Genre: Sci-fi/Rom-Com/Drama
Premise: Teddy thinks he’s the only living person left in a world where humanity is frozen in time… until his ex-girlfriend, Leyna, shows up at his doorstep. Together, they must go on a journey to find the cause behind the freeze and in the process, confront the issues that plagued their relationship before it’s too late.
About: This is the number 1 script on the 2019 Black List. The writer, Ken Kobayashi, graduated from USC Film School. This project is set up at Sony with Will Gluck producing. Gluck is no stranger to championing breakout scripts. He directed Easy A, one of the biggest spec scripts of 2009.
Writer: Ken Kobayashi
Details: 104 pages

Nat Wolff for Teddy?

Late last night, someone posted a comment regarding the low vote count for this year’s Black List. Writers don’t have agents this year, they reminded me. Duh! How could I forget?? And agents are the ones doing the heavy lobbying to get their clients on the Black List.

But it goes deeper than that. Yesterday, I championed the death of the biopic, as the dreaded genre was practically absent from the 2019 Black List. But now I realize that was almost certainly because the big agencies weren’t involved. Agencies promote projects for their talent arms, and biopics are actor favorites, since the actors get to play famous flawed figures and those movies always get Oscar noms. Once you remove the main people incentivized to promote that genre, however, you’re not going to have as many of them on list.

Which means maybe biopics aren’t dead after all. :(

This would also explain the uptick of original concepts in this year’s list. Managers are more willing to take chances on and develop original projects and they’re now the primary lobbyers. It’s a reminder that these things are never black and white. You take away one variable for a list and there might be 20 scripts out and 20 new scripts in. I suppose we’re going to find out if this change results in a better list or not. And it starts today with the top screenplay, Move On.

28 year-old Teddy has just asked his girlfriend, Leyna, to marry him. Leyna doesn’t mince words with her response. “No,” she says, and walks out the door. Teddy is devastated, lamenting to his best bud, Squid, who came to cheerlead, that nothing matters anymore. On his drive home, he tries to call Leyla but gets clipped by a truck, nearly dying. But it gets worse. A few minutes later, the entire world freezes.

Cut to three months later and Teddy is biking around a frozen world. Some things still work, like hot water and all the food stays fresh (since it’s frozen in the moment) but other than that, being alone in the world blows. But on his way home from biking, Teddy sees an impossible sight. It’s Leyna! She’s unfrozen as well!

She pops into his place and the two lament the situation they’re in. For some reason, they don’t discuss her marriage rejection. They hang out and the next morning Teddy shows her a google map of this giant black line off the west coast. He saw a black wall in person off the east coast and he wants to see if this other black line is also a wall. So the two go on a road trip together to find out.

During the trip, we occasionally cut back in time to the two meeting, getting to know each other, and starting their adult lives — all the things that led up to the proposal. What we learn is that Ted’s a moron. He took a job in Japan without clearing it with Leyla and then tried to save face by proposing to her. It turns out that rejection is the least of his worries, though, as Ted is about to find out the shocking reason why the world is frozen.

I saw a lot of people commenting on “Move On” in the comments yesterday and the consensus seemed to be that nobody made it past the first 20 pages. I can see why. The writing here doesn’t crackle loud enough to inspire that page-turning tick all writers strive for.

So what would’ve happened had you kept reading? Well, the script has a nice twist. There’s no doubt about it. And that led to an interesting final act. But before we get to that, let’s talk about everything else.

There were too many small but frustrating miscalculations in Move On to buy into it. For example, we get hit with the most gigantic story development ever. THE WORLD IS FROZEN. That’s something you need to sit in for a while. It’s not something you flippantly throw in before sprinting to the next plot point. But that’s exactly what happens. Less than ONE PAGE after the world freezes, Teddy sees Leyla. I knew at that moment the script was in trouble.

Understanding time and pacing and when to draw things out and when to move things along is an essential skill in screenwriting. Some writers do it naturally. For others, it takes time to learn. But, I mean, one page of Frozenville and we’re already throwing the girlfriend back in there?

Then, our lead characters aren’t acting like real people would. If two people lived in a frozen world for three months then ran into each other, it doesn’t matter who they are, they would spend the next 48 hours talking about this bizarre event and how it’s changed their lives and how scared they were and everything they saw and experienced. Instead, we get a brief conversation between Teddy and Leyla before she says, “We’ll continue this conversation tomorrow.”

The trifecta for me was when Teddy says he’s found this black line on the West Coast on Google Maps. He’s already been to the East Coast and seen a black wall off the beach. So he wants to “check to see” if this line is also a black wall. Here’s your answer, Teddy. Yes. Yes it is. What else would it possibly be? Yet that’s the goal we use to drive the story. At that point, I mentally gave up on the script and only read on because I was going to review it.

To the writer’s credit, we do get that twist. —SPOILERS— It turns out that on his way home that day, Teddy didn’t get clipped by a truck. He got flat-out T-boned and was killed. This is a simulation (both the world and Teddy) for people who need to find closure with those who they’ve lost. Leyla was devastated because she never got to discuss what happened and why she did what she did. So, five years later, she’s finally gotten a chance to get that closure.

I’ve read a lot of scripts where people are in simulations. I’ve even read a good number of scripts where people create simulations to connect with dead loved ones. But I’ve never read a script where we take the point of view of the simulated dead person inside the simulation.

It just goes to show how powerful POV can be in story creation. If you’ve been doing this long enough, you’ve come up with a hundred concepts, many of them discarded because they were too similar to other movies. But what if you changed the obvious POV to a non-obvious one? For example, everyone’s come up with a Die Hard idea. But what if you wrote a Die Hard idea from the point of view of Hans? The villain? It would be a completely different movie (I’m not saying it would be good – I’m talking off the top of my head here – but it would be different). So I give credit to Kobayashi for finding a cool angle that no one else thought of. I’m guessing that’s why he made this year’s list.

Unfortunately, the script wasn’t up to snuff in many other areas. I loved the twist. And I even liked the dark tone the script shifted to in those last 20 pages. But then you have stuff like Teddy learning he’s a simulation and, within one scene, being okay with it, and then, in the next scene, cheerfully ready to be turned off for good. There were so many story beats like this one that lacked genuine human reactions that I was constantly being pulled out of the script.

