For those unaware, this week is First Ten Pages Week. I’ll be posting reviews of the first ten pages from amateur scripts whose loglines won a Logline Contest. For more info, check out the original loglines here and the Winners Post here. You can also download the first ten pages of all five winners here.
Genre: Comedy-Drama
Winning Logline: A businessman begins seeing Post-It Notes that give him directions on how to improve his life.
About: Welcome to the first annual “First Ten Pages Week.” What I did was have readers send in loglines then vote on their favorites. The top five loglines, then, would get their first 10 pages read. With any of this week’s reviews, if the comments are positive enough, I’ll review them in full on an Amateur Friday. But the reason I’m really excited about this week is because I get to do something I rarely get to do in reviews – and that’s analyze SPECIFICS. So let’s get started with the number one vote-getter, Stationary.
Writer: Daley Nixon
One of the things you learn when you comb through tons of loglines and read tons of scripts is that the more vague a logline is, the shakier the script tends to be. If you don’t lay out a clear goal and a clear line of conflict in the log, there’s a good chance you don’t know to do so in a script either.
That was my big worry here. It’s a neat concept. But where’s the goal? Is it to improve his life? That’s pretty vague. And there doesn’t seem to be any clear conflict either. What gets in the way of these notes improving him? I’m not sure. So I’m a little afraid we might be heading into choppy waters here.
The first 10 pages of Stationary follow our hero, 20-something Noah Greenwood, going about his daily routine. Not surprisingly, his daily routine is pretty shitty. He lives by himself in a dirty apartment. He seems to be late to work every day. Simple activities like getting a coffee at Starbucks appear difficult for him. Nobody at work likes him. There’s a hot girl in his department who he has no chance of getting. And after the day is over, he goes home, goes to sleep, and starts the cycle all over again.
So, were these pages any good?
Unfortunately, those fears I had proved to be warranted. This is something all writers have to battle. The person reading your script is judging you every step of the way, EVEN BEFORE THEY’VE STARTED READING YOUR SCRIPT. They’re looking for signs of whether this will be a fun 90 minutes or a miserable 90 minutes. In this case, it’s looking closer to the latter. Let me explain why…
We start off with “20-something” Noah Greenwood. My reading experience has taught me that writers usually write main characters that are the same age as them. So now I’m thinking Daley is 24-25 years old. 24-25 is usually the age most screenwriters start writing screenplays. So I’m already thinking this is probably one of Daley’s early efforts, which means it’ll likely be laced with a lot of first-timer mistakes.
That assumption is proven correct less than 3 words later. Here’s Noha’s introduction: “NOAH GREENWOOD (mid 20’s) falls out bed.” It seems like we’re missing an “a” in the very second sentence of the screenplay. I don’t even know how to say this without getting angry. How do you expect anyone to take you seriously as a screenwriter if you forget a word in the second sentence of your screenplay? My experience has taught me that there is now no chance of this script being good. So I’m bummed. Because I was hoping for more.
This is followed by Noah throwing a tennis ball at the alarm clock to turn it off. This isn’t as bad as missing a word in the second sentence, but throwing something at the alarm clock to turn it off is an action I’ve seen way too many times before. You gotta do something different. Have him use something to fish the alarm clock over so he can turn it off. Anything but throwing a tennis ball at it.
Adding to the clichés, we have a mid-20s character waking up inside a dirty room. Again, I’m not freaking out about this choice, but how many times have we seen a mid-20s character waking up in a trashed room? We’re less than a page into this script and I’ve already encountered two big clichés.
On the plus side, I like the decision of the mom leaving an answering machine message saying they need to talk later. It’s always good to set up future scenes so the audience has something to anticipate. We may not have a goal for our character yet, but that’s tempered by the fact that we know he has a future meeting with his mother, who obviously has something important to talk to him about.
Unfortunately, the grammar and spelling mistakes keep coming in Stationary. Someone takes “a centuries” to order coffee. Then we have “abit” of a problem at the Starbucks (instead of “a bit”). Still, I did laugh when Starbucks ran out of coffee beans. That was funny.
On page 3 we have a couple more grammar mistakes as well as a misused comma (which should have been a period). After that we have a parenthetical that’s formatted so that it’s aligned with the dialogue. This may not seem like a big deal, but when I’ve already seen all these mistakes, it’s a killer, because it confirms the writer doesn’t have any interest in putting forth his best effort.
