Genre: Survival
Premise: In one of the greatest survival stories ever told, Ernest Shackleton took a crew of 22 men into the Antarctic, only to lose his ship, and be tasked with finding a way back home through some of the harshest weather conditions on the planet.
About: We’re going back in the time machine here to 2001, when Columbia was getting ready to make this movie with Wolfgang Petersen. Peterson had recently made another big picture survival story in The Perfect Storm. Although Zallian put the final touches on the script, it was actually finely honed by a number of high-profile (and very expensive) writers at the time, including Dan Gilroy, Jeff Maguire, David Field, Ron Bass and “Perfect Storm” scribe Bill Witliff. Zallian won an Oscar for his adaptation of Schindler’s list and is one of the most expensive screenwriters in Hollywood.
Writer: Steven Zallian
Details: 130 pages 4/28/01 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).
Ron Bass and Steve Zallian don’t come cheap. So when you’re paying them, you’re all in. So why, then, did Endurance fall by the wayside? Why did all those penguins and killer whales swim away? Who knows? Peterson had already made The Perfect Storm, which had some similarities to this, so maybe he wanted to do something different. And then of course, you had September 11th that year, which threw just about every project into disarray. So maybe Endurance suffered the same fate as a lot of films in development: a confluence of bad timing and bad circumstances.
But…BUT! Maybe it was a lot simpler than that. Maybe the script wasn’t good enough. Endurance is one of those projects that is only going to make money if it’s in the Oscar race. So the project is more dependent on its script than, say, Twilight: Breaking My Brain. Let’s solve this mystery right now. Was Endurance any good?
It’s the early 1900s. Ernest Shackleton has already made one attempt at exploring the last unexplored continent, Antarctica. Unfortunately, he had to give up a mere 100 miles from shore. That’s the thing with Antarctica. Getting there is just as big of a battle as surviving there.
But what really chapped Shackleton’s ass was that soonafter, another explorer DID make it there, destroying his dream of making it into the history books.
The pompous and determined Shackleton is nothing if he’s not exploring though, so he eventually decides to go to Antarctica anyway. There’s still plenty of unexplored land to claim. To his shock though, nobody gives a shit about him or Antarctica anymore. Nobody cares about the second guy to walk on the moon. So a humiliated Shackleton must drum up his own funds for the expedition.
Money is so tight that he actually has to hire a ragtag team of explorers with little to no experience. Many people thought Shackleton was crazy for doing this but this becomes a recurring theme. Shackleton is so fearless that he IS crazy. This man would swim to Antarctica if he didn’t have a boat.
That craziness eventually dooms him though. As they’re nearing the continent, pushing through large packs of ice, their boat is crushed as if it were made out of twigs, and the entire crew scampers off onto the ice, now stranded in the middle of the sea with no one who knows where they are and the nearest help 1000 miles away. And remember, this is 1915. There were no cell phones around except for this one.
It turns out Shackleton’s team was stuck in a swirling sea that was taking them around in circles, a hundred mile long H20 merry-go-round. And the land they were on wasn’t really land. It was packs of ice, great big sheets that weren’t even connected. To put it layman’s terms, 999 out of 1000 exploring teams would’ve been doomed.
But this is why Shackleton is considered one of the three greatest explorers of all time. He never gives up. Ever. Even when all hope is lost and he doesn’t have an answer, he creates an answer. His idea was to get to Elephant Island, which was 600 miles away and had never been officially explored before because it was so inhospitable (google it if you want to see why). The thing was, nobody on his team knew how to actually get to Elephant Island, and certainly didn’t know how to do it with their location constantly changing due to their sea-land merry-go-round.
Eluding starvation, the coldest temperatures in the world, and killer whales that were willing to break through ice to snatch themselves a human popsicle, Shackleton’s pure determination somehow got them to the edge of the ice pack and with their three life rafts, they sailed through the most dangerous sea in the world to make it to Elephant Island.
From there, Shackleton took a smaller group of men on one of the life rafts to get to the only island within 1000 miles that had people on it, with the plan being to come back with a rescue team to get the others. That also turned out to be an impossible journey as all they had was a compass and a vague sense of direction to find this tiny speck in the middle of an endless universe of water. In the end though, they did it, and even managed to get back to the other men and save them. Somehow, some way, they did not lose a single man on the entire team.
