Genre: Holiday Comedy
Premise: When Santa Claus’ protégé is killed in an avalanche, the next relative in line, a New York cop with no holiday spirit, is taken to the North Pole for his training until he must save Christmas from the grinch-like Krampus.
Why You Should Read: Apart from this script placing in the finals of both the Fresh Voices and Studio 32 screenplay competitions. It is a fresh new take, from two hungry writers, into the mythology of how to become the father of Christmas. It’s nostalgic, comedic and downright magical.
Writers: Matt Ritchey & Michael Onofri
Details: 101 pages

Merrrrrry Christmas everybody! I hope you get everything under the tree you wished for. I hope you don’t have to spend much time in airports over the holiday, what with all the sniffly flu-ridden travelers looking to spread their disease like candy canes. I luckily don’t have to take the worst Christmas flight ever this year (that would be LAX to O’HARE), as I’ll be working on my tan in good old Los Angeles. Praise St. Nick.

Now to our Holiday Amateur Offerings Battle. As much as I was rooting for Droid Rage to win due to its zany premise, it received two late suspicious votes that did not seem to be in the Christmas spirit. That’s okay because Christmas Academy sounds funner than a sleigh ride after the season’s first snow, like something Bruce Willis would’ve made after Die Hard 3 to poke fun at the genre. I’m loving the energy of the premise already. Let’s hope it’s more of a Lego Millennium Falcon gift than a pair of socks (which my brother got me last year. His rationale: “Everybody needs socks.”).

Every 200 years, Santa Claus must pass the baton to a new Santa, which is exactly what St. Nick is doing when we meet him. However, an unexpected avalanche obliterates the poor successor, leaving Santa to improvise. He decides to hold a Santa-Off for three distant relatives with the winner awarded the “Santa” title. But he’s going to have to move fast. Christmas is in less than a month!

Cut to New York City where we meet beat cop Chris Kimble. Chris is a bull in a china shop with attitude to spare, the kind of guy who will run up thousands of dollars of damage for every perp he brings in. After Chris does just that in his introductory scene, leaving a trail of Christmas carnage to catch a thief who he has to let go due to not properly reading him his Miranda Rights, his Captain suspends him for one month without pay.

This forces Chris, a Christmas hater, to take a Santa Department Store gig to pay the rent. While there, he’s approached by two store elves with suspiciously nice costumes. They tell him to follow them, and after going through some Narnia back closet, Chris finds himself in the North Pole! It’s there where he’s told he’s a distant relative to the Claus family, and will be participating in a competition to become the next Santa.

It shouldn’t be difficult. His competition is Melvin, an old dude who can barely walk straight. And Sandy, a hard-as-nails chick who’s so obsessed with winning she can’t see the forest through the Christmas trees. The thing is, Chris doesn’t care about winning. The only reason he participates is because Santa pays him to stay and compete.

Then a couple of things change. Chris starts to fall for Sandy. And some dude named Krampus starts stealing toys from the factory! Chris springs into cop mode to eliminate the threat. But when Krampus gets his hooves on Santa’s magic cloak, the thing that powers Christmas Eve, there’s a high probability there won’t be any Christmas this year. Unless, of course, Chris can stop him!

This is going to sound corny but I love the spirit of this script. Christmas is about letting go and having fun with the people you love, and there’s something undeniably fun about this premise. Every time I read the logline, I see the potential in it.

But here’s the thing. It’s really hard to write screenplays where the main character doesn’t care about achieving his goal. It’s not impossible. But it’s hard. And Christmas Academy is built around a protagonist who doesn’t care if he achieves his goal (winning the title of Santa Claus) or not.

This hurts comedies in particular. Jokes aren’t as funny if the character doesn’t care about succeeding. That’s because the character’s desire to succeed is what adds the stakes. And with stakes, it actually means something if the character fails. And failure (or the potential for failure) is where the funny is.

Look at Elf. Will Ferrel wants his father’s love more than anything. We know if he screws up, he could lose his dad. That’s what makes all his ridiculous mistakes so hilarious. Kevin must keep the burglars out of his house at all costs in Home Alone. We laugh because we care. Once you add the element of not caring, there aren’t as many jokes to be had. Or maybe I should say, you have to find your comedy somewhere else.

