Genre: Mystery/Thriller
Premise: Ten years after she disappeared as a teen, Violet, now 25, turns up with no
memory of what happened to her, but as her family welcomes her home, it quickly
becomes apparent that the past cannot be forgiven or forgotten.
About: These two writers first hit the trades ten years ago with a script called Mayday 109. The logline was, “The story of how a young World War 2 Navy commander saved a group of men after their ship was destroyed by the Japanese. That man? John F. Kennedy.”  They then went on to write Keeper of the Diary, about the attempt by Anne Frank’s father to sell her diary. This is their first high profile script I know about that is completely fictional.
Writers: Samuel Franco & Evan Kilgore
Details: 104 pages

Casey Affleck for Michael?

For the rest of this month, we’re going to be on a hunt. We’re going to be looking for scenes we can feature here on the site to work as inspiration for Scene Showdown. If you’re late to the party on Scene Showdown, here are the submission details.

What: Scene Showdown
Rules: Scene must be 5 pages or less
When: Friday, March 28
Deadline: Thursday, March 27, 10pm Pacific Time
Submit: Script title, Genre, 50 words setting up the scene (optional), pdf of the scene
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com

The fact that I couldn’t find a single scene from Sunday night’s episode of White Lotus, a show that hails from the best writer in television, is a reminder of just how difficult writing scenes is. I don’t think screenwriters think about it nearly enough. They think about their overall story then piece together a series of 1-2 page moments that, eventually, lead them to the conclusion of that story. But they don’t construct individual scenes unto themselves, scenes that have clear beginnings, middles, and ends.

It’s an epidemic and has become so common that I don’t think most writers even know how to write a scene anymore. I really don’t.

But I still go into every script hoping they do because I know that I’m going to have a much more enjoyable experience if they’re great scene-writers. So, let’s check it out!

Recently separated 36 year-old Michael Miller is going camping with his 14 year-old daughter, Violet. It’s going to be the last time they spend together for a while, as Violent will be going to live with her mom, Joanne.

Late at night, on the drive back from camping, Michael is stopped by a cop for speeding. The cop checks both Michael’s and Violet’s IDs, then request Violet get out of the car. Michael freaks out and tries to stop him but the cop threatens him with a gun. The cop then arrests Violet for distributing drugs, detains her in his car, and drives away. Michael tries to follow the cop but loses him.

When he finally makes it to the local police station, they say they don’t know this cop. After a few calls to other departments, they realize that the cop who picked Violet up was a fraud. Violet has been kidnapped.

Cut to 10 years later and Michael gets a shocking call. His daughter has been picked up in Mexico. Michael and Joanne head down there and retrieve their daughter, who has amnesia brought on by PTSD. The cops say to give her time. Her memory will come back.

(Things start getting spoilery from here on out)

When they get back to the U.S., a female detective named Manuela Garcia is assigned to cross the t’s and dot the i’s on the case. But she’s immediately suspicious that something is off regarding Violet. She’s particularly skeptical of the Mexcian cops, who refuse to send over the DNA test.

So Manuela goes down to Mexico to ask some questions. She immediately confirms that her suspicions were correct. This chick is definitely not Violet. But then who is she? And, more importantly, what happened to the real Violet? Manuela heads back to the U.S. to answer that question once and for all. But neither she, nor we, are prepared for what she discovers.

Okay, I got good news for you. WE’VE GOT SCENE WRITERS!

We get a fairly good one right away and then a really good one afterwards. That is the scene I’m pasting here. The setup is that this car has been riding Michael’s ass at night for a long time. Finally, Michael gets pissed and speeds away from it. As soon as he does, cop lights appear on the car, indicating it’s a cop, and he pulls them over.

This scene is an example of how classical situations can result in great scenes. Cops pulling you over create an immediate baseline of conflict that you can take in a lot of different directions in the scene. The trick with familiar scenarios is to build in your own unique details.

