I’ve got a big fat juicy newsletter that’s going to get you salivating over screenwriting in a way that’s illegal in Canada. We’ve got the surprise September Showdown announcement. We’ve got a nuanced conversation about how many scripts you should be writing. I take on Ahsoka (and the Star Wars brand along with it). I ask the question we’ve all been wondering: Is Keanu Reeves a secret screenwriting genius? There are a couple of new trailers out that caught me by surprise. The new guard of filmmakers and artists has definitely arrived. But is the old guard ready to give up their seats?
If you’re not on my newsletter list, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com and I’ll put you on!
Genre: Thriller
Winning Logline: When her estranged son returns and takes her grandson in the night, a veteran park ranger sets out to rescue him from the clutches of a mysterious cult deep in the Oregon woods.
About: This is the winner of the August Logline Showdown! If you missed it, you can check out all the contestants here.
Writer: Megan Carroll (story by Martin Hilligoss and Megan Carroll)
Details: 99 pages
Sigourney Weaver for Vick?
Remember that I’m announcing next month’s surprise showdown in the September newsletter, which is coming out tonight (Friday). If you want to know what the mysterious showdown is going to be (it’s not loglines) make sure to e-mail me and get on the newsletter list (carsonreeves1@gmail.com).
Onto the review!
People always ask me, “Carson, why do we have to write loglines?” The answer is that, in addition to making it quick and easy to understand if your script is something people might want to read, a well-written logline is a reliable indication that the writer has been around for a while and knows how to write.
That’s because writing loglines is hard. As in, it takes YEARS to learn how to write them well. It takes that long because you only practice writing loglines once every six months, after you’ve finished writing your most recent screenplay. Therefore, if you’ve figured out how to write a good logline, chances are you’ve been around long enough to learn how to write a good screenplay.
This logline felt professional to me from the jump so I’m not surprised it won.
Let’s see if it, indeed, indicates the writer can write!
60-something Vick lives in a small Oregon town with 8 year-old Jordy, her grandson. Jordy’s parents, Lee and Shaina, were drug addicts, and therefore had to give Vick custody to their son years ago. They’ve since disappeared.
That is until today, when Lee shows up at Vick’s door, three years since the last time he saw her or Jordy. Lee is unshaven and dressed in dirty clothes. He lives deep in the Oregon forest in a community called “Paradise” with his wife (Jordy’s mom), Shaina. Paradise is run by a woman named Cousin.
Vick senses there’s still good in her son and invites him to stay the night. Mistake. When she wakes up the next morning, Lee and Jordy are gone.
Due to a complicated history with the local cops, Vick decides to go into the woods and get her grandson back on her own. As a woman of a certain age, it isn’t easy hiking through the dense Oregon forest. But she meets a few helpful people along the way before spotting a couple of Paradise residents.
She follows them and when they discover her, she pretends to be a “Paradise” convert, eager to join the community. They bring her back where she meets Cousin, who seems to like her until Lee and Jordy spot her. Jordy leaps up and runs to his grandma, leaving everyone unsure of how Cousin is going to handle this.
Cousin is, strangely, calm, and invites Vick to stick around for the ‘big event’ tomorrow. What big event is that? Well, let’s do some math here. Crazy cult leader lady. Middle of forest. Bunch of followers who walk around like zombies. Yeah, I think we’re in ‘sacrifice’ territory here. But who’s going to get sacrificed? And will there be an opportunity to rescue Jordy before this sacrifice occurs?
So, when I had the Last Great Screenwriting Contest, one of the scripts that came out of that contest was a cult script. It was about a couple who were in a cult with a really scary leader. It was very well-written. But when I started sending it around town, I kept getting the same feedback, which was that these cult scripts are everywhere. A lot of writers write them and they all kind of feel the same, like a low-budget mumblecore indie version of something that would play at a second-tier film festival.
