the same well. And so while we may think we’re original, the reality is, that idea we came up with four months ago was inspired by the same set of news stories that tens of millions of other people saw.

I still remember a few years back, there were not one, not two, but three separate projects purchased that were focused on a peeping tom motel situation. If you did the math, you went back about 5-6 months and learned there was an article in a major publication about this peeping practice.

In other words, a bunch of people saw the same article and a percentage of them, who were screenwriters, thought, “Ooh, that would make a good movie.”

This is why I encourage writers to avoid coming up with movie ideas inspired by popular culture or current news stories because you’re choosing to compete with the highest number of writers whenever you do that. It’s better if your idea comes from real life experience or something random you encounter that very few people are aware of.

One of the reasons Tarantino is considered to be such a unique artist is because all of his ideas come from updating obscure old movies that not many people know about. So he’s not going to have a lot of competition for those ideas.

Anyway, I barely remember Hard Rain. What I do remember is that it had a fun trailer. Will The Long Rain offer more than that?

Nick True is in Mississippi prison for something. We don’t know what yet. On this particular night, the prison is being flooded with nonstop rain. It gets so bad that the guards have to chain all the prisoners up (three people to a chain) and place them outside so they don’t drown.

Nick, who often offers us deep thoughtful narration about life and imprisonment, is chained to a couple of sketchy dudes, TEE-VEE and Preacher Willie. As the little outdoor corridor they’re in also starts to badly flood, they rebel, and soon The Nick True Trio makes a boop-bop skedaddling run for it.

They somehow scale three fences and run into the rainy night. They’re able to make it to a barn, where they dry up. But then in a really random coincidence, the cops find them, and they’re on the run again. The rain still hasn’t stopped, by the way.

While they’re on the run, we start flashing back to how Nick ended up in prison. He was with the love of his life. They were going to have a fairytale ending. All Nick had to do was rob a bank first. Cause fairytale endings need money in America.

Obviously, the robbery goes badly. But even worse, Nick’s own brother deceives him in the worst way. Nick ends up losing his girlfriend and his brother. AND he ends up in prison. Hat trick on why crime doesn’t pay, Nicky.

But this prison break, along with all this rain, has given Nick a second chance. You see, that money he stole from the bank is still out there. He hid it. So if he can get it back, he just might be able to reboot that fairy tale.

Man, talk about a script that’s of its time. This screenplay couldn’t have been more 90s if Kurt Cobain scored a Youtube accompaniment for it. “Here we are now! IT IS RAINING! Is that Tommy Lee Jones? Or Morgan Freeman!??” (If you sing that to the tune of Smells Like Teen Spirit, it makes sense, I promise)

Whenever you start reading a script, one of the first things your mind does is attempt to figure out what kind of movie you’re watching. Once you understand the template, you know what to expect for the most part and you can settle in and enjoy yourself.

But what happens when the script doesn’t announce what it is? If you don’t make that clear, you can expect a lot of reader frustration. And I wasn’t clear on what this was. The script starts off with a really fun opening prison break scene where the characters are chained up together.

This is how you make things different. Everybody says, “Everything has already been done before.” And that’s true. There have been a million prison-break scenes. But I don’t remember any with three people chained up to each other. Any recently, anyway. That creates all sorts of new obstacles the writer can play with to write some creative scenarios.

This is followed by our characters hanging out in a barn where they get their bearings. The next day, the cops accidentally run into them and they’re forced to shoot a cop and steal his car. A helicopter drops down out of the clouds and starts chasing them.

They get to a bridge, which they shoot off into a raging river. And then, while they’re being pulled down the river, we jump backwards in time and cover how Nick ended up in prison, which was that he robbed a bank. This is a long slow flashback.

Then we’re back in the present again. Then the past. Then the present. Then the past. And things just sort of feel disjointed. It’s an “on-the-run” movie. No it’s a heist movie. No it’s a slow introspective character piece. Throughout all of this is this deep voice over from Nick where he ponders life. What is this thing? It’s like a Frankenstein script.

But then, somewhere around page 65, it picks a lane. We find out through the flashbacks that the money he stole from the bank robbery, he hid. Which means it’s still out there. And he’s going to get it.

It was an interesting moment when this plot beat entered the story because I immediately noticed I was more interested in what was happening. Was it just that plot point that pulled me in? No. The thing that changed it all is that NICK ALL OF A SUDDEN BECAME ACTIVE. Instead of being “the guy on the run,” he became “the guy with a plan.”

That’s a great screenwriting lesson. For the first sixty pages, I’m sitting there wondering when’s the “point” going to kick in? But my dissatisfaction was more likely coming from the fact that the main character wasn’t an active participant in the story.

