Genre: Action/Horror/Zombie
Premise: A team of misfits is tasked with going into a zombie-infested Las Vegas to retrieve 200 million dollars locked in a safe in the basement of a casino.
About: Army of the Dead is one of Netflix’s biggest releases ever and mega-director Zack Snyder’s follow-up to Justice League. Co-writer Joby Harold started his writing career with the 2007 Hayden Christensen film, Awake. He would later write King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. Co-writer Shay Hatten was just 26 years old when he wrote this and even younger when he wrote John Wick 3.
Writer: Story by Zack Snyder. Screenplay by Shay Hatten and Joby Harold
Details: 2 hours and 20 minutes long

One of the most frustrating things when watching a movie is being out of tune with the director. A director is not unlike someone you meet at a party. Sometimes you gel with a person – you like their sense of humor, you have similar interests, you like their opinions on things – and other times you get stuck with someone who feels like they live on a different planet from you – they bring up boring topics, they have an odd sense of humor, they rave about TV shows you wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole.

That’s not to say I’m the “right” guy at the party and the other person is “wrong.” It just means we see the world differently. That’s how I feel whenever I watch a Zack Snyder movie. Every choice he makes feels bizarre to me.

For example, one of the things he kept doing in this movie was not light his actors. There’s a specific reason why this is irritating. I want to see the characters’ faces! I want to see every little nuance, especially if the scene is an emotional one.

There’s a scene about 30 minutes into the movie where Dave Bautista is talking to another character late in the day. Snyder adjusts the camera to focus on the sunset and not on the actors to the point where it’s very hard to make out Bautista’s expressions. It’s annoying and actively works to hurt the scene.

And that doesn’t even touch on the bigger problems I have with Snyder, such as his over-reliance on melodrama. His over-reliance on slow motion and dramatic score. His pretentiousness. This is a man who wanted to not only do a four hour Justice League cut, but reframe it in 4×3 (television) format for no reason, then make the entire thing black and white. That’s the trifecta of pretentiousness right there.

The best thing about Army of the Dead is its setup. After a military caravan carrying top secret cargo crashes in the desert, the cargo, which turns out to be zombies, overwhelms the caravan before hightailing it to nearby Vegas, where they infect the entire city. The military walls up the city to keep the zombies inside and schedules a tactical nuclear strike in a week.

A group of mercenaries, led by former soldier Scott Ward (Dave Bautista), is then tasked by a rich Japanese man to get inside the city, head to a casino, and break into its safe, where 200 million in cash is sitting. Scott recruits all his old buddies, some above board, most of them below it, and off they go into a seriously zombie infested Vegas.

When they get there, they realize there’s a sort-of “zombie hierarchy.” There are regular zombies and then there are “Alphas.” The alphas seem to be able to communicate and plan. They also have super strength, which I suppose is why the military was interested in them. At the very top of the food chain are the King and Queen zombie. Do with that what you will.

Long story short, we eventually learn that the Japanese businessman never wanted the money. He wanted the queen zombie’s head. I think because it would give him access to the military’s secret sauce of turning people into killing machines. Unfortunately, the group falls apart quickly, divided off into their own little sub-groups, where they get picked off one by one. In the end, the original goal goes out the window and the only thing that matters is getting out of Vegas alive.

This is a cool concept right?

I love the idea of mixing a zombie movie with a heist movie. The exotic location of Vegas is a perfect backdrop for a zombie flick. The task actually makes sense for once in these movies. Of course there would still be money in Vegas. Of course people would try and get their hands on it before the city blew up. Conceptually, this is strong stuff.

So why was the movie so bad?

There are a few reasons.

The biggest is that, under no circumstances, can your hero ever be the 6th or 7th most memorable character in your movie. I’m not sure what the writers were doing with Scott Ward. I think they wanted to make him a big softie. Touchy-feely type. Whatever led to that choice hurt this movie bad. Because Ward barely says anything. When he does speak, it’s soft and mumbled. He’s not particularly active. In many scenes, he drifts into the background.

I’ll give you an example. There’s a big scene when they first get into Vegas where their guide surprises them by “feeding” one of the assholes on their team to the alphas. She says this is necessary if they want permission to run around the city. It’s a long drawn out scene where she shoots the asshole, they wait for the alphas to come, and, finally, they come drag the asshole away.

During this ENTIRE SCENE, Scott Ward says nothing. During this ENTIRE SCENE, Scott Ward does nothing. Don’t you think the star of the movie – actually, scratch that – the LEADER OF THE GROUP should have an opinion about someone offering up one of their men to the zombies without his permission??? That moment solidified Scott Ward as an empty leader and weak character. I guarantee nobody who watched this cared about him after that moment.