So, if you’re going to write one of these, you have to find an angle that doesn’t put it squarely in the above box.
I don’t think Wayward Son quite got out of the box. But it came close.
The thriller elements – the stakes, the urgency – definitely gave this a different feel than the cult script I read for The Last Great Screenwriting Contest. But there’s something about these cult scripts that always feels like they’re pulling punches. There’s horror right around the corner. But it’s never in your face.
And I get it. These scripts are often building towards some shocking ending. True to form, Wayward Son’s best moments occur during its third act. But in screenwriting, it’s not just about nailing the ending. You have to get the reader there in the first place. If they think they’re reading something that’s too tame, they’ll check out. And Wayward Son constantly flirts with being too tame.
Let’s talk about the opening sequence. Because I think the writer missed an opportunity there to capitalize on a gut punch, something that would’ve really pulled the reader in. When Lee first shows up to Vick’s, he’s calm and he’s nice, if a little awkward. They talk, they have pizza, they go to sleep, and then the next morning Lee and Jordy are gone.
What I think the writer should’ve done is have Lee show up, he’s nice and calm, they chat for a while, they talk about Jordy, she invites Lee to stay the night, and then, in the blink of an eye, he should’ve pulled a knife and slashed Vick’s throat, then taken Jordy.
You may say, “But then who looks for Jordy?” A cop! Have a cop look. Or, if you want to keep it in the family, maybe it’s Lee’s sister (Jordy’s aunt) who looks. Or maybe Vick and her husband are divorced. He’s a retired cop so he goes after Jordy.
You would’ve gotten that “Holy sh*t” moment in there to hook the reader. And then they’re in the palm of your hand for the next 90 minutes.
Another issue here is that the second act is the worst act. This is the act where Vick is traveling through the forest trying to find Paradise. I couldn’t figure out what the angle was here. Was it about how an old woman was doing something she wasn’t physically able to do anymore? It all just seemed rather tame. She’d meet some woman, they’d chat, she’d keep walking. She’d meet a man, they’d chat, she’d keep walking. Where are the teeth in this story? Why aren’t things getting gnarly?? At least ONE THING. Grab us by the throat. Give us a reason to continue to give you our undivided attention.
Carroll misses an opportunity in that second act when Machete and Kindling, the two Paradise residents who catch Vick following them, interrogate her. Vick lays a sympathy story on them about looking for meaning in life, which results in them taking her to Paradise.
30 pages earlier, we had the weakest scene in the script. Vick runs across a woman who’s clearly homeless and down on her luck and is in the beginning stages of trying to survive in the forest. Vick kind of feels bad for her situation but has more pressing problems to solve. So she leaves her. It’s, essentially, a pointless scene.
However, if that woman would’ve given Vick a specific story about how her life fell apart and a specific story about learning to find meaning by living off the land, now we could’ve used this scene as a setup to that Machete and Kindling interrogation. “Why are you in the forest? What are you doing here?” Vick could’ve then used, verbatim, what the homeless woman had said to her, and since it was so authentic, it would’ve been convincing to Machete and Kindling, who are moved by her story and take her in. That would’ve made Vick look sooooooooo clever. Plus, that seemingly boring scene becomes retroactively awesome.
Despite these criticisms, this script is very well-written. It moves fast. And best of all, it has some really strong character work in it. The complicated relationship Vick has with her son leads to a rescue story that is more layered than we’re used to. And, of course, you’re always going to get me on board when you build key character moments around Star Wars movies, which this does successfully.
When you put it all together, this is DEFINITELY one of the better amateur scripts I’ve reviewed on the site. If we ever do make a Top 25 Amateur Script List here on Scriptshadow, this will be on it. It’s worth reading.