That was the strange thing about Christmas Academy. It felt like a comedy. But there were never enough jokes. Part of this is due to what I outlined. The other part is that there wasn’t any structure to the comedy. It was more of a “let’s put our character in generally funny situations and hope that comedy evolves somehow” approach. Like Chris’s opening scene. He chases the thief. Yeah, throwing snow globes at the thief is kind of funny. Yeah, stealing a Christmas horse and buggy with a couple inside is funny. But none of these were hard jokes. It was more of a “comedy adjacent” situation.

Let me give you a more specific example. I was unlucky enough to catch one of the Meet The Parents sequels on TV the other day. The scene I landed on was Greg (Ben Stiller) and Jack (Robert DiNero) at a giant kid’s party. The writers decided that it would be funny if Greg and Jack got into a big fight during the party. And I agree that, in theory, this is funny. You have the irony of a couple of adults having a full out brawl at a kid’s party. But there was no structure to this sequence, nor was there structure to any of the jokes. It was more of, “We’ll take these guys through all the kid’s play stations and something funny will inevitably come from that.” So while the sequence was amusing. It wasn’t funny.

Contrast this against a more famous comedy scene, the dinner scene from the first Meet The Parents, and the difference is night and day. That scene was meticulously structured to mine the comedy built from Jack hating this dork who wasn’t good enough for his daughter, and Greg desperate to impress Jack in order to win his daughter. The conflict between the characters was so sharply crafted that the conceit of the scene – Greg was going to fail at every desperate attempt to get Jack to like him – essentially created a joke conveyer belt. It would’ve been hard to NOT write a funny scene here.

We don’t get anything like that in Christmas Academy. It’s more of a flow of humor-adjacent moments. Some of them are amusing. I liked Melvin’s bumbling around, for example. But there’s never enough scene structure to truly mine the kind of jokes that make us LOL.

I believe fixing the stakes will help this. If Chris wants to succeed, it makes every scene feel like it matters. If I were Matt and Michael, I would consider altering the concept. Someone’s been stealing Santa’s toys as Christmas approaches. This has never happened in the North Pole before so they don’t have a system in place to deal with it. So they recruit a real-life cop (Chris), to investigate. This way, Chris actually wants to achieve his goal.

Meanwhile, Krampus needs a bigger part. He can’t hide in the shadows for 70 pages and then become a semi-menace in the third act. We need to set him up sooner and establish that he’s going to stop Christmas this year. This ups the stakes considerably. Chris must first figure out who is stealing the presents, and then, of course, stop him.

You could still play up the contrast between character and setting here. Everybody in Christmas Land is happy and optimistic. Chris is serious and negative. He’s had a tough life and he sees this as a job. Not as saving Christmas. Of course, by the end, he will have found his Christmas spirit.

If you don’t want to do that, that’s understandable. But I would then look for another goal to drive Chris. We need him to care about whether he succeeds or not.

Hopefully this helps the writers and also some of you with similar script dilemmas. MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY HOLIDAY WRITING!!!

Script link: Christmas Academy

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

What I learned: Use fear to mine humor. In The Death of Stalin, the opening scene has a music director finishing up a concert. As everyone’s leaving, he speaks to a couple of co-workers who gossip about the fact that Stalin’s assassinating anyone who even mildly annoys him these days. RING RING. It’s the phone. The director picks it up and it’s Stalin. Stalin says he wants a recording of that night’s concert. The director, of course, nods and says okay. He hangs up and asks the assistants if they recorded the concert. No, they say. The director hilariously darts out of the room and starts screaming at the crowd to get back into their seats. He then tells all the musicians to get back in their places. They’re going to perform the concert all over again. The reason this scene is funny is because of how much fear we have for the director. We know if he can’t get everyone to stay here for another two hours, he will die. Without that fear, there is no joke.

Genre: Superhero
Premise: When a time-traveler comes back from the future to kill the boy who murdered his family, it will be up to Deadpool and his new super duper team to stop him.
About: There’s a sneaky sub-story regarding today’s film that the trades are trying to sweep under the rug. Deadpool 2 made 125 million dollars this weekend. That’s 7 million dollars less than the first Deadpool made on its opening weekend. The trades hate when one of their darlings underperforms because it means they have to come up with an angle that excuses the performance despite a history of tearing apart films with similar results. The spin they’re going with here is that Deadpool did better globally in its first weekend than the first film did. But that’s largely because they opened on more screens this time around. The thing is, Deadpool 2 does deserve a pass. It’s a better film than the first one. Its underperformance is the doing of its studio, which placed it between Avengers and Star Wars, possibly the worst release date in the past 10 years. Why not place Deadpool in June where the waters are calmer? I don’t know. But Deadpool 2 will leave between 100-200 million dollars on the table due to this bizarre decision.
Writers: Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick and Ryan Reynolds (based on the comic by Rob Liefeld & Fabian Niciza)
Details: 2 hours long

BEEEEP BEEEEP BEEEEP. Backing up the Spoiler Truck guys. If you get run over, it’s your fault.