This is one of the unheralded screenwriting power moves in The Fugitive, and one of the main reasons it works so well. Richard wasn’t just running from the police. He was trying to solve his wife’s murder. If he’s just running from the police, he’s reactive the entire movie. But if he’s trying to solve a murder, he’s active.

That change in The Long Rains saved the script. And then Nolan kicks things up a notch with a great climax. It’s definitely not a perfect screenplay but Nolan does a good job sneakily setting up the real story he wants to tell throughout the first half. Once he gets to tell that story, the script comes alive. Check it out yourself!

Script link: The Long Rains

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

What I learned: This script taught me that you can make things a lot more interesting for your smart main character by handicapping them. In this case, you stick him with two dumb people. Cause now, “stupid” enters into the equation sometimes, and the stupid moves lead to more interesting scenarios than the smart moves. For example, TEE-VEE can’t swim, so when they’re stuck in the raging river, TEE-VEE is practically ripping Nick apart to stay afloat, even though, by doing so, he’s ensuring that both of them will drown. So now Nick has to figure out a way around that. That scene doesn’t exist if Nick escapes prison on his own. So always look to handicap your heroes!

Submissions for the Logline Showdown need to be turned in tonight, Thursday, February 16th, by 10pm Pacific Time!

FINAL REMINDER that we’ve got the year’s SECOND Logline Showdown coming up this Friday. For those who don’t know what the Logline Showdown is, anyone can send me a logline at carsonreeves3@gmail.com. It must be a logline for a completed script.

I choose the 5 best submissions and place them up here, on the site, for you to vote on, over the weekend. Whichever logline gets the most votes, I review that script the following Friday.

If you want to enter, which is 100% free, here are the instructions:

Send me your title, genre, and logline. Nothing more.
Send it to this e-mail: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
Send it by 10pm Pacific Time, Thursday, February 16th.

Now, on to today’s article!

Tuesday, after writing my review for Male Pattern Baldness, I noticed that something I wrote at the beginning of the review was a criticism I’d been writing a lot lately, in both scripts I reviewed and scripts I’d given notes on.

The observation was: This script started off strong then lost steam.

I’ve been writing that SO MUCH lately so I wanted to write an article exploring why this happens and what you can do to prevent it.

Let’s start with the why. Why does this happen? There are several reasons. But most of it comes down to jumping into a script before you’re ready. We’re all guilty of doing this. We get an idea on Thursday. We get really excited about it over the next 24 hours. Then as soon as work ends on Friday, we start writing like a maniac and bang out as many pages as we can over the weekend.

Those pages, while sloppy, *do* have a lot of energy in them – especially the first few scenes. But then once the high wears off, so does the energy. Each subsequent scene feels like a chore. Which can be demoralizing if you’re only on Scene 14 and, therefore, still have 36 scenes to go.

How do we prevent this from happening? The problem can be broken down into two scenarios.

Scenario 1 is ignorance. A writer doesn’t yet understand how to keep a story interesting from page 1 to page 110. They need to keep learning how to write a screenplay and how to tell a story (two different skills, by the way) in order to fix this issue.

Scenario 2 is laziness. The writer knows how to keep the reader invested. But he also knows that, to do so, it takes a lot of work. It’s hard to come up with a fresh captivating plot that keeps the reader on his toes. And they don’t want to do that work.

This is why you see professional writers write the occasional bad script. They start thinking everything they write is gold because why wouldn’t it be? They’re getting paid a lot of money for their words. So they just don’t do the hard work required to keep the reader captivated.

Most of the people on this site fall into the first category. They don’t yet know how to make their script captivating past that first act. If you’re part of the second category, all I have to say is shame on you. Cause if you know how to do it and you’re not putting in the work to do so? That’s screenwriting malpractice. Get your hands dirty, get in there, and do the necessary planning and rewrites that are going to result in a great read.

All right, now that we’ve brow-beaten the second category, let’s help everyone in the first category. How do you start off with a head of steam and never slow down?

Funny enough, that’s the first tip. You have to embrace the philosophy of grabbing the reader right away and never letting them go. This might sound like obvious advice. But every single day I read a script that doesn’t abide by it. The philosophy I more commonly encounter is, “Grab the reader right away, now I’ve earned the right to slow down, I’ll start making things fun again later.”

You really don’t have the luxury to take this approach in the spec script market. You have to make things move in every single scene. So if you simply embrace that philosophy of grabbing the reader and never letting them go, you’ll be ahead of 90% of your competition.