For example, this wasn’t a normal “cop pullover” scene. The cop baited them into breaking the law. It tricked them. So, already, we’re (the reader) more heated than we would usually be in this scenario because we know this cop is a snake.

From there, we have our clear beginning, middle, and end. To find your beginning, middle, and end, find the goal. That’s where you build your scene from. The goal doesn’t need to come from you hero. It can come from the villain. That’s the case here. The villain, the cop, wants the girl. That’s his goal. Now he just needs to execute his plan.

The middle of every story is your conflict section. It’s no fun if the person with the goal achieves that goal easily. There’s got to be pushback. We get that here in Michael and Violet resisting (and freaking out).

The highlight of this scene is something we don’t often talk about in scenes which is REVELATIONS. Revelations are great ways to pump up a scene, especially one that’s already cooking, like this one. The cop makes Violet get out of the car instead of Michael and then arrests her for drug-dealing (something that was vaguely set up in an earlier scene). We don’t know WHAT’S HAPPENING here.  This was not expected.  Which is why we’re so charged up.

That leads to the final act of the scene – the ending. This is the climax, where Michael tries to fight back, demanding answers. But the cop is able to hurry out of there and Michael isn’t able to get back on the road fast enough to follow him.

Really good scene.

As for the rest of the script, it’s good! The problem this particular story poses for writers is that, usually, all the best stuff happens in the first act. The girl goes missing. We cut to 10 years later where she reappears.

But then where is the story engine from that point on? Why would we keep reading? To see Michael, Joanne, and Violet have a series of awkward conversations for 90 minutes? You need something to drive the story. Kilgore and Franco achieve that by shifting the goal over to Detective Manuela.

She takes the reins and becomes the story engine – first looking to confirm that this is Violet and then trying to figure out what happened to Violent. In that sense, it’s a very well-written screenplay.

[major hints at spoiler below]

The climax of Vanished is the biggest whopper on this year’s Black List. I haven’t read 80% of the scripts yet but I know that’s the case. Cause this ending is a big swing. Does it work? It does! But is it perfect? No. It’s ALMOST there but not quite. If it got there, I would give this an impressive. But it was still darn close. And I appreciate the creative swing with the ultra twist ending. :)

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

What I learned: A simple way to improve your scene-writing is to set up stuff BEFORE THE SCENE.  Then pay it off in the scene. One of the things you see happen in this scene is that Michael’s car won’t start. That ends up being the reason the cop gets away from him. This was set up a couple of times in earlier scenes. That this car was not top quality and was definitely on the unpredictable end. That setup allowed for the climax of the scene to be even more exciting.

REMEMBER THAT SCENE SHOWDOWN IS AT THE END OF THE MONTH. SUBMISSION DETAILS BELOW!

What: Scene Showdown
Rules: Scene must be 5 pages or less
When: Friday, March 28
Deadline: Thursday, March 27, 10pm Pacific Time
Submit: Script title, Genre, 50 words setting up the scene (optional), pdf of the scene
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com

A big reason I’m tracking White Lotus on the site every Monday is to see if Mike White can pull it off. Three straight seasons of a great show. It’s hard to do. And last week was the first time I spotted a loose piece of thread on the shirt.

One of the ways you can tell when writing is going bad is when it loses purpose. Things are happening on screen but you’re not entirely sure why they were included. With good writing, every scene, every moment, adds something to the story, whether it be the plot or something important about the character we didn’t know before. And it all falls under the umbrella of a story that’s building towards a conclusion.

I didn’t get a sense of that last week. That whole “get high and go watch a snake show” sequence (two characters leave the hotel to watch a local snake show), felt like a bad outtake from a rejected Hangover sequel. It was the opposite of purposeful. I had no idea why it was in the story and that usually indicates that the writer is trying to fill up time. That’s when you know you’re in trouble – when you’re just filling up pages so that the episode or movie can be long enough.

