Let me start by saying that the average logline submission this time around was better than ever before. Usually, every other e-mail I get, I’m rolling my eyes at how poor the logline is. But here, that didn’t happen. So all of you should be patting yourselves on the back for a job well done.
The big mystery for this competition is going to be: Did any AI loglines slip in? Cause I know plenty of writers tried to trick me to prove that AI loglines are better than human ones. For the most part, I think I spotted all of them. But maybe one or two got through. We’ll see.
I believe I responded to everybody who entered, telling them which of their ideas was my favorite. If I said to you, “Probably” or “prob” in picking your best one? That means it was the best of the five but probably not good enough to write. If you want more detailed thoughts on a logline, you can always order a logline consultation. They’re $25. E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com.
If you haven’t been a part of a showdown before, the rules are simple. Read all the loglines and vote for your favorite one in the comments. You have until Sunday, February 2nd, at 11:59pm Pacific Time to cast your vote. For the winner, I will dedicate a post on Monday or Tuesday to fleshing out the winning story and where I think you should take it.
One final thing. There were so many comedy loglines that, if I allowed all of them, this would be an 80% comedy contest. And the scripts that come from the comedy loglines here are usually bad. So, I’ll include a few comedies today. Then, next Friday, I’m going to do an all-comedy logline showdown – just because some of these loglines are really good and I want to give the writers some deserved attention.
Okay, are we ready?
Here are the logline entries…
Title: U-666
Genre: Supernatural Horror/WW2/Submarine
Logline: In the final days of World War II, a German U-boat tasked with smuggling high-ranking officials and occult artifacts to Argentina faces chaos when the captain’s son is possessed by a malevolent entity unleashed from the cursed cargo. As the possessed officer wreaks havoc, killing crew and sabotaging the submarine, the captain must confront supernatural terror and Allied forces closing in to exorcise his son, save his soul, and prevent the U-boat from becoming a tomb for all onboard.
Title: The Offering
Genre: Horror Thriller
Logline: A casual boat trip turns into a fight for survival when a young couple learns that their host is a servant to a pair of sirens and is offering them up as a feast. It’s Dead Calm meets Jaws.
Title: The Shot Heard Around in Time
Genre: Comedy
Logline: After traveling back in time and accidentally killing George Washington in a drunken duel, a bookish historian has to assume the identity of America’s first president and win the Revolutionary War.
Title: Nether Cop
Genre: Action, Horror
Logline: A clandestine division of the government, Dark Ops, whose agents employ a device that kills them for three minutes at a time, allowing them to battle demons on common ground.
Title: LAND OF ENCHANTMENT
Genre: Thriller
Logline: After arresting an illegal immigrant, a border patrol guard must team up with him when a Mexican drug cartel lays siege to the border station intent on killing him.
Title: In the Crease
Genre: Sports/True Story
Logline: In an urban community torn apart by drugs and violence, a disgraced ex-Ivy League lacrosse player seeks redemption by coaching an inner city lacrosse team.
Title: 221C BAKER STREET
Genre: Action-Comedy
Logline: When Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson go missing, the city’s only other detective duo finally get their shot at glory just as a criminal mastermind launches a plan to bring London to its knees.
Title: I’m With Cupid
Genre: Romantic Comedy
Logline: When an unlucky in love schlub finds out that his roommate used be Cupid, he coaxes him out of retirement to help him win the woman of his dreams… Only for a rusty Cupid to shoot himself in the foot and fall for the same girl.
Title: PARASAIL
Genre: Thriller
Logline: After the speedboat operator pulling their parasail apparently collapses and dies beneath them, a honeymooning couple find themselves speeding hundreds of miles out to sea, suspended 400 feet in the air, in a passage of water known as ’Shark Alley’. (FALL meets THE SHALLOWS).
Title: Burner Phone
Genre: Found footage/Thriller
Logline: When a teenage drug dealer fails to trash a burner phone after a deal gone
wrong got an undercover cop killed, he has only one hour to retrieve it and erase
an incriminating video before his boss cut all the loose ends (including him). Told
in real time from the POV of the phone screen.