The script for Endurance was a little like a night of karaoke. You don’t really want to go. Someone has to drag you into it. You’re immediately turned off by these people making idiots of themselves up on stage. Then you have a few drinks. It starts seeming not so ridiculous. Then somebody signs you up without you knowing. And the next thing you know you’re up on stage belting out Sonny and Cher’s “I’ve got you Babe” and having the time of your life.
That might be the worst analogy of all time but the point I’m trying to make is that even though Endurance ends well, it takes a long time to get going. You always want to get to the meat of the story – the main problem – by the end of act one, so around pages 25 to 30. The meat of this story has nothing to do with *going* to Antarctica. It has to do with what happens after their mission fails – once they become stranded. Unfortunately, that moment doesn’t come until the middle of the screenplay, so a full 60-70 pages in.
I had a lot of people complaining to me about that. It takes so long to get to the good stuff. The question then is, could you move the ship sinking up to page 30? Now the survival story starts at the end of the first act instead of the midpoint. You could, and now the entire second act can be about the escalating obstacles preventing them from surviving. But there is a trade-off. You lose the ability to set up many of the characters. You lose some time to set up the scenario. You risk things coming off as too rushed, and in the process, your script loses some depth. But I still think we’re waiting way too long to get to the good stuff so it might be the way to go (or maybe we can compromise – page 45?).
Luckily, once we do get to the good stuff, the script really picks up. What pulled me in was the sheer number of times that these guys should have died. I mean there are KILLER WHALES HUNTING THEM. Not those big nice cuddly whales you see in Pinocchio. But the kind that eat human flesh. They’re looking up at your shadows underneath the ice and then BURSTING through it to munch on you like a bag of potato chips. I’ve never personally encountered this problem, but I’d imagine it’d be difficult to survive.
And then there’s Shackleton’s pure craziness. When he doesn’t know how to get out of a situation, he just makes something up. He just points in a direction and says, we’ll go this way, because he knows that if people give up, if they have nowhere to go or no hope then they’ll die. And that is not an option for Shackleton. They should’ve died on that ice. They should’ve died on their way to Elephant Island. They should have died on their way to the second island (they should’ve never found it either). They should’ve died when they had to climb some of the biggest mountains in the world to get to the people on the other side of that island. After a while you just begin smiling and shaking your head at the ridiculousness of it all. “Did this really happen?” you ask yourself. I mean it’s too outrageous to imagine.
And the star of the script is obviously Shackleton. He just never gave up. I think that’s the big draw here. We’re always trying to come up with characters that audiences will love, and what’s more lovable than a hero who never gives up – who in the face of the most hopeless circumstances shrugs his shoulders and says, ‘No problem guys. We’ll just try this?’ We tend to like people we wish we could be – true heroes. And I don’t see anyone not wanting to be more like Shackleton after reading this story.
So this was a strange one. It started off slow. You weren’t really sure where it was going for awhile, and then it just had a great final 50 pages. I rarely get goosebumps at the end of screenplays but I got goosebumps at the end of this. So even though it’s not perfect, I would definitely recommend checking Endurance out.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: It’s especially important in stories like these to repeatedly remind the audience how impossible the upcoming situation is. The more impossible something seems, the more we’re going to want to see if our heroes can overcome it. So we’re reminded how inexperienced our crew is. We’re reminded that no boat has ever made it through this sea during this time of year before. We’re reminded that there is no possible way to get off these ice patches they’re on. We’re reminded that there’s no way to navigate a lifeboat through the most dangerous sea in the world. We’re reminded that there’s little to no chance they’ll find this tiny speck of an island in the middle of a vast ocean. By telling us these things before they happen, you create anxiety and anticipation in the audience. By being told it’s impossible, we want to see if they can overcome that impossibility.
Genre: Apocalypse/Western
Premise: At the turn of the 22nd century, a Federal Marshal tracks his best friend’s murderer through the Utah badlands to an outlaw stronghold. To bring his man to justice, he must first take out 30 of the most lawless fugitives in the land and their leader, a shadowy figure from his past.