The next thing you need to get right is generating a concept that actually warrants a full 110 page story. The old industry saying is: “A concept that has legs.” A lot of concepts don’t have legs. And the frustrating thing about these scripts is that you’re trying to make a plane fly that doesn’t have wings.

Now, most writers don’t figure out their script lacks legs until three months into writing it. A question that can help you identify leggy concepts is: are you going to have trouble cutting your script down to 110 pages or are you going to have trouble coming up with enough story to get to 110 pages?

If your situation is the former, your concept has legs. If your situation is the latter, it probably doesn’t.

To give you more specific examples, a movie like “Fall,” which follows two girls who climb to the top of a radio tower and get stuck – that concept was doomed cause it clearly didn’t have legs. “The Whale” is another film that people have complained about for not having legs (literally, since the main character can’t stand up), which is why it’s not getting the acclaim everyone thought it would get.

Even though I didn’t love, “Nope,” that script, with its dying movie-horse ranch business, the family issues between brother and sister, the rival Old West theme park and the flying alien predator, gave Peele plenty of story to work with.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying simple ideas can’t have legs. If you include a robust main plot, plenty of characters, and a fully fleshed out world, you should be okay. But any story that has that juicy fun setup (like Fall) yet you can’t think up more than 5 scenes off the top of your head? Those are the concepts you probably want to avoid.

Next up, you need either a really compelling main character or a really compelling supporting character. The reason you need this is because it doesn’t matter how good you are at plotting or fleshing out your story if your characters are boring. You could be a master plotter and the reader is still bored because you haven’t given us someone we like to watch.

To create this character, you want to start out by either making them likable (Thor) or interesting (Arthur Fleck in Joker). The less likable your hero is, the more interesting they need to be. Cause if they’re not likable and only kind of interesting, we’re not going to root for them.

Then, you want to create a hole in the character’s life – a blind spot, if you will – that needs to be filled in order for them to become happy and whole. A recent example would be Evelyn from Everything Everywhere All at Once. She had given up on her family, convinced that she screwed up by marrying a weak husband and subsequently having a weak daughter.

She needed to fill that hole with love. We stuck around to see if she was going to do that (love her family again). If you do this right, you create the opposite effect of what I just outlined. Which is that, even if you’re not a good storyteller, we will want to keep watching to see if our hero fills their hole and becomes happy again.

You might wonder how character stuff “keeps the story moving.”  That’s part of the magic of storytelling.  A compelling character shortens time.  We can’t get enough of them.  So even if the story itself isn’t great, we’re lost in this character’s existence.  And when that happens, time moves differently in our heads.  We feel like the story is traversing through time faster.

Moving to the more technical side of things, you must know how to keep an engine underneath your story at all times, specifically throughout the second act, which is where most engines run out of gas, and the reader either doesn’t fill them up again or doesn’t introduce a new engine.

“I just don’t know if this is a big enough engine for our story, Turreto.”  

An engine is just goal + stakes. It’s a goal your heroes (or in some cases, the villain) need to achieve and it needs to be very important. In Avengers Infinity War, the goal is in Thanos’s hands. He wants the infinity crystals so he can snap half of the universe out of existence.

But that goal is achieved by the end of the movie. So, going into Avengers Endgame, you need a new engine. The engine switches over to the good guys, who decide to go back in time to get the crystals to reverse Thanos snapping half of the universe out of existence.

The thing to remember is that there always needs to be an engine underneath the story. If there isn’t, or if the engine has low stakes, that’s when your script starts to feel like it’s running out of steam.

If we use Tuesday’s script, Male Pattern Baldness, as an example, we can see just how the absence of a couple of these principles resulted in it losing steam. First, the main character wasn’t really that likable and wasn’t really that interesting. So pretty much before the story gets started, it’s screwed. But let’s be generous and say that maybe some readers related to the hero’s anger and, therefore, rooted for him.

While you do have a goal – he’s trying to get his wife back – I’m not sure the stakes are high enough. Do we really feel like, if he got her back, that he would be happy and everything would be good again? I didn’t. So the stakes weren’t high enough. We have to believe that the character’s goal is EXTREMELY important if we’re going to stay emotionally invested in the story.

All right, let’s summarize here. To make sure you don’t start strong then peter out, first embrace the writing philosophy of: grab them and never let them go. Next, make sure you have a concept that has legs. Next, give us a character we either like or find highly interesting. Give them a hole that they need to fill in order to become happy. Finally, make sure there is always an engine running underneath your story. If an engine completes its mission, introduce a new one.

