Genre: Horror
Premise: A long-forgotten killer from the 1940s reappears in the present day to wreak havoc on a small town.
About: Blumhouse ain’t stopping any time soon. The business savvy Jason Blum realized that we haven’t created an iconic slasher movie monster since the 80s. And why wouldn’t you, seeing as you can milk over a dozen movies from a memorable antagonist. “Sundown” is written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, who scripted the remake of Carrie, and has also written on the TV shows “Glee,” and “Big Love.” The film will be directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, who directed some episodes of American Horror Story, as well as Black List script, “Me & Earl & the Dying Girl” (cancer is in, baby! Producer: “I love it. When the hero saves the girl from the terrorists in the end? One of the best climaxes I’ve seen all year. Buuuu-ttttt, is there any way we can add more chemotherapy?”). In classic Blum fashion, the movie will star a bunch of unknowns. ☺
Writer: Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (inspired by the film by Charles B. Pierce)
Details: 100 pages (2/25/2013 draft)

Don’t know much about this one other than that it’s a Blumhouse Production. Typically, I don’t review horror scripts unless they’re for Amateur Friday (where a lot of them seem to win the slot). But since Blumhouse so rarely misreads the public, it’s important, if you’re writing horror, to pay attention to whatever this guy does. Cause whatever he’s doing is setting the trend. Until someone else comes along at least.

Get your note pads out, because “Sundown” has one of the more needlessly complicated setups I’ve read in a screenplay. The story takes place in a town called Texarkana, which is a “double town,” split on the border between Texas and Arkansas.

Over half a century ago, in 1946, there was a series of horrific murders by a serial killer who wore a bag over his head. The man, who was never caught, was dubbed the “The Phantom Killer.” Flash-forward 30 years, and they made a movie about the murders, which became a cult hit. Now, every year in Texarkana, they show the movie all over town so people can freak out about their town’s very own ancient serial killer.

We’ll put an asterisk by “ancient” because it’s now present day. And when two teenagers, Cory and Jami, drive to a secluded area to do what kids in cars driving to secluded areas do, they see a man standing by the car WITH A BAG ON HIS HEAD!

We’re not sure if this is in protest to the new Los Angeles law that requires you to buy paper bags for your groceries or not.  But whatever the motive, the bagged one pins Cory down and rapes him while repeatedly stabbing him. He makes Jami turn away, so neither she, nor we, can see what’s happening. But we can hear it. And our surly imagination is much worse than whatever’s happening behind this chick’s face.

While Cory doesn’t make it, Jami is somehow able to escape the killer, and the next day, the town goes into full-on Freak Out Mode. Is this a copycat killer performing a one-night thrill kill? Or is The Phantom Killer back!? And if so, how is he back? He’d be, like, 90 years old by now. Is he going to kill people with his acid reflux?

Long story short, our killer keeps on killing while Jami becomes a little investigator, researching all the murders dating back to that first fateful kill. As she slowly puts the puzzle pieces together, she thinks she knows who the killer is. But is it too late? The killer may have one last big kill in him before going into hibernation for another 70 years.

The enemy!

The Town That Dreaded Sundown should’ve been dreading its overly elaborate setup. There is a lot of information given to us in the first act that could’ve easily been summarized as “the killer’s back.”

A serial killer in the 1940s. A movie about those killings 30 years later. A complicated border town with two mayors. All that stuff would’ve been cool IF IT ACTUALLY MATTERED. But if you never mentioned any of it, we’d still know exactly what was going on. Psycho Freak who’s pissed about the paper bag grocery law is killing people and he needs to be stopped. 1940 doesn’t need to tell me that.

The irony is that once you get past that first act of exposition, the story becomes blazingly simple. A slasher is killing people. Our hero is trying to figure out who he is. Which meant for the next 50 pages, I was consistently 30 pages ahead of the writer.

Here’s the thing. Horror movies are all the same. They’re broken down into a few different categories (slasher, ghost, monster-in-a-box), but once you know which one you’re watching, the movie becomes incredibly predictable.