I could keep harping on these mistakes which continue to show up throughout the 10 pages but I’ll just jump to page 8. At this point, we’re on our second day, and we still seem to be hitting on the same things over and over again. Why do we need to see Noah sitting at the lunch table alone a second day in a row? We’ve already seen it once. We’ve also already seen him get looked over by the girl. Why include an additional scene that repeats that information? This is a common mistake made in amateur screenplays. The writer believes that they have to tell you something seven or eight times for you to get it, even though we got it the first time. Professional writers jump right into the story. They tell you what they need to tell you and then they move on.
It was around this time that I realized I didn’t even know what Noah looked like because he was never described. This is a huge deal. Is Noah fat? Ugly? Handsome but doesn’t know it? Does he wear cheap clothes? Does he simply have bad fashion sense? This movie is about a man who’s going to change his life and we don’t even know what needs changing because we don’t have an inkling of what he looks like! You have to convey to us who your main character is. A good description is the very first (and easiest!) step towards achieving that.
The good news for Daley is that I see these mistakes all the time in amateur screenplays. He is not alone. This is the way a lot of new writers write. They don’t have a lot of respect for their work. They don’t really care if things look good or read well. They figure that as long as they get some semblance of what they’re trying to say onto the page then they’ve done their job. Unfortunately, that’s not what the industry is looking for. The industry is looking for professionalism. They’re looking for writers willing to go the extra mile. Who try to make their characters and their storylines unique. Who make choices they haven’t seen before. Who take pride in their work. Who want to be looked at seriously. Don’t just make things “okay.” It’s your job to give us 100% of what you have, whatever “what you have” is at the moment. I feel like Daley’s given us about 30% of what he has. You can do better than this Daley. Get back in there and really push yourself this time. Good luck.
Link: Stationary (First Ten Pages)
Would I keep reading? – Not with this many mistakes. The writer doesn’t take enough pride in his work. Too much stuff is repeated, which implies the story will be slow and repetitive. There were some laughs, but not enough to overcome these problems.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me (the laughs barely kept this out of the gutter)
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I Learned: One of the biggest mistakes new writers make is setting the bar too low. The bar they use is movies like Transformers 2 or Vampires Suck. They say, “Well those scripts weren’t anything special. Therefore I don’t have to be special.” This is what I want you to do. Take that standard you believe is the standard Hollywood judges its scripts by? Then multiply it by 1000. That’s the real standard you’re being judged by. I’m not going to get into how a big studio film is able to get away with bad writing. You just have to trust me when I say you’re being judged on an infinitely higher level. So don’t submit anything where you haven’t given your absolute best!
For those of you unfamiliar with the First Ten Pages Experiment, what I did was have longtime Scriptshadow readers send in a logline for their screenplay. The top five loglines, voted on by those readers, would get the first 10 pages of those scripts reviewed on the site this week. Well, the week is almost here and it’s time for YOU GUYS to read those submissions. So here are the winners, with links to the pages. Now I’ve already read all five entries and I KNOW there is going to be a TON of discussion. However I don’t want that discussion to begin until the reviews have been posted so I am CLOSING THE COMMENTS on this thread. This is a download post only. That being said, prepare to answer this simple question: Would you keep reading?
MONDAY
STATIONARY (54 votes)
GENRE: Comedy-drama
LOGLINE: A businessman begins seeing Post-It Notes that give him directions on how to improve his life.
TUESDAY
THE FOURTH HORSEMAN (35 votes)
GENRE: Action/Thriller
LOGLINE: Hired by Homeland Security to envision terrorist attack scenarios, a skillful ex-soldier turned novelist, must battle anarchists when they hijack his nightmare plot to destroy new York
WEDNESDAY
THE OSWALD SOLUTION (21 votes)
GENRE: DRAMA
LOGLINE: When a prison guard falls in love with the wife of a death-row inmate, he’s forced to choose between his love for her or reveal the discovery of crucial evidence that will save her husband’s life.
THURSDAY
NICE GIRLS DON’T KILL (20 votes)
Genre: Action Comedy
Logline: When a meek and universally abused copy editor is mistaken for the professional killer she accidentally bumped off, she decides to take on this violent new identity until the killer turns out to be not so dead, and very pissed off.