I have a lot to say about this one so let’s jump right into it!

Deadpool 2 starts in typical Deadpool fashion, with Deadpool blowing himself up. But the curse of being Deadpool is that he can’t die. So like Humpty-Dumpty, they put him back together again. A few scenes later, Deadpool shows us the reason he killed himself. A bad guy pops into his apartment and shoots Vanessa in the heart. Yes, Vanessa, from the previous film is dead.

Meanwhile some dude named Cable, who’s from the future, is also suffering from family tragedy. His wife and son were murdered by a firestarting super-villain. So Cable time-travels back to 2018 to kill the offending villain, a mutant 12 year old boy named Russell, before he can begin his decades-long killing spree that ends in the murder of his family.

Deadpool is reluctantly recruited into the X-Men, which means he has to do good, and his first order of goodness is to save Russell. But being Deadpool, he has to do things his way. So he recruits a team of the worst superheroes imaginable, calling them X-Force. It’s then a race for X-Force and Cable to see who gets to the boy first.

To stand out amongst an entertainment machine that pumps out thousands of hours of content every day, millions if you count the internet, when you write a script, you must give us things that we’ve never seen before.

That doesn’t mean you have to give us a movie concept we’ve never seen before. It’d be nice. That’s what the original Deadpool did. It gave us a fourth-wall breaking R-rated superhero. But it’s hard to find those ideas.

So the next best thing is to give us moments WITHIN YOUR SCREENPLAY that we’ve never seen before. One great original moment is nice. Two is better. And anything over two is awesome. Deadpool 2 gives us three moments.

The first is the opening credits scene. For those who haven’t seen the film, Deadpool’s wife, Vanessa, is killed in the fourth scene of the movie. It’s an emotional moment. I was genuinely shocked. These two were set up as the perfect couple in the first film.

The title sequence that follows, a James Bond parody set to a surprisingly catchy Celine Dion song, begins listing the credits. Except they aren’t what we expect. “Produced by: Wait a minute, did you just fucking kill her?” “Directed by: Are you insane?” Director of Cinematography by: “Holy shit, you really fucking killed her.” (paraphrased).

This was clever, not just because we’d never seen it before. But what you probably don’t know is that credit sequences are unionized. It’s hard to change them. Unions did this to prevent situations where producers kept their credit on screen for 60 seconds. Or say the studio hated the job the costume designer did. This would prevent them from simply not including her credit.

I bring this up because there’s a bigger issue at play here. There are things that we believe are “set.” That can’t be changed. So we don’t even consider it. I’m assuming the reason it took so long for someone to think of this was because everyone assumed you can’t change a title sequence. You had to accept them. This is a reminder that everything is open for change. There should be no avenue closed off from your imagination.

The second moment was the X-Force fail. This was my favorite sequence in the movie. I knew something was up because the superheroes looked super cheesy, even for a movie that made fun of superheroes. But I didn’t think they were going to kill them off before they fought a single battle! That was brilliant, and the one time in the movie where I couldn’t stop laughing.

Finally we had baby legs. I wasn’t a fan of this scene. A lot of people think the baby-adult hybrid thing is funny. They’ve done a lot of Super Bowl commercials covering it. But it’s too weird for me. Regardless, there’s a lesson to be learned here as well. This is one of the most talked about sequences in the film, and it’s six people in an apartment. This is what I remind writers who think that the only way to catch a reader’s attention is to go bigger. No. This scene proves that the smallest scenes can be the most memorable. You just have to be creative.

But maybe the biggest surprise of Deadpool 2 was how character-driven it was. I’d just done a screenplay consultation for a writer who wrote an action film. And my big note to him was, “You need to give us more character development so that we care about these characters during the action.”

As I was writing that, I realized that the average screenwriter has no idea how to do this. Their understanding of character development in an action film is to write one scene every 30 pages where two characters are in a room, resting, and one of them gives the other a monologue about their troubled childhood.