And finally, understand that the way to make the rest of your script as good as the first few scenes, is through rewrites. You keep rewriting every scene until it’s just as energetic or dramatic or suspenseful or captivating or shocking as the first few scenes. If you take even one scene off, I promise you the reader will notice it. So do that extra work until all of your scenes are so good, the reader has no choice but to keep reading.

That way, I won’t have to write this annoying phrase – “I love how the script started but it ultimately ran out of steam.” – ever again. :)

Number 5!

One of the big problems screenwriters run into is that they’re good with the writing part but they have no idea how to strategize their career. They don’t know how to break in. Without a concrete plan, they just sort of write stuff and send it out to a few people and if nobody says it’s great, they cry in their Cheerios, spend several months watching bad television and eating a lot of donuts and Reeses peanut butter cups, before jumping back on the horse and trying again.

Much like your protagonist needs a goal in his story, YOU need a goal. Today, I’m going to give you ten goals to choose from in regards to what your plan should be. Once you know what your goal is, you can cater your screenwriting break-in strategy accordingly. Here are the ten best ways to break in as a screenwriter in 2023 from least effective to most effective. Are we ready?

LET’S GET STARTED!

10) Be the ultimate self-promoter – Be someone who’s on every screenwriting message board there is and constantly promote your work. Get people to read it. The trick with this is you have to be genuinely nice about it and reciprocate the gesture. If you’re out there asking everybody to read your scripts, you should be offering to read their scripts too. What’s going to happen if you do this consistently is that you’re going to grow a network and people in the screenwriting community are going to know who you are. And what ends up happening is that, in these bigger networks, there are always industry people dipping in and out of that network. So they’re going to be aware of you. And if people are talking about how your writing keeps improving and then you come out with some great concept for your latest screenplay, I guarantee you a few of these industry people are going to be curious and want to check the script out. We have a few of these promoters here on the site. I will allow them to share with you their secrets in the comments section.

9) Contests – Contests aren’t what they used to be because they used to be the only middle-ground between being a no-one and being a repped screenwriter. Nowadays, obviously, you have this thing called the internet which, if you’re smart, you can use to circumvent the contest route. But the bigger contests still hold some sway in the industry. Managers and agents still pay attention to the people who win a Nicholl Fellowship. They’ll even take a look at your logline if you were a finalist. There are a few more good contests. Austin. Sundance Screenwriters Lab. And I’m sure a few of you will post others in the comments section. Contests aren’t as helpful as they used to be. But you can definitely parlay a good showing in a big contest into representation.

8) Short stories on Reddit – Short stories naturally lend themselves to feature film ideas and one of the bigger trends over the last five years is production companies snatching up the rights to original horror short stories being posted on CreepyPasta on Reddit. I believe they also have subreddits for sci-fi and romance and drama and whatever else tickles your fancy. Although horror seems to be the genre that gets the most attention. The great thing about this is that your story doesn’t need to be crazy elaborate. 2000-5000 words is all you need for a good short story. And that’s just one-quarter of the words you would write in a feature script. You also get instant feedback from readers so you’ll know right away if your story is working or not. If not, you’ll find out why and you can go back to the drawing board, improve, and try again. Short horror stories are one of the avenues that have filled the vacuum of the long lost spec boom.

7) Spec Sale – The days of giant spec sales are long gone. They just don’t happen anymore for a number reasons, the biggest of which is that in the 1990s studios got burned for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on good first acts and terrible second and third acts. So they went the more dependable route and started hoarding IP. However, you can still break in with spec sales under the right circumstances. Those circumstances are writing lower budgeted big concept genre material (horror, sci-fi, contained thriller). You’re not going to get paid as much. But you can sell those scripts and, because they’re cheap, there’s a good chance of them getting made. And now you’re in the system. You know that movie about the two girls who climb up a tower called, “Fall?” Stuff like that you can sell as a spec script.

6) Find some IP and write a script based on it – Industry people like IP better than they like sex. It’s a magical word to them. I bring this up because you’d be surprised at just how interested someone will be in a marginal idea solely because it’s previously established IP. The trick with IP is to go in one of two directions. One, look for overlooked material. Books (or games, or comics) that made a little splash in the 80s and 90s and 00s, but not a big enough splash to become a part of popular culture. I remember Akiva Goldsman got the rights to some unicorn book from the 90s for a bag of pistachios and a half-finished can of Busch Light. You can option these more obscure materials for next to nothing from the authors if you’re charming enough. Cause what else do they have going on? The other avenue is to look for stuff in the public domain. You probably want to stay away from your Peter Pans and Robin Hoods only because everybody picks those. Keep an eye out for books that will be in the public domain A YEAR FROM NOW. That way, you can write the script over the course of the next year and have it ready the second the book enters the public domain. Sites like this one will tell you what’s upcoming.