I’m sure Mike White has a different interpretation of why he included that sequence but there’s no question the last episode was the worst of the first three. So I went into this one hoping it was a one-off issue.

Was it?

Well, guys…

I’m getting worried. My White Lotus BVDs need a cleanin’.

Something I wanted to do with this episode was identify a great scene so I could share it with you here as inspiration for Scene Showdown. Mike White is a great scene-writer. So color me WTF’d when I got to the end of the episode without seeing a single good scene.

Almost every single moment in the script is a scene snippet as part of a larger sequence. One of the plotlines of this episode was that the loopy Ratliff family goes on a giant yacht courtesy of a girl Saxson met at the hotel. The whole yacht plotline was random and unfocused. We’d see the dad, Timothy, drinking and mumbling to himself. We’d see Saxson encouraging his little brother, Lochlan, to talk to girls. We’d see mom, Victoria, complain about her social anxiety.

But WHERE WERE THE SCENES!???

Scenes require structure. They require a beginning, a middle, and an end. They require someone who wants something, then that goal is complicated by conflict, then they either get what they want or they don’t.

The closest thing we got to that was Chelsea sitting her perpetually antagonistic older boyfriend, Rick, down and asking why he’s acted so weird the whole trip and why he’s demanding to take a side trip to Bangkok tomorrow (that’s the goal for the scene. She wants to know what’s up with him). He hems and haws, not wanting to tell her (that’s our conflict). But she pushes and, finally, he relents, telling her (spoiler) that the owner of this hotel killed his father. And he wants revenge.

While it’s the most “scene-y” scene in the episode, it isn’t a very good scene. The last three episodes have so heavily hinted at why Rick is here that the reveal isn’t surprising. Which means that *we* don’t benefit from the scene. Only Chelsea does. She’s now caught up with us. But how is that entertaining to the viewer? It isn’t.

Mike White is playing a dangerous game of what I call “swimming in sequences.” Sequences are, basically, long scenes. The argument for them is this: instead of coming up with a perfect beginning, middle, and end for a scene every two minutes, why not create a larger sequence – one with a bunch of scene snippets – and use that to create your beginning, middle, and end.

And when you’re on top of your sequence writing – when you deftly outline their beginning, middle, and end – they can work. Just like scenes work. But because sequences are so much longer, it’s easier to get lost in them. And the next thing you know, you’ve got 6-7 scene snippets, but because they’re not tightly constructed enough, the sequence feels loose and unconfident.

Which is exactly how this boat sequence felt. Where was the goal of the sequence? Without that, you’re screwed. Cause now nobody in the audience knows what we need from this boat ride! If you gave us SOME KIND of entry point, I would’ve been okay with that. For example, Saxson likes this French prostitute woman who invited them on the boat – the one who’s currently the girlfriend of the man who owns the boat. Okay, so give Saxon the goal of trying to have sex with her.

That’s actually a pretty strong entry point into the sequence – to try to have sex with the woman who’s beholden to the boat’s owner. Lot of potential conflict there. Lots of potential danger in the fallout. But we don’t get anything close to that.

I think back to the original season of The White Lotus, and they had these great scenes, like when Shane (the entitled rich newlywed) would challenge Armond (the hotel manager) about him screwing up their room booking. Armond, who would privately realize Shane was right but refuse to admit it, would have these marathon scenes with Shane where he would dance around saying sorry and look for ways to fix the problem that Shane was never satisfied with.

I liked those scenes so much, I highlighted one in my dialogue book.

We’re not getting enough of that this season and that’s usually an indication that the writer has lost the plot. They’re not really sure what the show/season is about. They’re not really sure what each individual character’s storyline is. They’re not really sure where they are in the season. When that happens, you throw in these big chunks of story that can eat up time in an episode (sequences) and you just, sort of, have stuff happen in them, like Saxson and Lochlan hitting on some Thai wives for 3 minutes.