FRIDAY
DEEP BURIAL (17 votes)
Genre: Thriller
Logline: Posted out to a remote nuclear waste dump site in the Australian Outback to secretly assess the mental state of the ex-addict Aboriginal worker who mans the plant, an anxious young female psychiatrist is forced into a fight for survival when they find a mysterious stranger stranded in the desert.
Genre: Period/Noir
Premise: (from writer) In wartime LA, a lounge singer falls for the detective hired by a vigilante group to investigate her gangster boyfriend’s treasonous activities.
About: Fatal Woman won this year’s Zoetrope screenwriting contest. – Every Friday, I review a script from the readers of the site. If you’re interested in submitting your script for an Amateur Review, send it in PDF form, along with your title, genre, logline, and why I should read your script to Carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Keep in mind your script will be posted in the review (feel free to keep your identity and script title private by providing an alias and fake title). Also, it’s a good idea to resubmit every couple of weeks so that your submission stays near the top of the pile.
Writer: Laura Kelber
Details: 106 pages (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).
I loved what Laura had to say in her query letter. Not only was her attitude great but she had an interesting story to tell. This is what she said: “When this won the grand prize of a major contest back in February, I thought I had it made. I thought, at the very least, I’d get a mid-level manager. But there was zero interest. Zip. Nada. I didn’t get so much as a “what else you got?” query. In fact, I got a helluva lot more response when one of my comedy scripts made the Nicholl Quarterfinals. OK, I know exactly what you’re gonna say: amateurs shouldn’t write period pieces. I know! I’ve written 17 screenplays now, including comedy, drama, and supernatural, dutifully submitting them to contests. But it was an effin’ period piece that won the grand prize. It’s a sad fact (or maybe it’s a good one), that contest winners don’t always tend to be commercial. After the disappointment of getting nowhere with this script, I’ve moved on to others. I like to write. So this one is more or less dead to me. Tear it to shreds!”
Well Laura, your wish is my command. :)
No, I’m not going to tear Fatal Woman to shreds. But I do think it has some significant problems. Having said that, I have a pretty good idea why it won. I talk to a lot of contests readers and I’ve held a couple of contest myself. There’s this wide-held belief that if you have a thousand screenplay submissions to anything, that at least one of them is going to be great. Not true unfortunately. You have to remember that like 80% of the scripts are from people who’ve never even read a screenwriting book before, which makes the pool of relevant scripts considerably smaller. And even then, as you all know by reading this site, it’s still incredibly hard to write something great. So what ends up happening is that it isn’t necessarily the best script that wins the contest, but the best writer. And I think that’s what happened here. The writing here is great. But the story itself is often muddled and confusing. Let’s take a look.
It’s Los Angeles circa 1942, the middle of the war, and Monique is a Veronica Lake-like lounge singer who’s nearing that age where people will start seeing her as a Ricki Lake-like lounge singer. In fact, her thuggish boyfriend who owns the nightclub, Flip Foster, is already moving on to the new hot younger version of her, creating all sorts of tension at work. Rrrreow!
One night after a set, Monique is approached by private detective Dan Armstrong, a handsome bloke (they used that word back then right?) who lost his leg in an accident and is therefore unable to fight for his country. Dan thinks that Flip is involved in some suspect illegal activity and wants to know if Monique will help him get to the bottom of it. Since Flip no longer wants to make sexy time with Monique, she decides, “Why not?”
Unfortunately, that’s where I started getting confused. A bunch of strange plot points are thrown at us one after another and we’re stuck trying to figure out what the actual story is. It starts when Flip takes Monique out on his ship and Dan sneaks onto it as well, only to get captured by Flip and questioned as to who he’s working for. In one of the more bizarre moments, they actually make him take a truth serum. I think that’s the official moment where I started pulling away from the script.
Eventually Flip, who I’d assumed was this terrifying dangerous crime lord, politely shuttles Dan back to shore and lets him go without a scratch. Since when are bad guys so nice? In the meantime, Monique finds out that Flip is using the roundup of Japanese Americans at the time (For those who don’t know, our racist 1942 government rounded up all the Japanese-Americans and put them in concentration camps on the off chance they were spies) to change their identity into Chinese-Americans, release them back into the general population, and make a nice chunk of change out of it.
At some point, Monique decides she’s in love with Dan and wants to run away from him, but when Flip hears about this, he’s furious and refuses to let her go. Because Flip is footing the bill for Monique’s ailing brother, she has no choice but to stay with him, and that means she’ll never get to be with the man she’s fallen in love with.