5) Write a Pilot Script – As a feature guy, it pains me to say this. But pilots sell more than features these days. And the great thing about pursuing this avenue is that, unlike fifteen years ago, where you had to be a seasoned veteran to get a show on the air, these days, virtual no-names can get on the air (True Detective, The End of the F***ing World, Severance, PEN15). There are so many slots to fill for networks and streamers that they have no choice but to take a chance on young writers LIKE YOURSELF. So write a pilot, preferably with a juicy concept (think more “Stranger Things” and less “This is Us”), then do your research, see who reps the writers of shows like yours (on IMDB Pro), and START QUERYING THEM!

4) Black List – The Black List continues to be a touchy subject around here. It used to be great. Now the town has learned how to game the system so a bunch of crappy scripts make it on the list. Also, woke scripts get heavily weighted regardless of whether they’re good or not. So the Black List is definitely less prestigious than it used to be. But getting on the list is still going to give your career a bump. And if you make the top 10, it will be a sizable bump. You’ll be able to get meetings with everyone in town and, hopefully, parlay a few of those into writing jobs. How do you get on the Black List? Go through the last two Black Lists. Write down every manager who has more than one entry. Note what kind of scripts they like. And write a script in that universe (woke and biopics are most managers’ entry point). Query them with a logline. They’ll probably want to read it if your script is in any way similar to the kinds of scripts they usually promote onto the list. And if the script is good, they’ll send it out. And now you get to be on the Black List. Simple as that!

3) Write and direct a short film – A short film that gets a lot of views online allows you to e-mail lots of reps and producers in Hollywood and get a meeting with them. It’s the ultimate business card. Because it’s not just a short film. It’s a promise of what you’re capable of if someone gave you the money to make a feature film. And everyone’s going to want to be in on that because they’re going to make money from it. But you have to give us a short film that’s special in some way. It’s got to be legitimately scary. It’s got to be incredibly moving. It has to have a world-changing twist to it. It has to have something shocking in it. It’s got to be controversial in some way. People always say, “There’s a million short films. It’s impossible to stand out.” Well, yeah, if you write some lame handheld mumblecore drama in a one-bedroom Hollywood apartment, nobody’s going to care. But, luckily, you’re a writer. So you know what captures audiences. Especially if you read this site. Use that knowledge and make something memorable.

2) Get on a TV writing Staff – The last time I counted, there were 700 shows on TV. If each of those shows averages 5 writers, which is probably a lowball estimate, that’s 3500 writing jobs. Are you one of the 3500 top writers in the United States? If you read this site and you’ve been at this for while, you should be. Or you should be close. There are just so many of these jobs, mathematically, it’s easier than trying to sell a spec or make the Black List. If you want to get on one of these shows, identify what kinds of shows you would love to write for, then write an original pilot script in that genre. Then query all of the managers and agents who represent TV writers (through IMDB Pro). Then they’ll send your script in to the right people and hopefully you get staffed on one of those shows. You also want to submit to all the studio TV writing programs, which someone can list for me in the comments section.

1) Direct a movie from your own script – By far, this is the fastest way into the system. Because the thing that Hollywood values most is a finished product. And if you do it this way, you’ll have a finished product. The rub is that you have to want to direct and you have to have some money. With that said, part of being a writer is being financially creative. It’s something you’ll be asked to do over and over again when you’re hired for jobs. So try to write something that would be cheap to shoot. A writer recently sent me a script for a consultation that was limited to a computer screen, like Searching. And it was a good script! So it can be done. And if you do it, it really is a “jump to the head of the line” situation.

And there you have it! Did I miss any? Rank them incorrectly? Feel free to let me know in the comments.

Genre: Horror
Premise: A drug addict returning from rehab kidnaps her daughter from her father then tries to skip town, only to end up at an old BnB chased by an evil tooth fairy determined to take her daughter from her.
About: This script finished in the bottom 25% of last year’s Black List. Chris Grillot had one other script on the Black List several years ago called “Bella.” Grillot is using his former job as a crime journalist in New Orleans as inspiration for much of what happens in today’s script. Except for the tooth fairy demon stuff, I’m assuming.
Writer: Chris Grillot
Details: 100 pages on the dot!

It’s been a while since we’ve reviewed a horror script on Scriptshadow so I thought, let’s bring the site back into equilibrium.

There have actually been some cool horror films that have come out lately. We had M3gan. We had Barbarian. We had Smile.