It’s lacking definition and I’m legitimately worried. Cause I love this show so much. But I also know how hard it is to write an extended story well. Sometimes I believe that all writing is just a house of cards and that if a writer is forced to write for long enough, the story will fall apart. Which is why the first movie in a franchise is awesome. Second movie, not so much. Third movie, getting worse.

Same thing with TV. Each season seems to get a little sloppier. Until we reach that final season, where the show starts to get back on track. The reason for that is, the show has purpose again. It’s going to end at the end of the season. So the writer can now write towards a goal, instead of being stuck out in the ocean clinging to any piece of conflict or unresolved relationship issue he can find.

But the good news is, you can manage this problem if you understand its pitfalls, which I’ve just laid out for you. Structure is everything. The more you move away from it, the more trouble you’ll find yourself in. Create strong beginnings, middles, and ends to scenes. Definitely create strong beginnings, middles, and ends to sequences. As long as you’re doing that, you’re giving yourself a chance. :)

Let’s find out why!

So you didn’t make last week’s First Page Showdown. Wanna know why? Six of you are about to find out. I encourage everyone here to read these pages then read the official Showdown pages because sometimes it’s not easy to tell why pages work. You need to see what’s on the other side of the tracks in order to compare.

And I’m not bashing today’s writers. I’m hoping to help them. Most writers never get feedback and, as a result, keep making the same mistakes over and over again. Today’s writers are going to be getting some valuable information. That’s why I say, if you can afford me, hire me (I’ll give you $100 off if you mention this article – e-mail: carsonreeves1@gmail.com). I can definitely help you. At the very least I’ll help you identify a couple of blind spots in your writing so you can start improving.

Okay.

Are we ready to check out these six submissions that didn’t make the cut?

Let’s do it.

Okay, so there are a bunch of little issues here hurting this page and telling the reader that, if they continue, it’s going to be a clunky read. I don’t like backwards sentences. For example, I don’t like, “Ice cream moves into the mouth of John, who’s eating it.” I prefer “John eats ice cream.”

In general, screenplays work best in the active voice so, unless you’re really trying to do something unique with your voice, you should stick to that. Cause the very first sentence here was so backwards written (“A spray can in a child’s hand flits across a house front.”), I had to read it a couple of times to understand it. And that’s a death knell for a script. If a reader has to read something twice, you’re a goner. Especially if it’s the first line of the script.

The angry neighbor helping him instead of hurting him was a nice unexpected beat. But then he uses some weird word – which I understand was a joke – but it was a joke that didn’t land. It was more confusing than anything. The thing that made sure I wasn’t going to keep reading, though, was the house owner throwing a bottle at a kid and hitting him in the head and (seemingly) killing him. I suppose in a really dark comedy, beats like this are on the table. But with the glitches I mentioned above (and a few other ones I didn’t), I was reasonably sure that I didn’t need to turn the page.

Jaco in the house! Unafraid to throw his page in front of the judges. I love it. So, when it comes to this page, there really isn’t anything wrong with it. It’s not like the previous entry, where there were a handful of mistakes that painted the page in a negative light. The problem here is that there’s nothing positive to latch onto either. Two guys try to turn a wheel on a drill. That’s not exactly high drama.

I suspect Jaco might make the argument, “Well, I only have one page.” True, but the winner of the contest created a compelling dramatic scenario inside a single page so it definitely can be done. But, let’s go with that argument anyway. Even still, the scene isn’t promising any drama. Two guys are turning a wheel. There are no stakes, no urgency, no conflict (except for maybe which one of them has to turn the wheel – which is a conflict that didn’t even matter in the end since both of them try it).

I suppose we have the danger of the “spark” happening. But it’s so casually mentioned that I assumed it wasn’t a big deal.