As she alludes to in her e-mail, Laura starts off with a concept that has such narrow audience appeal that the majority of people who hear the logline aren’t going to be interested in reading it. Literally the only way you can write one of these scripts and get others interested is if the script is absolutely flawless. That’s the only way. You get an L.A. Confidential, what, once every 20 years? That’s why I try and steer you guys away from this stuff because I don’t want to see you waste your time.
As for the script itself, I think it gets buried under too many plot threads and too many ideas. One of the ways I measure a script’s potential is I imagine somebody asking me what it’s about. If I have trouble with that explanation or the explanation itself doesn’t sound very exciting, there’s a good chance that the script is in trouble. If you asked me what Fatal Woman was about, I’m not sure how I would answer. I would say something like, “It’s sort of about a lounge singer in 1942 who falls for a private investigator. But it’s also about trafficking Japanese-Americans for money. Though not really because that plot doesn’t really play into the ending.” You get a semblance that there’s something there but it’s not concrete. It’s not clear or “hook-y” enough.
Let’s use that old trick of trying to find some irony in the premise and see if we can’t come up with something better. What if a guy who was trafficking Japanese-Americans during World War 2 ended up falling in love with one of them? That’s not great and I would brainstorm it extensively to find more conflict and higher stakes, but already I think it’s a more interesting story. I mean what does a lounge singer have to do with trafficking Japanese-Americans? There’s too big of a disconnect between the elements (stealing a phrase from yesterday’s logline article). This seems so much cleaner.
Now I’m not saying everything’s bad here. I thought Dan was a really interesting character. I like the idea of a man who desperately wants to fight for his country but can’t because he’s handicapped. I thought it was interesting seeing the shame and guilt he lived with every day. So I really felt that character was well developed.
And the writing itself, as advertised, was very good. I mean here’s Monique’s character introduction: “She’s talented and perky enough to please the audience, but would draw yawns from any passing talent agent.” I mean that told me everything I needed to know about the character in one line, which is the mark of a great screenwriter.
But this script suffers from too many problems, the biggest of which is that I’m not sure it knows what it’s about. There’s only a semi-commitment to the Japanese-American smuggling subplot, and that leaves the bulk of story to rest on the Dan/Flip/Monique love triangle, which I don’t think has the muscle to keep our interest. We’re also confused about what characters are doing and why they’re doing them half the time. I had no idea why Flip would just let Dan go. Why not kill him? I’m still not sure who was fighting at the end of the script. Was it Dan’s people versus Flip’s people? If not, who were these other guys? And what did any of it have to do with the Japanese-American smuggling plot? Why is it that that plot became a big deal in the middle of the second act and then simply vanished? And why have the climactic scene in the movie take place in a tiny office? Since I wasn’t clear about a lot of these things, Fatal Woman basically became a bunch of characters wandering around talking to each other. The goals weren’t clear. The stakes weren’t clear. So no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get into it.
My advice to Laura would be this: “You’re a really good writer. I think trying to fix this story is more trouble than it’s worth. Move on to the next script and kick ass with it.”
Script link: Fatal Woman
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: One thing I’m sure people will bring up is the 5 to 6 line unfilmable asides Laura uses throughout the script, such as this one on page 38: “Wait a minute! What happened to that steamy lip-lock? Apparently, afterwards, they hopped into the cab and drove all the way back to Dan’s place. Obviously, they’ve had sex. It might have been a long night of Kama Sutra passion, or maybe Dan thinks a simple wham-bam routine’s all he needs to impress a dame. We’ll never know, because it’s the ‘40s and the Hays Code is in full swing. Why else would Dan use a word like “heckuva”?” For the most part, I found these asides charming and fun. But here’s my theory on this. Your primary goal as a screenwriter is to make somebody believe that your story is *real*. If you can convince somebody that a made-up string of sequences from inside your imagination REALLY HAPPENED, you have reached the mountaintop as a storyteller. That’s what we’re all trying to do. The second they’re aware they’re reading a script, you’ve lost that spell. You’ve brought them back to reality. So why put anything in a script that’s going to facilitate that? It’s the equivalent of walking up to them and saying “Hey, you know this is all fake right?” Ironically, the reason I didn’t mind the asides here was that I wasn’t really into the story to begin with, so they were a welcome distraction that made me smile. But had I been engulfed in Fatal Woman, I probably would have had a big issue with them. There are exceptions to this rule of course. For example, I don’t mind them much in goofy comedies when we know what we’re reading isn’t real anyways. But I do have problems with them in almost every other genre.