Deadpool 2 is about 30% action. This means 70% of the film is covering character. Seeing Cable’s reaction to the aftermath of his dead family is character development. Deadpool whining to a bartender after his wife died is character development. Seeing quick flashes of Russell being tortured is character development. Seeing Deadpool rage-kill the man who killed his wife is character development. Deadpool and Cable having a difference of opinion on how to treat Russell is character development. Cable carrying around his boy’s burnt stuffed bunny is character development. Deadpool’s dreams where he’s back with his wife are character development. Russell desperate to find a friend he can trust is character development. In fact, Russell’s entire character (a boy who’s been abused his whole life and is now taking it out on the world) is character development.

I reminded the writer that anybody can write action. But very few writers can develop character. That’s the hot commodity in screenwriting. If you can do that? Hollywood will hire you from now until the end of time.

As much as I admired the crafting of Deadpool – the chances it took and the overall writing – I did have one problem with it. Its biggest strength – Ryan Reynolds – is also its biggest weakness. The fourth-wall-breaking joke-a-minute schtick is tiring. It’s so tiring. Yes, Deadpool does it better than anyone. But it’s still a gimmick. And gimmicks have short shelf lives. Note how in Ferris Bueller, Ferris only does the fourth wall breaking in that opening sequence. During the rest of the movie, it happens only a handful of times. And that’s because John Hughes knew that the audience would get tired of it. Deadpool’s commentary started to irk me towards the end. And that’s the only reason this movie doesn’t finish with an impressive.

[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Action films have way less action than you think they do. It’s roughly around 30% of screen time, usually less. Let this be a lesson that you need to learn to develop character if you’re going to be a successful writer in this genre.

Sorry about the lack of posts. I was at LAX all night yesterday trying to get back to the Midwest. I didn’t make it but it looks like a Christmas miracle might get me out tonight. Before we move on to today’s article, I want to beg every traveler out there to please never fly American Airlines for the rest of your lives. Not only is it a terrible airline as far as comfort and customer service, but they have to be the most clueless airline company on the planet.

After being bumped 3 times last night to later and later flights, my last flight changed gates ELEVEN TIMES. That is not a printing error nor is it an exaggeration. In addition to this, I saw three women break down, fall to the floor, and start crying, due to how much they’d been dicked around all night, and one man lead a 30 person revolt against the gate attendant. It was insane.

After we’d changed gates for the 10th time, American Airlines kept saying we couldn’t board because the plane outside was broken, and they needed to tow it out before they could bring in “our plane.” We waited an hour for this towing to happen. Finally, when they moved us to our 11th and final gate, which did not have a plane in it, many astute passengers pointed out that since they no longer needed to tow a plane away, they could bring “our plane” up and start boarding. American Airlines, clearly caught in a lie, quickly moved to a new excuse about air traffic being broken or something.

I know the holidays are crazy for air travel but I’m not basing my critique here on just this experience. Every time I have flown American Airlines, it has been terrible. I only flew them this time because I had to. But I will never fly them again after this. It was the last straw.

Now, on to funner topics!

Because I don’t have time to write an in-depth article or review, I thought I’d share with you some brief thoughts on a screenwriting concept that’s always frustrated me: THEME

Theme has always been a tricky concept. To this day, I’m yet to meet someone who’s given me a definition for theme that doesn’t sound bullshitty (this is why theme posts get debated so vigorously – since there is no definition, everyone’s interpretation is different). But the other day I stumbled upon a Youtube video covering academia and had a mini-revelation. As I retroactively tested that revelation, I realized how much sense it made.

The idea is this. “Theme” comes in two flavors – simple and complex. BOTH can work effectively. You can use the simple version of theme and still write a good movie. In fact, I’d argue that the simple version gives you a better chance at writing a good movie. However, the complex version gives you a chance at writing a GREAT movie.

But before we get into that, let’s remind ourselves why we’d want a theme in the first place. A theme is there to keep your story focused. Whenever you lose your way, like a lighthouse, the theme is there to steer you back on course. Without a theme, your script seems scattered, confused, and unsure of what it’s trying to say.

If you were to grade this article on theme, for example, it would fail. I started out talking about how shitty American Airlines was before moving onto a screenwriting article. That’s thematically inconsistent, which is why this article feels messy. You could argue that because I just referenced my opening to prove a point about theme, that the theme for this article is intact, but that’s a debate for another time.