But it does show you how powerful a big concept and a big twist can be. If you’re a young writer who’s a long ways away from mastering this skill, those two things can act as turbo boosters. Because both of them are memorable. You remember the concept. You remember the twist. In most cases of reading screenplays, you don’t remember anything about a script after a couple of weeks.

Move On is a fun screenplay when viewed in totality. But it’s an uphill battle getting to the twist that saves it. It wasn’t enough for me to recommend the screenplay.

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

What I learned: Screenplays where a character acts bizarre for reasons that aren’t revealed until late in the story are hard to pull off. Once we hit the twist on page 70, we get a better understanding of why Leyla is acting so strangely (why she just conveniently appeared out of nowhere and why she’s so laid back in spite of the outrageous circumstances). This is her simulation. She doesn’t have to talk or answer anything from Teddy if she doesn’t want to. She just wants to spend time with him to get closure. Think about what you’re doing to the reader here, though. You’re having a character act unlike any rational human being would for 70 pages before you tell them why. It’s not that you can’t pull this off. But you have to creatively find ways to make the character feel real in the meantime. Or else the reader sees this character who’s doing all these things that no normal person would do and they give up on the script before they get to the great twist. So travel down this road cautiously.

Reminder that CONTAINED THRILLER SHOWDOWN – a script competition for contained thrillers (action, sci-fi, horror, dramatic, all okay) – is set for January 17th. Submissions are due Thursday, January 16th, by 8pm Pacific Time. Send a PDF of the script to carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Include your title, genre, logline, and why you think the script should get a shot. The best five entries will be posted for the showdown!

It’s a crazy day. The Black List is out. Or, at least, it’s being dripped out on Twitter. Maybe someone can post the list when they’re finished because I have to run around town today. Any concepts that catch your interest? Share them below. We’ve also got the big Rise of Skywalker premiere. That means we’re going to know REALLY SOON whether this movie is good or not. If we get a lot of those tweets that *sound* excited but the content of the tweet doesn’t say the actual movie is good (“This is the most real Star Wars movie of the last few years!” “JJ brought some amazing direction to this last film!” And my personal fave: “You’re going to love Rey. She kicks all types of a$$ in this movie!!!”) then our hopes for a good Star Wars film are over. Oh yeah, this post isn’t about Star Wars. Thoughts on the Black List. Leave them below!

EDIT! (LIST PRINTED BELOW)

People have been curious about the low vote count for the top 10 scripts. I think that’s because there’s no runaway great script this year. My first impression is that this feels like a return to form for the Black List. Lots more original ideas than in years past. Less of the most unoriginal genre out there – the biopic – helps a lot. The Traveler did, indeed, make the top 5, like I predicted. The Menu up there as well! Two great scripts.

“Move On” winning the top slot is bittersweet. I gave notes to a writer 8 years ago who had this exact same concept. I kept telling him, “This is a slam dunk! Keep working on it!” I think he just wasn’t into it enough to give it those extra 3-4 drafts that it needed. This is something all screenwriters deal with. How much of yourself do you have to give to a script? Because great scripts tend to require everything we’ve got. You have to be ready to do that hard work on those final three drafts where you hate your script more than anything because you’ve been living in it for so long. But that extra work ends up paying off in the end.

Just to remind everyone, these are AGENT AND MANAGER LOGLINES. Agents and managers aren’t writers. Some of them understand logline writing better than others. But don’t judge these loglines on their construction because, besides a few exceptions, these aren’t writers writing them.

29 votes
Title: Move On
Writer: Ken Kobayashi
Logline: Teddy thinks he’s the only living person left in a world where humanity is frozen in time… until his ex-girlfriend, Leyna, shows up at his doorstep. Together, they must go on a journey to find the cause behind the freeze and in the process, confront the issues that plagued their relationship before it’s too late.

20 votes
Title: Field of View
Writers; Reiss Clauson-Wolf, Julian Silver
Logline: A soldier, forced to relive her worst day in combat, begins to question her sanity when the VR simulation she’s experiencing doesn’t match her memory of the mission gone wrong.

19 votes
Title: Don’t Worry Darling (read my review!)
Writers: Cary Van Dyke, Shane Van Dyke
Logline: A psychological thriller about a 1950s housewife whose reality begins to crack, revealing a disturbing truth underneath.

16 votes
Title: Cicada by Lillian Yu
Writer: Lillian Yu
Logline: When a talented hacker is recruited by the mysterious Cicada 3301, she gets wrapped up in a plot that threatens to destroy the entire world. Based on the real organization.

Title: The Traveler (read my review!)
Writer: Austin Everett
Logline: A man jumps forward in time at the same time every morning. As the length of time increases for every jump, he struggles to keep his family together and find a cure, all as his secret spreads throughout the world. Based on the novel by Joseph Eckert.

Title: The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
Writers: Kevin Etten, Tom Gormican
Logline: Actor Nicolas Cage, spiraling and trapped in debt, makes an appearance at the birthday party of a Mexican billionaire. While there, he learns that the billionaire runs a drug cartel, and the CIA recruits Cage for intelligence.

15 Votes
Title: Rumours
Writers: Tyler Austin, Patrick Eme
Logline: In 1970s LA, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, two struggling musicians and lovers, join a band called Fleetwood Mac and are thrown into a whirlwind of worldwide fame, infamous drug addiction, and one of the best-selling albums of all time — which also happens to be about the disintegration of their relationship.

14 Votes
Title: A Magical Place Called Glendale
Writer: Sara Monge
Logline: To revamp her self image, an arrogant but well-meaning high school socialite decides to help a former friend land the guy of her dreams… but in the process, realizes she wants her for herself.

Title: Shut In
Writer: Melanie Toast
Logline: A single mother is held captive by her violent ex, and her two young children are left at risk. She must do everything to protect them and survive.

13 Votes
Title: The Broker
Writer: Justin Piasecki
Logline: A fixer who brokers off-the-books exchanges for powerful corporate clients finds himself being hunted after he’s hired to protect a whistleblower and the evidence she’s uncovered.