Script Link: Wayward Son
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Think three-dimensionally to solve screenplay problems. Let’s go back to my earlier suggestion of Lee killing Vick in the opening scene. I could see Carroll coming back and saying, “I get it. I like the idea of a huge shock in the opening scene. But I want a 60-plus year-old woman in the lead role. So I can’t kill her.” End of discussion, right? No. If you’re the screenwriter, you’re God. Think three-dimensionally and shuffle the variables around so you can have what you want as well as what you need. Invent a sister character – Abby. Abby, Vick’s daughter and Lee’s sister, is now the legal guardian of Jordy in this draft. You then write the same opening scene. Lee comes. Abby trusts him. But this time, Lee kills her and takes Jordy. The news is then given to Vick, now a Ranger who’s nearly retired. Vick then goes after Jordy. Exact same movie but now we get that big shocking opening that pulls the reader in.
“What’s that, brother? My logline didn’t make the showdown???”
It’s time to play that most wonderful of games: “Why didn’t my logline get picked for Logline Showdown?” This month, though, we’re going to do something special. We’re going to focus on submissions that need to retire. As much as I’m rooting for everyone on today’s post, it’s time to move forward with new scripts. Cause I want you to have a chance! The below loglines are never going to get that chance, no matter how many times they’re submitted.
And a reminder that, tomorrow, we have a script review of this month’s Logline Showdown winner, “Wayward Son.” The logline for that was: “When her estranged son returns and takes her grandson in the night, a veteran park ranger sets out to rescue him from the clutches of a mysterious cult deep in the Oregon woods.” Tune in to see what I thought AND to read the script yourself.
Okay, are we ready? Here we go…
Title: My Lonely Earth
Genre: Sci-fi
Logline: At a top-secret lab, a psychotherapist battling nightmares of an alien abduction learns that not only are her nightmares real, but that her alien child is being kept in the facility, and she’s running out of time to save him.
Analysis: Full disclosure. I helped Nicholas with his logline here. I’ll let him decide if he wants to post the original logline so you can see where he started. My issue with My Lonely Earth is that it feels like an overly familiar premise that doesn’t have that “strange attractor” that makes the idea stand out. I read sooooo many scripts that take place in secret labs. There’s an outbreak or an alien and the scripts follow the characters running around the lab hallways, hiding in rooms, and it just gets tediously repetitive. So unless you’re going to add some strange attractor that helps me think of something *other* than that, then any contained thriller that takes place in a lab probably isn’t going to get my juices flowing.
Title: Plagued With Love!
Genre: Musical Comedy
Logline: An overconfident plague doctor and his bumbling partner must find a cure for the plague before King Louis XIII executes them for their numerous failures, and so off they go on an adventure full of song, dance, romance… and swollen lymph nodes! (Galavant meets The Road to El Dorado)
Analysis: Every time I see this logline, I consider posting it in the showdown but then I realize that the only reason I’m considering it is because I like Katherine. But if this logline came from “Joey Franzone” as opposed to “Katherine Botts,” I wouldn’t consider it. What’s interesting here is that this concept has the opposite problem that My Lonely Earth has. It is one GIANT strange attractor. It’s so off the reservation that I’m imagining something too wacky, too goofy. But the deciding factor is that it’s not clever enough. And I can give you a comp that was clever enough to get my attention. It’s a pilot I reviewed recently: “During the Black Plague, a group of rich Italians head off into the countryside to party out the plague in a beautiful villa.” Notice the irony in the concept. Notice the commentary on the rich (they’re so clueless they think they can party their way through the worst plague in history). There’s a cleverness there that’s not quite present in Plagued With Love. I wouldn’t tell Katherine to ditch the script entirely because it’s unique enough that there may be someone out there who falls in love with it. It’s just not my jam.
Title: Runaway Car
Genre: Thriller
Logline: When a hacker takes control of a driverless car in order to get revenge against her abusive ex-boss, an innocent new employee in the passenger’s seat has to fight for survival against both of her new adversaries.