For that reason, you want to take whatever’s unique about your idea, and infuse that into the plot as much as possible, since that’s the only opportunity you have for making your script different. If your horror movie takes place on a pig farm, for example, I better not see a garden variety slasher flick. I should see horror where pigs are involved in various ways.

So here, I kept waiting for this double-town thing to work its way into the plot. Or this 1940s stuff. And the 1940s stuff does peek in every once in awhile. Maybe, for instance, the killer could be the son of the original #1 suspect in the killings. But in the end, nothing surfaced from that first year that affected the plot. It was still a killer with a bag trying to kill people.

Why not create friction between the border towns to begin with? And then this serial killing thing starts and each mayor has a completely different idea on how to tackle the problem. This causes a lot of conflict between the mayors and the towns. Maybe one of the towns is poorer, so the assumption from the richer town is that the killer must be from the “degenerate” side of the tracks.

You know what, if you really wanted to add some tension, why not set this on the border between the U.S. and Mexico. Now you can really explore some crazy shit.

As far as the 1940s stuff, I’m not sure placing the original killings in the 40s was the best thing for the movie. It’s too far in the past for us to believe that the same killer could return. If you changed the original murders to the late 1970s, now it’s conceivable that the original killer could be back. Again, 1940s sounds cool cause it’s so long ago but you can’t put “cool” things in your script if they don’t serve the story in an interesting way. Every choice you make must serve the story.

That’s not to say “Sundown” was bad. It had some really good scenes. The early scene with Corey getting raped while we stayed on Jami’s horrified face, looking in the other direction, imagining what was happening behind her – that was good stuff.

One of the most important things about being a horror writer is knowing when to show something and when not to. Sometimes, not showing is infinitely scarier. I’d go so far as to say that every scary moment in your script – you should consider both options. Should you show the horror or not? Your first inclination may be to show it.  But always consider the alternative.  It might surprise you.

“Sundown” isn’t breaking any new ground, which is a shame, because it could’ve. It had such an information-heavy setup that I was sure all this information was going to be used to create an elaborate horror plot that I’d never seen before. Instead I got “Halloween” but with a not-as-cool mask. Not a bad script. But not that good either.

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

What I learned: Very important for writers to know. If you’re writing 5 line paragraphs or longer, the reader is skimming through those paragraphs. Lots of writers laugh in the face of the “stay under 4 lines” rule of writing action paragraphs. But readers HATE huge chunky paragraphs and they take it as an insult when you write them. They fight back by skimming. To prevent this from happening, keep your paragraphs short!

Genre: Period Drama
Premise: Set in the 1700s, Knifeman chronicles the birth of modern surgery.
About: Knifeman is one of the lucky pilots that survived AMC’s in-house contest where only the best pilots, as voted for by the employees, make it to air. Knifeman is written by Rolin Jones, who created another AMC series, Low Winter Sun, which didn’t make it past the first season. Rolin has also written for Friday Night Lights, Weeds, and the United States of Tara.
Writer: Rolin Jones (created by Ron Fitzgerald and Rolin Jones) (Inspired by the book, “The Knife Man: Blood, Body-snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery” by Wendy Moore)
Details: 50 pages (AMC CUT #3, 12-16-13 draft)

We’re reaching a new era in television that I suppose was inevitable. So many damn channels are getting into original programming that the supply is usurping the demand. Shows are paying more and more to advertise their arrival but their premiers come and go without a whisper. Someone told me The Strain debuted a few weeks ago. I had no idea. “Salem?” A pilot I reviewed a while back. I guess that’s had an entire season already? You could’ve fooled me.

It seems like there are 5 “buzz-worthy” shows on TV at any one time and if you’re not one of those shows, nobody cares about you. Those shows, at the moment, appear to be Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, Orange is the New Black, Scandal, and The Good Wife.

As for why I picked Knifeman today, it’s because AMC cares more about its scripts than any other network besides HBO. So even though I don’t have much interest in 18th century surgery, I knew the script was going to at least be interesting. And it was.