On to “simple theme.” The simple version of theme is the act of wrapping everything around a single idea. That idea can be anything! Take the Star Wars movies. A common theme I’ve heard thrown around for them is “Good vs. Evil.” As long as you play out the struggle of good vs. evil, the movie’s going to feel consistent and whole. However, if a storyline popped up in Star Wars about a character who was obsessed with money and needed to have all the money in the universe, you’d be like, “Uh, what the hell does this have to do with Star Wars?”

Or take Zootopia. The theme there is that we can be anything we want if we put our minds to it. It’s a simple easy to follow formula that gives your movie a point. And since Star Wars and Zootopia are both awesome movies, we know this type of theme works.

Now let’s move to the complex version of theme. To achieve this, we’ll be transforming the word itself. “Theme” will now become “Thesis.” The idea with a thesis is to create a question or theory that has to be proven or debated over the course of the story. Whereas bigger budget Hollywood fare will lean on theme to power its core, character pieces rely more on a thesis. And the best way to understand the power of a thesis is to compare two similar character pieces, one that used a theme, the other that used a thesis.

The first is Sully. Sully was boring as shit. Why was it boring as shit? Because the theme was boring as shit. What was that theme: Heroism. That’s it! A man being a hero. Now yes, that kept the story consistent throughout its running time. We were never confused about what Sully was about. But because this was a character piece, it needed a thesis, something that forced us to think a little more.

Bring in Flight. Flight based its screenplay on a thesis, that thesis being: “Can a bad person still be a hero?” Denzel Washington’s captain character put 250 peoples’ lives at risk by drinking all night and snorting up coke before he piloted that flight. But he still ended up pulling off a radical maneuver that saved most of the passengers’ lives. Notice how, by using a thesis, the story becomes a lot more complex. We’re not sure what we think of Whip. Yeah, he saved all those people, but he shouldn’t have gotten on that plane fucked up in the first place.

In both cases, we have something to center the story on. But in one, that something merely represents what’s going on, whereas in the other, it forces us to continually ask a question. Can bad people be heroes?

Hey wait a minute. My last two examples were about airplanes. Maybe this article is more theme-centric than I gave it credit for.

I’ll finish by saying this. If you’re just starting out in screenwriting, whether you’re writing a Hollywood movie or a character piece, go with a theme. Even if you’re experienced and you’re writing a Hollywood movie, go with a theme. The only people for whom I’d encourage using a thesis are seasoned screenwriters who are writing character pieces. I say this because I’ve seen beginner screenwriters try and use theses and they always make it too complicated on themselves. By trying to make their stories so intelligent and thematically resonant, they forget to actually make them entertaining. Don’t be one of those guys.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!!

Here they are folks!  These are the top 10 Amateur scripts ever submitted to Scriptshadow (not including The Disciple Program and Where Angels Die).  My voting system works like this.  People send in their top 10, and then I assign a sliding point system to each entry.  So if something finishes number one on someone’s list, I give that 10 points.  Finishing number two gets you 9 points.  Three gets you 8 points.  I then tally all the points up.  I’ve included the point totals of all ten.  I believe over 300 people voted!

Inside the numbers: Only one script that got a “wasn’t for me” made the list (Primal, at number 8).  The Savage South, a rather low key script at the time, had a lot more supporters than I thought!  Finishing at number 8.  Things got REALLY crowded at the bottom and some scripts JUST MISSED the list.  The three that were the closest were Goodbye Gene, with 170 points, A Bullet For My Best Friend, with 163, and Guest, with 156.  Also a sorta surprise was Grendl’s Real Monsters making the list.  A lot of people seemed to like that one.  Well, I’ll leave it at that.  Here is the list.  Congratulations to the top 10, and thanks to everyone who voted!!!

1) Rose in the Darkness – 533 points – A secluded boy’s way of life is threatened when he befriends Rose – the girl whom his parents have imprisoned in the family attic.

2) Patisserie – 502 points – A young Jewish woman in occupied France escapes the Nazis by changing places with a shop owner. But as her love grows for the other woman’s husband and child, so does her guilt.

3) Fascination 127 – 419 points – A group of men are hired by a mysterious client to remove Jim Morrison’s casket, give it to him for 24 hours and then return the casket into the ground before it is publicly exhumed to be moved to the United States.

4) Keeping Time – 390 points – A for-hire time traveler who specializes in “preventing” bad relationships meets his match with a mysterious woman who claims to also be a traveler and is determined to stop him from completing his mission.

