Genre: Thriller
Premise: Whilst performing an autopsy, a forensic pathologist suspects the body is from the future on a failed mission to prevent a world catastrophe. He must now decide whether to continue the mission, a task that requires bombing a commercial airliner on a transatlantic flight.
Why You Should Read: Money problems. Custody battles. Drinking on the job. A penchant for violence. 48 Hour Token is a high concept thriller that demands a common but deeply flawed man to prevent a world catastrophe whilst fighting to keep his sanity. To save the world, it’s usually expected you must don the spandex to fight the battle between good and evil. In the real world, the protagonists often come with baggage and the room for failure is non existent. — This isn’t a blind submission. In preparation for this Amateur Offerings, I have utilised several coverage services that most followers of this website would be familiar with. 48 Hour Token has been labelled a ‘well constructed thriller’ with ‘multiple, diverse elements’ whilst containing ‘realistic dialogue for the genre’.
Writer: Branko Maksic
Details: 115 pages

Leo?

I always like Branko’s insights in the comments section so I’m excited to see what he has in store for us. Let’s check it out…

41 year old Patrick Crawley is an alcoholic pathologist who’s going through a messy divorce. After a particularly nasty argument with his ex-wife, Esmeralda, he goes to determine the cause of death of his latest dead body, only to find a bloated corpse that was discovered in the sea with its face smashed in. Yummy. While poking around, Patrick finds a key for a safe deposit box in the dead dude’s stomach!

Hoping by some miracle this key will lead to cash that will nab him the best lawyer in town (which will allow him to get custody of his daughter), Patrick instead gets a USB drive and two tokens. He plugs the drive into his computer to find a movie file where some woman claiming to be from the future is talking about saving the world from a terrorist attack. Feeling its his civic duty to find out more, he seeks this woman out, but she ends up dead.

Soon after, Patrick is cornered by the Chinese, who administer a toxin that paralyzes his body but not his other senses. Patrick is carried into a hotel room where a woman performs fellatio on him to secure his sperm, and then tells him that if he continues to snoop around, they’re going to kill his daughter and insert the semen into her rectum to make it look like he assaulted and killed her. Not nice people these terrorists.

Patrick ignores this warning for some reason, possibly because he’s beginning to believe that mankind is truly in danger. The Chinese’s plan seems to revolve around having a doctor carry a super-toxin on a flight to America and then letting it free so that everyone in America dies. Somehow, Patrick has to stop that from happening. Unfortunately, he finds out that he was duped and the doctor is a decoy. A separate woman with the real toxin is on a different flight that has already left for America.

Luckily, Patrick gains access to a time machine that allows him to go back in time and try again. And this time he has the help of Past Patrick, allowing the two to divide and conquer. Will they stop the decimation of America in time? Or is this all happening whether they succeed at their plan or not?

(A quick apology to Branko if I missed anything here. The plot was a little hard to follow at times)

This is an interesting one because Branko clearly knows what he’s doing. He knows how to hook us with a dead body teaser. He knows that that’s going to give him time to thoughtfully introduce his characters. His first scene with our lead, Patrick, is packed with conflict, like all good scenes should be. We get to see Patrick at his job, allowing us to grow closer to him. And before we get bored, Branko introduces a mystery – a key inside the body. While we eagerly await that mystery box to be opened, Branko uses the time to develop Patrick even more. We see him interacting with his daughter. We see him talking with his dead dad at the cemetery. If this were a test on writing first acts, Branko would ace it.

Yet something was bothering me and I couldn’t figure out what it was.

Then it hit me.

How you introduce your hero is one of the most important scenes in a script. Some might argue it’s THE most important. The reason for this is that the first scene has a huge impact on how we view that character. Therefore, if we don’t like the hero in that first scene, it doesn’t matter if you ace the first act test. A part of us checked out after that intro. And that’s where the problem was here.