Title: FORGIVE ME, FATHER
Genre: Thriller
Logline: A priest’s illegitimate son uses his father’s confessional to extort money from the wealthy congregation, but when he hears a confession that implicates a hitman in a string of high-profile murders, he attempts his most lucrative and dangerous extorsion yet.
Title: Seven Minutes in Kevin
Genre: Comedy
Logline: When a group of misfit high schoolers discover a closet that acts as a portal into the body of Kevin, their school’s popular golden boy, they must navigate his perfect life while trying to keep their secret—and their sanity—intact.
Time is running out to get your loglines in for The Five Loglines Showdown!
As the last entries stream in for the 5 Loglines Showdown…
What: 5 Loglines Showdown
When: Friday, January 31st
Deadline: Thursday, January 30th, 11pm Pacific Time
Submit: 5 loglines, each with a title and a genre
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
….I was reflecting on the kinds of movies that make it to the big screen these days and, like a lot of writers, I thought, “Oh man. It’s all IP and recycled movies.” I momentarily thought, “Why even bother writing a script? Barely any make it to the big screen so who cares??”
Luckily, rational minds prevailed.
First of all, that’s a silly way to look at it. Every movie you see at the box office has a screenwriter – usually several of them – who wrote it, and all of those screenwriters started out writing their own stuff, got noticed with those scripts, and then moved their way up to a place where they could write those studio films.
So don’t get it twisted.
But, the more promising news comes in the form of what I’m about to tell you: Streaming is the new playground for spec script writers. And it’s not like you’re settling that much. Some of these streaming movies have 9 digit budgets. So, instead of crying that theatrical movies based on spec scripts aren’t realistic anymore, take advantage of this new avenue that your screenwriting forefathers never had.
From just 2024, here are 75% of the movies made for streamers (all American – I didn’t include the British ones). And while not every single one started off as a spec, all of these could’ve been written on spec. This is what the streamers are looking for. They don’t care as much as studios do about if it was a comic book, novel, or video game. They just want to make movies.
So, here we go….
NETFLIX
Carry-On – High-concept thriller about a TSA agent who must follow the orders of a terrorist.
Don’t Move – Thriller about a woman crippled by a paralyzing agent from a serial killer. She must escape somehow.
It’s What’s Inside – Body swapping 20-something horror comedy.
The Union – A normal dude must team up with an old flame, who happens to be a secret agent.
Back in Action – Another 2-Hander spy thriller except the two main characters are a married couple.
Atlas – Sci-fi flick that focuses on a rogue robot.
Trigger Warning – A former Special Forces agent must defend her recently deceased father’s bar against a local gang.
Damsel – Die Hard in ancient times with a dragon.
Lift – Big broad Kevin Hart airplane heist action-comedy.
Uglies – Young Adult post-apocalyptic movie about how everyone must get surgery at 16 to become pretty.
Incoming – A comedy about what it’s like to be an incoming freshman in high school.
Lonely Planet – Adult Romance where an older female writer starts a relationship with a young man while on vacation.
His Three Daughters – Three adult daughters return home to take care of their ailing father.
A Family Affair – Strangely enough, another movie about an older female writer who has a relationship with a younger man. This one is more of a comedy, though.
Irish Wish – A woman makes a wish while on vacation in Ireland and becomes the bride in the wedding she’s attending.
HULU
Hold Your Breath – Psychological horror film about a woman living in a house during the Dust Bowl while a dangerous man roams the countryside nearby.
Prom Dates – A high school coming-of-age movie about two girls trying to go to prom.
Quiz Lady – A broad comedy about a serious woman obsessed with a quiz game show who gets a chance to be on the show.
AMAZON
Canary Black – CIA agent on the run.
Brothers – Dark Comedy where two brothers who hate each other embark on a heist road trip.
Killer Heat – A movie about twin brothers where one of them dies and an investigation ensues.
Jackpot – Big comedy where, in a Purge-like future, if you win the lottery, anybody who kills you on that first day takes the prize.
Space Cadet – Legally Blond at NASA.
The Boys in the Boat – Real-life sports story about a rowing Olympics medal in the 1930s, I believe.