For those of you unfamiliar with the First Ten Pages Experiment, what I did was have long time Scriptshadow readers send in a logline for their screenplay. The top five loglines, voted on by those readers, would get the first 10 pages of those scripts reviewed on the site next week. Of those five, if any of them were well-liked enough (by you guys), I’d review them on a future Amateur Friday. Now in a last second surprise (hey, every contest has to have some drama right?), CLOTH removed themselves from the competition due to the production team deciding it’d be best to keep the project under wraps. I was kinda bummed cause I wanted to read the script but that just means one of YOUR scripts gets to take its place. If you’re interested in becoming a part of future private contests such as this one, e-mail Carsonreeves3@gmail.com with the subject line, “Include.” Here are the top 5!
WINNER!!!
STATIONARY (54 votes)
GENRE: Comedy-drama
LOGLINE: A businessman begins seeing Post-It Notes that give him directions on how to improve his life.
2nd PLACE
THE FOURTH HORSEMAN (35 votes)
GENRE: Action/Thriller
LOGLINE: Hired by Homeland Security to envision terrorist attack scenarios, a skillful ex-soldier turned novelist, must battle anarchists when they hijack his nightmare plot to destroy new York
3rd PLACE
THE OSWALD SOLUTION (21 votes)
GENRE: DRAMA
LOGLINE: When a prison guard falls in love with the wife of a death-row inmate, he’s forced to choose between his love for her or reveal the discovery of crucial evidence that will save her husband’s life.
4th PLACE
NICE GIRLS DON’T KILL (20 votes)
Genre: Action Comedy
Logline: When a meek and universally abused copy editor is mistaken for the professional killer she accidentally bumped off, she decides to take on this violent new identity until the killer turns out to be not so dead, and very pissed off.
5th PLACE
DEEP BURIAL (17 votes)
Genre: Thriller
Logline: Posted out to a remote nuclear waste dump site in the Australian Outback to secretly assess the mental state of the ex-addict Aboriginal worker who mans the plant, an anxious young female psychiatrist is forced into a fight for survival when they find a mysterious stranger stranded in the desert.
Since I know you guys just couldn’t survive without knowing who finished 6-10, the rest of the top 10 went like this: The Wreckage, The Lost Colony, Sagittarius and The Crab, The Wake, and then we had a three way tie between Plurally Inclined, The Accidental Lawyer, and Long Way To Tippery. I would be more than happy to read any of these for future Amateur Friday reviews so if any of you are interested in submitting, let me know.
Anyway, this little experiment took on a life of its own and I came to realize just how opinionated people were when it came to loglines. Particularly when their own logline was ignored in favor of someone else’s! But I think there’s a bigger lesson to be learned here. When you start looking through a lot of loglines you begin to see them through the eyes of an agent or a producer or a manager. You start to understand that this is the process by which you’re being judged. And if you come up with a concept that’s only “decent” or “pretty good,” you’re going to be out-shined by loglines that are of lot more exciting, even if your script itself is better. It helps you realize just how important concept is.
And really, it begs a bigger question, which is that, “Is it my logline that’s the problem or is it my idea that’s the problem?” And that’s one of the hardest questions to ask yourself as a writer. Because nobody likes to work on something for a year only to find out that nobody’s interested in reading it. Yet I see it happen all the time. I would go as far as to say it happens to 75 percent of the writers out there. This is why I tell you to test your logline BEFORE you write your script and not after because if you wait until after, you may find out that you’ve just wasted a year of your life.
So with that in mind, I want to look at the 9 loglines that got 3 or less votes and give you my opinion on why they didn’t garner more attention. The objective here is not to embarrass anyone. One of the problems with this business is that nobody tells you WHY they didn’t like something. How can you fix something or move on from something if no one’s explaining why it isn’t working? I want to explain – in my opinion – why these loglines aren’t working. Now some of you are probably asking, “Well if these loglines weren’t working, why did you pick them in the first place?” As I stated to the people submitting, I didn’t just include my favorite loglines. I included loglines from longtime readers who I felt had earned a chance, as well as top commenters whose scripts I was interested in reading. Anyway, let’s look at the logs…
GENRE: Action
TITLE: HELL AWAY FROM HOME
LOGLINE: An unhinged former DEA agent sneaks into Mexico (all the while being hunted by his ruthless ex partner) to get revenge on the Chief of Police/Narcotrafficker who captured and tortured him nine months earlier.