About: This script finished on 2011’s Brit List, the United Kingdom’s answer to the Black List. I have to admit that many of the scripts I’ve read off of the Brit List haven’t been very good, but every once in a while I run into a sleeper. I’m hoping this is the sleeper. Burnthaven is being developed by the producer of Slumdog Millionaire.
Writer: Sebastian Foster
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’m going to admit to something that might get me kicked off my own website. I saw Once Upon A Time In The West for the first time this year. Yes, you heard me correctly. I only just saw one of the most important movies in all of history. Here’s how clueless I was about the film. I actually thought that Clint Eastwood was in it. For the first 30 minutes, I kept shifting impatiently. “When the hell is Clint going to show up??” Well, Carson, it turns out Clint Eastwood isn’t in the movie. Which just pissed me off. If I’m going to watch a Western, I at least want to watch one with the genre’s most famous star.
But then something happened. The movie started to grow on me. In a really weird way too. I became baffled not only at the sheer amount of silence in the film, but how well it worked for it. It seemed like everyone was having these really long dialogue exchanges BUT WITHOUT ANY DIALOGUE. And then the score. Easily one of the most haunting scores you’ve ever heard. If you haven’t seen this movie, rent it. I guarantee it is unlike ANY movie you’ve seen before. It just has this strange energy to it that I can’t describe in words. Check it out.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, Westerns aren’t my thing. So when I pick them up, I usually do so begrudgingly. That changed when I saw the premise of this script. A Western set in the future? After the apocalypse? That’s something I could get on board with.
Burnthaven starts off in the dried up Utah plains in the mid-2100s. We’re not told much about the past, but from the decaying airplanes and oil tankers you see strewn about, you have a pretty good idea of what’s led us to this point.
“This point” is a world trying to get back on its feet. Marshall Robert Hudson, an honest but tough lawman, is one of those people leading the charge. Hudson and his deputy, Rigsby, are tending to a crashed “stagecoach” (horses towing a gutted Greyhound bus) when one of the survivors, a squirrely man named Cander, shoots and kills Rigsby in order to preserve his stash of water filters, which are the equivalent of gold out here in the water starved plains.
Cander steals a horse and gallops away, and Hudson makes it his mission to find and bring him back to justice. The problem is a group of local bandits, led by the soulless Toby Meeks, a mean African American senior with his face half burnt off, gets to Cander first, taking an interest in his water filters. They head back to Meeks’ hideout in Burnthaven, and Hudson follows them there.
Needless to say, Meeks and his crew rule the town with fear and are used to getting what they want. But they’ve never met a man like Hudson before, who doesn’t take no for an answer. At first Hudson tries to get Cander back the old-fashioned way, by asking politely, but Meeks shoots that idea down real quick. It becomes clear, then, that the only way Hudson is going to get his man is if he kills each and every one of these bandits. So that’s exactly what he does.
What I liked about Burnthaven was that I could actually imagine a world like this in a post-World War 3 United States. This isn’t the imaginary universe of The Road Warrior, where people dress up in exposed football pads and colored Mohawks. This is just bad people taking advantage of a bad situation going up against the good guys. And that’s how things are when shit hits the fan. The bad dudes rise up and start ruling the world with terror. So I appreciated the realism in how Foster approached this world.
However, as the script went on, I began to realize that nothing about the past played into the story at all. In fact, minus the water filters and the Greyhound bus shell, you could’ve easily plopped this story down into 1857 and it would have been the exact same movie. That bummed me out even more than realizing Clint Eastwood wasn’t in Once upon a Time in the West. I mean what’s the point of setting a Western in the future if you’re not going to take advantage of the future setting?
There were some strange story choices here as well. Hudson loses his best friend to a guy who killed him more out of fear than any genuine “badness.” So the guy we’re going after isn’t really a bad person. This may seem unimportant at first glance, but if we don’t hate the guy we’re going after, we’re not really going to care much if our hero catches him or not. I mean look at my third favorite unproduced script, The Brigands Of Rattleborge. In it, we see the man we’re chasing rape and kill our hero’s wife. That’s someone I want my protagonist to catch.
On top of this, our hero doesn’t even want to do anything bad to the guy. He just wants to take him back to his town and give him a trial. In the meantime, he’s ruthlessly killing the 30 men who are holding him. So let me get this straight. He believes in justice and a trial for the man who killed his best friend, but anybody who gets in the way of that justice needs to be killed? Am I the only one who thinks this doesn’t make sense?