If I were advising Jaco on the rewrite, I would encourage him to make everything harder. Don’t have it be cold. Have it be the kind of cold that, if you’re outside too long, you get frostbite and lose your hand. Their work ended two hours ago but they’ve been playing catch-up all day, and now they’re outside late, way past when it’s safe, and it’s clear they’re flirting with fate if they stay out any longer. We really get the sense that someone’s going to lose fingers if they’re out here for even a few more minutes. This could create more conflict between the pair (one’s tough and wants to keep going. The other wants to get inside).

Meanwhile, their boss is pissssssed. If this drill issue doesn’t get solved tonight, both of them are getting reprimanded, which could lead to losing their jobs. These higher stakes will create more stress and tension within the characters, which is going to play so much better than this jovial ‘who cares’ attitude each of them has now. I mean you’d think they were trying to open a coconut on the Fiji islands with how chirpy they are. I would make a few other changes as well, but this is a good starting point.

Always remember that, in screenwriting, you’re trying to pack as much as you can inside the limited amount of space that you have.  Not enough was packed into this first page. We discover a Fresca. I don’t know if that’s a common occurrence or not but based on the initial reaction, it seems quite common. “Common” doesn’t get me to turn the page.  Uncommon does.

From there, a father has a very on-the-nose argument with his daughter who, in over-the-top fashion, throws her iPad down and stomps away. I’m always wary of over-the-top dialogue or over-the-top actions early on as it indicates that the emotional calibration throughout the screenplay will be off.

For the first page, I would’ve nixed the daddy-daughter setup and, instead, focused on the team unearthing something unexpected. That would’ve gotten me to turn the page.

This isn’t a bad scene. Death is about as high stakes as things get, which is why we like a lot of death in our movies. So the scene does possess a level of weightiness that at least has me curious to finish the page.

I also liked the observation about the casualness in which we act after death. How strange it is that we turn to something as mundane as potato salad after something as monumental as the end of a life. Coming up with thoughtful observations about life isn’t easy and that sentence grabbed me just as I was ready to jump off the ‘done with this page’ cliff.

But after that line, everything else was just… I hate to say it but boring. I got the impression that if I kept reading, I was going to read this low-energy small-town story about 20-somethings trying to figure out life and that’s not a movie to me. That’s a scene in a TV show or a chapter in a book. I need the promise of something bigger, something larger than life, in a movie. And this page wasn’t giving me that.

This page left me bewildered. We’re introducing something that’s never been seen before yet it’s dealt with with the same level of casualness as a stray dog. Oh yeah, that’s just the abnormally giant bird that hangs out in the forest and sometimes comes out and pesters humans.

No. If you’re introducing something extraordinary, you should slow down, linger on the details, and capture the awe it inspires in those witnessing it. This girl is encountering something Jurassic—something that shouldn’t even exist—yet her reaction betrays none of that astonishment. The brother’s reaction is also strange. He’s already seen this thing seven years ago? Does that mean we’re in a fantasy world and most people are aware of these things? Is this a shocking event? A common one? I’m so confused.

I get the feeling that the writer felt pressured to have something big happen on the first page so he decided to introduce his script’s big anomaly right away. But if you’re going to introduce something big and exotic, something that should not exist, you need time to set that up, to build up to it. Jurassic Park built up for a full 30 minutes before its scientists first laid eyes on dinosaurs. And remember how that scene played out. There was a good five minutes of characters standing there with their jaws on the ground. Cause that’s how shocking what they were looking at was.

Jurassic Park is also a good example of how to write an opening page. Don’t let the cat (or the dinosaur) out of the bag right away. Hide the cat in shadows within its cage as the guards transfer it. Show scientists poking and prodding it, as we hear the carnal noises it makes from within its cage. And then have someone make a mistake and the cat grabs them, pulls them in and eats them up, all in shadows. Note how much more dramatic that scenario is than a bird just hopping out of the forest on page one, saying hi, and then we’re onto the next beat.