It’s the 18th century and a bad time to be a human being. You get a head cold on Wednesday, you could be picking out your burial plot by Saturday. But you know, doctors are still doing their thing. They’re selling patients on the equivalent of frog blood, but the patients don’t know any better, so everyone goes along with it.

In this medical mediocrity, we follow two doctors. One is Julian Tattersal. He’s an esteemed doctor/surgeon at St. Stephen’s Hospital. Then there’s his brother, John Tattersal. John is technically a barber. But in his spare time, he jacks recently deceased bodies from the local cemetery, cuts them open, and explores the human anatomy, looking for new ways to perform surgery and save people.

John is desperate to get in on this whole St. Stephen’s gig, but for some reason, his brother Julian looks down on him, and refuses to help him get a job. Ya see? Nepotism doesn’t always pay off.

Eventually, the two find themselves fighting for the same client, a man who’s accumulated a nasty blood clot on the back of his leg. Julian says the only way to help him is to amputate the leg. John disagrees. He says he can get in there, tie off the artery, and the circulation will move around the problem spot. No amputation needed.

Even though John is very unofficial, the man chooses him because he wants to save his leg. The finale is the big operation, and – spoiler alert – everything seems to go well until John is finished, when the artery is tied up and the man drops dead. The end.

I’m far from understanding TV pilots as well as I do features, but I know enough to say that Knifeman does not deliver on the pilot front. First of all, the show feels way too small. If you look at a previous AMC pilot, Turn, there’s a bigger overarching storyline about the United States trying to gain independence. It added stakes and urgency to the more personal storylines that the characters were engaged in.

There’s none of that here. This literally has only two storylines. Julian doing work at the hospital and John doing work in his apartment. It’s way too simple and way too general.

You also need a series of hooks in a TV show, whether those hooks are teasing the segment after the commercial break, teasing the next episode, or teasing the entire series. Give us a giant monster walking through the trees (Lost). Give us a potentially deadly cancer diagnosis (Breaking Bad). Give us a sister who was supposedly abducted by aliens (The X-Files). There weren’t any hooks teasing anything here, so I rarely found myself interested in what was going to happen next.

For example, the end of the pilot (spoilers) has John killing this guy during surgery. And that’s it. Where’s the reason to watch the next episode if the question’s already been answered (he’s dead – oops)? We certainly don’t get the sense that killing this man is going to put John in danger. He made it clear to the man (a servant) and the man’s owner that he could die during the surgery.

And that was another thing about this that made it small. There were no stakes! I mean why is John working on a servant? Someone whose life doesn’t mean anything?? If he dies, so what? Why couldn’t it have been someone of importance in the town? Now there’s some real shit on the line. If John fails, his career is over before it starts. If he succeeds, he’ll be a superstar. But no, it’s just a nobody who nobody cares about. And that seemed to be the theme throughout. If there was a choice between making something big and important or small and insignificant, the latter was chosen.

What I was hoping for was that, as both John and Julian worked their way through the surgeries, they’d start noticing some spooky unknown disease inside the bodies, perhaps the start of a plague. And they realized they weren’t equipped to deal with this problem if it spread. That’s the kind of long-standing “problem” or “hook” I was seeking from this episode but never got it.

Honestly, I don’t know where this show goes from here. I don’t know what the episodes are going to be about. A pilot’s supposed to bring up a lot of questions that we want answered. But the only real question seems to be whether John will become an official doctor at the hospital. I’m not sure I care enough about that to keep watching.

The only time the script really came alive was during the surgeries, when the gooey bits of human flesh oozing and pumping inside the bodies were bandied about. I started to wonder – is the only reason they made this show so they could show gross surgeries? They wouldn’t make an entire show just to show that, would they? And yet blood and guts were the big star here.

With all that said, I do see the potential of this world. There’s something weird and unsettling about the imagery in Knifeman. A hack of a barber doing stolen cadaver surgery in his dark apartment, surrounded by jars of brains and hearts and livers – that’s something you can build a show off of.