On top of all this, the script just becomes repetitive. Our main character is killing 30 people and he painstakingly counts them down one by one. After about the seventh kill, all I could think was, “I have to wait for 23 more of these??” And that’s exactly what happened. We just waited and waited as Hudson would kill these people one after another. Is there any way we could make it, like, 6 people?
I am willing to admit that this isn’t my genre. It seems like there’s a different set of rules in Westerns that I don’t get. Specifically, there seems to be this theme of honor that’s hit on in these films. So maybe Western fans like the fact that Hudson is trying to stay honorable in all of this instead of simply killing the guy who killed his best friend. I guess there’s some logic in that. But it still seems strange to me that he’s willing to kill 30 people to get that justice. Anyway, I couldn’t get into this one. I didn’t think it was very good.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: You have to commit to your plot points. If you don’t know or care about what’s going on, we won’t either. I’m referring specifically to the water filter plot. What do the water filters have to do with anything here besides initiating Cander’s killing of Rigsby? From what I understand, Meeks thought Cander had hidden a stash of them, which is why he doesn’t kill him right away. He wants to locate them first. But after that, Meeks just forgets about the filters. In fact, I don’t think they’re ever brought up again. What this tells me is that the writer didn’t fully think through this plot and is trying to fudge it. The biggest tell of this fudging is the fact that we don’t we see a single person in the entire movie THIRSTY!!! How can you expect us to commit to a storyline about needing water when nobody in the movie mentions a need for water??? Contrast this with the animated film Rango. Watch that movie and see how much emphasis is put on the lack of water and how that plays out throughout the movie. You don’t get to simply abandon major plot points in your movie because you don’t want to try and figure them out. That’s lazy and amateur hour.
That last thread was getting a little large. Let’s start a new one. Here are the updated standings. Voting (which is happening privately) ends in about 48 hours.
1) Stationary
2) C.L.O.T.H.
3) The Oswald Solution
4) The Fourth Horseman
5) Deep Burial (tie)
6) Nice Girls Don’t Kill (tie)
There are about 7 other scripts nipping at the heels of numbers 3, 4, 5, and 6 though. A close race after those first two.
In two weeks we’re having First Ten Pages Week, where I’ll review the first ten pages of five amateur scripts. I’ve been working with Scriptshadow Nation in the background to determine which scripts those will be. Due to the animated nature of the e-mails I’ve been receiving, I figured you guys would want a place to talk about these loglines so here they are. The 50 loglines being voted on. Feel free to tell us what you think.
GENRE: DRAMA
TITLE: THE OSWALD SOLUTION
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.
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.
GENRE: Comedy-drama
TITLE: Stationary
LOGLINE: A businessman begins seeing Post-It Notes that give him directions on how to improve his life
Genre: Comedy
Title: Abraca-Bastard
Logline: Chuck Cleaver finally gets the courage to ask out the girl of his dreams. But as soon as things start to heat up, her ex-boyfriend who’s also the Internet’s hottest new magician Dane St. Clair (think Criss Angel meets David Blaine with more eye liner) rolls into town, dead set on winning her back.
GENRE: Comedy
TITLE: It’s a Long Way to Tipperary
LOGLINE: When a wealthy Jewish man is buried in an Catholic cemetery
in Ireland, he comes back from the dead and forces a grave digger to
carry him to Tipperary, USA before he decomposes and his soul ends up
in hell (Sheol)
GENRE: Action/Thriller
TITLE: THE FOURTH HORSEMAN
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
Genre: Action Adventure
Title: The Wreckage
Logline: A wild young woman gets seduced into a high tech, storm chasing motorcycle gang that loots and murders under the chaotic veil created by natural disasters.
GENRE: Action/Adventure
TITLE: 10/31/87
LOGLINE: Worried that his three best friends are growing apart, a 13 year-old boy convinces them to go trick-or-treating one last time in an effort to break their town’s all-time trick-or-treating record and save their friendship.
GENRE: Comedy
TITLE: The Boys Are Back In Town
LOGLINE: When three friends return to college for a reunion to find their once glorious fraternity in shambles, they decide to stay to help bring the house back to prominence.