Why is your protagonist in the background????

The other big issue is the zombies. This critique is a little more complex, though. I’m the first one who will tell you that if you’re going to write a zombie screenplay, you need to evolve the mythology. So I get why we have alphas. I get why we have zombies who are stronger.

On the other hand, you have to understand why the mythology of anything has worked for so long and make sure that any changes you make don’t undermine that mythology. The reason zombies are terrifying is because they don’t reason. They are mindless. There is no horror situation more visceral than a horde of zombies closing in on a character with nowhere left to run. You’ve eliminated all that in one fell swoop with these intelligent scheming zombies.

Late in the script, we get this scene where one of the tougher soldiers gets cornered in a room with an “Alpha” zombie. The alpha decides… ehhh, I don’t want to bite you. I want to FIGHT YOU. So him and the alpha zombie fight. Is this a fresh new way to deal with zombies? Yes. Does it make the zombie mythology better? Not even a little bit. Once you have a strong intelligent zombie who wants to fight you, you no longer have a zombie. You have a human. You can put as much makeup on him as you want. But he’s the same as a human.

Even when Army of the Dead occasionally locked into a good moment, it would screw it up. There’s a potentially great scene where the team enters a hallway that’s packed with zombies. But the zombies are all frozen for some reason. Someone says, “Oh yeah, they’re hibernating. We can walk through them just don’t make any sudden movements.”

Having to walk through a packed crowd of sleeping zombies who could wake up at the slightest noise is a great scene idea. The problem is, they didn’t set it up. You need to set stuff like this up beforehand for it to fire on all cylinders. You needed a scene 15 minutes earlier where they’re walking through a room and there are a couple of zombies not moving and THAT’S when someone says, “Oh yeah. They’re hibernating.” This establishes the hibernating premise so it’s an official part of the mythology.

That way, 15 minutes later, when they see the crowd of still zombies, the audience already knows what’s going on. They know this is a group of hibernating zombies. They know this is going to be terrifying getting through them. And it all feels more natural because the rules have been established. Telling us all of this at once creates a “making it up as we go along” feel to the storytelling that turns audiences off.

Despite half its running time being in slow motion, the movie did have a few nice moments. (Spoilers) One of my favorites was when Scott had this really intense heartfelt conversation with his ex-girlfriend and in the very next moment, a zombie walks over and, while the ex was turned away from Scott, grabbed her head and spun it around, cracking it, so that it finished facing Scott. I certainly didn’t expect that to happen!

And there were a few other funny moments with the crew. But, all in all, Snyder’s incessant indulgences as a filmmaker mixed with superhero zombies and an inability to spot a protagonist that needed a complete reimagining, doomed this movie. Which is too bad. I was hoping to have fun with this one.

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

What I learned: The worst thing you can do in these movies is have the audience know exactly who’s going to survive. Kill off people they don’t expect and you will have the audience on guard. Army of the Dead succeeded in this department. I was positive the ex-girlfriend was going to live. And the second she didn’t, I perked up. Because I realized I was no longer going to be able to predict what happened next.

Week 0 (concept)
Week 1 (outline)
Week 2 (first act)
Week 3 (first half of second act)
Week 4 (second half second act)
Week 5 (third act)

I had a contemplative moment this weekend.

I was trying to find something to watch after a long day of work. I checked Netflix. I checked HBO Max. I checked Disney Plus. I checked Hulu. I checked Peacock. I checked Amazon Prime. I even sat around for several minutes convinced that I owned another streaming service that I’d forgotten about.

Long story short, I couldn’t find anything to watch.

But that’s not what made me introspective.

The sheer volume of movie/show thumbnails I scrolled through was an eye-opener. There was so much. I still remember the days when you turned on the TV and you had five choices. You went to the movie theater and you had one, maybe two choices.

To see all of this stuff in front of me available with a single click was almost scary. How can any writer possibly surprise an audience anymore? Or write something original?

There are only so many ways you can arc a character. There are only so many plot tricks you can use. There are only so many ways you can tell a story. Is it even possible, anymore, to write something that feels unique? That feels honest and original? Has this ocean of media swallowed that option up?

I thought about that for a long time. I had two good hours since I wasn’t able to find anything to watch, remember.

I came to the conclusion that, yes, it is still possible to achieve these things. The analogy that convinced me was that we have billions of people on this planet. We run into people all of the time. And yet we still end up meeting people we really like. Maybe as a friend. Maybe as a romantic interest. Maybe as mentor or a business connection.

In other words, we never get bored of people, despite how many of them there are.

That tells me that we’ll never get bored of good TV shows and good movies.