Analysis: Point blank, I’m done with driverless car scripts. I’ve read a dozen of them. I’ve been pitched three times that number. Unfortunately, it’s that idea every writer in town wanted to write. This happens every couple of years where a new technology or pop culture phenomenon or viral idea pops up and everybody wants to write about it. I always tell writers if you’re going to write about something ubiquitous, come up with a really fresh or weird angle so that your script stands out from the pack.
Title: We Band of Angels
Genre: Historical
Logline: An Army nurse arrives in the Philippines just before the Japanese attack and throw her into one of the most ruthless POW camps of WW2. Based on a true story.
Analysis: I feel bad because I know how much Montana loves this story. He came to me for a logline consult. Then I think he workshopped it with you guys. This latest iteration is, I believe, something he’s come up with himself. There’s something missing from this concept, though (I’m not talking about the logline, I’m talking about the *concept*). Remember that World War 2 is one of the most competitive movie concept spaces. So “decent” won’t cut it. You have to have that strange attractor or “next level” component that makes the idea stand out. Especially in the wake of Oppenheimer, which covered the life of, arguably, the most important man in World War 2. This logline is not convincing me why I’d want to watch a woman in a Japanese POW camp. Maybe this logline makes it into the mix for a World War 2 Logline Showdown. Otherwise, I don’t ever see it making the cut.
Title: WARLOCK DOWN
Genre: Action
Logline: A failed magician turned cop must defeat a group of evil warlocks who have taken the residents of a magical boarding school hostage – including the love of his life.
Analysis: I know this is Tal’s most popular logline but there’s something about it that feels overly constructed to me. It’s like a group of movie execs got together and tried to come up with the most high concept idea ever and just started haphazardly pairing movies up. “Beverly Hills Cop meets Frozen!” “No.” “King Kong meets Barbie!” “No.” “Iron Man meets Armageddon!” “No.” “Die Hard meets Harry Potter!” “Yes!” There’s nothing organic about it. It really does feel like the kind of thing an AI program would come up with. I just don’t see a scenario where I would include this in a Logline Showdown. And yes, I know Tal is coming with a list of 10,000 managers and producers who requested the script off the logline. I’m just not going to be one of them.
Title: There’s An Alien In My Bathtub
Genre: Sci-Fi/Comedy
Logline: A nerdy germaphobe and a clumsy extra-terrestrial become unlikely heroes during a worldwide pandemic.
Analysis: I can say with certainty that this will not make a Logline Showdown. When you say, “There’s an alien in my bathtub,” that’s the literal movie I’m imagining. I’m imagining a single shot of an alien in a bathtub talking for 120 minutes. Which sounds like the most boring movie ever. But even if that’s not the actual movie, the whole concept doesn’t feel big enough to me. It’s too silly. The stakes are too low. There’s no dominant source of conflict to cause uncertainty in the story. And, no, there’s not going to be anything that can be said to convince me otherwise. So for Randall, I would start submitting a new script. And make sure you come to me before you write it for a logline consult (carsonreeves1@gmail.com). I can make sure you don’t make this mistake again.
Title: BACKPACKER ROAD
Genre: Comedy
Logline: While on a group tour of South East Asia, a sorry traveler is stuck sharing a room with a sex tourist while sparking up a relationship with a pretty, charismatic girl.
Analysis: I know John gets passionate when he talks about this idea. I know John isn’t interested in writing anything mainstream. He fully embraces that his idea doesn’t perfectly fit into the Hollywood mold. But, because of that, he has to understand that his ideas are not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. And this isn’t my cup of tea. The sex tourist part feels random. A guy meets a girl while he’s on vacation and, oh, there’s also a sex tourist in the story! What?? How do these two things connect? Do they just swap stories at the end of each day? “We toured the lake.” “That’s cool, I scoped out some 15 year old prostitutes.” I’m not interested in reading that story. And I know FOR A FACT that John is going to explain that that’s not what his story is about. But it doesn’t matter. This logline is not going to make the Logline Showdown. It feels more like a darker version of The Beach. So write it as a novel.