This page isn’t bad but here’s the problem. It’s all very linear. All very obvious. A pirate boards a Roman ship and rounds everyone up. There’s nothing unique about the scene or the moment.  And the pirate leader makes a very weak speech.  “I board your ship and your men… try to kill me?”  Uh, why would he be confused about that?  YOU’RE PIRATES TAKING OVER THEIR SHIP!  OF COURSE THEY’RE GOING TO TRY AND KILL YOU!

I’m going to make a weird analogy but stay with me. Have you ever said to a stranger, “Hey, how’s it going?” Or given them a compliment? “I like your shoes.”  Because these statements/questions are uttered millions of times a day all over the world, they will be met by auto-responses. “Good, thanks.” “Oh, thank you.”

In other words, your inquiry was so generic that the other party didn’t have to use their brains. They instead depended on “auto-response” mode, a low-energy process happening in the back of their brain that allowed them to not have to think.

Sometimes I feel like these scripts are written in such an expected manner that the readers are in auto-response mode. They don’t have to think. Even when pirates are raiding Roman ships, you have to give us something different, something unique, something that’s going to make a reader tell his boss, “This script had an AMAZING first scene. It grabbed me and never let go.”

Instead of saying, “I like your shoes,” say, “I love these shoes but they look like they’re murdering your feet.” That subtle change takes the person out of auto-response mode and gets them to think a little. Same thing here. Instead of a basic linear “pirates raid a boat” scene and pirate captain acts mad, have these pirates be unlike any pirates we’ve seen before! Have them raid a fellow pirate ship!  Or make them unorthodox. Remember that, before Pirates of the Caribbean, pirate movies had been bombing in Hollywood for two decades.  So they did something different.  They made the pirates ghosts. Turn something – ANYTHING – on its head so we know we’re not reading yet another script that’s going to play it safe and give us a story we’ve seen a million times already.

Genre: Thriller
Premise: A burgeoning artist is offered a once in a lifetime fellowship, luring her into the
dark side of New York’s elite art world.
About: Cassie Keet has been working in the industry as an actor for a long time. She also writes, directs, and produces a lot of short films. This script finished on last year’s Black List with 15 votes.
Writer: Cassie Keet
Details: 118 pages

I get e-mails fairly often asking about why the Black List scripts aren’t as good as they used to be. My response?

Remember when everyone used to watch American Idol? And then, one day, The Voice came around and nobody watched American Idol anymore? Media experts claimed it was the rotating chairs that caused the change. But that’s not true. What caused the change was that American Idol was bringing in true unknowns, raw singers who had never achieved anything. Whereas The Voice was curating their contestants, many of whom had already had success. The audience loved the better singing of those curated singers.

That’s what happened with The Black List, but in reverse. There were a lot of complaints that the Black List celebrated writers who were already making millions of dollars on their screenplays. Pesky scribes asked, shouldn’t we be celebrating aspiring screenwriters since they’re the ones who need the publicity? And hence, the Black List unofficially became the Up-And-Coming List.

So, this is your fault!

I wanted the best scripts.

With that said, the space between you, the aspiring writer, and the Black List, is as thin as it’s ever been. You can make the list! But you still have to do a few things right. Let’s see what today’s writer did right.

When we meet 20-something New Orleans native, Cecilia, she’s grilling an art critic at an art show about the crassness in which he evaluates art. While Cecilia follows him around with a camera, the critic takes shots at nearly every piece of art at the show. But when they reach the big room, the critic sees that his interview is playing on a big screen and every artist has been watching him.

It’s then that we realize this interview was a piece of art constructed by Cecilia! Naturally, the moment goes viral and, pretty soon, Cecilia is hot sh*t.

Not long after, she’s offered a fellowship by the prestigious Bridger Foundation. For one month, she’ll have an all-expenses paid trip to New York where she will create a piece of art and then show it to all of New York’s elite. Cecilia is ecstatic!