Ricky Stanicky – An update on The Hangover template.
Role Play – A man realizes he is married to a secret assassin.
Foe – A hard-drama sci-fi movie about an unhappy marriage and a man called into space to work on a ship.
APPLE
Fly Me to the Moon – A romantic comedy about a woman helping a NASA director beat the Russians and get America to the moon.
Blitz – A World War 2 movie about a kid trying to get back to London while it’s being bombed by the Germans to be with his mom.
Wolfs – Two fixers get stuck on the same job. They despise each other.
The Instigators – Two knucklehead criminals get caught up in a job way bigger than them and must somehow survive the skilled people trying to kill them.
Fancy Dance – A very heavy drama about a Native American woman trying to find her missing sister.
The Family Plan – About a family who must go on the run due to the dad being a former secret assassin.
Are you catching what I’m throwing here? As you look through all these ideas, what do you see? The streamers are pretty much looking for everything! You’re not limited to very narrow parameters like you are when you’re writing spec scripts for studios.
There are a few main trends I noticed though. Streamers love secret assassins. They love two-handers. And they love action-comedies. So you’ll probably have a little more success with them if you’re writing one of those genres.
Okay, keep those loglines coming! As of the time I’m putting this post up, 5:00pm Pacific Time Wednesday, you have 29 hours to get your five loglines in!
Good luck!
Logline Showdown deadline is just a couple of days away!
Genre: Horror
Premise: When a group of teenagers repair an old clock with a mysterious 13th numeral,
they are granted an extra hour where their actions have no consequence.
About: Anna Klassen first made waves with her J.K. Rowling biopic, When Lightening Strikes, which made the 2017 Black List. She would later win the ScreenCraft Fellowship that year.
Writer: Anna Klassen
Details: 116 pages
Madeline Cline (from Outer Banks) for Nell?
Welp, we’re almost there, guys.
The 5 Loglines Showdown!
If you’re just revisiting Scriptshadow after a break, here are the details…
What: 5 Loglines Showdown
When: Friday, January 31st
Deadline: Thursday, January 30th, 11pm Pacific Time
Submit: 5 loglines, each with a title and a genre
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
In order to get you revved up, I looked through the entire 2024 Black List to find the snazziest logline – the kind of concept that represents what you should be shooting for.
I definitely found it.
I’ll be surprised if someone comes up with a better logline this Thursday but I’m rooting for it! Let’s see if the script delivered.
We open on 18 year old Andrew Tate wannabe, Blake, recklessly driving his car down a mountain road, cops in tow, then purposefully shooting off a cliff to his death. Cut to four months earlier and we meet the rest of our high school characters.
There’s Nell, who has a sick dad and a young brother, both of whom she cares for. There’s Wyatt, the captain of the football team, and Quinn, his pink-haired girlfriend since 4th grade. And then there’s Lyle, the nerd.
The five of them all get caught cheating during a test so their teacher makes them come in on their off day and clean out the old school library, which hasn’t been used in years. It’s here where Nell finds an old fancy watch with a 13th hour.
Elsewhere in the library, Blake starts picking on Lyle and the next thing you know, he pushes him. Lyle falls back onto an old rusty spike and dies. Everybody starts freaking out. That is until they reset an hour earlier when Lyle was fine. After their initial shock, they realize that this watch gives them the power of a 13th “no consequences” hour each day.
The group starts using that power. Nell burns down her house. Blake gets in a fight-to-the-death with his perfect brother. Wyatt and Quinn have sex in a packed diner. If nothing matters, you can do anything you want!
The ragtag crew then forms their own version of utopia, passing the watch around, each using it to do bigger and crazier things. Wanna rob a bank? Why not! Heck, they even create a Fight Club! That is until one of them accidentally cracks the watch. The next day, Nell’s father remembers her yelling at him during the 13th hour. But that’s not possible!
Now that certain things during the 13th hour can carry over, the group has to be more careful about what they do. But once you’ve experienced that much power, it’s hard to give it back. Blake is the first one to test the limits, and ends up dead because of it. The others realize that they must destroy the clock for good. But will they?