Title: Pod
Writer: Nabil Chowdary
Logline: After a mission to destroy a black hole that endangers mankind goes wrong, an astronaut awakens in her escape pod to find that decades have passed seemingly in a moment. Now, with an old body and fragile mind, she battles against the elements of space & time to complete her mission.

Title: Wayward
Writer: Andrew Zilch
Logline: The wife of a megachurch pastor seeks atonement after she and her lover kill an attacker in self-defense, but don’t report it out of fear of exposing their affair.

12 Votes
Title: Grandma Wants to Die by Patrick Cadigan
Logline: When Ben is left footing the bill for his own wedding just weeks before the big day, he’s forced to make a deal with his estranged grandmother Minnie. She’ll give him the money if he signs the papers for her assisted suicide. Ben gladly agrees, only to unearth Minnie’s final agenda before she departs… destroy the wedding from the inside and seemingly ruin Ben’s life.

Title: I Heart Murder
Writer: Tom O’Donnell
Logline: A true-crime podcaster tries to solve a gruesome cold case, putting her in the killer’s crosshairs.

11 Votes
Title: 8 Bit Christmas by Kevin Jakubowski
Logline: Ten-year-old Jake Doyles goes on a herculean quest to get the Christmas gift of his generation – a Nintendo Entertainment System – in suburban Chicago in the late 1980s.

10 Votes
Title: Black Mitzvah
Writer: Lauren Tyler
Logline: After embarrassing herself at the most popular girl’s party, a black and Jewish middle school misfit embarks on a journey to glow up and throw the best Bat Mitzvah of all time.

Title: The House Is Not For Sale
Writer: Roy Parker
Logline: With one last chance at a promotion, a down-on-her-luck real estate agent returns to her rural hometown to sell the impossible – a haunted house where countless couples have been murdered. As the bodies of new residents continue to pile up, our real estate agent will stop at nothing to rid the house of evil – no matter what the cost.

Title: Klein
Writer: Derek Elliott
Logline: Life as a single dad hasn’t been a challenge for Las Vegas blackjack dealer Mike Klein, until his ex resurfaces after walking out on the family six years ago.

Title: The Menu (read my review!)
Writer: Seth Reiss, Will Tracy
Logline: A young couple visits an exclusive destination restaurant on a remote island where the acclaimed chef has prepared a lavish tasting menu, along with some shocking surprises.

Title: The Process
Writer: Levin Menekse
Logline: Trapped at a three day personal development retreat, a woman fights to save her husband and herself from being brainwashed by a charismatic self-help guru.

Title: Refuge
Writer: Debra Moore Munoz
Logline: A brother and sister navigate the perils of both man and nature through Central America in their quest to find safety in the United States.

Title: Ripple
Writer: Ezra Herz
Logline: After strange deaths and suicides skyrocket in a dying Appalachian coal town, Maggie – a first responder – wages a personal war against the local coal mine, unearthing a disturbing past that the company has kept secret within the waters of the local lake.

Title: They Cloned Tyrone
Writer: Tony Rettenmaier, Juel Taylor
Logline: An unlikely group is thrown together by mysterious events that leads them to uncover a government conspiracy.

9 Votes
Title: Breathe
Writer: Doug Simon
Logline: In the near future when air-supply is scarce, a mother and daughter fight for survival when two strangers arrive desperate for an oxygenized safe haven.

Title: Dollhouse
Writer: Michael Paisley
Logline: When a struggling fashion model in New York City gets chosen by a mysterious Parisian designer to be the face of his first campaign since his disappearance five years prior, she begins to realize she was chosen for a reason and must decide how much she’s willing to sacrifice for beauty and recognition.

Title: Helldiver
Writer: Ben Imperato
Logline: After finding themselves stranded on the wreckage of a Helldiver bomber in the middle of the ocean, an American aviator and a Japanese Kamikaze pilot must work together to survive their greatest threat yet — a 22-foot great white shark.

Title: High on Christmas
Writers: Hannah Mescon, Dreux Moreland
Logline: A stoner comedy about one family trying to save Christmas from itself after Santa eats the wrong batch of cookies.

Title: The Laborer
Writers: Jared Anderson
Logline: A pair of out-of-work immigrant brothers catch a break when they are hired as day laborers to work at a house in the Hollywood Hills, until they witness something they will wish they had never seen.

Title: Say Something Nice
Writer: Erin Rodman
Logline: After she catches her boyfriend cheating, Liv goes on a social media tirade that lands her in court for slander, and the judge forces her to make amends by composing one positive comment for every negative comment she posted, while under the supervision of a reclusive mediator also on the rebound from a failed relationship. Inspired by true events.

8 Votes
Title: Affairs of State
Writer: Pat Cunnane
Logline: A romantic comedy about an outgoing President, an incoming Prime Minister, and their second shot at love.

Title: An Aftermath
Writer: Lauren Caris Cohan
Logline: After a whirlwind lost-distance online romance, a once-cynical writer inherits a remote smart-house from her newly deceased new husband and discovers he might not be entirely gone after all.

Title: Apex
Writers: Aja Gabel, MJ Wesner
Logline: When old college friends on a trip to Mexico get trapped in an underwater cave system with a bull shark, old tensions and power struggles resurface as they fight to survive.

Title: Barron: A Tale of Love, Loss, & Legacy
Writer: Nicolas Curcio
Logline: Fearing the devastating impact that his father’s presidency would have on his personal life, his country, and the world at large, ten-year-old Barron Trump sets out to sabotage his father’s 2016 campaign.

Title: The Cabin at the End of the World
Writers: Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman
Logline: A gay couple and their adopted daughter have their cabin invaded by four strangers who take the family captive and tell them that, to prevent the upcoming apocalypse, one of them must be killed by the others.

Title: The Diamond as Big as the Ritz
Writer: Cody Behan
Logline: When the underprivileged John Unger is invited to spend the summer at the mansion of his peculiar classmate, his thirst for grandeur leads him down a dangerous exploration of greed, morality, and the secret horrors of the ruling class. Based on the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story.

Title: First Harvest (read my review!)
Writer: Kevin McMullin
Logline: George runs a struggling farm where he cares for his terminally ill wife, Alice. Everything changes when he decides to bring home an orphaned baby he found out in the field. The child’s presence begins to unearth buried secrets while engulfing the family in a series of supernatural events.