They just haven’t created a story yet. You need more than incisions to keep people tuning in every week. If they figure that out, Knifeman is going to be a nice offbeat alternative to the bigger shows on television. If not, it’s going to end up like a botched surgery on E.R.

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

What I learned: It’s risky if the only thing going on in your TV show is the immediate on-screen stuff.  It’s better if there’s a bigger overarching storyline or problem to give the show some gravitas.  The big mistake here was that Knifeman was only about these two surgeons and nothing more.  It needed something with some scope that hinted at a bigger story.  If we feel a show is too small in scope, we have a hard time seeing it last.

Genre: Superhero!
Premise: An Amazonian Princess living on a remote island is brought to the real world, where she uses her unique set of powers to take down a mega-corporation with world domination on the brain (basically every comic-hero plot ever).
About: This is the Joss Whedon draft of Wonder Woman he wrote in 2006! Whedon, as many of you know, has left his DC buddies in the dust to become the head directing honcho of Marvel Universe with his Avengers films. To give you some context of the movie business when Whedon wrote this, the two big superhero films preceding this draft were 2005’s Batman Begins and 2004’s Spider-Man 2. Both films were considered dark (Batman moreso than Spider-Man of course) and so the dark realistic super-hero trend was beginning.
Writer: Joss Whedon
Details: 115 pages (2006 draft)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Yay!!! Michael Bay is a kajillionaire. Can’t say I ever got into the whole mutant turtle thing. But I knew when Dr. Explosion decided to put his particular brand of vapidness on the turtle tale, I definitely wanted nothing to do with it.

I was rooting for Swetnam’s Into the Storm (spec script) to do some hurricane like damage at the box office, but it just goes to show how difficult it is to play with established properties (remember that spec script writers – it’s why your concept has to be really awesome for Hollywood to take notice). Into the Storm needed at least a couple of recognizable faces to sell the movie, like Twister and The Perfect Storm before it. I don’t think a storm by itself can do all the heavy box office lifting.

Speaking of storms, what happens when a Marvelnado and a DCunami meet? You’ll find out today. Whedon, the flagship director for the third biggest movie ever, Marvel’s Avengers, wasn’t always chummy chummy with the Marvel comic book family. He was once playing for the other team, scripting the DC script for Wonder Woman.

Stories like this always intrigue me. Because if Joss Whedon wrote a Wonder Woman script today, while he’s on top of the world with the biggest franchise in the world, everyone would be DESPERATE to read it. It would be the hottest script in town, right? So what changes if he wrote it eight years ago? Was Joss Whedon any worse of a writer? He may not have been a household name at the time, but he’s still the same guy. So why not use this script for a wonder woman movie. Say it’s written by Joss Whedon and everyone wins, right?

Well, that’s assuming he overcame the same problems everyone who’s been trying to adapt Wonder Woman over the decades has run into. Which is that her character’s not fit for today’s super hero audience. A lasso that makes people tell the truth? How dumb is that? It looks to me like they finally said fuck it and Zack Snyder is going to change the character to make her a straight-forward ass-kicking female, kind of like how he dropped the whole Clark Kent glasses reporter stuff. Screw history.

But what if Joss Whedon had been in charge. What would he have done? Let’s find out!

I don’t know if you knew this or not. But Wonder Woman is an Amazon. You know that legendary island full of tall beautiful ass-kicking ladies? Well it’s real. At least in this script it is. A pilot named Steve is bringing food and supplies to child refugees when his plane goes down and crash-lands on this Amazonian Island.

At first Steve goes looking for Jeff Bezos, but he ends up running into Diana instead. Diana is the Princess of the island. And when her mother, the queen, finds out that a man has entered the perimeter – a huge no-no on this island – she sentences him to death! (probably why Beznos is hiding)

But Diana’s developed a little bit of a crush on Steve, and challenges her mom to a duel for the right to help Steve get off this island and save the children! She ends up winning, and the two head off, where Diana learns the complicated multitudes of the real world, namely that when you deliver supplies to kids, a local warlord is going to want 75% of the goods for himself.