However, we must concede that there is more competition for storytelling than ever before. And, for that reason, giving 65%, 75%, 85%, even 95%, of what your story could be isn’t enough. It has to be 100%. You have to give your all. You have to be able to look at your script and say, “This is the best I can do.” If you want ANY shot at breaking into the business, that’s the bar you need to clear. Because there are plenty of above average projects floating around Hollywood. You need to write something beyond that to get noticed.

The question then becomes, what gets you to 100%?

The answer is REWRITING.

Most first drafts will be lucky to cross the 50% threshold. That means, after one draft, your script is 50% of what it could be. Which, obviously, means, you’ve got 50% to go. While it would be nice if that 50% was writing a second draft, that’s not how it works. If you’re doing it right, your second draft might get you to 65%. And, from there, you’re aiming for each draft to get you another 5%. If you can write a great script under 10 drafts, you’ve done an amazing job.

Remember that Good Will Hunting was rumored to have 50+ drafts. Uncut Gems had something like 200 drafts. But I consider that overkill if you’re doing your job right. A good rewriting strategy can get you to that 10 draft marker.

So what is rewriting?

Rewriting is about identifying problems in the current draft and coming up with solutions. And that’s what we’re going to do this week. We’re going to read our script and we’re going to figure out the five (rough estimation, could be more or less) biggest things that are wrong with it. But in order to do that well, you need to put your script down for at least a few days. That means, either Wednesday or Thursday, you’re going to pick your script back up and read the whole thing from start to finish.

What I want you to focus on while reading is how you feel during the read. Don’t focus on characters or plot yet. Just focus on, are you bored? Are you annoyed? Is this section good? Is this section bad? Your emotions will signal to you when something isn’t working. Write all that down. Note every time where something doesn’t feel right. Or even doesn’t feel as good as it could be.

Once you’ve done that, go back through your notes and ask WHY you felt that way. The WHY is where you will find your answers for how to approach the next draft.

I’m working with a writer on a sports script right now and one of the first things we noticed while re-reading the script was how disinterested the main character felt. This was by design, something that the hero would learn and correct over the course of his character transformation. But it didn’t work. The disinterest led to a passive character, and that’s something you can’t have in a sports movie. Your hero needs to be active.

There were also subplots that didn’t work. Whenever our hero was around certain characters, their scenes would drag. It was a telling sign that those characters weren’t working.

There were also parts of the script that felt disconnected from the main storyline. This was a sports movie and yet certain situations had our character a thousand miles away from his sport. There were legit reasons why these choices were made during the writing of the script, but if something doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.

One of the hardest things to get right is your hero’s transformational arc. They start with a flaw. They gradually learn about their flaw. And then, at the end, they overcome the flaw. This is hard to execute in a first draft because flaws are negative and you want your hero to be likable. So you’re trying to find that balance between likable and flawed. And then you’re trying to set up an ending that organically allows your hero to overcome the flaw. It’s asking a lot of one draft. So you almost always need to play with this and fine tune it over multiple drafts.

Sometimes things just don’t work out the way you thought they would. Your amazing villain turned out to be cheesy and forgettable. All of this is common in a first draft and none of it should deter you. This is what rewriting is about.

So I want you to read your script Wednesday or Thursday with fresh eyes. I want you to write down everything that isn’t working. And then just start to consider solutions. Some solutions will come to you quickly. For example, if your hero is unlikable… give him a couple more likable traits! Or add a save the cat moment.

Some solutions you won’t have answers to right away. I once wrote a comedy script with four main characters (think Eurotrip). Three of them were guys. One was a girl. And it just wasn’t working. The energy my female character was bringing wasn’t funny for some reason. So I battled over getting rid of the female character and replacing her with a guy. But then it’s an all guys movie and that didn’t feel right either. So maybe I needed to reinvent her so she was funnier.

You have to make decisions like that all the time in screenwriting. Sometimes you have to marinate on these problems for a while before you come up with a solution. That’s what this week is about. It’s about reading your script, figuring out what isn’t working, writing down the obvious solutions, then taking the rest of the week to try and solve the more complex issues.

The good news is, you don’t have to figure everything out this week. Normally, I prefer you have at least a month before you write your second draft. You want a solid plan going into this draft. But we’re working on an accelerated schedule, so we’re going to do this in two weeks. This week is about identifying the problems. Next week is about coming up with an official outline for our second draft.

For those of you who want to rush this and start your second draft right away, I encourage you to try this method instead. At the beginning of this post, I talked about the unbelievable volume of media you’re competing against. To be better than all those other thumbnails, you need to take this seriously. You need a plan of attack every time you write a draft. That’s what I’m trying to teach you. Have a plan of attack so that you get the most out of each draft. That way, you’ll get 15% closer as opposed 3% closer.