Title: My Boyfriend’s Wedding
Writer: Carrie Solomon
Logline: After Georgia accidentally receives an out of the blue invitation to her on-again, off-again boyfriend’s wedding, she and her best friend Keely make the ill-informed decision to attend.

Title: Resurrection
Writer: Andrew Semans
Logline: Margaret is a single mother living in New York with her teenage daughter. When David, a mysterious older man from Margaret’s past, begins appearing randomly in her environment, she becomes convinced that he intends to bring tremendous violence into their lives. So Margaret embarks on a vigilante mission to protect her daughter, and to disembowel David.

Title: The Searchers
Writer: MacMillan Hedges
Logline: An inside look at the unique relationship between John Wayne and John Ford on the set of THE SEARCHERS.

Title: Sister
Writer: Azia Squire
Logline: Following her mother’s sudden passing, a queer black woman returns to her southern town to assist her estranged sister plan the funeral. Her trip takes a turn when sleep deprivation manifests visions of her deceased mother.

Title: Super Dad
Writer: Sean Tidwell
Logline: A subversive superhero story about the world’s only superhero living a bachelor lifestyle, learning he has two very different teenage twins he never knew existed, and now has to figure out how to be a father.

Title: The Swells
Writer: Rachel James
Logline: A young woman, propelled by an unstoppable rage, begins inviting her victims to a summer lake house as revenge for past wrongs. But when one of her guests has been wronged as well, she passes on The Swells- bringing its wrath to the streets of New York.

7 Votes
Title: Betty Ford
Writers: Kas Graham, Rebecca Polack
Logline: An intimate portrait of the sensational First Lady and ERA champion, Betty Ford, as she challenges, scandalizes, dances and drinks her way through the White House to gain a higher popularity rating than any President in American history, all whilst maintaining a 26 pill-a-day drug habit.

Title: Doll Wars
Writer: Matt Ritter
Logline: When the upstart Bratz dolls challenged Barbie’s antiquated gender norms and threatened their monopoly, Barbie struck back with a billion-dollar copyright lawsuit. In jeopardy of shutting down, Bratz turned to a small, scrappy, all-female law firm to take on Mattel in a historic, David vs. Goliath intellectual property battle that changed the toy industry and American popular culture forever. Based on a true story.

Title: Don’t Go in the Water (read my review!)
Writer: Peter Gaffney
Logline: A recovering alcoholic sets off for seclusion but gets more than he bargained for when he encounters a mysterious creature nearby.

Title: First Ascent
Writer: Colin Bannon
Logline: Two years after a free solo accident nearly kills Hillary Hall, she enlists the help of her old climbing partners to document her comeback — the first ascent of 4,000 foot rock wall in rural China. During the harrowing climb, Hillary struggles with her inner demons and supernatural forces, as it slowly becomes clear that this mountain does not want to be conquered.

Title: The Man in the Woods
Writers: Darren Grodsky, Danny Jacobs
Logline: After moving to Maine and befriending an enigmatic hermit, twelve-year-old Henrietta Thorne begins to wonder if he holds the key to solving a mystery that has eluded our planet for more than a decade.

Title: The Perdition in Liege
Writer: Henry Dunham
Logline: A prisoner of war in a Belgian POW camp undergoing abandonment survives an execution firing squad by chance and escapes by hiding among the dead. After removing his fallen compatriot’s dog tags to get home and give their families solace, he attempts the fifty-mile journey south toward the allied stronghold, through the deadly war-torn landscape, and before a hell-bent SS officer on his tail catches up to him.

Title: The Repossession
Writer: Megan Amram
Logline: Twenty years after a failed exorcism, a meek young woman becomes unlikely friends with the foul-mouthed demon that possessed her as a child.

Title: 10-31 (read my review!)
Writers: Peter Gamble, Ian Shorr
Logline: A young woman takes her niece and nephew trick-or-treating and discovers a note inside a candy wrapper that says there’s a killer loose on her block.

6 Votes
Title: Apex (read my review!)
Writer: Stephen Vitale
Logline: A mysterious loner heads to Muscle Beach in 1985 to pursue a career as a competitive bodybuilder. Struggling to transform his physique, he unleashes a darker side of himself as he descends into madness.

Title: Assisted Living
Writer: Kay Oyegun
Logline: A thief finds sanctuary in a retirement home after going on the run.

Title: Atlanta Onfire
Writer: Adam Morrison
Logline: The true story of Leo Frank, a young, Jewish businessman who, due to widespread anti-Semitism/the KKK in the post Civil War South, was wrongfully accused, tried, and convicted of murdering a 13-year-old factory worker, Mary Phagan.

Title: Blue Slide Park
Writers: Kyle Anderson, Michael Vlamis
Logline: After his first album topped the Billboard Charts, life was never the same for Malcolm McCormick aka Mac Miller. This is his story of music, love, success, family, and addiction. Based on the forthcoming manuscript UNT. MAC MILLER BIOGRAPHY written by Paul Cantor for Abrams Press.

Title: Can You Tell Me How?
Writer: Gregory Bonsignore
Logline: Alarmed by the disproportionate dropout rates amongst children of the working class, a young female TV producer finds a way to teach them their ABCs and 123s. With the help of genius puppeteer Jim Henson and a diverse team of dedicated researchers and educators, they brought us the groundbreaking show, Sesame Street.

Title: Girlfriend on Mars
Writer: Kaitlin Fontana
Logline: Amber and Kevin, weed dealer burnouts committed to going nowhere together, have been dating for twelve years. When Amber enters a reality show that will take the winner to Mars with no chance of return, Kevin has to face what it really means when the ones we love leave us and leave the planet. Based on the story by Deborah Willis.

Title: Meet Cute
Writers: Chris Powers, Dan Powers
Logline: ‘Meet Cute’ the hottest dating app on the market, brings couples together by giving them their Rom Com moment. When the app’s biggest skeptic, Haley, matches with one of its developers, Russ, their instant connection starts to change her mind.