Patrick is one of the most knowledgeable commenters on the site. So why didn’t his logline attract more attention? My fear is that there isn’t anything that stands out or sounds original in the logline. DEA, Mexico, ex-partner, revenge, Chief Of Police. How many movies have you seen that have included this exact set of variables. A LOT. You gotta have that ONE thing that truly stands out about your logline or else you’re fighting an uphill battle.
GENRE: Sci-Fi/Action
TITLE: Foe
LOGLINE: In a near-future world shattered by an alien invasion, a lone Special Forces soldier stumbles on a group of military veterans holding their abandoned VA Hospital as the invaders lay siege.
I’m a big sci-fi fan so at first glance, I see this as something I’d want to read. But a closer look gives me pause. “Lone Special Forces solider” is a very generic sounding character. It seems like every character in an action movie is a lone special forces soldier. Then you have a bunch of military veterans trying to protect their hospital. So now I’m imagining a bunch of old guys fighting aliens. I suppose that might be cool but it almost seems like two different movies – aliens on the one side and military veterans on the other. I can see why this logline would confuse people.
GENRE: Science Fiction/Thriller
TITLE: SCINTILLATION
LOGLINE: A disturbed woman fleeing an abusive marriage finds work at an observatory in New Mexico where she discovers a relativistic attack is about to be launched against the Earth — and she’s the only one who can do anything about it.
One of the commonalities I see in non-hooky loglines is a disconnect between the elements. For example, here, we have a disturbed woman fleeing an abusive marriage. Then all of a sudden she’s the only one who can stop the world from being destroyed. What do those two things have to do with each other? Why do we need to know that she’s fleeing a marriage? I’m not saying that her failed marriage isn’t an important part of her character but we only have one sentence to convey what our movie is about. Why point out something that, relatively speaking, is so unimportant?
GENRE: Comedy
TITLE: Finger Lickin Code
LOGLINE: Once the two most senior members of a famous chicken organization are murdered by a one-legged man, a disturbed puzzle solving whiz finds himself with a possibly schizophrenic sidekick, 11 sealed cryptexes, and one secret recipe he must save.
I haven’t really figured this out yet so maybe somebody can help me, but there seems to be a real abrasiveness towards wacky comedy ideas. However, we know movies like this get made, so who are the people who like these ideas and where are they hiding? Keeping that in mind, this might be one of those loglines that suffers from information overload. It’s just a lot of stuff going on and you can’t really wrap your head around it all.
Genre: Drama, Crime, Sports
Title: Short of a Miracle
Logline: A basketball prodigy escapes the inner city to play collegiate basketball, but the actions of his father, a corrupt NYPD officer, threaten to derail his promising career.
I’ve had this conversation with the writer before (very cool and nice guy) and he seems to be aware of it even though he’s still pushing the script. People just don’t seem to be interested in fictional sports movies unless they’re comedies or boxing films. It’s as simple as that. I’m not saying this script can’t be great, but everybody in the business knows you can’t get these movies financed so they’re never going to read it. You can drive yourself insane trying to push this idea out there.
GENRE: Contemporary Noir Thriller
TITLE: ELLA CINDER
LOGLINE: When a sexy female private investigator in Los Angeles tracks down a femme fatale for a playboy from a famous family, she uncovers a deadly conspiracy to rob the family’s fortune that may be linked to her own mysterious childhood as an abused orphan.
There’s too much going on in this logline. By the time you get to the end of the logline you don’t even remember the beginning because there’s so much stuff in between. We have a female private investigator, a femme fatale, a playboy, a deadly conspiracy, the robbing of a family fortune, and a mysterious childhood as an abused orphan. Where is the person reading the logline supposed to begin? This logline needs to focus on the core concept of the story and strip everything else away.
GENRE: Horror
TITLE: Fetalgeist
LOGLINE: A pro-life student group finds itself trapped inside a long since abandoned yet very much haunted abortion clinic.