After the Warlord shoots Diana for questioning his motives, she gives him a taste of his own medicine, beating some ass, and Steve realizes he’s got something special here. So he takes Alice/Wonder Woman back to the U.S., to a crime-ridden city called Gateway, which I guess is Wonder Woman’s version of Gotham.

In Gateway, there’s this super-huge company called Spearhead that poses as a wonderful company that manufactures weapons to help the United States defend itself.

Wonder Woman, pissed that there’s so much lying and corruption in this city, takes it upon herself to work her way up the local gangster ladder to find out who’s ultimately responsible for all this crime. Using her truth lasso (which forces people to tell the truth), it eventually leads back to, you guessed it, Spearhead.

The problem is, Spearhead’s being protected by a super-human of its own, some freaky-faced metallic skull-capped dude named Strife who, oh yeah, just happens to be the nephew of Ares. Ares as in THE GOD OF WAR! Yup, craziness is happening all over. So if Wonder Woman is going to save the day, she’s basically going to have to defeat a God to do it.

I’m going to give Whedon this. He somehow made Wonder Woman cool. I thought there was no way around the whole truth-lasso thing. But Whedon doesn’t use it much, and when he does, it’s with attitude (for example, with one gangster, Wonder Woman slings the rope around his neck like an Indiana Jones whip, before asking him who he works for).

But the biggest reason this worked was that Whedon went all in. He committed to this character, to this world, to the rules of this universe. And I think that’s what you have to do with these scripts.

When amateur writers tackle comic material, they typically have a vague sense of the hero they liked growing up, then they use their own imagination to fill in the gaps, whether it be their heroine taking down a gangster or kicking ass in some big set piece fight. It all feels very thin, like a writer who really loves movies including all his favorite movie moments in one script.

When you read the opening of Wonder Woman, the detail involved in this Amazon tribe, where they came from, the hierarchy, the connections between the characters. It feels like Whedon really immersed himself in the comics and knew this world before he wrote anything. And when you do that, even if the world is silly and weird, the audience believes it, because you, the writer, have committed to it.

That’s one of the biggest differences I see between amateur and pro writers. Pros commit themselves to the world. Amateurs learn a little bit here, a little bit there, and think that’s enough.

I never really knew how good of a writer Joss Whedon was until this script actually. His writing always seems to have this immediacy, yet it never feels rushed. It creates this propelling motion as you’re reading, spinning you down from one paragraph to the next.

In amateur screenplays, it always feels like the writer is fighting his sentences, writing himself into corners he must clumsily write himself out of.

And I noticed that what Whedon is really good at, is that no matter how intense things get, he’s not afraid to undercut it with a joke to lighten the mood. For example, near the middle of the script, amongst a lot of chaos, a girl stops Wonder Woman and with giant puppy dog eyes says, “My cat’s stuck up in the tree.” Wonder Woman looks up at the cat, then back to the girl. “Climb it.” She then runs off. This is something Christopher Nolan can learn from the Firefly scribe.

The only weakness in the script is that no matter how skilled Whedon is, he can never get too far away from the fact that this is a super-hero movie. There are only so many surprises you can pull on the audience. It’s why I liked X-Men: First Class so much. Because for once, there was something different going on that we weren’t used to in the comic book world. It’s why Batman Begins made such a big splash when it came out. Because it approached the superhero genre from such a realistic place (Nolan’s got Whedon there). It’s why, I believe, Guardians of the Galaxy did so well. Because these weren’t your typical super-heroes and it wasn’t your typical super-hero movie.

Those movies found little black holes to slip into that took them to parallel universes which allowed them to tell a new story.  But Wonder Woman is stuck in the land of garden-variety comic book movies.  It tries to break out (the first act, away from the city, felt pretty unique), but ultimately is pulled back in (giant egomaniacal city villain alert).