Look, I love all of you. And just because I don’t like your logline doesn’t mean someone else won’t. But I want the longtime readers of this site to have the best shot at making the Showdown which is why I’m encouraging you to come up with something new. Cause I want you competing! I want your loglines to be featured in the big bright lights. I don’t want you to continually send me these loglines that don’t have a shot.
HOWEVER! There’s some news everyone here might find interesting. You may have one final showdown you can enter these scripts into next month BECAUSE the deciding factor of the next showdown will NOT be your concept. I’ll announce what it WILL BE in the newsletter, which I’m sending out this Friday. E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com if you aren’t already on the newsletter list.
Genre: Action/Revenge/Comedy
Premise: Blasting out of prison after being double-crossed by the Mastermind of a heist, a Demolition Expert uses his genius with explosives to enact revenge on the Caper Crew who set him up while simultaneously picking up the pieces of his personal life.
About: The controversial screenwriting talent, Colin Bannon, he of the many wild high concept ideas, is back with another script. This is one of two scripts Bannon had on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Colin Bannon
Details: 115 pages
Colin Bannon reminds me of Mattson Tomlin and Max Landis, two writers who unapologetically seek out big juicy concepts then proceed to write them as fast as possible.
What Bannon has going for him is that he’s the most talented of the “high concept three.” How do we know this? Cause he’s written the best script of the trio – “Birdies,” a pitch-perfect deconstruction of weirdo influencer families. It’s that script that gives me hope every time I open a Colin Bannon script. But I’ll be honest. I haven’t seen Bannon put in that level of effort since Birdies.
Let’s see if that changes with The Demolition Expert.
Gus Bender is the demolition expert on a team of heisters. We meet him with his buddy, Joey Fix, “the mastermind” of the heist, as they break into the “Mind Lab” skyscraper where the CEO, Lazlo, keeps all his most precious items.
They coordinate with Wolf (hacker) and Smoke (driver), as well as their inside man, Stick (a master pickpocket). Using their time-tested abilities, they make their way into Lazlo’s abandoned office where Gus uses a new bomb of his that doesn’t create an explosion to break into Lazlo’s vault. They quickly take 60 million dollars worth of diamonds and they’re out.
Back at the warehouse rendezvous point, where they bring the stolen items to the investor, Gus goes to grab something in the back room, and when he comes back, everyone is gone. Seconds later, a SWAT team shows up and arrests Gus, who goes to prison for ten years.
During that time, Gus plans his revenge. But you have to understand that a demolition expert’s revenge is a little different than a normal citizen’s revenge. Gus is going to blow up everyone who screwed him over, one by one.
He starts with Lazlo’s personal assistant, Travis, who he blows up in a bank. He then moves to the investor, Bank, and blows up his entire casino. He then sets his sights on Smoke, who’s become her own tech CEO. But it’s clear that Gus isn’t getting any satisfaction from these kills. The only person he truly cares about blowing up is Joey. But first he wants to find out why Joey made him the fall guy.
It turns out that Joey will be selling a violin he stole from Lazlo (they waited 10 years for the heat to die down) at a high-end private auction in a few days. Getting to that auction is the only chance Gus may have to enact his ultimate revenge, a revenge that will make even Oppenheimer jealous.
Welcome to one of the wackier screenplays I’ve read all summer.
This one is ka-raaaaazy with a capital “K.”
Where do I begin?
Let’s start here. When Gus is in prison, he gets beat up every day by his giant cellmate. And, every beating, he gets a tooth knocked out. He collects these teeth in a little tin. We have no idea why.