A big shout out to everyone who’s stayed up to date with their writing. Awesome job. I’m super proud of you!

Genre: Thriller
Premise: (from Black List) A chemical leak in a local water supply in Central Florida wreaks havoc on the invasive population of pythons, leading a family to the fight of their life to survive.
About: This script finished with 11 votes on last year’s Black List. It is the writer’s breakthrough script.
Writer: Creston Whittington
Details: 110 pages

Today was an extremely long and difficult work day for me.

And, after it was all done, I had to read a script. And review it. Starting at midnight.

To say I was in the best mindset to read a script would be an untrue statement. But I bring it up because when you’re on the come-up, your script is likely going to be low priority to whoever’s reading it.

Which means it will probably be read under similar circumstances as to how I read this script – at the end of the day when you’d rather call it a night. Which is yet another reason to put everything you’ve got into your screenplays. Because while you can’t control outside factors such as the mood of the person who’s reading your script, you can control how much effort you put into your script.

Let’s see what we’ve got today.

We start out with some daunting local Florida history:

“Every year, the state of Florida sponsors snake hunts in an effort to exterminate the Burmese Python, an invasive specie introduced to the Everglades by the Exotic Pet Trade.

Although the low detectability of these snakes makes population estimates difficult, most researchers propose that at least 30,000 and upwards of 300,000 pythons likely occupy southern Florida and that this population will only continue to grow.”

20-something Sharon Esperanza has just got off of work (at the local aquarium) and realizes that her 12 year-old brother, Bobby, isn’t home. It doesn’t take long for her to realize what he’s up to: The Annual Burmese Python Hunt! That’s right. Here in Florida, once every year, you’re allowed to go out and hunt pythons.

Sharon finds Bobby and yells at him. This is the kind of nonsense that got their dad killed, she tells him. But Bobby tells her how fun hunting pythons is and why can’t she please let him. Sharon is reluctant but she figures if Bobby’s going to be hunting pythons, she might as well tag along to make sure he doesn’t get hurt.

Meanwhile, there’s this giant political backstory going on involving Florida gubernatorial candidate Pam Huntley. It’s discovered that Pam was first eaten by, digested by, then defecated by, a 30 foot long Burmese python. This news coincides with a park ranger being swallowed up by another python. Who’s being hunted here. The pythons or the people???

As the hunt continues, the death continues. But it looks like the pythons are winning! As Sharon’s news reporter mother looks into the cause of the sudden attacks, she finds evidence that the local corrupt politician has been working with a giant Florida pharmaceutical company and that the drugs they’re disposing into the water have turned these pythons into serial killers!

Will Sharon and her brother realize how bad this is in time to get back home and protect themselves from the snakes!? Or is it too late? Have the snakes found their way into each and every home in town!!????

I struggled with this one, guys.

Big time.

I think there were twenty characters introduced before page 10? Do writers realize that readers actually have to remember people? And if you introduce a billion people, there’s no way we’re going to remember them all?

There was also a ton of 5-6 line paragraphs. Look, you can write as many 5-line paragraphs as you want in a script. The reader’s not going to read them, though. You’re not gaming the system by squeezing all that extra information in. People who open scripts expect them to read fast. When the scripts don’t read fast, readers simply adapt their reading style to ‘skim-mode’ so that they do read fast.

On top of all this, this script is titled Reptile Dysfunction. When I open a script titled Reptile Dysfunction, the ratio of work to entertainment should not be 5 to 1. Scripts like this should be the easiest scripts to read in the world.

Yesterday we talked about dead relative backstories. Most movies have them. So it’s a common thing you’re going to be writing a lot. Which means you want to be good at it. You want to understand what works and what doesn’t work and make choices that are right for your screenplay.

In this script, after the opening teaser, we watch old home video footage of two people getting married, having a kid (Sharon), watching the kid grow up, graduate from high school, blah blah blah. And then, somewhere along the way, the dad dies. And we finally get to present day where we are now with Sharon as a young adult.

What that montage did was it created context for our main character, Sharon. We were “there” when her father passed away. The argument FOR this montage, then, is that we feel closer to Sharon than had we not gone through that experience with her. The argument AGAINST this montage is that it takes up valuable script time where we could already be into the story.

It’s no secret around here that people will give up on your script within a single page. Everyone on this site has done it. You have read one of those Amateur Showdown pages and thought, “Nope, not good enough to continue.” A montage like the one in Reptile is not story. It’s not entertainment. It’s not dramatic or suspenseful. All it is is backstory. It’s INFORMATION. When you’re giving people information, as opposed to drama, they lose interest.