I was just watching Conan O’Brien interview Ben Stiller and Stiller struggling with the reality that he had no idea how people would react to Severance. He didn’t know if they’d think it sucked or if they’d fall in love with it.
That is the journey of every artistic endeavor. You hope it’s going to work. But you just don’t know.
A lot of it comes down to meeting a simple directive: Deliver on the promise of the premise.
This is especially true for high concept ideas. When a producer requests to read your high concept script, their expectations are high. They want to have fun. So if you give them a run-of-the-mill execution, they’re going to be upset.
Is The 13th Hour execution run-of-the-mill?
Good question. And not one that’s easy to answer.
Klassen gets so caught up in the setup of her screenplay that the entire first half is predictable. If I had wanted to, I could skip 10 pages and not be lost. That’s usually an indication that you’re not being creative enough with your story.
This happens a lot in screenwriting. I’ve been guilty of it. Everybody here has probably been guilty of it. “Setup” is the most technical thing in a script (set up the characters, set up the plot, build the three-act structure) and therefore the most susceptible to cliche. It’s easy to lay out those beats and then robotically hit them.
But once the script moved past the setup and into the payoff, a lot changed. The biggest change was the focus on theme. Klassen did a nice job exploring the idea of time and what it means to us. Specifically, how it means different things to different people.
For example, for someone like Blake, it meant he had a release for all the craziest things he’d never be allowed to do in real life. Whereas, for someone like Nell, who has to take care of her father and young brother, it meant just having more time in the day. To relax. Or to practice a skill that she never had time for before.
And there’s something inherently compelling about actions without consequences. There’s some wish-fulfillment rush you get whenever you explore that subject matter. The fight club bit felt like a gag at first. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized, “If you have an hour a day of zero consequences, eventually, that would become boring. What do you do then? Maybe you do start a club where you beat the shit out of each other. Cause at least then you feel something.”
There’s definitely some crossover with The Substance here. Later in the movie, they realize they didn’t read the fine print. An hour of extra time costs 1 week of your life. So you’re aging faster. This meant there was a real cost to continuing to use the watch.
And I thought Klassen explored that convincingly. If you got hooked on an extra hour of no consequences a day, you might kill someone who threatened to take that away from you.
I enjoyed when Klassen went deep like that with the characters. But, unfortunately, it was juxtaposed against a lot of boilerplate dialogue. Whenever these characters spoke, they sounded like cliches.
For example, here’s a dialogue exchange from The 13th Hour. When writing dialogue, the questions you want to ask yourself are: Is this dialogue bare-bones? Is it cliche? Are all the responses expected? Is there little-to-no creativity?
Contrast this with yesterday’s script, Carousel. That script had some problems but dialogue was not one of them. Here’s a random snapshot of the dialogue from that script.
Notice how much more creative the latter is. You could tell there was real thought put into it. Whereas, with 13th Hour, you got the sense the dialogue was formulated in the first draft then never improved upon. Look, guys, most of my complaints regarding dialogue can be solved with effort. Keep going through the scene 30-40 times over the life of the screenplay, and look to improve lines/words/phrasing wherever you can.
By the way, if you want to upgrade your own dialogue, I know an amazing book that will start improving your dialogue WITHIN AN HOUR. Check it out.
Lastly, what I look for in this type of idea is cleverness. If you’re writing in the time-travel genre, you have to be clever. The grandfather of the time travel universe, Back to the Future, has like three-dozen clever moments in it. Where was that cleverness here?? Characters driving their cars off cliffs isn’t clever. I needed more.
Like a lot of scripts on the Black List, this one has some good things and it has some bad things. The story should’ve been set up faster so we could start exploring the premise quickly. I needed more creativity and cleverness when exploring the premise. And the dialogue needed work. This is a teen movie. Teen movies are dialogue playgrounds. You can’t come with your middle reliever. You gotta come with your ace.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If an average writer could quickly come up with equivalent dialogue to the scene you’ve written, that’s an indication you’re not working hard enough to write memorable dialogue.
What I learned 2: Klassen on outlining – “An outline is also my insurance policy against writer’s block. Even on days when I don’t feel compelled to write, I can refer to the outline and produce a rough version of what my more motivated past self envisioned because bad writing is always better than no writing.”