When he finally gets out, he tricks Travis into thinking they’re going to take down Joey together. But Gus only has revenge on his mind. So, while they’re driving, Gus guns their car into a bank, bangs Travis’s head against the dashboard dozens of times until all his teeth are gone. Then Gus brings out the tin of his teeth from prison and shoves them into Travis’s mouth. He then jumps out of the car, leaves the building, detonates the car bomb… ALL SO THAT THE POLICE WILL IDENTIFY TRAVIS AS GUS BECAUSE HE HAS GUS’S TEETH.
I don’t know if that’s the most genius thing I’ve ever read or the most ridiculous, lol. But it’s a great indication of what kind of script you’re getting into with The Demolition Expert.
There is no shortage of zaniness here.
When Gus finds Wolf, it turns out she’s started a mindfulness app that measures your resting heartbeat to keep you “mindful.” So what does Gus do? He hooks a bomb up to the app (somehow ahead of time), and then corners her, explaining that if her heart rate exceeds 183, the bomb blows up. This makes Wolf nervous, so her heart rate keeps rising, which Gus draws her attention to, which makes her heart rate rise even more. And now it’s a desperate race to calm herself down.
Later still, Gus finds Smoke, the getaway driver, who is in the middle of a NASCAR race. He hacks into her headset and explains that he’s rigged her car to blow up if it goes below 200mph. “It’s like SPEED,” he tells her. “But faster.” He then explains that her only salvation is to leave mid-race and get to Santa Monica, never dropping below 200 mph. An impossible feat that she attempts to achieve anyway.
Again, I don’t know what to make of these choices. I don’t want to be disrespectful but they often feel like something a 16-year-old would come up with. Maybe that’s good. Cause that’s the demo you want coming to the movie. But even when you’re writing for younger people, the craziness has to have some level of sophistication to it.
Look at Pixar movies. They’re written for 10-year-olds. But if 10-year-olds had written those movies, they’d be packed with a bunch of farting and burping and silly ideas that didn’t make sense.
I mean, Michael Bay makes an appearance in this movie. Or there’s a moment where a demolition expert, Mary Beth, approaches Gus and tells him that they did the same thing to her. She then offers him to join her on an island for the rest of his life. A woman he’s known for 30 seconds. That’s not sophisticated writing. That’s first draft writing.
That careless recklessness permeates the script.
And yet, to Bannon’s credit, it never totally derails the experience. There’s just enough of a “good time at the movies” feel to the script that you overlook its weaknesses. This is clearly Bannon’s modern-day take on Speed and it’s probably how a modern-day version of Speed would look like. There wouldn’t just be one scenario (a bus that couldn’t drop below 50 mph). The social media generation needs more stimuli, which is what The Demolition Expert gives you. It entertains you with multiple bomb situations.
Every audience member has their own threshold for suspension of disbelief. Some of us need airtight logic to keep our diselief going. Some of us only need jokes and silliness. The Demolitions Expert is much closer to the latter than the former. But, then again, so was Speed. So mileage will vary here.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Scenes that cut between more than two characters involved in a complex situation that needs a lot of description are going to leave a lot of readers cold. These scenes work great on screen. But on the page, they require a lot of concentration to follow. It’s more about us figuring out what’s going on than it is about us being entertained. So this opening heist scene in The Demolition Expert was work to me. It was not enjoyable. I prefer simplicity. The opening scene in Drive covers similar subject matter but it focuses on one singular character in one singular situation – a getaway driver driving away.
Obviously, in Mission Impossible and Fast and Furious type movies, you will sometimes need to write these scenes. But I encourage writers to both simplify them and zero in on the most entertaining component of the scene and feature that. We’d rather read about Ethan Hunt dangling from wires in a secured CIA computer room where one bad movement gets him and his team caught than cutting between 10 different characters all chiming in, where we only understand half of what all of them are contributing. Reading should NEVER FEEL LIKE WORK. It should ALWAYS FEEL LIKE PLAY. Let that mantra guide you.
Do we have a new Top 25 script on our hands!!?