Genre: Thriller
Title: Deep Burial
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: 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.
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.
GENRE: Comedy
TITLE: Get Fired
LOGLINE: In order to afford his girlfriend’s dream house – before losing her to her rich ex-boyfriend – the too-modest Ben Douglas sets out to GET FIRED from his depressing cubicle-job so he can get his severance money.
GENRE: Action/Adventure/Sci-fi
TITLE: Bob and the Teleporting Backpack
LOGLINE: “A quirky physicist invents a teleporting backpack with the help of his wicked-smart female grad student. When the CIA and a group of Somalian terrorists find out, he and his family become their number one target.”
GENRE: Horror
TITLE: HUNTING GROUNDS
LOGLINE: Loggers and environmentalist must put aside their bitter differences and track down a creature which has staked a claim to their forest, and in that effort they learn nature’s number one rule: everything that eats, gets eaten.
GENRE: Action/Adventure
TITLE: The Resurrected
LOGLINE: When a hardboiled detective becomes a test subject for an ex-government scientist, he must cross the globe to save his own life and stop the protege of Nikola Tesla from conspiring with the Third Reich to unleash Tesla’s most devastating weapon.
GENRE: Sci-Fi, Thriller
TITLE: C.L.O.T.H.
LOGLINE: In a future Los Angeles where each citizen is free to commit one murder without repercussion, a programmer battles the agency in charge and unveils the true motive behind its creation.
GENRE: Sci-Fi / Coming-of-age / Romance
TITLE: Sagittarius & The Crab
LOGLINE: Until he can accept that he is no longer in love with the ex who broke his heart, a hopeless romantic is stuck in a time-loop with her that will repeat itself every two days and will do so as long as he still believes she’s ‘the one’.
GENRE: Comedy (R-rated)
TITLE: A Job
LOGLINE: A down on his luck young man gets a part-time job as a personal driver thru Craigslist, which leads to him becoming entangled with two rival drug organizations.
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.
GENRE: Action Comedy
TITLE: Escape From Aunt Barbara
LOGLINE: A grounded college kid is forced to spend the weekend with his Aunt he hasn’t seen in years, only to learn she’s a super-spy.
GENRE: Sci-Fi, Drama, Mystery
TITLE: A Stone Heart
LOGLINE: On the eve of the Third World War, a troubled soldier abandons the military to investigate one last lead regarding his father’s mysterious death.
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.
GENRE: Comedy
TITLE: The Ugly Sister
LOGLINE: An ugly girl gets the chance to live life as a beautiful woman when she discovers that she and her pretty fraternal twin sister switch bodies thanks to a Hello Kitty Lip gloss mishap. As they try to live each other’s lives, one is getting married and the other her PHD, while desperately seeking a remedy, their parents reveal a long-held family secret that makes the reversal impossible.
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.
GENRE: Dramatic Horror
TITLE: The Lost Colony
LOGLINE: A Cartographer and his wife buy an ancient beach house in the exact location the Lost Colonists of Roanoke Island disappeared 400 years ago. They quickly experience the violent and horrible truth behind it – and they’re next!
GENRE: Quirky Drama / Romance
TITLE: Plurally Inclined
LOGLINE: After one of her alter-egos seduces the guy she’s been crushing on, a shy college student with multiple personalities struggles to rid herself of her meddlesome headmates and find love on her own.
Genre: Action
Title: Hail Mary
Logline: A reformed hitwoman must return to the world of bullets and bloodshed she left behind, and take on the organization she helped build, in order to avenge the death of her younger sister
GENRE: Science fiction/thriller
TITLE: FLYOVER COUNTRY
LOGLINE: An airliner is forced down in the dreaded “Blue Zone”: the primitive interior of America, now inhabited by predatory mutants. The survivors must fight their way out, not realizing that they, in turn, have become subjects of a genetic experiment .
Genre: Action Comedy
Title: Nice Girls Don’t Kill
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.
GENRE: Sci-Fi, Action-Adventure
TITLE: Monster World
LOGLINE: 300 years after a global tectonic catastrophe, two men and one fish travel around watery Earth ruled by giant sea monsters looking for a missing female scientist — who’s kidnapped by the world’s largest, most dangerous beast.