Remember, the Logline Showdown deadline is this Thursday! Details below!
Genre: Drama
Premise: A doctor coming off a divorce must learn to understand his anxiety-ridden teenage daughter while exploring a romance with an old flame.
About: This is the last script from the 2023 Black List that I was interested in reading. Screenwriter and director, Rachel Lambert, is best known for a film she made recently with Daisy Ridley titled, “Sometimes I Think About Dying.”
Writer: Rachel Lambert
Details: 116 pages
The character of Rebecca feels like an adult Jennifer Lawrence role.
A quick reminder of how to enter Logline Showdown this week.
What: 5 Loglines Showdown
When: Friday, January 31st
Deadline: Thursday, January 30th, 11pm Pacific Time
Submit: 5 loglines, each with a title and a genre
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
This may be the most ironic review I’ve ever posted considering I’m promoting a logline competition in the same post. This is, obviously, one of the weakest loglines you could enter in a logline competition.
To that end, Carousel is a great example of a script that a Hollywood agent would read and say, “This writer has talent,” while simultaneously knowing the script would never go anywhere.
UNLESS the writer was also the director. Which today’s screenwriter is. So she’s figured out a way to circumvent the obstacle. But let this be a lesson to non-writer-directors that trying to get traction with a script like this is like trying to get traction as a tennis pro while playing with a hockey stick.
The script takes place in Cleveland, Ohio, where Noah, the head doctor at a local medical clinic, is dealing with the fallout from his divorce and his deteriorating relationship with his 14 year old daughter, Maya, who’s battling crippling anxiety.
If the recent divorce isn’t bad enough, Noah’s also dealing with the death of his father, who used to run the medical clinic. Noah’s brother, Sam, stepped in to help during the transition but is now eager to move on, leaving Noah unsure of how to move forward.
The one bright light in Noah’s life occurs when Maya falls in love with Debate Team at school. However, Noah will later learn that his former lover, Rebecca, who’s moved back from a high-level political job in D.C., is coaching the debate team.
Noah attempts to weave his way back into Rebecca’s life even if she’s reluctant to reciprocate. Then the two run into each other so much that she figures, ‘why not give it a go,’ and the relationship reignites.
I wish I could give you some splashy exciting plot that develops after this but the above synopsis is pretty much it. That’s all that happens in the script. Which should give you an indication of where this analysis is going.
This is the problem a lot of writer-directors have.
They hide their writing behind their directing. They can make something look like a movie. But there’s nothing underneath it. That’s because writer-directors, except for the superstars we all know, rarely put as much effort into learning writing as they do directing.
Literally nothing happens in this script.
It’s so devoid of any plot points that you might as well have had us follow 5 real people around for a week. Just have us experience life. Cause that’s what this script is. It is trying to mimic real life.
Well, I’ve got news for you.
REAL LIFE IS BORING.
Movies are meant to highlight the most important and exciting moments from life. That’s what makes us want to see them. Cause they feel larger than life. Even writers who like to explore grounded real-life stories know this. Your biggest plot point in a movie cannot be drunk texts on page 103, which is what actually happens in Carousel.
You can probably feel my frustration here because this is one of my pet peeves – writers who place the burden on the reader to be entertained rather than on themselves to entertain. It’s your job, as the writer, to inject DRAMA into your story consistently enough that we stay invested.
That’s not taking anything away from the character development or the dialogue here, both of which I found strong. The attention to detail, particularly in relation to Cleveland, was also strong: “This storied institution of Cleveland is a menagerie of ethnic cuisine and legacy food stalls the size of multiple city blocks. There’s pierogi, kimchee, paczki, salted and cured fish, kraut, sausages served on hard homemade rolls with krauts. Noah, Rebecca, and Maya browse and sample.”
But that’s not storytelling.
Storytelling requires a plot. It requires you to periodically advance the story in dramatically compelling ways.
I don’t think I encountered a single plot point here. I’m not asking for 16,000 plot points, like Deadpool & Wolverine. But can you give me one? Even though I liked the Maya character, as we trudged towards the midpoint, I was hoping she was going to die so, at least the story could have some plot to deal with.