What I like about horror is that it’s very flexible tone-wise. You can take the exact same premise and construct three very different experiences depending on the tone you choose.  While older viewers dismiss the genre as a jump-scare fest, you can write some pretty dramatic horror movies. Which is definitely what we get today.

29 year old drug addict, Celia, has just finished her latest court-ordered rehab. Celia lives in the heart of New Orleans and on this particular night, the night she goes to get her daughter back, it’s raining like hell.

Celia picks up her 10 year old daughter, Imani, from the girl’s father. Imani has a cast on her arm. Celia knows what that means so she storms back in the house and all we hear is a gunshot. She races back out and tells Imani that they’re going to California. TONIGHT.

They don’t get very far, though. The rains are so intense that Celia’s Corolla gets stuck in 3 feet of water. The two have to practically swim over to the nearby gas station, where Celia asks the checker for a ride. He laughs at her but a couple minutes later, a local Louisiana swamp lord zooms up to the station on his boat!

The man, David, says he’s got a B&B down the street and Celia can stay there the night then get their car fixed tomorrow. Without any other options, Celia is forced to accept and, oh yeah, the home also happens to be an Antebellum plantation! As if they didn’t have enough to worry about.

Once there, Imani’s tooth pops out, and one of the maids at the B&B, Jeanine, tells her to *make sure* she puts that tooth under her pillow tonight. Celia shakes her head. Now they’re dealing with crazy weirdos obsessed with the tooth fairy? Can this night get any worse!

But after the two fall asleep, the night does get worse. The tooth fairy creature, nicknamed “Le Feu Follet,” nearly snatches Imani. Celia storms up to Jeanine and asks her what’s up. Jeanine tells her the whole backstory of this thing, that amounts to if you don’t offer your tooth, it takes your kid.

So what do they do now?? Jeanine says they’re lucky in that all of the candles here at the home are blessed by Jesus or something. And since the tooth fairy won’t go near them, they just have to stay in the light. Except that these weak candles won’t last the whole night. Which means they have to escape.

The team gears up to make a run for it, but then the crafty tooth fairy snatches Imani away! Now, the plan changes. They have to go find the only person left in town who knows where this tooth fairy creature lives. Then Celia is going to save her daughter!

Here’s the way I look at horror scripts these days.

You’ve got your horror monsters.

And you’ve got your horror scripts.

If you’ve got a horror monster, you have to create a short film proof-of-concept.

If you’ve got a great horror premise that doesn’t rely on how your horror monster looks, then you can still get away with trying to sell the script by itself.

In other words, if you’re writing “Mama,” which is entirely dependent on how the “Mama” creature looks, you need to do a proof-of-concept short. You even need to do that for simple monsters, like the shadow monster in Lights Out.

But if you’re writing something like The Sixth Sense, that’s not a horror script where you need to put a monster on the poster. So that’s one that can get by on the script alone.

What’s interesting about Chatter is that it’s somewhere in between these two options and I don’t know if it’s good enough to get traction as a script alone. You probably need to do a proof-of-concept short on the tooth fairy creature.

With that said, the character work here is intense. And dark. This isn’t some light-hearted funzo horror movie, like M3gan.

We feel Celia’s addiction. We feel the physical abuse in her relationship, as well as the abuse from the father towards the daughter. We feel this “all hope is lost” vibe as they’re trying to start a new life. It’s intense, man!

That’s probably the script’s best quality. Its darkness. These people felt like they were genuinely at the end of their rope.

The script probably would’ve been a lot better, though, if the writer had patched up his mythology. We’re told that this creature used to steal children all the way back in the Civil War. But once word got out that it was doing so, everybody made sure to always put their teeth under the pillow.

Apparently, only one person didn’t do this in the last 50 years, and that was Jeanine, who didn’t do it for her son, which is why the tooth fairy took him. I’m trying to do the math here.  How many teeth fall out of a child as they grow up? 15? Okay, now how many children have grown up in New Orleans in the past 50 years. 10 million? So we’re looking at 150 million teeth, and only once did someone not put a tooth under their pillow? I’m not sure I’m buying that.

I think a good question is, does stuff like this matter?

Does it really matter to a reader if that aspect of the story doesn’t pass muster?

It’s a good question. And the answer is, “It depends.” If I’m super invested in the characters and the storytelling and the script is really good, then I probably don’t care about it. But If I’m where most readers are when they’re reading a script, which is they think it’s pretty good and are hoping for a big exciting ending that’s going to put the script over the top. If that’s where a script is, then anything that’s shaky in the script could be the deciding factor that makes the reader give up.