TITLE: Ron
GENRE: Drama/Horror
LOGLINE: The loneliest man in the world finds keeping an escaped zombie for company is better than stewing in his own solitude but how long can he keep the zombie a secret?
GENRE: Supernatural/Comedy
TITLE: SORHORRITY
LOGLINE: Four Sorority pledges accidentally burn down their house and with only a week before the “Best Home on the Row” competition, they’re forced to renovate the Haunted House at the end of the street.
GENRE: Horror
TITLE: Fetalgeist
LOGLINE: A pro-life student group finds itself trapped inside a long since abandoned yet very much haunted abortion clinic.
GENRE: Drama/Thriller
TITLE: The Accidental Lawyer
LOGLINE: During his first week on the job at a prestigious law firm, a lazy unmotivated associate uncovers a deadly secret involving the firm’s largest client, which just happens to be his father’s multi-billion dollar company.
GENRE: Sci-Fi
TITLE: On This Day In History
LOGLINE: History knows him by his alias, D.B. Cooper – the only person to ever successfully highjack a commercial airliner – but whether history will know him as someone else – depends on whether he can prevent terrorists from highjacking four planes on a fateful September day in 2001?
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.
GENRE: Science-fiction thriller
TITLE: Coyote
LOGLINE: As the Mexican drug war spreads north, a desperate US government unleashes a covert team of militarized vampires to hunt down all illegal border crossers. Now, a dutiful Arizona Border Agent caught in the crossfire is forced to follow her conscience and ferry a young migrant to safety before they’re both hunted down and bled dry.
GENRE: Horror/Thriller
TITLE:Tainted
LOGLINE: When a wayward teen discovers her mother was murdered by a cult 18 years ago, she finds herself in a race to learn the truth before she becomes their next sacrifice.
GENRE: Action/Thriller
TITLE: Freedom, N.H.
LOGLINE: When a married couple desperate to escape their mysterious past witness a roadside murder, they must rely on their own dangerous skills and unstable new alliances to survive an explosive small town war.
GENRE: Thriller
TITLE: Please Be My Predator
LOGLINE: A fugitive President takes refuge in a family’s farm, demanding they care for him until his military supporters arrive, but with a reward for his capture the family will do whatver it takes to cash in.
GENRE: supernatural thriller
TITLE: THE GHOST MACHINE
LOGLINE: When Thomas Edison and his young assistant investigate a haunted mansion, they must use his secret ghost machine to unravel an age-old mystery before they fall prey to a sinister entity.
GENRE: Family
TITLE: Puppy Kindergarten
LOGLINE: After a recently divorced dad adopts a puppy to win his kids’ affections, his competitive neighbor also adopts a puppy, igniting a feud when they enroll in the same Puppy Kindergarten class.
Genre: Commercial Comedy
Title: Psychic Hotline
Logline: A rag-tag group of small-town friends set out to kidnap a New York City psychic they believe wrongly predicted in-group infidelity.
GENRE: Western/Thriller
TITLE: The Wake
LOGLINE: After seven shadowy men kill him and kidnap his wife, a volatile sheriff strikes a deal with the Devil to return to Earth and mete out revenge – only to find himself facing down his own evils as he discovers that justice isn’t as straightforward as he thought.
GENRE: drama/mystery/horror-lite
TITLE: Resurrection
LOGLINE: A couple’s deteriorating marriage is further tested by the arrival of a mysterious young boy who bears a strong resemblance to their long-lost son.
GENRE: COMEDY / DRAMA
TITLE: ONE LAST SHOT
LOGLINE: Frank Donnelly is living the dream: he’s a playboy running a message parlor offering “full service” treatment for his beautiful clients. All is well until his world comes crashing down when he learns he has a rare disorder – if he has sex one more time – he will die!
GENRE: Adventure
TITLE: Untitled Sea Monster Movie
LOGLINE: A mathematician with a phobia of the sea and a marine biologist with something to prove have to travel into a treacherous stretch of the Atlantic Ocean to uncover why entire ships are being lost to rogue waves and the population of blue whales are going extinct, where they realise that none of their theories or models could predict the cause had come from the age-old depths of the ocean itself.
GENRE: Romantic comedy
TITLE: License to Carry
LOGLINE: A child-averse pastry chef must dissuade his fiancée from having children in order to save their relationship.