You know I actually thought this one would do better. It has some nice irony in it and a great spooky setting. But maybe the biggest lesson I learned from this process was to stay away from subject matter that divides people so much. That sounds contradictory even as I’m writing it because I’ve always learned that you SEEK OUT subject matter that causes conflict and brings out passion. But when you’re talking about abortion, you’re talking about something people just get really wound up about.
GENRE: Heist Movie
TITLE: The Inside Job
LOGLINE: To save a sick little girl, a master thief must team up with his doctor ex-girlfriend to steal stem cells from a vicious mobster who can’t know he’s had surgery.
I thought this would have potential but I think it runs into trouble in the second half. The second you use the word “mobster” in your logline, you’ve stepped into an arena of cliché that a lot of people dislike. That’s not to say to never put mobsters in your movie. But I find it’s a word that turns people off for some reason. Maybe others can chime in on this and let me know if they feel the opposite. But it’s the last part: “vicious mobster who can’t know he’s had surgery” that’s the real confusing part. The mobster can’t know he’s had his own surgery? If your logline is even a little confusing, you’re screwed. Because how can somebody expect you to write a clear story if you can’t even write a clear sentence? That’s why it’s so important to workshop your logline and get others opinions on it so you know that it works.
GENRE: Horror (Realism ala “Carrie”)
TITLE: Deafo
LOGLINE: In a town torn apart by enforced pit closures, a deaf teenage loner sets out on a dark journey of violent revenge against everyone who has ever wronged him
Again, look at the disconnect between the elements here. The first half of the logline is about a town torn apart by “Enforced pit closures (a clunky phrase that probably shouldn’t have been included). Then the second half is about a deaf teenage loner who goes out for revenge. What do enforced pit closures have to do with a deaf teenage loner? Guys, the elements in your logline (and story for that matter!) have to connect. They have to be cohesive. The Matrix isn’t about a circus trainer who learns that he’s living inside of a computer program. It’s about a *programmer* who learns that he’s living inside of a computer program.
Those are my thoughts on the loglines. But really, I’m just one opinion. Let’s go to you guys, the people who voted. Why did you pass up on these loglines? Try and be constructive and not just tear them to shreds. Remember, we’re trying to help each other here. Let’s learn what people dislike so we can all avoid these mistakes in the future.
Genre: Comedy/Historical
Premise: (from writer) Before James Bond, there was Benjamin Franklin: inventor, philanthropist, and the single largest exporter of kicking British ass. Using his array of inventions and weapons, Franklin is a one-man army thirsty for Redcoat blood, especially when he’s wrongly accused of treason.
About: This won the $20,000 monthly grand prize at the Amazon Studios contest a few months ago. A little birdy told me it’s a project the media giant is really excited about. You can learn more about it, download it yourself, and see a storyboard trailer of the film here.
Writer: Jason Ungate (revisions by Frank Pasquine)
Details: 116 pages – November 10th, 2011 draft (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).
I have to admit that I’m still confused about a lot of Amazon’s contest rules. I know they (thankfully) changed it so that random writers can’t rewrite your script (dumbest idea ever?), but as I’m looking at the title page for Ben Franklin, I see that it’s been revised by Frank Pasquine. Unfortunately I don’t have any idea if this rewrite was authorized, if the original writer approved of it, if it’s something that Amazon themselves facilitated. I’m not even sure if this is the draft that won the contest. It’s all very peculiar and confusing to me, but hey, where’s the fun in clarity?
I will say this about the Amazon contest. They clearly have a vision for what they’re trying to do. This contest is almost the exact opposite of the Nicholl contest in philosophy. Amazon doesn’t care about deep character driven thematic pieces. They want movies. They want films that people will go see. Now they might not always be right in choosing those films, but at least their contest is more reflective of the industry.
So. What’s this script Amazon’s so high on about? Well, it’s about a 70-year-old Ben Franklin superspy type dude. This isn’t the Franklin you read about in your history books. Oh no no no. This is the medical anomaly who can take down a gaggle of bad guys faster than Jason Bourne. If that kind of thing excites you, you’re going to love this.
Unfortunately, the US government isn’t as excited about our hero’s martial arts abilities as we are. In particular, a rising young general named George Washington is sick of getting one-upped by Franklin, who’s constantly stealing his spotlight. Even more concerning to Washington, however, is that Franklin uses phrases like, “A bullet a day keeps the motherfuckers away.” Yes, I’m afraid to say, that line *is* in the screenplay.