Now you may say, “But Carson. What about Pixar’s Up? That started with a montage of two people meeting, falling in love, getting married and one of them dying, and it’s considered one of the greatest scenes ever!” That’s true. But that movie was ABOUT THAT RELATIONSHIP. The whole movie WAS THAT RELATIONSHIP so it made sense to start the movie with the montage of their lives together.

This, meanwhile, is a movie about anacondas attacking a Florida town. It doesn’t need that montage. Yes, I agree that it brings us a LITTLE closer to the main character. But I don’t think it’s worth it when you can just allude to the fact, along the way, that she lost her father.

Screenwriting is so funny. Yesterday was all about a premise that was too simple for its own good. It didn’t have enough meat on the bone. Then you have today’s script which takes a simple premise – snakes invading a town – and approaches it like it’s a Woodward and Bernstein biopic. This is so over-plotted and over-populated, it gets in the way of what the script is meant to do – which is to give the audience a good time.

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

What I Learned: When it comes to fun ideas, get out of your own way. Anything that gets in the way of a fun read – long paragraphs, overly complicated plots with lots of jumping around, character counts in excess of 40 people – need to be eliminated. We’re picking up your script with a certain expectation of fun. Just like if someone thinks they’re about to read War and Peace and instead gets The Da Vinci Code, they’re going to be pissed, the same thing is going to happen if your fun-sounding premise reads like a history book.

You know there’s not a lot to talk about in Hollywood when you’re thinking, “Maybe I should cover Kim Kardashian and Kanye West’s divorce today. Maybe there’s some screenwriting tip we can draw from Kanye’s tweets.” I thought I had a juicy nugget to build today’s article around when someone sent me a link to “JJ Abrams’ Episode 8 Treatment.” The presentation was somewhat convincing. The treatment is a series of pictures (as opposed to a PDF) on red paper, the color that makes them hard to photocopy, and therefore preferred by writers trying to keep something from leaking. But I barely got to the second page before my b.s. meter started chirping.

It always amuses me when people say things like, “JJ Abrams doesn’t know what he’s doing! He only knows fan service.” Go ahead and read this treatment. This is what true fan service looks like. Within seconds of Rey handing Luke the lightsaber on the mountain, the two start dueling, Luke immediately jumping into exposition mode. “Did you ever ask yourself how an untrained pilot like you could suddenly fly the Falcon & outmaneuver those Tie Fighters? Then, somehow rendezvous with Han & Chewie shortly after? You know how to pilot the Falcon, because I know how to pilot th eFalcon. You beat Kylo on Starkiller because I was with you… aiding your untrained mind. It’s an old trick Jedi masters used to help their padawans.” You gotta love the ampersands, incorrectly capitalized words, and randomly placed commas, lol.

I was bummed it was fake cause I wanted something to talk about today. But then I realized I hadn’t updated everyone on my producing endeavors in a while. So guess what? I’m going to do that right now!

PRIORITY NUMBER 1 – KINETIC

For those of you who visit the site less frequently, Kinetic is the script that won my contest. The logline is: “Following a harrowing phone call while out on the road, a long haul trucker with a tormented past must deliver a tank of liquid crystal meth before sundown in order to save his pregnant wife.” If you remember, I told you that our number one priority was attaching Gerard Butler. So we first went to Millennium, a production company he does a lot of movies with, and they passed. As soon as that happened, I was able to get the script to Butler’s gatekeeper through a mutual friend. And that’s where it is now.

All I can do at this point is wait until she reads it. One of the most frustrating things about this business is the waiting game. Especially when you’re low on the priority list. Until I’ve got movies under my belt, it’s going to be a grind. And I know that. I’m not afraid of that. If Butler doesn’t work out, I’ve got the next three steps ready for Kinetic. Cause here’s the thing with Kinetic. And it’s something I’ve never really had with a project before: THIS IS GOING TO BE A MOVIE. It’s too perfectly suited to become movie for it not to become a movie. It’s too guaranteed to make money for whoever produces it. It has all the elements that result in a profitable fun film. And not only that. If the execution of the film is as good as this script, it has the potential to become a franchise. So all I have to do is keep getting it to people. There’s no question, in my mind, that, sooner or later, one of those reads is going to lead to the project getting greenlit.

PRIORITY NUMBER 2 – MOTHER REDEEMER

Here’s the logline for Mother Redeemer for those who don’t remember: “After a devout member of a small religious sect receives a sign from their God that she will be the mother of Earth’s messiah, she must find a way to protect her divine child from the cult’s corrupt leader.” Mother Redeemer is an interesting project because I’ve been sending it out and getting lukewarm responses. Now, here’s the thing. I know this is a good script. I read scripts like it all the time. And this is a cut above all of them. But the script is undeniably a slow burn. And what I’m realizing is that the hardest kind of spec script to get people excited about is a slow burn. The spec scripts that work best on the market are scripts like Bullet Train or Kinetic. Stuff that moves quickly on the page. Mother Redeemer is all about ‘build’ and tension and suspense, all of which it does beautifully.