GENRE: Dark Comedy
TITLE: Eugene’s Hotline
LOGLINE: After his best friend seemingly commits suicide, a self-centered pleasure hound convinces his equally selfish friends to start a depression hotline … little do they know, they’re entering a world of deadly competition.
GENRE: Comedy
TITLE: Why I Hate Dogs, A Love Story
LOGLINE: The failed son and only child of a wealthy family, comes home after his father passes and is forced take care of the family dog to get his inheritance.
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
GENRE: Drama
TITLE: Untitled Drama
LOGLINE: A troubled Cupid-like figure gets snared in a love triangle with the woman he meant to set up.
P.S. If you are one of the many jilted and angry readers who didn’t get picked and sent me an e-mail about it, feel free to post your logline here and either get your revenge (“Carson, why didn’t you pick this??”) or be informed by the savvy Scriptshadow Commenters on why it didn’t make the cut.
Genre: Thriller
Premise: (from writer) When Chanley Hightower hires an ex-con to kill his cheating wife, he doesn’t count on the ex-con sub-contracting the hit and his old-friend-turned-enemy the Chief of Police taking a sudden interest in the health of his marriage. Hightower’s a capable man, but this is a lot of shit to shovel.
About: 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: Will Alexander
Details: 113 pages
Will has been pushing HARD for me to review his script, making all sorts of claims to its awesomeness, saying it was better than Casablanca and Chinatown combined. He claimed it was going to win him an Oscar and that if I didn’t read it, I would be missing out an opportunity to discover the first classic film of the 21st century.
I’m just kidding around Will. No everyone, Will never said those things. But he definitely had confidence in his script, believing it was at least better than most of the stuff reviewed on Amateur Friday. So let’s take a look and see if he’s right.
Hightower opens up with Johnny Wayne Stubb and Deesa Hightower, both 26 years old, having sex. We pull away to see that this is happening on a closed circuit television which Dessa’s husband, Chanley Hightower, is watching. Needless to say, Hightower isn’t happy with this development, especially since it seems more like lovemaking than fucking. It appears that this relationship is real. And that means he and Deesa are on the outs.
Well, Hightower doesn’t plan on going quietly. In fact, he’s going to take care of this the old fashioned way: hire someone to kill his wife. So he locates some out-of-work stooge, a local named Chigger, to kill his wife for 50 grand. Since Hightower is the richest man in town by a country mile, 50 grand is a drop in the town well.
In the meantime, we meet Police Chief Garrison McElrath, a man who grew up with Hightower and apparently has a bit of history with the millionaire. That history is a complicated one and from their first interaction, we can tell there’s plenty of tension between the two.
In addition to wanting to kill his wife, Hightower also wants to buy some property off her. You see, there’s only one building in the entire town that he doesn’t own, and that property is hers. He ruthlessly attempts to get her to sign a deed transferring the building over to him, but she steadfastly refuses.
Hightower’s hitman, Chigger, also turns out to be a pretty lousy choice. Not only is he prancing around talking WAY too much, but he decides it’d be much safer to have someone ELSE do the hit, and therefore subcontracts the assassination to some drug dealer, who in turn (I believe) subcontracts it out to some druggy. Needless to say, the hit is starting to look less and less like a sure thing.
All this talk makes the chief suspicious and he heads over to the Hightower mansion to ask him what’s up. Once Hightower realizes McElrath is on to him, he makes the snap decision to kill him. And thus begins a mad dash to dispose of the body – not an easy task with the entire town now looking for the missing chief.
In the meantime, Deesa is planning to run away with Johnny Wayne, and we’re wondering if that’s going to happen before whoever the hell ends up as the hitman comes to kill her. And Hightower also has to settle one last secret with the mysterious and sexy Chevelle, a waitress at the local diner who clearly has some tangled past with Daddy Warbucks.
Hightower reminded me of a book in a lot of ways, with its numerous characters and intricate plot. Because of that, Will has created his own biggest hurdle: a complicated story. The more complicated your story is, the better a writer you have to be. We were just talking about this yesterday. We need to be CLEAR about what’s going on in order to stay interested. And the more stuff you PACK IN to your script, the harder it is to stay clear. So I guess the question is, did Will bite off more than he could chew?