5) Fatties – 308 points – When a lonely masochistic chubby chaser is abducted by two fat lesbian serial killers, it’s the best thing that ever happened to him.

6) The Devil’s Hammer – 297 points – When an outlaw biker, and soon to be father, attempts to leave the sins of his old life behind, he is pushed by a vengeful Sheriff into the arms of an ancient cult of disease worshiping sadists.

7) Primal – 234 points – After survivors of a recent hurricane relocate to a quiet Louisiana bayou town, a creature goes on a nightly rampage of terror and carnage. Convinced it is the legendary werewolf known as loup garou, an intrepid teen vows to discover the beast’s true identity and destroy it.

8) The Savage South – 201 points – When a professional contract killer discovers he’s become the target of an assassination himself, he teams up with the would-be killer to figure out who set them up.

9) Real Monsters – 180 points – The members of a small Irish town housing a supposed Lochness-like monster in their lake find their world turned upside-down when an American documentary crew arrives to find out if the monster is real.

10) Reunion – 176 points – At their ten-year reunion, a formerly bullied outcast decides to enact revenge on the cool kids who made his life miserable.

Well, you asked for it so here it is!  I’ve had my Top 25 scripts over on the right-hand panel there forever.  But we’ve finally had enough Amateur Friday reviews (over 100) to create a Top 10 Amateur Scripts List!  We need to celebrate you guys who have done what many consider impossible – impress the impossible-to-impress Scriptshadow readership.  Here’s how it’s going to work.  I’m listing all of the serious competitors below (scripts that had high “wasn’t for mes,” “worth the reads,” “impressives,” or any buzz) and you can vote for your Top 10 (or Top 5 if you haven’t read all of them) by e-mailing me at carsonreeves3@gmail.com with the subject line: “VOTE.”  Include your list from 1-5 or 1-10.  I’ll take votes up until 11:59 pm Sunday, August 31st and announce the following week.  Let’s take a trip down Amateur Lane. Good luck!

PATISSERIE
Premise:  A young Jewish woman in occupied France escapes the Nazis by changing places with a shop owner. But as her love grows for the other woman’s husband and child, so does her guilt.

LE PETITE MORT
Premise: An alcoholic stilt walker must save the small town that loathes him from an invasion of zombie midgets.

LORD OCKLEY AND THE ALIEN
Premise: A wanton English Lord hires a “hermit” to live in his garden (as was the trend in 18th Century England). An alien from another planet stumbles into this scenario, who the drunk Englishmen consider to be French.

360
Premise: After surviving a violent car accident, a woman is attacked in her home by a masked assailant and finds herself living out a time loop that has her experiencing the attack from several points of view.

SERVED COLD
Premise: A Detroit bank thief accidentally steals from the Canadian mob and is forced to lift a rare painting from the Detroit mob to pay them back.

HEMINGWAY BOY
Premise: Fatherless Copywriter, Nick Adams, uncovers a stash of immaculate love letters dated the year he was born and post marked from Key West and Havana, Cuba. Convinced he is Hemingway’s bastard love child, he travels to Key West with teenage son in tow to usurp his birthright.

OF GLASS AND GOLDEN CLOCKWORK
Premise: On the eve of the Third World War, a young soldier abandons his post to search out a robot claiming to have information regarding his father’s unsolved murder, only to discover these two are more connected than he ever could have imagined.

AESOP THE COURAGEOUS
Premise: When his mother is kidnapped and sold into slavery, the legendary fableist must overcome being a short, ugly mute and outmatch Greek philosophers and bloodthirsty kings to rescue her and save the kingdom.

ON THE CORNER OF RUE ST. ALOISE AND RUE DU CHEVAL
Premise: November 1944, Strasbourg, France. A Solider wakes up with amnesia in “La Zone Occupée”. The only thing he remembers is his duty to deliver a package on the corner of Rue St. Aloise and Rue Du Cheval at 10:30pm. No name, no date, and under no circumstances is the package to be opened.

BREAKING THE CHAIN
Premise: A gambler wins millions on a crazy bet, yet is unable to
 tell anyone. Instead, he resolves to secretly use the money to improve the 
lives of those closest to him, and win back the love of his long-suffering
 wife.

THE IMAGINEER
Premise: The life story of one of the most creative minds of all time, Walt Disney.