That’s why details, in and of themselves, don’t matter. But taken in totality, with all the other details of the story, one lazy detail could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

For example, you have these candles. These candles are special god-approved candles that scare away the tooth fairy. Well, hold on here a second. These candles won’t last the night? Then what good are they? And does that mean you have to go to the church every morning to relight the candles? That seems like extremely specific mythology. Or are you saying they last for a long time but Celia and Imani just happened to show up on the night where they were running out of wax? If that’s the case, then that’s a bit coincidental, don’t you think?

Again, by themselves, these things don’t matter much. But when added up, they definitely matter. Because the reader is asking these very same questions in their mind as they’re reading your script INSTEAD OF doing what they’re supposed to be doing, which is enjoying your story.

With that said, there’s a teensy bit more good to Chatter than bad. Like I always say, get the main characters right and that will act as deodorant for many of your script’s weaknesses. I felt that Grillot got the characters of Ceilia and Imani right. And then I always love when writers take a goofy idea and treat it really seriously. It always creates an unexpected tone.

So, much like Monday’s movie review (You People), this one squeaks by with a ‘worth the read.’

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

What I learned: Early in the script, Celia walks into the dad’s house. We stay outside so we can’t see anything. We hear a gunshot, we see her hurry out of the house, and then her and Imani make a run for it. However, later in the story, we learn that she didn’t shoot him. She merely fired a warning shot. I believe that the audience would rather you imply something bad DIDN’T HAPPEN only to later reveal IT DID, than imply that something bad DID HAPPEN only to later reveal THAT IT DIDN’T. Because it’s a letdown. Celia is bada$$ if she killed him. The stakes are much higher, since now they must completely disappear in order to survive the rest of their lives. Whenever something cool happens in your script and you later say, “Psyche!” the reader doesn’t like you.

Hey, Jordan didn’t make the cut of his high school team either.  So if you’re on this list, it may be a good thing!

This is a reminder that on the second to last Friday of every month, we’ll have a logline showdown here on the site. Send your title, genre, and logline to me at carsonreeves3@gmail.com. I’ll vet the best five, put them up on the site for competition. Winner gets a review the following Friday (so your script has to be written!). The next deadline is Thursday, February 16th, 10pm Pacific Time.

Unfortunately, not every logline can be a winner. So in the spirit of both teaching and making sure that everyone doesn’t keep sending me loglines that have no chance, I’m featuring 7 loglines that will not make the Amateur Showdown cut. If you entered with one of these, learn from your mistakes, and enter another showdown with a fresh concept. We’re doing these all year long so you have time!

Title: HAVE YOU SEEN ME?
Genre: Thriller
Logline: Disturbed by the disappearance of a pretty blond white girl overshadowing that of her black best friend, an 11-year-old white girl fakes her own disappearance in hopes of it leading authorities to her friend.

Analysis: I sort of understand what’s going on here but it’s one of those ideas that’s not quite formulated when you lay it out. And this is a challenge that a lot of writers run up against. These ideas that *kind of* sound like movie ideas. But if you actually break down the logline, they don’t make sense. In this case, we’re exploring the well-documented phenomena that the news only reports on pretty young white girls that go missing, never black girls. So our hero fakes her disappearance… to make people look for her black friend. Wait, hold on, what?? How does her going missing get people to look for her friend? Aren’t they only going to look for her? And doesn’t that only solidify the ‘missing young white girl’ phenomena? Maybe she leaves messages for the cops like, “Don’t forget my friend who’s also missing!” I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense to me. And a logline MUST MAKE SENSE. Let me say that again. A logline MUST MAKE SENSE. You don’t get to explain your logline to someone. They just read the logline. So IT MUST MAKE SENSE.

Title: Office Murder Mystery
Genre: Mystery
Logline: Waking up in a locked office next to the dead body of his boss, a man suffering from a schizophrenic disorder must find the real murderer by the end of the business day with the help of his five favorite dead mystery writers that only he can see, hear or speak to.

Analysis: This one comes from a longtime reader of the site, Alex, who I really like. But this logline doesn’t work for me. It definitely has a high-concept feel to it. But two things are keeping me away. One, whenever you start talking about schizophrenics, the writing level needs to be 10 times that of a normal writer. It’s a very specific disease and in order for it to come off as authentic, the writer really has to understand it, and in my experience, 999 writers out of 1000 don’t. So it always ends up being lame. Also, the “dead mystery writers” thing comes out of nowhere. One second we have a dead body of a boss and the next we have mystery writers??? Where did these mystery writers come from exactly? I know. They’re in his head. But they’re not set up well. We weren’t told that our hero was a vociferous reader or an aspiring novelist. Just a “man.”  So there’s zero connection to the mystery writers component.  For these reasons, the logline doesn’t work.