Sort of. I say sort of because he ALMOST pulled it off. You see, I hadn’t read this logline in three months (since it was originally sent to me). So all I had to go on was the story as written, not the logline you read above.
And about a third of the way through, Deesa refers to Hightower as “Daddy.” All of a sudden, I was confused. “Wait a minute,” I thought. “Deesa is the daughter of Hightower??” I thought she was his wife. But the more I thought about it, the more it actually made sense. First, they never acted like husband and wife – I mean not even in a “We’re pretending to look like husband-and-wife to the rest of the world,” sort of way. They only saw each other in passing, which indicated more of a father-daughter relationship. There was also the hefty age difference. So I went back and re-read the opening scene to see if I misunderstood it. It clearly said Deesa was his wife. Okay, what’s going on here? Is she the daughter or is she the wife? In the end, I decided that “Daddy” was being used sarcastically. But it took me 15 full minutes to solve that mystery when it could’ve been solved in a second with a simple “sarcastic” in parentheticals or by putting “Daddy” in quotes. I’m willing to accept this as my fault, but remember, when you write extremely intricate plots with lots of characters, you’re going to run into this kind of problem. The reader is tasked with sorting out a lot of information. If you’re not clear on every single piece, they can easily get lost in the forest.
Another thing that confused me was the whole obsession Hightower had with this building he didn’t own. I couldn’t understand why he gave a shit about it or what it had to do with anything. But what really baffled me was why he couldn’t get a building from his own wife. First of all, since they’re married, don’t they both own the property? Once you get married to someone, isn’t all your property split evenly? If not, why wouldn’t his wife have given him the property? Maybe not now but earlier, when they were happy? Either way, there were no clear stakes (as I could tell) to owning this place so I just didn’t care about it.
Also, there was this strange subplot about Hightower fucking high school girls. A fairly large chunk of the story is dedicated to it and yet it had absolutely nothing to do with the plot. If you’re going to write an extremely complicated story, the last thing you want to include is an incidental storyline. The same could be said about the Chevelle subplot. It was more story relevant than the statutory rape stuff, but it ultimately had nothing to do with the present story, and since you already have a ton of more relevant balls you’re juggling, why confuse things by adding another?
Luckily, once Hightower hit the midway point, it started to rebound. Instead of drowning itself in multiple story threads, the script became more about the present and the actions our characters were taking to survive. A particular highlight was Hightower having to get rid of the Sheriff’s body as more and more townspeople closed in on him. It was nice to simply watch a tension-filled sequence unfold instead of having to remember 15 different things at once. A lot of that energy continued through the second half because Will didn’t have to spend any more time setting things up. All of his setups had already been taken care of.
I also thought the dialogue was pretty good here. Here’s an exchange Hightower has with Chigger, after he’s seen him chatting with too many people around town. “I don’t give a merry shit you tell me you “ain’t said nothing;” you’re a crook and a mental deficient. Talking to me, then my wife – IN FRONT OF THE FUCKING CHIEF OF GODDAMN POLICE – tells a story to a man like him regardless of whatever loose stool does or does not spew from that rancid hole in your face. Now, you fuck up again—“ CHIGGER: “—I just seen your truck there, I got some questions about—“ HIGHTOWER: “—I’ll kill you. I will kill you.” Hey man, I know good dialogue is subjective, but I was pretty darned impressed with that, as I was with most of the dialogue here.
I think Hightower is a screenplay worth pursuing. But it needs some work. Strip away the stuff that doesn’t matter. Chevelle adds context but not enough to warrant her inclusion. And please, get rid of the high school stuff unless you can make it more story-relevant. Hope you guys can give Will some more ideas. If I were working at a production company, I’d pass on the script in its current state, but I’d definitely recommend the writer for future submissions.
Script Link: Hightower
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: “Kick the dog.” Just like you want to give your hero a “save the cat” moment so we love him, you want to give your villain a “kick the dog” moment so we hate him. But twisting kittens heads off? Come on. Guys, no animal cruelty in your scripts. Nobody likes animal cruelty. Even if you only include it to make us hate your bad guy, we’re still focusing more on you twisting the kitten’s head off than we are getting angry at your villain for doing it. Besides, you can be so much more creative than that.