I suspect that the people reading it aren’t sticking with it long enough to lose themselves in it. The reason I suspect that is because the same thing happened to me when I first read it. The main reason the script made it through the “First Ten Pages” round was not because I was enamored with the story. I simply recognized that the writing was strong. Then, when I started reading the script in the second round, I remember being on the fence about it 25 pages in. I specifically remember being tired and wanting to go to sleep. Then I thought, “Ehhh, I’ll finish it up so I have more time to myself tomorrow.” And, from there, every 10 pages, the script got better. And better. And better. And by the third act, my face was two inches from the screen, I was so into it. The dirty little secret about script reads is that nobody owes you a full script read. If they’re bored on page 20, they may decide to not read the rest and tell you they did. It’s not like they’re going to be quizzed about it. I suspect that might be what’s happening here. People aren’t making it past that same threshold in the script that I made it past where the script got infinitely better. So, the writer, Brian, and I, are trying to address this issue and make those first 20 pages read quicker. I still have a ton of confidence in the project. It could literally be made for 3-5 million dollars and it’s got two AWESOME roles for actors: the young pregnant woman (think Margaret Qualley) and the cult leader (think Michael Shannon or Adam Driver). I would love to get a Jennifer Kent (Babadook) to direct this. Ultimately, it’s going to be about finding people who, like Brian and I, are fascinated by the cult world.

PRIORITY NUMBER 3 – MANIACAL

You guys might not know about this horror project yet. Here’s the logline: “A teenager is forced to protect her half-siblings when mysterious masks begin appearing around the world that compel people to put them on, turning them into homicidal psychopaths.” It comes from co-writers Andy Marx and William McArdle. The two made the finals of my contest with their script, Crescent City (“A woman with the ability to control ghosts is forced to protect a witness being hunted by supernatural assassins.”). So why am I focusing on Maniacal instead of Crescent City? Simple. It will cost 1/10th as much money to produce. This is a 3-5 million dollar movie. Crescent City is a 30-50 million dollar movie. It’s John Wick with a female lead in the voodoo world. And it’s a movie I want to make badly. But Maniacal feels like the clearer path to victory, right now. And then, once we get that movie made and the writers have some heat on them, we’ll pitch Crescent City. Because I think Crescent City has the most upside of all of these projects. It could become a HUGE franchise.

The writers and I are currently fixing a few issues with the script. One of the main problems was that the mythology was a little thin. This crazy stuff starts happening all around the world and I wasn’t convinced that the reader understood what was happening. So we’re adding more scenes that give us insight into what’s going on. The thing I love about Maniacal is that it harkens back to those fun horror movies they made in the 80s. Simple but scary. And I love this hook of, what if you woke up one day and everyone was Michael Meyers? It wasn’t just one guy. What do you do? As soon as we get the script right, we’ll start targeting the horror production companies.

REST OF PROJECTS

What else am I working on? Contest finalist, That Wind Come Down (“After taking the fall for a horrific crime and spending twenty five years in prison, a neurologically disabled ex-con must confront his troubled past as he desperately tries to find a kidnapped young woman who’s disappearance may be connected to his past transgressions”) is still in the development stage. The script made the finals mainly on the talent of its writer, Chris Rodgers. But the story needs to go through a maturation process before it’s ready for the market.

I still have to re-read Tighter (“When a Japanese rope bondage workshop is taken hostage by masked intruders, a couple must find a way to escape their captors while tied together at the wrists”) and give Arun Croll notes. I’ve been slammed wall-to-wall with work so I haven’t been able to find the time yet. I found this amazing writer who wrote this great NASCAR pilot about a race car driver who finally gets a chance to shine after the retirement of his famous father but then his father wants back in. It’s basically NASCAR meets SUCCESSION. This might be the best-written thing of all the scripts I have but I’m struggling to understand the TV world. It’s something I don’t know as well as the movie world. So this might take a little longer to get through the system as I educate myself (feel free to e-mail me if you have advice cause this pilot is better than 95% of the stuff on TV right now. It deserves to be made).

I’m also working on a unique tennis project called, “Loser.” Let’s just say it’s unlike any sports movie you’ve seen before and is built around the premise of a professional tennis player who loses… a lot. There’s a script from long-time Scriptshadow reader, Alexander Bashkirov (who’s had tons of scripts reviewed on the site) called “Scorcher,” which is an action thriller with a REALLY fun premise that we’re working on. And there’s a thriller set in India that I hope to share more about in the coming months.