It just makes things so much harder on you, as the writer, if you’re only writing a character study. When characters are only going through internal emotions, that exploration needs to be perfect for the script to work. You have no wiggle room for error like you do when you’re hitting us with a new plot point every 10 pages.
Take Rebecca and Noah. A pretty good exploration of a relationship. But was it good enough to carry the movie all by itself? Not even close. I just finished the script and I still don’t understand why these two have such a complicated relationship with one another. This line from the script explains it best: “She looks up. And there, standing right there in her backyard, is Noah. He is the last person she wants in that moment. And he is the only person she’d ever want.”
Uhhhhh… what?
I don’t care as much about that confusion if I’m enjoying the plot. But if that character stuff is the only source of entertainment in the screenplay, I’m going to demand perfection.
It’s too bad because there is talent on display here.
In particular, there is a sophistication on the character side that you don’t usually see in a lot of screenplays. “When you’ve convinced someone it’s safe for them to love you, you have immense power.” “They talk about whatever topics allow them to feel connected to another man without doing any emotional labor.” “This is Ian all over again. He builds the maze, you run through it, hoping there’s an “I love you” at the end.”
If you love drama and character studies, I would not write feature scripts. I would write for TV. I would write a novel. Both of those give you more space to explore character and neither requires the stakes and urgency movies do.
I’ll leave you with a page from the script which demonstrates just how slow the read was designed.
Script link: Carousel
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: To all the writers who prefer grounded drama, I beg of you to keep this in mind – You’re not trying to win over your college English professor. You’re trying to win over hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of moviegoers. Never forget that when you’re coming up with a story.
People be doggin Flight Risk but I swear on the Delta wings that Sally the flight attendant gave me on a flight from Chicago to Cleveland when I was 10 years old that it was a good script!
Plus we gotta give Lionsgate credit. The studio only gets two number 1 films a year so we just celebrate it when it happens!
I’m not here to talk Flight Risk though.
I’m here to talk American Primeval.
The show has exploded on Netflix, becoming the most watched new show on the streamer.
Let me make something clear to every screenwriter: When you have a show that does well in a genre that the public typically ignores? YOU MUST STUDY WHY.
There are secrets in every breakout success so, if you’re smart, you’ll dissect why something that wasn’t supposed to happen happened.
I sat down and watched the pilot episode of American Primeval and have discovered all the answers.
Come in with a focused sympathetic situation
A lot of times with these TV shows that have a lot of characters, the pilot will jump around, covering a lot of territory, so as to set up the plot. The problem with this is that whenever you dilute the narrative, you lose narrative thrust.
So, I like when a pilot introduces us to a main character, or group of characters, and stays with them. It’s much easier to hook a reader that way. Especially if you create a sympathetic situation with those characters.
When we meet Sara Rowell and her son, Devin, they’re in a bind. They’ve arrived in a dangerous town on the frontier. They don’t have any allies. They’re two weeks late. Sara’s trying to meet up with her husband, yet nobody knows where he is.
We sympathize with that. Because we know that if they don’t find her husband, they’re probably dead. So, emotionally, we’re hooked. And that does sooooooooo so so so much work for the story. If you can get the reader emotionally hooked on your main characters and their situation, you’re golden. American Primeval does that right away.
Drop us into the thick of things
A mistake I see a lot in TV writing is, what I call, “SETUP ADDICTION.” All the writer cares about, in that pilot, is setting up the 15 characters in their show. I get it. TV has a lot of characters. It covers many hours of story. For that to work, you have to tell us who everyone is.
The problem is, when you only focus on that, you don’t actually hook us. You’re telling us, “bear with me while I describe all my characters to you. Then, once I’m finished, we can get to the good stuff.”
No. That’s not how successful storytelling works. You must entertain us ALONG THE WAY. That starts on the very first page. So, here, we’re not just setting things up. We’re immediately meeting two people, a mother and her son, who have arrived at a remote train station, both of whom are looking for the mom’s husband.