Genre: Thriller
Premise: After a devastating wildfire wipes out a small California town, a teenage girl is missing and presumed dead. A year later, an obsessive mother and cynical arson investigator begin to suspect that she’s still alive…and in the clutches of a predator.
About: Dan Bulla is one of the newer writers on Saturday Night Live, joining the longstanding sketch show in 2019. He also wrote an episode of the Pete Davidson show, Bupkis. This script finished on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Dan Bulla
Details: 111 pages
Mark Ruffalo for Nick?
It is the most wonderful time of the year.
No, I’m not talking about the return of football. I’m talking about the U.S. Freaking Open! I’m currently bouncing around between watching 128 first round matches, having the time of my life.
It was during this trip to nirvana that I thought to myself, “You know what would be nice? Reading a script about a forest fire!” Hey, I can’t defend how my mind works. It does what it wants to do and I try and keep up.
Little did I know I’d be stumbling into a bona fide banger of a screenplay!
40-something Jessie lives in Avalon, California – one of those small Northern California towns in the middle of endless forests. And on this morning, it’s a bad day in Avalon. A massive forest fire creeps up out of nowhere, causing a mad dash to get out of town.
Jessie and her husband, Ken, are assured by the local police that the high school has been evacuated, meaning that their daughter, Wendy, is okay. Still, they barely escape and get to the rendezvous point, where they learn the devastating news that Wendy secretly ditched school that day.
Cut to Wendy and a couple of her friends goofing off in the forest when the fire approaches. They make a run for it but get split up, and Wendy finds herself on a road that is blocked in both directions. Just before she’s about to die, a red pickup truck arrives and a man named Randy saves her.
Cut to a year later and we meet Nick, a private fire investigator. Nick is in Avalon to meet Jessie, who says she has evidence that the fire was not, indeed, caused by a downed electrical generator, but rather by arson. Nick has a lot invested in Jessie’s claim because he’ll receive a giant windfall of cash if he can get the electric company off the hook.
Unfortunately, Jessie seems flat-out crazy these days. She lives in an RV in this shell of a town, collecting burned-up debris in the hopes of proving there’s more to this fire than meets the eye. Nick knows that her theory is weak from the get-go and considers turning around and leaving immediately. But Jessie’s emotional plea to help her figure out how her daughter died gets Nick to stay.
The next day, Jessie shows Nick a mysterious gray line she found in the burnt-up forest. Now Nick is interested. This line implies that the fire was started by arson. Which means somebody planned this. He further figures out that Wendy may not have died after all. Could these two things – the arson and Wendy’s disappearance – be related? And, if so, who, in town, has her? Nick and Jessie will have to team up to find out!
Let me say that this is the first script I’ve read in months where I thought I was a lot earlier in the script than I was. I thought I was on page 60 and it turned out I was on page 85! Usually, it’s the opposite. I think I’m on page 60 and I’m on page 20.
That’s screenwriting code for: this script was awesome.
I liked the script even before I opened it. It’s a fresh concept. We don’t usually see serial killers and wildfires in the same story space. It’s a unique combination. More importantly, it rewrites the investigation narrative. Usually, when we read about a killer or an abductor, it takes place in a city, which means that every investigatory beat in the story is one we’ve already seen before.
Here, the investigatory beats are all unique because we’re in a bunt out town in the middle of nowhere. We’re not going to apartments in Brooklyn asking cousins when the last time they saw Jenny was. We’re in a forest examining dead animal carcasses. I can’t emphasize enough how important this is. Readers read the same stuff OVER AND OVER again. So if your plot provides a world with a bunch of fresh scenarios for your characters to engage in, you’re up on every other screenwriter in the business.
As always, these scripts depend on authenticity. I always say to writers – if you’re writing about a specialized subject matter, you better know a lot more about that subject matter than I do. If I think we know that subject matter evenly, I’m done with your script. Cause I know you didn’t do any research, which means you’re not trying. I don’t have time for writers who don’t try.