Title: The Mother
Writer: Michael Notarile
Logline: The incredible true story of Fredericka Marm Mandelbaum, who was the countrys first female mob boss. During the Gilded Age, Marm opened a school for criminals, and built her empire by treating her gang of runaways and orphans as family — eventually partnering with George Leslie to pull off what is still to date the largest bank heist in American history (adjusting for inflation).

Title: No Good Deed
Writer: Christina Pamies
Logline: A woman with a troubled past invites her teen niece to live with her in the family’s farm house, but the two become tormented by a creature that can take away their pain for a price.

Title: Nomads
Writer: Esteban Orozco
Logline: A reverse SEARCHERS from the perspective of the Natives going East into the unknown, the metropolis, the belly of the beast, late 1800s New York City.

Title: The Showrunner
Writer: Cosmo Carlson
Logline: The unbelievable true story of the creation of the worlds first, longest running, and most notorious reality show “COPS.” Based on “How ‘Cops’ Got Made — And What It Says About America” by Tim Stelloh.

Title: Stampede
Writer: Sontenish Myers
Logline: A young slave girl named Lena has telekinetic powers she cannot yet control on a plantation in the 1800s.

Title: T
Writer: Eric Gross
Logline: The true story of how Lawrence Tureaud, a poor kid in Chicago with 12 brothers and sisters, fought and charmed his way into becoming the single lettered icon of saintly compassion and macho energy.

Title: This Is Going to Hurt
Writer: Cameron Fay
Logline: An absent mother attempts to reconnect with her daughter by relaying to her how she helped her own parent through battles with cancer and addiction.

Title: Til Death
Writer: Jessica Knoll
Logline: Swept up in the excitement of her wedding day, Dr. Julie Wheeler is oblivious to the killer on her guest list, who is methodically stalking her nearest and dearest, until its too late.

Title: Voicemails for Isabelle
Writer: Leah McKendrick
Logline: A low-level TV writer struggles to cope with the death of her little sister by continuing to leave her voicemails chronicling the shitshow that is dating in LA. When the phone number is unknowingly transferred, a cocky New York real estate agent begins receiving the hilarious and confessional voicemails, and feels pulled to California to find this stranger he feels intimately close to.

Don’t forget. You have one week left to turn your script in for the HOLIDAY AMATEUR SHOWDOWN. Must be a late-year holiday-themed script. I’m giving you til next Thursday, December 12, at 8:00 pm Pacific Time. Send the title, genre, logline, why you think it deserves a shot, and, of course, a PDF of the script (you’d be surprised at how many people forget that part), to carsonreeves1@gmail.com

Genre: Action
Logline: A disaffected NYPD cop visiting her daughter in a state-of-the-art hospital is unwittingly caught in a hostage situation when extremists raid the building seeking the cure of a deadly virus.
Why You Should Read: I got my start writing for B-Movie King Roger Corman, which basically means your creative flexibility gets completely strapped by ultra-low budget constraints. I wrote “Hemorrhage” to break free of such restrictions and focus on telling a story about a hard-pressed mother struggling to mend old wounds between her sick daughter, albeit with armed extremists threatening to rip apart what little bond they have left. I love the thrill of a good action movie, especially ones with compelling antagonists whose motives aren’t simply black or white and make us truly fear for the principal characters’ lives. If you get a kick out of the same thing, then you’ll have a blast reading “Hemorrhage.”
Writer: Justin Fox
Details: 108 pages

Zoe Saldana for Laken?

When I conceived of Action Week, this is exactly what I imagined. A good old-fashioned balls-to-the-wall action flick. But I realized something while reading “Hemorrhage,” which is that reading action scripts is challenging. Action is meant to be experienced visually. It isn’t meant to be conveyed in words. There are only so many “He jumps,” “She shoots,” “They runs,” “It explodes,” a reader can take before they tune out.

This is why I encourage writers to come up with action concepts and set pieces that are unique in some way. The more uniqueness you can bring, the more you disrupt the pattern. “Gravity” comes to mind. That movie had so many unique action scenes because of the story’s unique setup. Or that library book attack scene in John Wick 3. That’s the sort of stuff you need to put on the page.

Let’s see how Hemorrhage fared in this department.

An American doctor in Afghanistan is trying to help contain a deadly virus when she, herself, gets infected. She’s tossed on a plane and flown back to New York City so she can be treated. Meanwhile, 35 year old cop Laken Atwood is finishing up the day’s beat so she can get to her daughter, Piper’s, lung surgery. Piper’s lung was punctured due to a car accident where Laken was driving. So Piper’s not exactly thrilled to see her mom.

While this is going on, terrorists led by creepy frenchman, Cedric, creepier fake doctor, Mateo, and Mateo’s angry younger sister, Ana, show up at the hospital the Afghanistan doctor is being sent to and start killing everyone they see. They then withdraw blood from the woman, which no doubt they will use to kill large portions of populations at some point in the future.

In case you were wondering, this is the same hospital Piper is staying at. So when Laken and Piper hear all the shooting, Laken knows it’s time to high-tail it out of here. There are a few problems though. One, Piper is connected to a computer thing that’s keeping her lung pumping. Two, Laken’s husband, Danny, is downstairs grabbing snacks. And three, New York is in the midst of a storm so bad the streets have turned into lakes.

Laken tries to construct an escape plan but the terrorists are on them quickly. Laken kills Emil AND Ana, which makes Mateo so angry, he momentarily ditches his plan to destroy the world so he can find this pesky cop and kill her. Eventually he’s able to get his hands on Piper and does the unthinkable – HE INJECTS HER WITH THE VIRUS!!! This gives Piper a couple of hours to live. So now Laken will have to retrieve her daughter from the terrorists and somehow find the vaccine before Piper bites it. Will she succeed?

I like what Fox did with his characters.

He made this about the mother-daughter relationship. A lot of action writers don’t care about character stuff. But if you can create characters who a) we want to root for, and b) have a conflict that we want to see resolved, we’re going to be a heck of a lot more invested in your story.

I also liked the way the setup made our hero’s job more challenging. Laken isn’t the female John McClane. She doesn’t get to roam free through a building wherever she wants. She has to protect her daughter who’s only got one lung and has to lug around an apparatus in order to breathe. That was good.