Every character we meet isn’t met to say to the audience, “Here I am. I will be one of the characters in the story.” Instead, they come in as dramatic accomplices or foils to our heroine’s goal. That’s how you hook a reader in a pilot. You start the entertainment on page one.
And here’s a pro-tip for you: Come into the story as late as possible. We could’ve easily come into this story with Sara on the train, on her way to town. And it probably would’ve allowed us an easier way to introduce her and her son. But, had we done so, we would’ve started off with a slower, more boring, scene.
By starting the story as late as possible – with her and her son already having arrived in town – we jumped right into things.
Introduce danger above and beyond what we’re used to
The average potential viewer dismisses Westerns because they find them boring. Westerns move slower. Plot beats take longer to get to. The setting is vast but often empty. This genre doesn’t feel exciting enough for most people.
Therefore, if you write a Western that leans into that template, we’ll dismiss it. But, it’s clear right away that American Primeval has no interest in typical Western conventions. It leaned into intensity as much as possible. Even in the slow moments, there were always scary-looking dudes lurking nearby – guys who could snap our heroine’s neck in a second if need be. There is no safety in American Primeval and that’s what’s drawing in people who don’t typically watch Westerns.
That’s a valuable lesson, by the way. When you give readers what they’re used to, they will react accordingly. Give them a bigger, scarier, more intense, Western, and they will clear their Thursday nights out to binge your show.
One of the things that really stuck out to me about American Primeval is when the local sheriff laid out to Sara why she needed to turn around and go back to Philadelphia. You’ve got a brutal winter, fearless outlaws, three of the most violent Indian tribes in the country, bears, wolves, and let’s not forget the crazed Mormons.
Unlike any Western I’ve ever watched before, it felt like there was no way to succeed. If you can create that belief, you will retain 99% of your readers. People are inherently curious about impossible odds. In contrast, if you say, “The goal is difficult but doable,” there’s no reason for the reader to keep reading. Cause you told them straight up that the hero will probably succeed. NO. You want them to believe that YOUR HERO WILL DEFINITELY DIE. That’s how to keep a reader invested.
Urgency In Non-Urgent Scenarios
This next tip is reading crack. Whenever you write period stuff, create an URGENT SCENARIO. Readers are so accustomed to stories set in the distant past unfolding at a slower pace. So if you can create a scenario that feels urgent, the juxtaposition will evoke an unfamiliar and exciting feeling in the reader.
Right from the start here, we learn that Sara’s husband left two weeks ago because she and her son were late. So time is of the essence. He’s two weeks ahead of them. They have to move now!
Give us truth
Finally, American Primeval is yet another example that writing rewards truth.
When you try and lie by creating scenarios that the reader knows are either factually or subconsciously inaccurate, they will turn on you.
One of the things that confused me when I looked into this show is that audiences loved it but critics did not (they gave it a 67% on Rotten Tomatoes). The deeper I looked, the more I realized that critics, who mostly favor progressive storytelling, dislike when Native Americans are portrayed poorly. So they never give stuff like this a positive score.
This opens up an opportunity for anyone who wants to portray controversial aspects of history truthfully. There were some savage natives back in the Wild West and by simply showing that truth, you give the reader a show that feels different from every other show they’ve seen.
If you look at Killers of the Flower Moon, there are no bad Native Americans in that film. Only bad white people. That’s mostly how things are portrayed these days. As a writer, your job is not to mimic what other people think is right. It’s to seek out the truth and show it. Cause if you can show that truth, you are giving people an authentic experience, which is something audiences rarely experience these days.
All of this is what’s led American Primeval to be the most popular show on Netflix. I was only surprised by this BEFORE I found out who wrote it. Mark L. Smith is a great writer. What better endorsement can you get as a writer than Quentin Tarantino hiring you to write something (he hired Mark to write his Star Trek film).
I also chat with Mark every once in a while. I beg him for that Star Trek script but he always says the same thing. He’d be kicked out of Hollywood if he gave it to me. But I’ll keep trying!
Unless you can’t handle extreme violence, I recommend ALL OF YOU watch this show. It’s a spectacular example of how to write a great pilot script that hooks the reader.