Patrick is introduced as an angry aggressive person. He’s saying a lot of bad things to his ex-wife. He admits to clocking her in the face for cheating on him. While movies are all about exploring character flaws, anger is a tricky one. It’s hard to identify with someone when our first impression of them is pure rage. I mean, think about if you met someone in real life who’s going off on some angry tirade. Would you be like, “Hey dude, what are you doing later? Want to hang out?” Because that’s what you’re asking us to do here. Hang out with Angry Yelling Man for the next two hours. I would never say something’s impossible. But I was never 100% Team Patrick in this script, and I think meeting him this way was why.

But even that wasn’t the whole reason. There was something else bothering me about the first act so I went back and reread it. Eventually, I figured it out. The storytelling was too technical. You could see the writer’s mind at work in each scene. “This is the scene where I set up what he does for a living.” “This is the scene where we show he loves his kid more than anything.” There wasn’t enough flow. It didn’t feel organic enough.

I know Branko is going to kill me for this comparison, but if you read the beginning of Juno, you’re not really aware that a movie is being set up. We feel like we’re organically following this girl around during a particularly disruptive time in her life. I don’t want to confuse Branko by pretending that Juno and 48 Hour Token are anything alike. However, I think he could benefit from a looser more organic storytelling style and not this mathematical dissection of scenes where it’s too obvious what he’s doing. Just because a scene passes the Screenwriting 101 Test doesn’t mean it’s connecting emotionally with the audience.

Despite all this, I still felt the logline teased some juicy ideas, particularly the stuff with the plane, so I was confused when I got to page 35 and we still weren’t on the plane. And then page 45 and we still weren’t on the plane. And then the halfway point passed and we still weren’t on the plane. They keep talking about a plane. Why aren’t we on a plane?

At a certain point, I realized we weren’t getting on that plane, and once I realized that, I had a hard time grasping what kind of movie I was watching. It didn’t seem to fit inside of any known template. Some people will argue that this is a good thing. If a movie isn’t fitting inside a template, it’s original! You’re not going to know what happens next! And while that’s a valid argument, it all depends on if you’re actually enjoying the ride. I wouldn’t say I WASN’T enjoying the ride here. But I was only casually invested.

I suppose if I were to pitch this, I might call it a sci-fi version of Chinatown. And if you’re reading it through that lens, you might enjoy it. But for me I was too often lost in this story. Even though there was a clear goal (stop the world-ending killer virus), the plot points seemed to arrive in a way that was at odds with the plot. Our Chinese super-villains didn’t show up until the midpoint. Our time-travel didn’t get used until the final act. The plane, which is the whole point of the story, doesn’t arrive until the very very end. If you were a fly on my wall while I was reading this, you would’ve repeatedly heard me say, “Earlier.” “Earlier.” “Earlier.” I wanted everything to happen earlier.

Having now read the script, I would advise Branko to take the plane out of the logline. Just make clear that it’s a whodunnit with a sci-fi time travel twist. At least this way, you won’t have anyone going in thinking this is a plane thriller then be disappointed that it’s a traditional sci-fi noir procedural.

Curious to see what others thought. Share your reviews in the comments section!

Script link: 48 Hour Token

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

What I learned: Stay away from “try-hard” descriptions. They always take readers out of the story. When it comes to description, it’s better to be clear than clever. One character here is described as, “Possesses skin so healthy that it radiates its own moral laws.” Another one is described as, “A hummingbird of naked nerve endings.” Neither of these really make sense.

So I watched that Blurry Man Twilight Zone episode you guys recommended last night and now I’m furious with you. That episode was the definition of a “biding time until the twist” script. They literally hit the same beat 50 times in a row. And the big twist wasn’t even a twist. It was more of a shocker. Anyway, you now owe me a suggestion. I’m going to check out at least one Black Mirror episode this weekend. If you see them, let me know which one it should be. And for everyone else – IT’S TIME FOR THE SCREENPLAY SHOWDOWN!!!