A couple of final thoughts that can double as today’s “What I learned.” Think hard about writing slow-burn spec scripts. They aren’t naturally suited for the spec market, which favors faster moving stories. Don’t get me wrong. If they’re great, they can get you noticed. But there’s no question you’ll have to send your script out to more people than you would if you wrote a more spec-friendly genre. Also, one of the things about sending your scripts out there is that everyone is going to tell you why your movie *can’t* be made. Back to the Future, one of the greatest movies ever, was famously rejected by everyone. The Anchorman creators were famously told by one studio to never EVER send them a script like that again, lol. It took John Lee Hancock, who has a successful career in the business, 30 years for someone to finally let him make The Little Things. The point is, there is no script that automatically goes to the front of the line. It’s always “Here’s why this doesn’t work.” Your job as a producer, or as a writer promoting their own script, is to not take these critiques personally and understand that they’re part of the process of getting a movie made. No movie has ever been made without people persevering through a lot of adversity. If you believe in a script, keep going until the cameras start rolling.

Have a wonderful week, guys. And if you’re a production company or director or financier or actor who wants to be involved in one of these films, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com. Get in before it’s too late! :)

KINETIC by Chris Dennis!!!!!

Bradley Cooper for Clay?

Here’s the logline for Kinetic: “Following a harrowing phone call while out on the road, a long haul trucker with a tormented past must deliver a tank of liquid crystal meth before sundown in order to save his pregnant wife.”

If you missed it, you can see all five finalist loglines here.

To be honest, today’s winner was a difficult call. Crescent City, Mother Redeemer, and Kinetic were neck and neck all weekend as I tried to decide who the winner was. The argument for Crescent City was its deep interesting mythology, its modern lead character, its enormous potential as a franchise, and it being the highest concept of the bunch. The argument for Mother Redeemer was that it had the best character development, the lowest budget, and has an amazing third act. Mark my words, when this movie gets made, the line “I’m the Mother Redeemer, motherf#cker,” will be one of the most quoted lines of the year.

In the end, the reason Kinetic edged out the others is that it knew exactly what it wanted to be and gives the audience exactly what they want. This is a good old fashioned action movie. It’s about a dude in a truck who some bad people decide to f*ck with and in the process they unleash the kraken. There’s no other script in the top 5 that has a clearer poster or trailer than Kinetic.

It’s The Equalizer. It’s John Wick. It’s Taken. But wrapped in this dirty messy rural universe. Clay, the main character, feels like a descendent of the cowboys from those old Clint Eastwood movies. And the trucker angle is just unique enough to set this movie apart from its influences. This is the blue collar version of Taken. And I have no doubt there’s a huge audience for that.

On top of all that, I see franchise potential. This main character is such a badass that he could carry three or four more Kinetic movies if we want. That factored into the win as well. Because like I told you guys from the very beginning of this contest. I wanted to find MOVIES. Not scripts. MOVIES. And this is the most movie script of all 2000 entries I received.

There’s one more thing that pushed Kinetic over the edge. The main character, Clay, is surprisingly deep for an action movie hero. Chris Dennis, the writer, explains what he was thinking when he conceived of the character:

“Clay isn’t your typical one-dimensional hero seen in this sort of script. He’s broken. He’s unsure of himself. He’s planned out this life with his wife but he’s not sold on it. Only when he realizes that he’s about to lose it all does he steel himself to recover it at all costs. There’s been mention of the cocaine scene in the truck, the one where Clay is forced by his captor to snort it off the steering wheel. The cocaine isn’t his ‘Popeye spinach’… no. It’s symbolic of this life he’s worked desperately to put behind him. The hurt, the loss, the pain of everything he’s experienced encapsulated in that thin white line. And when that asshole puts a gun to his head and forces him to partake, Clay sees that life he’s built starting to crumble, and realizes that the only way out is if he takes matters into his own hands. It’s devastating for him in the moment, but if he doesn’t act, what follows will be even more heartbreaking!”

If you’re wondering how Chris wrote such a great script, his story should be inspiring to all of you. It’s basically what I’ve been telling you guys all along. Keep writing, keep reading, and keep learning. You do that long enough, you’re going to write something great. Here’s Chris on how he got to this point:


“For a brief time I thought I wanted to direct films, even went to school for it, but as I became more aware of the movie making process, I was instinctively drawn to how films looked on the page, which led me to buying Syd Fields’ classic, “Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting.” From there, I started to track down the screenplays of my favorite movies to read and compare them with how they looked on the screen, which helped me understand how the written word is translated visually (I also read a certain spectacular blog! – Carson note: I added the word “spectacular”). I played around with writing screenplays for a bit, wrote some absolutely utter crap, but it was around ’08/’09 that I fully committed to taking writing more seriously, to really try to hone my craft and find my voice. I scheduled time to write; tried to never miss a day unless I absolutely had to. Ever since then I’ve made it a goal to write 2-3 feature length screenplays a year – some years it’s easy, others it feels like a monumental task (and that was in pre-pandemic times!).