And my favorite part of the script was when they jammed the virus into Piper. Now you’ve got this literal ticking time bomb that’s going to go off ON TOP OF Laken needing to get her daughter back from the terrorists. All of that was great.

But every time it felt like this script took a step forward, it would take two steps back. Let’s start with the storm. If you’re using something to create a convenience in your story that is so big it could be a movie on its own, that’s a problem. Fox needed to create a reason why cops couldn’t just descend upon this hospital and rescue everyone. So we get a storm so intense it’s creating rivers on the streets. I don’t know if that’s ever happened in New York history. If the thing you’re using to plug up a pot hole is so big it could be its own film (A flooded New York City!), people aren’t going to buy it.

Then you had the dad. He was clearly the weakest character in the script. The guy goes missing for long stretches of time without an explanation. What I’m guessing happened is that Fox never truly understood the dad so there wasn’t any commitment to the character. All writers run into this problem. At a certain point, if you’re not going to fully commit to a character, you have to cut bait. The dad could’ve died a few years ago. He and Laken could be divorced and he lives in another state. But he definitely shouldn’t have been here in this hospital.

And, finally, I didn’t understand Mateo’s plan. At first we learn that the terrorists fighting for him are doing so because he planned to use this virus to save people. How do you use a virus to save people? It didn’t technically matter since he was lying to them and was always going to use it as a weapon, but we still have to buy into why the terrorists believed such a thing in the first place. And even once we learn that he’s going to use it as a weapon, it isn’t clear who he’s going to target or how. And then, late in the movie, we establish that Piper needs to get the vaccine which means that… there’s a vaccine. So how is this virus going to kill a bunch of people if we have a vaccine for it? As your villain’s ultimate plan emerges, we should feel more and more satisfied, not more and more confused.

But hey, this is Amateur Action Showdown. So what about the action, Carson!?

The action was fine. My favorite sequence was the sky-bridge. That felt unique to the situation and therefore it popped as the most memorable of the action sequences. But everything else was standard shoot-shoot-duck-hide-shoot-fight-shoot. There wasn’t a lot of creativity. I implore action writers everywhere to do as little of the generic action stuff as possible. We can get generic action anywhere. What action can we only get from your movie? Figure that out and you’re going to come up with tons more creative action scenes. Like the “attacked at the border highway” scene in Sicario. I’d never seen anything like that before.

This is probably stale advice to you, at this point. I talk about it all the time. But, it’s one of the main things that distinguishes the writers who stay stuck on the outside from the ones who make millions of dollars. The writers who can come up with original situations within the genres they specialize in will stand out PRECISELY BECAUSE the majority of writers do not bother to go the extra mile.

This isn’t to say Fox’s script was too generic. Not at all. It’s simply that it wasn’t creative enough. If I were to rate it on a scale of 1-10, I’d give it a 6. Which is respectable because most of the action scripts I read are 5 and below. I could even see Hemorrhage sneaking into the 9 or 10 slot on my Best Amateur Screenplays of the Year list. However, I think this script has another gear or two to it and that Fox needs to really push himself if he wants to get it there.

Script link: Hemorrhage

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

What I learned: “The Baby Yoda” – In order to make your hero’s journey more difficult, add something fragile that they have to protect. In Mandalorian, it’s Baby Yoda. Here, it’s a physically impaired daughter.

Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: In a place distant from our normal reality, a reclusive man charged with interviewing prospective candidates for the privilege of being born must choose between an applicant he likes and one he considers tough enough to survive in the real world.
About: Edson Oda is a 2017 Sundance Screenwriters Lab Fellow from São Paulo, Brazil. Like the great John Hughes, he started his career in advertising. Not only did he write Nine Days but is slated to direct it for Mandalay Pictures as well. The script finished with 7 votes on last year’s Hit List.
Writer: Edson Oda
Details: 113 pages

Ahhhhhhhhhhh!!!

We were so close!

So close to three impressives in a row. Nine Days had me all the way up to the last 20 pages. But it didn’t stick the landing. And I’m really torn up about it because just like yesterday’s masterful script, Nine Days is a high concept premise that doesn’t feel like anything else out there. I don’t know where all these cool ideas are coming from all of a sudden but I’m not complaining.

Will is a 40-something lifeless individual who lives way off in the middle of the desert. We realize quickly that Will’s existence situation is different. He spends all day, every day, watching a series of TVs in his living room. These TVs aren’t playing the latest episodes of The Mandalorian. They’re playing lives. Real lives, down on earth, in real time. We realize that Will is somehow connected to these people, although we don’t yet know how.

Will’s favorite life to watch is Amanda’s, a 28 year old master violinist. Amanda has maximized every opportunity in life. And tomorrow, she’ll be rewarded with the biggest concert of her career. Will preps for the big day like he’s about to watch the Super Bowl. He sees Amanda practicing in her room, sees her getting her things together, hopping in her car, driving downtown… and promptly slamming her car into the concrete wall of an overpass.

Will is devastated. What happened?? He doesn’t have time to mourn the loss, though. The next day, “candidates” start showing up at his house. These candidates are people who Will will interview over a nine day period and the “winner” gets to be born. There’s the goofball, Alexander. The romantic, Maria. The introvert, Mike. The a-hole, Kane. And then there’s Emma, a strange woman who doesn’t have any interest in following Will’s rules.

The competition revolves mostly around the candidates watching the same lives Will watches every day. Will will then ask them questions about what they watched. For example, someone will watch the life of Rick, a 9 year old boy who gets bullied every day and Will will ask, “What would you do if you were in Rick’s position?”

After each day of interviews, Will speaks to his neighbor, Kyo, who, unlike Will, is a never-lived. His only job is to make sure Will does his job confidently. Will also rewatches tapes of Amanda’s life, trying to figure out what led her to suicide. He’s convinced that if he watches every moment, he’ll identify what led her to her decision. The last remaining contestants are Kane and Emma. While Kane is mentally the strongest of the bunch, there’s something special about Emma Will can’t quite put his finger on. Who will win a chance at life? You’ll have to read the script to find out.