If you haven’t played Amateur Showdown before, it’s a cut throat single weekend screenplay tournament where the scripts have been vetted from a pile of hundreds to be featured here, for your entertainment. It’s up to you to read as much of each script as you can, then vote for your favorite in the comments section. Whoever receives the most votes by Sunday 11:59pm Pacific Time gets a review next Friday. If you’d like to submit your own script to compete in a future Amateur Showdown, send a PDF of your script to carsonreeves3@gmail.com with the title, genre, logline, and why you think your script should get a shot.

Good luck!

Title: An Invitation to You
Genre: Dark Comedy
Logline: A bitter empty-nester begrudgingly heads to a secluded resort for solo travelers and is introduced to herself — literally. Awkward dislike gives way to all out warfare when she discovers that only one version of herself will leave at the end of the weekend.
Why You Should Read: The dramatic question at the heart of this story is “Can/should I love myself as I am?” I think it’s a relevant question, because people suck. I know I let myself down all the time. When they first meet themselves, some of the characters in this story detest themselves. Others depress themselves. And others are so infatuated with themselves that they jump right into the sack. I honestly don’t know how I would react if I met myself, which has been part of the fun of writing this story — I get to inhabit every possibility.

One of the big challenges of this story has been figuring out how to present six pairs of “doubles” in a way that isn’t infuriating for the reader (I’m dying to read Jordan Peele’s script for US to see how he did it). I hope I’ve succeeded, but I am very open to feedback!

Also, the action lines of this script aren’t written in first person, so hopefully it will piss fewer people off than my last AOW script. :)

Title: Once Upon a Time in La Mancha
Genre: Western/Comedy
Logline: An old rancher obsessed with dime novels and cowboy stories heads West with his trusting farmhand to offer his own brand of unneeded justice.
Why You Should Read: A Western retelling of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, I wanted to translate the chivalric ideals the eponymous character had 400 years ago to a more American and recent setting, transporting the hapless knight near the Mexican-American border to a time when the mythical Old West was dying. Hope you read and enjoy my interpretation!

Title: THE KEEPERS OF THE CUP
Genre: Action/Comedy
Logline: Two die-hard hockey fans thwart a Russian terrorist attack by stealing the Stanley Cup and travel across North America to deliver it in time for Game 7… It’s GET HIM TO THE GREEK meets CELTIC PRIDE.
Why You Should Read: What if I told you amidst a world of boozing, fighting, trash-talking and hockey, there were two men who were the calm within the storm? And what if I told you that these two men were at the center of an outrageously funny story? Would you believe me? Would you believe them? Now if you’re looking for a script with award winning credentials, this won’t be for you. It has too much personality. (Though it did get me named a Universal Pictures Emerging Writers Fellowship finalist if that means anything. (It doesn’t.)) But if you are looking to be entertained, to laugh, and to wonder how on Earth two life-long best friends at the breaking point of their friendship find themselves on the run from Russian terrorists with none other than THE STANLEY CUP, then this is for you. No! This is meant for you. This is the fictional, true story of how these two friends assume the role of “Keepers of the Cup,” a real job where employees of the NHL guard the NHL the legendary Stanley Cup with their lives 365 days a year. This is a story about friendship, this is a story about duty, this is a story about country, and this is a story about becoming the best version of you. This is “The Keepers of The Cup.” I hope you enjoy. If you don’t, well, the Stanley Cup Finals are on.

Title: 48 Hour Token
Genre: Thriller
Logline: Whilst performing an autopsy, a forensic pathologist suspects the body is from the future on a failed mission to prevent a world catastrophe. He must now decide whether to continue the mission, a task that requires bombing a commercial airliner on a transatlantic flight.
Why You Should Read: Money problems. Custody battles. Drinking on the job. A penchant for violence. 48 Hour Token is a high concept thriller that demands a common but deeply flawed man to prevent a world catastrophe whilst fighting to keep his sanity. To save the world, it’s usually expected you must don the spandex to fight the battle between good and evil. In the real world, the protagonists often come with baggage and the room for failure is non existent.