I’m actually shocked that audiences haven’t grown tired of the genre yet because, like Wonder Woman here, we’re basically seeing the same movie over and over again.  So kudos to Whedon for writing what really is a cool script. It’s just too bad he was limited by the genre.

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

What I learned: In fight scenes, it’s not as important to detail every punch or sword swing, as it is to give the reader a sense of what kind of fight it is. Tell us how each fighter fights, and we’ll be able to fill in the visual gaps ourselves. So when Wonder Woman fights her mother, Whedon writes: “Everywhere Diana strikes, Hippolyte counters. Diana tries to control the fight through youth and relentless strength, and though she responds with no less, Hippolyte relies on experience over enthusiasm.” Obviously, you’ll detail fight specifics after this, but sentences like this allow you to summarize pieces of the fight so you don’t have to detail. Every. Single. Swing.

TITLE: Lost Continent
GENRE: Action/Adventure
LOGLINE: A treasure hunter is in a race against the man who murdered his father to find the lost kingdom of Atlantis and the incredible power that it harbors.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: I’m actually shocked there haven’t been as many movies made about Atlantis as there have been about the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians.  It’s freakin’ Atlantis!  There’s so much story there and it’s ripe for a proper adaptation.  I’ve been reading the site for years (awesome work by the way) and tweaked and improved this script using much of the great advice that’s been doled out.  Recent rewrites have focused on deepening characters and creating people to care about throughout this globe trekking adventure.  This is one of the few scripts of mine that has escaped the dark and deep hole I’ve dug in my backyard where dreams go to die.  If it sucks, please don’t take it as an indictment to the excellence of Scriptshadow.

TITLE: The Tallest, Darkest Leading Man in Hollywood
GENRE: Based-on-a-true story
LOGLINE: The never-been-told, hard-to-believe but nevertheless true story of the making of the original King Kong and the maverick filmmaker who made Hollywood’s first blockbuster.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: Just the other week, Legendary Pictures announced a King Kong prequel at Comicon. I’ve written a script about the making of the original King Kong and thought it would be a good time to try to shop it around.

TITLE: The Cargo
GENRE: Action, Thriller
LOGLINE: Wrongfully accused of treason, a disgraced soldier earns a shot to clear his name. His task? Protect a passenger train and its mysterious cargo from anarchist terrorists.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: I wasn’t alive when the first “blockbusters” came out in the late 70s and early 80s, but to me, they represent the filmmaking ideal: crowd-pleasing genre pieces that boast edgy, cerebral themes. “The Cargo,” my first feature script, is me emulating that format. It’s a topical, politically astute action story that weaves recent cybersecurity controversies into its set pieces. It’s also my first time opening my work to public judgment, and I’m ready to do whatever it takes to improve as a writer.

TITLE: Swedish Lesbian Vampire Wonderland
GENRE: Comedy
LOGLINE: To save his scandal-plagued career, a sex-addicted footy star enters an experimental Swedish rehab facility that is actually a castle of machismo-draining vampires.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: You’ve read the title, right?

TITLE: CODE BLACK
GENRE: Action/Thriller
LOGLINE: When a vicious crime boss seizes a hospital to secure a heart transplant for his dying father, an aging firefighter must leap into action to save the chosen donor — his daughter.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: I have an interesting problem for someone who loves to write — I’m dreadfully bored by about 85% of the amateur screenplays I delve into. They’re usually top-heavy and don’t muster much in the way of forward momentum. CODE BLACK is intentionally lean, barreling forward as much as possible. If a psychotic JOHN Q was the villain in DIE HARD I think it’d look a little something like this, and I hope your readers enjoy it.

The market is changing. Because this is America, a company isn’t doing well unless it’s growing. Stock prices must continue to rise. Dividends must continue to… … divvy.  And that’s putting pressure on Hollywood to deliver product with more upside. Obviously, there’s only so much a single film can do. Only so many toys it can produce. Only so many tie-ins it can manufacture.