I love ideas that help you see common things in new ways. If one character says to another character, “You’ve done nothing with your life since you graduated high school,” that line disappears the second it reaches a reader’s head. But if you show us a woman working in a factory, robotically packaging one product after another every single day and a man watching her, writing down, “7789 days since selection. No significant/relevant new event,” – that’s the kind of perspective that makes you think about life. When was the last significant event in my life? What does my life look like from someone else’s perspective? That’s what this concept brought to the table.

Oda also sets up a nice structure for his story. We know there’s nine days til the decision. It’s right there in the title. We get a good feel for how the contestants are being interviewed – what information we’re trying to get out of them in order to make the decision. But Oda doesn’t stop there. Understanding that sitting in a house for 2 hours is going to get repetitive, Oda adds two strong subplots to break things up. The first is his nosy neighbor, Kyo, who Will is annoyed by but who keeps coming around anyway. And the second is the mystery of what happened to Amanda.

It’s important when you’re writing a screenplay that has a really clean structure like this one, to BREAK THINGS UP with subplots. You don’t want the story to get into too much of a rhythm because what happens is the audience starts being able to predict things. If the pattern is never disrupted then we’re eventually going to be ahead of the writer. Subplots can be used as pattern breakers. You can also use plot twists or character twists. But subplots are nice because you can bring them in and out of the story throughout the script.

I knew the writing was strong in Nine Days early on. There are rules to learn about this world. These people coming to Will aren’t exactly alive. It isn’t clear why they’re the ages they are. We don’t know who Will is or what his exact job is. So Oda writes this montage sequence on the first day of interviews where the contestants ask him these very questions. “And if I’m selected. Am I still gonna look like this?” “And what’s the difference between being here and being alive, besides the time duration?” The best exposition is the exposition the reader isn’t aware of. And because these characters genuinely wanted to know the answers to these questions, you don’t think for a second they’re exposition.

Oda was also good at setting up these little mysteries. For example, after a day at Will’s, we’d see Kyo walking to some unknown house we hadn’t seen before. He walked up to the door, which opened, but Oda wouldn’t show us who was inside. Only Kyo greeting them and walking in. That’s one more little mystery that I have to keep reading to discover the answer to.

But the script wasn’t perfect. The big problem was Emma. Emma is the most important character in the script. And yet she’s given the least amount of screen time of all the candidates. Which didn’t’ help since she was a poorly constructed character as is. Her defining trait was smiling like she knew something you didn’t. I’m not sure what I was supposed to do with that info.

What often happens when you don’t understand the character you’ve created is you build a mystery into them and convince yourself that it’s okay if they’re mysterious to you, the writer, as well. Sorry but that never works. The writer is God. The writer has to know everything. And the reason this ending is a mess is because Oda never figured this character out.

(MAJOR SPOILER) Will ends up picking Kane over Emma. Then learns Emma left him a bunch of notes of things she noticed in his house (????). So he ran after her in the desert and performed some sort of Shakespeare sonnet for her (it was unclear what he was reciting but it sounded like Shakespeare). It was supposed to show us Will finally being vulnerable, something he’d long ago stopped doing. But his lack of vulnerability wasn’t set up well. The Shakespeare sonnet wasn’t set up well. And since I still didn’t understand Emma, him performing this for her didn’t move me at all. So the ending was a huge bummer.

BUT this concept has tons of potential. And the script is 80% there. I think Oda can get it there if he completely reworks his third act. It’s not going to be easy cause I don’t think this works until you figure out who Emma is. And figuring out characters is always some of the hardest work you do as a screenwriter. But if he can conquer that, this movie could be great.

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

What I learned: A trap many screenwriters fall into is overthinking their bigger characters and, in the process, creating someone messy and unfocused. That’s how I would define Emma. And yet, the same screenwriter is easily able to figure out their secondary characters, like Kane. Kane is a guy who has tons of confidence and who we know will be able to handle life on earth, but will his selfishness do him in? That’s the question we’re trying to answer in Kane’s journey. So my advice to screenwriters is to not overthink your bigger characters. Yes they will have layers and yes they will have nuance. But first, identify exactly who they are and what holds them back. I promise you that the simpler their core essence is, the easier they’ll be to write.

Currently one of the best writers in town, Taylor Sheridan is back with another spec that’s expected to start a major franchise.

Genre: ACTION/CRIME
Premise: A former delta force operator is given a unique opportunity by the DEA to take down drug dealers without any oversight.
About: Can life get any better for Tyler Sheridan? The writer of Hell or High Water, Sicario, and Sicario 2, as well as writer-director of Wind River, recently moved into TV, where he took a project that wasn’t on anyone’s radar, Yellowstone, and turned it into a surprise hit. F.A.S.T doesn’t seem to be following the same narrative, unfortunately. Sheridan was in negotiations to direct it with Chris Pratt attached to star, but those negotiations broke down and the studio brought Gavin O’Connor onto the project. Since that point, it’s unclear if Pratt remains on F.A.S.T. But a new Sheridan spec is always a big deal so I’m excited to find out about it today.
Writer: Taylor Sheridan
Details: 132 pages

Will Pratt come back to the project?

I think Taylor Sheridan is one of the best writing successes of the last five years. There are hundreds of thousands of fellow actors writing screenplays. He rose above them all by putting emphasis on the things he knew best – character development and modernizing old-fashioned subject matter like cops and robbers.

The way breaking in works is that you go at screenwriting for a while until you finally write something that people like. Then everyone in Hollywood wants to work with you. Because you’ve been at this for so long, you have 2-3 scripts in the hopper that are almost there. These scripts allow you to keep the momentum going.

But once you get past those scripts, you’re writing from scratch. Now, theoretically, you’re a better writer so you should be able to write a good script faster. But the reality about screenwriting is that you need drafts. No matter how good you are, it takes half-a-dozen drafts before you even start to find your story. This is what famously happened during the writing of The Sixth Sense. That script started off about a boy who drew spooky images about a killer and ended up being about a kid who saw dead people and the psychologist who helped him.

All this is to say that the well appears to be drying up for Sheridan. His first couple of scripts were great. But Sicario 2 was a narrative mess. It was the first script where I thought, “He’s rushing this.” And I’m not mad. Look, you don’t know when the Hollywood truck of money no longer wants to pay you a visit. So you have to capitalize when you’re hot. But I’m worried that Sherdian may be biting more than he can chew. Let’s hope I’m wrong.