“A lot of people pause when I tell them I’ve been at this for over a decade now without ‘breaking in.’ Sure, it’s a loooooooong time, I know, but I keep going because deep down I love screenwriting. It satisfies some strange desire in me, and I figure if I love it enough to do it for free, it’ll be that much more fulfilling the moment someone wants to write a check for me to do it. Plus I’m an optimist… I just know my next script is going to be my best. I won’t say the journey’s been easy… not at all. The entire time I’ve been writing I’ve had to juggle a ton of obligations, ranging from full-time jobs to being a husband and a father to 3 kids under the age of ten. But I still find time to write. I wake up at 3 am before the rest of my day starts to write. I stay up late on the weekends to write. And much to the chagrin of my wife, I often skip out on non-essential family functions to write. Why? Because I love it, and because deep down I know that I still need to hone my craft.

“Though I’ve yet to ‘break in,’ I have some modest success in contests along the way, which keeps signaling to me that I’m on the right path. I’m a 3-time Page Awards winner (Grand Prize shy of the Grand Slam), a 3-time Launch Pad Feature Finalist, WeScreenplay Feature winner, along with high placements in several other contests. Now I can add another to this list — THE LAST GREAT SCREENPLAY CONTEST!!!!!!!!!!”

I also asked Chris what inspired him to write Kinetic specifically:

“The seed of the idea came to me while driving and listening to the song “Thinking On A Woman,” by Colter Wall. The song is kind of a lamentation on the tragic side of long-haul trucking… about missed time, lost love, and the vices a man turns to in order to ease his troubled mind. I had been on the search for an idea that was somewhat contained, so I took the character of this song and flipped his situation. What if he’s overcome his demons? They’re there, sure, but he’s managing to keep them at bay. And what if he’s on his last haul, heading home to a pregnant wife to leave this lonely life on the road for good? But what if that happy life he’s heading home to is suddenly put into jeopardy? What lengths would this man go to in order to preserve that little slice of heaven that he’s built?

So with that as my jumping off point, I molded this truck driving character, Clay Cutler, as a disgraced Special Forces veteran and a recovering addict, who’s nearly got his life back in order when the shit hits the fan and he has to overcome obstacle after obstacle to get that life back. I set out to write an old school action flick with no filler, semi-contained (pun intended), with one hero and one goal: to get his wife and unborn child back, no matter what it takes. And once Clay makes that decision, there’s nothing that’s going to stop him.”

As I’m reading back Chris’s answers, I’m reminded of something else I loved about the script – the recklessness of both the story and its hero. I’ve been reading a lot of screenplays lately where the writers let up on the gas, which leaves the script feeling neutered. Kinetic, true to its title, barrels forward in a way that other writers are scared to do. It’s almost like they’re afraid they’ll be unable to keep it up til the last page. Kinetic is this don’t-stop-til-the-last-credit-rolls force of nature. It really wants to deliver on its promise for a great fun action movie. And it does that.

So what’s next for Kinetic, Chris, and myself?

GETTING THIS MOVIE MADE, BABY!

I’ve just started talking to close contacts about Kinetic. I’m trying to find out which production houses want to make a movie like this. I’m going to be coming after Original Film (Fast and Furious guys). I’m going to be coming after 87Eleven (Stahelski and Leitch’s company). G-Base (Gerard Butler’s company) is going to get a call. Atlas Entertainment. Village Roadshow. Thunder Road. Millenium.

And hey, if you’re a production house that makes movies like Kinetic and you’re reading this post right now, E-MAIL ME (carsonreeves1@gmail.com). I’ll jump on Zoom with you tomorrow and if we click, we’ll set this up somewhere by the end of the week! I see this as a slam dunk. It’s not a matter of if it will get made. It’s a matter of who makes it with us.

Congratulations to Chris Dennis one more time. By this time next year I hope we’ll be sharing with you all the crazy stories from the set. :)

WANT YOUR OWN SCRIPTSHADOW GLORY? – This is a reminder that the next Amateur Showdown (High Concept Showdown – where only high concept scripts can compete) is coming in March! So get those scripts ready! If you don’t know what a high concept is, check out this post here…

Amateur Showdown Genre: HIGH CONCEPT
Where: Entries should be sent to carsonreeves3@gmail.com
What: Include title, genre, logline, why you think your script deserves a shot, and a PDF of your script!
Entries Due: Thursday, March 4, 6:00pm Pacific Time