For awhile, the studios had a solution for this. They called them “sequels.” Clever idea, right?  Sequels allowed a studio to keep making money off the same property. But sequels can take 2-3 years to make. Growth, once again, was stagnated by a seemingly insurmountable obstacle.

Enter the “universe” phase. Universes not only allow you that original movie plus its sequels. But now you can have SPINOFF films. Have a super-hero or secondary character everybody loved? Give him his own movie! Conceivably, you can now release a movie from your franchise EVERY SINGLE YEAR. Marvel proved this was a viable business model with their Avengers franchise. Pretty soon, Star Wars jumped on the bandwagon, then Universal with their horror characters, and DC/WB with the Justice League, though they seemed a little confused by the whole notion (“Universe? Ohhhh-kaaayyy.  Yeah, we’ll do that.”).

Now whether this model will work for an extended period of time is another question. The reason they didn’t do this kind of thing before was because they assumed people would get sick of seeing the same old shit. But with Marvel’s dominance, we’ve surprisingly witnessed the opposite. People want more of this shit!

The result is that intellectual property drives the majority of studios’ decisions now. And if your intellectual property can spurn more intellectual property, even better.

Nipping at the heels of the “universe” IP approach are YA novel adaptations. Twilight, The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Maze Runner, The Giver. Publishing houses are starting YA novel brands with the explicit purpose of getting movie deals out of them. So crazy has the YA novel craze gotten, you can’t even option YA books that have 5 reviews on Amazon anymore. Desperate producers have already beaten you to the punch!

After that, you have the toy properties (Transformers, G.I. Joe, The Lego Movie), the traditional sequel franchises (Planet of the Apes, Fast and Furious), high-profile book adaptations (Lord of the Rings, World War Z) the animation properties (mainly Disney and Pixar), and the occasional ultra-concept film (Godzilla, Super 8).

So what does over-dependence on IP mean? It means fewer and fewer slots on the calendar for original spec screenplays. Which is why you’re seeing less and less screenplays being purchased. Now I’ve been reading a lot of the specs out there, the ones making big enough waves to get noticed, and the biggest reason they’re not doing well, in my eyes, is because they’re not good enough.

This stems from the majority of writers assuming their scripts only have to be as good as the movies they see on a typical summer weekend. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. The top films at the box office were all born out of intellectual property. In other words, the people on the other end of the pitch already knew what the writer/producers were talking about. When someone hears, “Godzilla,” they know who Godzilla is. They don’t have any idea what your script, Chocolate Frank and the Huckleberry Dancers, is about. It’s just a pile of digital paper.  That means the big IP project shoots to the top of the priority list while Huckleberry Frank gets stuck up chocolate creek without a paddle.  The only way your script is going to get picked over a project like Godzilla is if it’s exceptional, not simply “as good as.”

Intellectual property has taken over and you, the screenwriters with original ideas, are being pushed out. Should you throw in the towel? Give in? Of course not. Adversity is the harbinger for some of the greatest creations in history. We must adapt! We must change our tactics. But I shall warn you. Not all of this advice here is sexy. We’re looking at cold hard facts so we need to consider cold hard solutions. Throw all your preconceived notions about how to make it in this industry in a box and slide it under the bed. It’s time to put on your reality pajamas and make some tough decisions.

How to compete with IP…

Solution 1: Make your own movie – Far from earth-shattering advice. But this continues to be one of the fastest ways to break in because you bypass all the bullshit gridlock Hollywood’s famous for. Movies are getting cheaper and cheaper to make. The amazing Blackmagic camera can be had for under two grand. And since you’re on this site, you already have a HUGE advantage over your competition. One of the biggest weaknesses in any low-budget film is a bad script. But you guys are writers! You know how to write a script. So write something cheap and shoot it cheap and get it out there!