I LOOOVED the opening forest fire scene here. It was SOOOOO intense. And the level of specificity to it was impressive (the way this fire spreads sounds eerily similar to what happened in Hawaii recently – and this script was written a year before that happened). There’s this moment where they’re desperately trying to get out of this logjam of cars and they finally break through and they’re racing against the smoke and they look over and there are these deers who are right next to them, also trying to escape. It felt so specific, like the writer was fully tuned into the sequence.
The writer also knows how to navigate the nuts and bolts aspects of storytelling. For example, there’s this early scene with Nick where the writer wants to establish that Nick knows what he’s talking about. You do this in screenwriting because it gets the reader on the character’s side. Readers LOVE when the character knows something that the average person doesn’t.
There’s this moment where Jessie is trying to convince Nick that a bottle rocket was the cause of the fire. Nick takes a look at the bottle rocket and the affected area and says this: “There’s deep char on the right side of the trees. Minimal char on the left. Burns rising, right to left, steeper than the slope. Branches all bent in the same direction. Foliage freeze. That means the wind was blowing right to left at the time of the fire. No odor. No sign of accelerant. It’s burned on top, untouched on the bottom. That tells me that a fully formed, advancing fire swept over this area, right to left, at about six miles an hour. The bottle rocket didn’t start the fire. It’s just some litter you found in the woods.” If there was any doubt that this guy is a fire expert, this assessment puts it to rest.
And then there’s this little moment early on that told me I was dealing with a guy who KNOWS SCREENWRITING. Jessie gets Nick to stay one more day by telling him that, tomorrow, she’ll show him a piece of evidence that will prove the fire was created by arson. The day comes, Nick shows up at her place, and says, “Where’s the evidence?” And she says, “Change of plans. First you’re going to tell me what happened to my daughter.”
The words “change of plans” should be a part of every screenwriter’s vocabulary. Why? Because YOU NEVER WANT THE READER TO GET COMFORTABLE. You don’t want them having a sense of where the story is going all the time. “Change of plans” throws the reader off. Cause now we’re going in a direction that wasn’t a part of the original plan. It’s exciting.
Not that you have to use those exact words (“change of plan”) every time. It’s more about you, the writer, occasionally changing things up so you don’t stay on that same predictable path the whole story.
Oh, one more thing. In a lot of the scripts I read, the bad guys never get the deaths they deserve. They get these quick weak deaths where they don’t suffer at all. This bad guy gets a terrible death and it’s awesome.
All this adds up to a really good screenplay. One of the best – maybe even the best – scripts on last year’s Black List. Definitely check it out!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive (Top 25!)
[ ] genius
What I learned: There comes a time in a lot of scripts where a character will remember something about their loved one and share that experience with another character. These memories are one of the best ways to separate yourself from the average writer. Cause most writers have these boring on-the-nose memories they have their character recall.
“Oh, I remember when Wendy was 7 and she fell in the pool and she didn’t know how to swim and so I jumped in after her and I pulled her out and she wasn’t breathing and I’ll never forget giving her mouth to mouth. I thought for sure she was going to die. But, then, at the last second, she let out a breath. And it was at that moment that I knew my daughter was a fighter.”
Note how unimaginative that is. Note how 99 out of 100 writers would’ve been able to write the same thing. Real memories are unique. They have weird details. They don’t go according to plan. And they rarely line up with the five cliched memories that most writers use in these instances. Note how different, even a little bit odd, the chosen memory Dan Bulla uses for Jessie when she shares a story about Wendy…
“One time, I sat in the living room all night, waiting for her to come home. Just absolutely fuming. She finally snuck in just before sunrise. Didn’t see me sitting there in the dark. She shut the door. Locked it without making a sound. Then she went upstairs, straddling the steps so the stairs wouldn’t creak. And I didn’t say anything. I just watched her. And I remember feeling lucky. Lucky to witness that. Because I was seeing her. The real her.”