She shows up in New York and quickly meets the married couple responsible for the fellowship, Davis and Isabel Bridger. Right away, she finds the handsome Davis to be a bit handsy. Then again, she’s not exactly putting the kibosh on the touching. Although things get weird a couple of nights later when the two have sex and then Isabel walks in…….. AND JOINS IN!

The next few days, Cecilia starts digging around and learns that there have been 7 fellowships in the past year! That doesn’t sound as prestigious as she thought. When Cecilia goes back over the fine print of the deal she signed, she essentially learns she’s a slave to this couple for the rest of her life, as are all the Fellows. Uh oh.

Cecilia first tries to be polite, begging Davis and Isabel to be let out of the contract. But they give that request a hard no. Which means Cecilia has to get crafty. She will need to use her final art project to both pit the couple against each other and expose them to the world. Will she pull it off? Or is she up against something bigger than she realizes?

Whenever I read a script, I try and imagine the trailer, specifically to see if it could suit up in the jacket of a movie. And I see that here. A young woman gets dropped into the dangerous underbelly of the art world, a place dominated by sociopathic evil rich people, and must fight her way out of it. Throw Anna-Taylor Joy in the lead role and that’s a movie.

If you want to know what screenplay that shouldn’t be a movie looks like in trailer form, go watch this trailer. That’s not a movie. That’s low-stakes mumblecore that will appeal to the writer, their parents, and nobody else. Actually, probably not even the parents. A movie appeals to a mass audience and Fellowship is that.

But it’s also so bland.

With a movie like this, you’re trying to titillate. You’re trying to shock. You’re trying to create this dark world that stirs unease within the reader. And, save for one scene, this doesn’t do that. That scene is when Cecilia is having sex with Davis and then Isabel comes in. Instead of being angry, she joins.

But every other attempt at a dark moment is served up with kid gloves. This is exactly what I was talking about the other day in the newsletter. If you promise a gun-weilding violent film second to none, like the upcoming movie, Havoc, then give us lots of violent gore and awesome gunplay, we’ll be happy.

If you’re promising this dark sexy thriller that will unearth the shocking art underworld, you better give us lots of dark sexy sh*t and some shocking art world revelations. Outside of that one scene, we never hit more than a 5 out of 10 in the sexy or shocking department. The script sits there like a fat cat you’re dangling a string over. It sort of casually plays with the string but mostly looks disinterested.

This is VERY COMMON in intermediate screenwriting, by the way. There are a lot of well-structured professional scripts from intermediates that don’t push the envelope enough. They’re either too bland or too reserved or too predictable. That’s the big challenge with screenwriting. You gotta follow this three act structure, which is inherently predictable, yet still find ways to be unpredictable within it. The writers who learn how to do that are the ones who graduate to advanced level.

Heretic is a great example of that. That writing team (who broke out with A Quiet Place) was always decent. But when they learned to become unpredictable within the screenwriting format is when they wrote their best script yet.

Also, you have to stick the landing with your script. I’m not going to say that Keet’s script flipped upside down once it hit the runway. But it definitely wasn’t as smooth of a landing as it could’ve been. Cecilia has to create this super clever piece of art that takes the Bridgers down yet the piece of art we get is a hodge-podge of a dozen different things that feels like the opposite of clever.

I do think this will become a streaming movie. And that’s a big accomplishment. All aspiring writers would kill for that opportunity. But I couldn’t help but be disappointed by the bland execution here. I wanted more.

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

What I learned: If your script is set in the present, I would avoid putting the current year anywhere in your script. A lot of people will read your script after this year. So if you put down “2024” like Keet did, and someone reads the script in 2025, it already feels dated. Therefore, option number 1 is to avoid including the year anywhere in your script. But if you have to put it in there, put the next year in. So, if you’re writing a script now, put in “2026.” It gives the script a longer shelf life.

Last week we had a contest for Best First Page. This was the winner, which I’m going to review for you right now!

Was The First Horseman my pick for best first page? You’ll have to wait til Thursday for that answer, when I rank the five contenders. Before we get into today’s analysis, let’s take another look at the winning page.