Solution 2: Write comedies or thrillers. These two genres seem impervious to the IP plague. The great thing about thrillers is you can write them in multiple genres (horror, sci-fi, action, psychological), so you have a lot of range there to find subject matter you like. And comedies don’t need IP to be funny. Again, if you can come up with a clever concept (Neighbors), you can be looking down at the rest of us from your house in the hills at this time next year. These two genres are the best genres to write in if you’re writing specs, point blank.

Solution 3: The “spec universe” – The next option is one that hasn’t been proven yet, but with the “universe” approach gaining steam, I think it’s only a matter of time before it becomes the next big thing in spec screenwriting. It’s basically what “Moonfall” writer David Weil did. Off the buzz of Moonfall’s success, he used his meetings to pitch a 7 movie franchise based on The Arabian Nights.

Now there’s two things going on here. First, Weil is using an “IP” property that’s in the public domain. This allows the studio to get all the benefits of IP without having to pay for it. Secondly, he’s using the “universe” approach here to pitch the property. He didn’t come in with a single tiny spec to sell. Remember, studios have to think bigger now. They need more to bring to their investors. They want properties that are going to deliver over a longer period of time.

So look back through those public domain properties and see if anything sparks your imagination. The Count of Monte Cristo, a great book, is a popular older property that keeps getting remade. Can you come up with a franchise version of that? Of something else like it? I mean obviously you don’t want to force a “universe” onto an idea that can’t support it. But if the opportunity’s there, why not take it?

Solution 4: True stories, known quantities and IP sneak-arounds – Hollywood loves true stories. They love’em! So go out there and find a captivating true story to tell. You have 10,000 years of recorded history to draw from. I guarantee there are a few thousand amazing true stories that haven’t been told yet. Another option is a “known quantity IP sneak-around” approach. You find something that’s real and that everyone is familiar with, and you build a story around that. This is how Aaron Berg sold Section 6 for a million bucks (about the origin of MI-6), and I’m sure it played a role in F. Scott Frazier’s recent sale about an agent who worked for the agency that would later become the CIA. The idea here is to find sexy subject matter that people have heard about, and build a story around it, so it’s an easier sell, both from writer to studio, and studio to moviegoer. Once again, this is a way to write about something known without paying an IP price for it.

Solution 5: “If you can’t beat’em, join’em.” – Basically, throw out the idea of selling a spec. Instead, figure out which kinds of movies you love above all others, the kind of movies you’d die to get paid to write the rest of your lives, and write a script in that genre. So if you love movies like Guardians of the Galaxy, write a big crazy space opera. If you like Godzilla, write or make a movie about big monsters. The script will serve more as a writing sample for what you’re capable of doing, and get you out on meetings with the kinds of people who make the movies you want to write. You may not get that big splashy sale, but you get to play in the sandbox you always dreamed of playing in, and isn’t that the ultimate goal?

Solution 6: If you can’t join’em, leave’em. And write a pilot. – Pilots are so much easier to sell than specs these days. Everybody wants them. I heard even the Weather Network is jumping on the original programming bandwagon. Anybody have a spec titled “Light Rain?” As a movie lover, this used to be unthinkable to me. Who cares about TV! But TV keeps getting better and they treat writers like kings compared to the feature world. So pour through all of your movie ideas and see if any can be adapted into TV shows.

Solution 7: Write a great script. – No, I’m serious. If all else fails and you don’t like any of these options, write an awesome script about anything you want and I PROMISE you, you’ll get noticed.  Just keep in mind that if you go this route, the script has to be better than if you go any of the other routes.  You have to knock it out of the park.  To achieve this, make sure you are BEYOND PASSIONATE about your idea. Because if you’re not passionate, you won’t pour your soul into it, and if you don’t pour your soul it, there’s little chance of it being great.  If it’s not great, you’ve got no shot at competing with all those big IP properties.  Also, make sure there’s a good story here. Don’t write about an entitled 25 year old white male who’s depressed because his trust fund was taken away from him (unless it’s a comedy!). Give us a real story and tell it well.

What about you folks? What do you think writers should be writing in this new era? Is there something I’ve forgotten? A future trend you see coming around the corner? Share and debate in the comments section!