Title: Eagle Heart
Genre: Period drama – WWII
Logline: When his father comes home from war without legs and without hope, a nine year old boy believes that by saving a dying bird he can stop his family from falling apart.

Analysis: These are always hard for me to turn down because I can tell the writer has written a very heartfelt story that he cares deeply about. But the logline still has to work. A big problem I’ll see in a lot of loglines is that the writer makes a HUGE leap from one dot to the next. A ton of necessary information in between is skipped over, making the logline seem awkward and disconnected. We start out with a dad coming home from war, injured and hopeless. Okay, so far so good. Then we’re saving a bird. Wait, what??? What about saving dad?? Then we find out he’s saving the bird so that his family doesn’t fall apart. What about saving the bird to save his dad!!?? All three sections of the logline do not operate in harmony, which is why I passed this one over.

Title: SINNERMAN
Genre: Horror
Logline: When a home invasion ends in murder a mother of two young children is ‘haunted’ by the intruder’s malevolent spirit but she soon discovers that she’s the undead and is being held in purgatory…

Analysis: First of all, when a writer hits me up with 4 or 5 submissions, I pretty much don’t trust those entries. As writers, we typically have 1 or 2 screenplays that are RIGHT NOW our best work. We do not have five equally good scripts. Three of those are older work and not nearly representative of what we’re capable of now. So if you’re just spamming people with your five most recent screenplays, chances are you’re not really trying to show someone your best work. Hence, I wouldn’t use this strategy (on my site or anywhere else). As for the logline, it has a bunch of those buzzwords that make it sound like a movie (home invasion, haunted, undead, purgatory) but nothing unique to help it stand out from the pack. A script idea usually needs a unique attractor of some sort. This one doesn’t have one.

Title: WEIRD WAR
Genre: Epic Vietnam War Era Supernatural thriller
Logline: A young grunt in denial about his psychic ability is assigned to an elite squad of spirit hunters and is forced to come to terms with his family’s own supernatural past.

Analysis: If you follow my site, you know that extended genre descriptions take you out of the running immediately. You want one genre descriptor, two at most. In very rare situations, three. But whatever you do, you don’t want to add things into the genre description (Epic, Vietnam Ear Era) that aren’t accepted known genres. Not only does it come off as unprofessional, but it indicates that the script is all over the place. So, what do we see with this logline? Well, it sounds all over the place. Psychic abilities. Spirit hunters. It sounds out there and, based on my extensive experience reading scripts, like it’s going to have a very wonky and muddled mythology. Now, could I be wrong? Of course. But this is what my experience tells me is coming, which is why the script didn’t make the showdown.

Title: Edge of Humanity
Genre: Sci-Fi
Logline: Earth faces the final stages of environmental collapse from climate change. The global government secretly commits genocide to avert human extinction, while rival factions fight to uncover the truth.

Analysis: First of all, this writer sent a nice e-mail saying that he recently received his first “RECOMMEND.” So good on him! But, when it comes to Logline Showdown, the recommends are rarer than snow in Los Angeles. We’re tough graders here, and the problem with Edge of Humanity is that the logline is way too broad. There isn’t a single mention of a character. So who do we connect to? And what’s the actual story, since presumably we’re going to be following someone on a journey? On top of that, the broad strokes are too generalized and don’t set the script apart. More generic buzzwords: “environmental collapse,” “climate change,” “global government,” “genocide,” “human extinction.” It just sounds like a million other scripts, movies, and tv shows. This is your monthly reminder that a logline should not be about what makes your movie SIMILAR to others. It should be about what makes your movie DIFFERENT from others.

Title: Controller
Genre:  Sci-Fi
Logline:  A young fugitive, still traumatized from a high school assault, uses an experimental mind-control device to save a new lover from a jealous techno thief.

Analysis: This logline has several problems. For starters, the high school assault should not be in the logline. That’s backstory. It doesn’t add anything relevant that we *need* to know to understand the story. From there, you have “experimental mind-control” and “techno thief.” These are two major aspects of the logline and they don’t go together at all. The featured words in a logline MUST CONNECT for your logline to feel whole. So, for example, if you say your hero is a vegan, then it works well if, later in the logline, they find themselves in a slaughterhouse. Finally, I don’t really know what a techno thief is. You mean like they steal bitcoin? It feels like a dated word and it’s not clear enough all on its own. If any word in your logline has a chance of being even mildly misunderstood, you don’t want to use it.

Carson gives logline consultations for $25 a pop.  E-mail him at carsonreeves1@gmail.com if interested.