THE ALIEN DIARIES
Premise: A book appraiser working at an old farm mansion finds a diary that implies the family who used to live there 200 years ago may have come in contact with a crashed alien ship.

THE HOUSE THAT DEATH BUILT
Premise: A recently widowed cop reclaims an old property in a small southern town, only to discover that key figures in the town have been hiding a horrifying secret.

THE SLEEP OF REASON
Premise: After his wife goes missing, a man heads to the darkest reaches of Transylvania to find her.

I THINK MY FACEBOOK FRIEND IS DEAD
Premise: After receiving panicked messages from a girl he’s been Facebook-stalking, a meek agoraphobe wrangles together his closest internet friends and journeys into the real world to find her.

REAL MEN PLAY FUTEBOL
Premise: A teenage boy hoping to escape the poverty of his West African village finds the opportunity when a professional futebol scout comes to town.

TRIBUTE
Premise: A marginally talented tribute band finds itself magically/accidentally transported back to the year 1973 and seizes the opportunity to become actual rock stars by “stealing” the career of the group they’ve long made a living out of impersonating.

CAPTIVE
Premise: When a group of bank robbers kidnap his wife, an accountant must try and save her. But when they all end up in a strange Rube Goldberg-like trap-filled mansion, the kidnapping becomes the least of their worries.

THE HOSTAGE
Premise: (from writers) It’s a brilliant bank robbery plan. But there’s one contingency no one could have planned for: One of the hostages turns into a werewolf, turning the bank they’ve locked down to keep out the police into a deathtrap. And turning a criminal into a hero.

REUNION
Premise: At their ten-year reunion, a formerly bullied outcast decides to enact revenge on the cool kids who made his life miserable.

CHARMING
Premise: After beating out his twin brother for the throne, Prince Charming finally settles down with his new bride-to-be, Snow White. But when she ditches him for his brother, he will have to find a way to win her back.

THE AUGMENTED GEOLOGIST
Premise: (from writer) In Victorian England, a respected geologist studies a strange crystal artifact that grants him incredible powers, tears his life apart and sends him on a deadly chase to discover its unearthly origin.

REAL MONSTERS
Premise: The members of a small Irish town housing a supposed Lochness-like monster in their lake find their world turned upside-down when an American documentary crew arrives to find out if the monster is real.

MOVERS
Premise: A moving company specializes in moving humans.

EDEN’S FOLLY
Premise: A left-for-dead rancher wakes up in the middle of the desert with no memory of who he is. He goes off in a search to find out what happened.

THE INCREDIBLE SHAVING MUG FRACAS
Premise: (from writer) A lost cache of Nazi gold could save the crumbling hometown of a failed actor. But the key to the treasure, an antique shaving mug, is also the key to his doom. He must outwit, battle and defeat weird and dangerous Nazi sympathizers who have skulked into town searching for him and the treasure.

BEST FRIENDS FOREVER
Premise: After learning that his family is leaving the town he grew up in, a heartbroken 13 year-old boy convinces his best friends to go trick-or-treating one last time in a daring attempt to break their town’s unbreakable trick-or-treating record and become legends.

MAD DOGS
Premise: A repressed teen werewolf tracks down her estranged father — the sheriff of a resort that caters to the hedonistic pursuits of werewolves — but an outbreak of weaponized rabies turns their reunion into a fight for survival.

KEEPING TIME
Premise: (from writer) A for-hire time traveler who specializes in “preventing” bad relationships meets his match with a mysterious woman who claims to also be a traveler and is determined to stop him from completing his mission.

NINE TWELVE
Premise: (from writer) A man embarks on a relationship with a 9/11 widow after claiming to have lost his brother in the attacks.

ROSE IN THE DARKNESS
Premise: (from writer) A secluded boy’s way of life is threatened when he befriends Rose – the girl whom his parents have imprisoned in the family attic.

VERONA SPIES
Premise: (from writer) After landing a job at an escort service, a young woman learns that her first date is an international spy who’s just stolen a multi-million dollar pharmaceutical secret. She agrees to help him shake the assassins waiting outside of the hotel, and soon finds herself embroiled in a deadly game of corporate espionage.

GOODBYE GENE
Premise: (from writer) A demented 14 year old girl strikes up a weird relationship with a convicted sex offender. Shit gets crazy when they embark on a twisted road trip in a “rape van.”