So, why did this page win? What’s going on that separated it from so many other submissions? And what can you learn from it so that you can improve your own first pages? Because let’s remember why I held this showdown: You need to get that first page right.  The reader is hyper-critical at this stage since they’re trying to determine if they’re reading yet another garbage script or they got lucky and stumbled onto a special writer.

Let’s start with the setting for The First Horseman. You’d be surprised at just how often scripts begin in familiar territory. We’re in the middle of New York for yet another romantic comedy. We’re trapped in a small town for a frustrated coming-of-age film. We’re flying down the streets in a car chase. We’re in a dangerous town in Afghanistan for yet another war movie.

The problem when you drop us into familiar territory is that we go into “auto-read” mode. If you’re going to give us something that doesn’t require any brain power, we’re not going to offer any brain power. Which means we’re now reading each page in a sort of familiar daze.

But here, with First Horseman, we’re on an island that I’ve never heard of before. We’re in the Yellow Sea, also unfamiliar. And, to add some spice to that setup, we’re walking around in an unnaturally colored green mist. All within four lines (one slug line and a 3-line paragraph). That’s a strong opening.

The next part doesn’t disappoint either. We’ve got scientists in Hazmut suits. That immediately creates intrigue. Why are they in the suits? What is it they’re doing here?

We often talk about hooking the reader with a shocking inciting incident by page 12 (the alien tri-pods showing up in War of the Worlds). But the hooking should actually start much earlier. Because, early on, you’re just trying to get the reader TO READ THE NEXT LINE.

Who cares about the inciting incident if you can’t even make that next line compelling?

After setting up the unique location and the intriguing suits, we get this unexpected development. These hazmat-suited scientists are ensnaring… rats? That’s strange. I was expecting something more traditional. Whenever I see writers give me something unexpected, I credit them. Cause it means I’m not getting the same movie I’ve gotten a million times before.

From there, just halfway into THE VERY FIRST PAGE, something catastrophic happens. The rat bites one of the suited men, exposing flesh. From the reactions of both scientists, we know this is a terrible thing. Which means we’re riveted despite being just 24 lines into the script. That’s great stuff.

Let me also highlight that the writer is never going above three lines per paragraph. And he usually stays at two or less. Not only is this a good practice in general. But when you’re starting your script and have little-to-no-dialogue, there’s a danger that the reader sees the dreaded “wall of text” and shuts the script before he’s even started. Believe me, the wall-of-text-script-close is a real thing.

So the writer wisely mitigates that issue by keeping the paragraphs lean, ensuring that your eyes will move down the page without it ever feeling like work.

Now, let me make something very clear here, because I don’t talk about this enough. Just because you write lean paragraphs does not mean your script will be good. It’s 20% of the solution. The other 80% is writing a good story. The main reason our eyes are moving down the page is because the writer has set up an intriguing scenario and is executing it well. The lean paragraphs just help all that slide down easier.

I liked the ruthlessness of Scientist 2 immediately killing Scientist 1 but it wasn’t the only choice the writer had. He could’ve drawn more suspense out of this moment. The first scientist could’ve pleaded for his life. Maybe created a distraction (unhook the cage full of rats and throw them at Scientist 2?) that allowed him to make a run for it. But that’s down to the individual writer and I think the ruthlessness of shooting him right away created its own level of impact that hits the reader hard.

What I’m saying is, either option could’ve worked.

And, finally, the writer gives us one last satisfying beat when we watch Scientist 2 go back to work as if nothing happened. That creates another level of intrigue. What’s going on here that, after someone is shot dead, you don’t even begin the protocol to deal with it?

It’s a really strong first page and, for all of the reasons I listed above, a worthy winner to the contest. Hopefully, we’ll get to review the full script here on the site one day!  Let’s hear why you guys like it.

Great job to the writer, Finn Morgan!