Kyle is a former delta force operator in the Middle East. But ever since he’s been back in Baltimore, he can barely make ends meet. His wife and two kids are tired of living in a garbage tract house. If something doesn’t change soon, he’s not sure he’ll be able to keep it together.

One day while bringing his kids home from school, Kyle spots two skinheads – who live on his block no less – carrying his TV and furniture back to their house. Kyle has his kids wait at home then goes over to get his effing stuff back. As often happens with skinheads, things escalate, and within seconds, Kyle’s killed both of them.

Kyle calls his old commander, Sheel, who now works for the DEA, and Sheel comes over to help him clean up the mess. They learn that the skinheads were drug dealers in the area. In a roundabout way, they just helped the community.

This gives Sheel an idea. You see, it’s impossible to get anything done at the DEA. There’s a thousand miles of politics and red tape. So what if you just… didn’t have to worry about that? In the Middle East, the CIA used to run a program called “F.A.S.T.” that didn’t have any laws. If you wanted to take the bad guys out, you just went to their house and did it. Sheel wants to do the same thing, but for drugs. And he wants Kyle to run it. The upside is that Kyle gets any money he finds at the houses.

There are rules, though. You can’t kill anyone. You seize drugs and money and then leave. That’s going to require a very skilled team, Kyle says. “You can use anyone you want,” Sheel replies. Kyle gets some of his best men back together and after carefully prepping their plan, they begin their operation.

The first job goes so well that they keep doing them, and within a week, they’ve done more damage to the local drug trade than the DEA has in 10 years. They’re so good at what they do that word travels to the higher-ups, who want them to take on a higher profile job – IN TURKEY. The group is flown out to Turkey where they’re going to be facing the biggest drug kingpin in the entire country. Will they make it out alive? What do you think?

To answer my earlier question – Sheridan is back!

It’s hard to figure out exactly what Sheridan does better than everyone else. Because when you take a step back and look at his screenplays from afar, they don’t seem that special. They’re covering territory – SWAT, DEA, CIA – that are so often used in movies that they’ve become cliche. And yet he’s clearly better than everyone in this genre. So what’s his secret?

The answer very well may be in the opening scene. When I read any script where a character is a vet, they always have post-traumatic stress syndrome. They’re all having trouble adjusting back into society. The ubiquity of thier condition destroys any weight it may have. The only way you break through that wall is by individualizing the character’s experience. You give them something that sells their PTSD in a way that separates them from characters in other scripts. That separation is what makes us believe they’re real.

Here, Kyle is engaged in a therapy session with a military psychiatrist. She’s asking him how he’s been doing. Kyle is trying to say all the right things. But between answers, we’re getting quick flashbacks to his time in the Middle East. He’s inside a moving van where ISIS members are taping an attempt to decapitate him. He’s only barely able to get out alive. The psychiatrist asks another question. He answers with, “I’m fine,” and we get another flashback with him casually chatting with a soldier while walking through a city and then an IED evaporates his friend. Back to therapy.

There was something about this three-pronged attack of a therapist asking him questions, him denying anything was wrong, and a flashback that proved the opposite, that sold me that this was a real vet and not that paper-then “vet in name only” character I typically see in scripts. In other words, Sheridan finds a way to sell you on his characters so that you care more about what happens to them.

And he’s so smart about it. Like the way he updates old screenwriting tricks. “Save the Cat,” for instance. The idea behind saving the cat is to get your character to do something nice for/to someone and, once the audience sees that, they’ll like the character. The problem is most screenwriters’ approaches aren’t imaginative enough to create an authentic moment. They’ll just have the hero pass a homeless man five bucks and call it a day.

But Sheridan realizes that “saving the cat” is a much broader tip than merely being nice. It’s anything that makes us like the character. The “save the cat” moment in F.A.S.T. comes when Kyle is bringing his kids home and sees a couple of skinheads walking his TV and furniture back to their house. He puts his kids in a safe room under his garage and walks over, puts a gun to the skinhead’s face, and tells him they’re going to pick everything back up and walk it right back to his house.

The reason we like this is obvious when you think about it. Skinheads are bad. We don’t like people who take our stuff. And therefore, we love anyone who’s willing to stand up to those people. Because, in our lives, we wouldn’t be able to do that. This man represents who we wish we could be.

There’s nothing you can do in a script that pays more dividends than a character people love. You could be an average writer but if you’re great at that one skill, you can go a long way in this business.

The other thing Sheridan does that makes him different is he finds these little cracks inside well-known subject matter and builds stories around them. So he doesn’t just tell a story about the CIA. Or the DEA. He creates a division within them – a totally new type of team that does a very specific job in “F.A.S.T.” You might be sensing a theme here. Sheridan looks for small ways to make his script different than all the other scripts out there. He knows that generic won’t cut it.

Problems? Sheridan sometimes adds one extra plot beat late in the second act that draws the narrative out too long. He did this with Sicario 2 and he’s doing it here as well. Late-story pacing is crucial to driving a script home. If you linger too long in plotlines that don’t matter, you risk the audience’s attention drifting away like dandelion strands on a late August afternoon. That’s the section you gotta keep tight and, despite its title, F.A.S.T. feels slow in that area.

Still, this fortifies Sheridan as one of, if not THE, top gun in this genre. I can’t think of any other writer who does it better in 2019. Can you?

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

What I learned: Dealing with emotion in screenwriting is challenging. It’s easy to oversell it, and when that happens, the moment feels cliché or on-the-nose. When I read the line, “A single tear falls down his/her cheek,” in a script, I literally throw up inside of my mouth. Which is why I’m happy to show you someone who tackles this issue successfully. Here, Kyle is being interviewed by a therapist and she gives him a rorschach test and asks what he sees. He struggles to come up with an answer, and then Sheridan writes this: “He stares at it and smiles, as his eyes well with tears ….” Why is this better than “a single tear falls down his cheek?” Because the reaction is more complex. He smiles WHILE fighting tears away. There’s contrast in reaction (two contrasting things are going on at once) which is way more honest, and therefore, a lot more authentic.