INHUMAN
Premise: (from writer) After a radical exorcism leaves a possessed teen in a coma, a psychologist reluctantly helps the clergymen, who performed the rite, wake the child, but soon suspects foul play and finds himself trapped in a secluded monastery with only one person to turn to for help: his newly awakened patient.

WHITE LABEL
Premise: (from writer) When a young vinyl music store owner loses everything — love, friendship and vinyl records — he struggles to rebuild his life, hindered by pimp-like friends, a beautiful agent provocateur and an ex-girlfriend who refuses to let their relationship die until she finds a suitable successor. In the vein of HIGH FIDELITY and 500 DAYS OF SUMMER.

THE THALLUS OF MARCHENTIA
Premise (from writer): Based on a true story, a group of college kids in the 60s pose as royalty from a made-up country (Marchentia). What starts out as innocent fun, spins out of control when the media turns their arrival into the most important visit in the city’s history.

THE TRAGIC LIFE OF DEXTER STRANGE
Premise (from writer): A colorful but washed-up bad boy recounts his epic rise and fall in Hollywood on an online video blog.

MARLOWE
Premise (from writer): P.I. Sam Marlowe shows novice writer Raymond Chandler the realities of detective work, juggling gangsters, corrupt politicians and movie star Jean Harlow to find out who’s burning farms on the Arroyo Seco Canyon.

THE SAVAGE SOUTH
Premise (from writer): When a professional contract killer discovers he’s become the target of an assassination himself, he teams up with the would-be killer to figure out who set them up.

THE DEVIL’S HAMMER
Premise (from writer): When an outlaw biker, and soon to be father, attempts to leave the sins of his old life behind, he is pushed by a vengeful Sheriff into the arms of an ancient cult of disease worshiping sadists.

PRIMAL
Premise (from writer): After survivors of a recent hurricane relocate to a quiet Louisiana bayou town, a creature goes on a nightly rampage of terror and carnage. Convinced it is the legendary werewolf known as loup garou, an intrepid teen vows to discover the beast’s true identity and destroy it.

BARABBAS
Premise (from writers): In 30 A.D., a charismatic stonemason bent on revenge leads a band of guerrilla rebels against the Roman occupation of his homeland.

A BULLETT FOR MY BEST FRIEND
Premise: When a young gang of girls kills her brother, Dakota, a former member of the gang, vows revenge.

SUNNY SIDE OF HELL
Premise: (from writer) When a woman is kidnapped in Texas during the Dust Bowl, her husband embarks on a harrowing odyssey where he’s forced to confront danger in the forms of Mother Nature and man and also the mysterious past he buried years ago.

SUBMERGED
Premise: (from writer) Trapped in a shrinking air pocket deep beneath the ocean’s surface, the survivors of a plane crash battle to stay alive long enough for the rescue teams to locate them.

WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU
Premise: (from writer) When a child killer is sentenced to death under dubious circumstances, the investigating detective discovers that the very man being executed holds the keys that can solve the crime.

WARNING SHOT
Premise: (from writer) A mother and daughter held hostage at an isolated farmhouse struggle to survive as one of their captors grows increasingly unstable.

ECHOVAULT
Premise: (from writers) When an elite team of Allied forces assault a top secret research facility, they become trapped underground with a sadistic Nazi Colonel and a mysterious Machine which allows him to switch bodies, turning the team against one another as they desperately try to survive.

GUEST
Premise: After checking into a hotel to escape her abusive husband, a woman realizes guests in the next room are holding a young girl hostage.

PROVING GROUND
Premise: 9 strangers wake in a deserted Mexican town besieged by killing machines: they must discover why they’ve been brought there to survive.

FASCINATION 127
Premise: A group of men are hired by a mysterious client to remove Jim Morrison’s casket, give it to him for 24 hours and then return the casket into the ground before it is publicly exhumed to be moved to the United States.

FATTIES
Premise: When a lonely masochistic chubby chaser is abducted by two fat lesbian serial killers, it’s the best thing that ever happened to him.

UNDERTOW
Premise: Unhappy with her life, a housewife visits a physicist who transforms the way she views the world – and her own mind.

A LOT OF BLOOD
Premise (from writer): After two friends leave the bar after a night of drinking, they discover their car missing from the parking lot, an RV in its place, and a woman trapped inside.

IN THE FLESH
Premise (from writer): A woman fights to escape an isolated home controlled by an Incubus, a demonic force that feeds on sexual energy. A task made more difficult by her co-hostages, who are content to remain under the creatures spell.