Anyway, the British sail over to our shores because we weren’t paying our taxes or something and like the big mountain of meanies they are take over Philadelphia, pushing all of us Americans out of the city. It’s there where Franklin meets Benedict Arnold, who’s already crafting a plan to take Philadelphia back. Right before Franklin can help, however, the Americans find a letter that Franklin wrote to the British telling them in detail how to capture Philadelphia! What!? No! Franklin has secretly been working for the British??
Of course not sillies. He’s been set up! So he does some kick ass move to escape from jail then goes on a search to find out who framed him. Due to circumstances out of his control, he’s forced to team up with Washington, who as we’ve established, hates him more than a cherry tree that won’t grow. Somewhere around this point, Franklin gets a hold of a 1956 Thunderbird. It was at this point that I either stabbed myself in the gut or tried to rip my eyes out of my head in order to make the torture stop. Unsuccessful, I was forced to keep reading.
Essentially, an evil British general arrives and demands that Franklin create for him the elusive electrocution string, rumored to be the most powerful weapon on the planet. Franklin refuses but when the evil General steals his girlfriend (who I forgot to mention he met along the way. And oh, she’s 24 – remember, Franklin is 70), he has no choice but to risk the safety of the world and create a weapon that makes the atom bomb look like a firecracker. And oh, somewhere in all of this is a plot I think, even though I never really figured out what it was.
Well, let’s see.
I guess the first thing I should say is that I’m not really into these historical mash-ups to begin with. You will not see me in line for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter for example, even though Fox is spending like $200 million dollars on it. So Ben Franklin: Electrocution String had about as much chance with me as me trying to get up a ski slope without the electricity required to make the tow-rope go. I’m sorry. I was trying to make an electricity joke there. Oh my god! This script has destroyed my sense of humor!
Where was I? Oh yeah. Ben Franklin suffers from a disastrously unclear plot. I have no idea what anybody’s goal is in this movie. I think the main goal was that Franklin and Washington had to find out who wrote the letter that framed Franklin. I don’t care how you spin that. That’s gotta be the most boring goal you could possibly give to a story like this. Bodhicat just said this the other day and I couldn’t agree more, but: Who cares??? Who cares if they find out who sent the letter? Are we the audience really on the edge of our seats saying, “Oh man, oh man, I *hope* they find out who sent that letter!?” No. Of course not. This is why it’s so important to make your goals strong. You have to give your heroes objectives that the audience desperately wants them to achieve, that there are real genuine stakes attached to, that have consequences. If Franklin and Washington never find out where this letter came from, what happens to them? As far as I can tell, nothing. So there are no consequences. And if there are no consequences to the main objective of the story, who cares?
I also thought that they could have done more with the humor here. It felt like the humor was either really cheap or really random, such as all of these historical figures swearing at each other, or our hero busting out a car that hasn’t been invented for 200 years yet. I suppose that’s okay for a younger audience in the 13 to 18 demo, and maybe that’s the demo they’re going after. But if you dig a little deeper and give just a little more effort, you can broaden that audience outside of high school. I mean we all know Washington as the most honest man in history. Why not make him a liar? Why not have him keep getting caught in his lies and be forced to cover them up with even more lies? I mean have some fun with history here.
The only shining moment in Franklin comes at the end. I had to admit that the whole electrocution string weapon stuff (which turned out to be Franklin’s kite experiment) was kind of genius. Unfortunately, it was the only moment in the script where I felt like the writer had actually tried, where he pushed himself to come up with something original. I don’t take any pride in disliking this so much but I just couldn’t get into it at all.
Script link: Benjamin Franklin: Electrocution String
[x] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Research your contests. Know what kind of scripts traditionally win in a contest before entering. If you look at all the past winners for Amazon, you’ll see that they’re all basically high concept ideas aimed at the 14-25 male demographic. So if you enter a script that’s set in the 17th-century about a man obsessed with studying tree bark called Dark Leaves, then shame on you when you’re surprised that it didn’t win. Enter that same script into the Nicholl, however, and you may have a shot. This is the age of the internet people. It doesn’t take much effort to figure out what the winners of every contest are. Do your homework so you don’t waste money (and yes, I know Amazon is free – but why enter a script and lose the rights to it if it has no chance of winning?).