This isn’t a blind submission. In preparation for this Amateur Offerings, I have utilised several coverage services that most followers of this website would be familiar with. 48 Hour Token has been labelled a ‘well constructed thriller’ with ‘multiple, diverse elements’ whilst containing ‘realistic dialogue for the genre’.

Title: Sib
Genre: Psychological thriller
Logline: A young bride’s dream wedding descends into a nightmare after her estranged sister shows up and desperately tries to convince her that the charming groom is actually a sadistic psychopath.
Why You Should Read: One of my previous scripts, an hour long pilot, was optioned to a successful producer out in LA. The project quickly fell into limbo though, so I decided to refocus on my first love of writing features.

My next project, a horror/dark comedy, was chosen to compete in an ‘amateur offerings’ round a few months back, where it ended up finishing in second place. This was slightly heartbreaking but it definitely gave me inspiration to finish up this current project and resubmit, in hopes of potentially landing a review from Carson this time around.

With ‘Sib’, I really aimed to write a concise and continuously moving story. Clocking in at 93 pages, it’s a quick read. I drew inspiration from some of my favorite filmmakers such as Darren Aronofsky and Lars Von Trier, and tried to take the story to some dark and strange places, culminating in an unsettling and hopefully unexpected third act. I’d appreciate the opportunity to participate in another amateur showdown, everyone’s feedback last time was very insightful. Thanks for your time!

Genre: Thriller
Premise: A film school dropout with a talent for producing AI-generated “deepfake” videos is caught in a global conspiracy when he receives a disturbing commission from a mysterious online stranger.
Why You Should Read: If you haven’t yet seen deepfakes in the news, you will. This emerging AI-powered technology lets anyone with an average gaming PC churn out eerily lifelike fake videos of people. The social and political implications of this technology are huge, and it has politicians, generals, artists, and celebrities freaking out. Someone is going to make a movie about deepfakes. I hope it’s this one, and I think my background in tech makes for a story that’s plausible and well-researched while still being thrilling, unpredictable, and character-driven.
Writer: Alex Payne
Details: 115 pages

I’ve always said that the only original stories left to tell are the ones that incorporate new technology. I mean, do you really think you’re going to find some new angle on the zombie genre? Or the romantic comedy? Or an action-adventure? Or biopic? People have been telling these stories for decades – arguably centuries. Which means high-profile technology that nobody expected to exist (because if it did, it would’ve already been written about) is the last opportunity to write something fresh (incidentally, this is why “voice” is valued so highly in the industry. With every story already being told, the only way to make a story stand out is via the unique way in which its told). However, just because you’re writing about something new doesn’t mean you can’t descend into tired storytelling tropes. That’s what I’m always worried about when I see a script like this. Is the flashy subject matter a smokescreen for what’s going to be a traditional thriller? I hope not!

22 year old Mo James is essentially squatting in a New York City apartment, promising his friend of a friend landlord that he knows he’s missed the rent the last three months but he promises he’ll have the money soon. Mo’s not the only one in his family having money problems. His once successful father is about to lose his home and business if he doesn’t come into some dough fast.

Mo heads to the dark web hoping to find a job that will pay for all this. Oh yeah, Mo is a deep faker. He takes home porno videos and fits celebrity heads on the girls’ bodies. There ain’t enough money in it for a New York City lifestyle, though, so Mo is desperate to find something that pays more. That’s when he comes across a 1.3 million dollar deep fake job. He thinks it’s fake, but after a little research, he learns the client is legit.

Mo accepts the job but when he receives the video, he realizes why it pays so much. In it, a militant Asian woman is speaking to an entire crowd of people, trying to rile them up. Mo’s job is to deepfake every single face in the crowd! There’s no way he’s going to be able to pull this off by himself, so he contacts his sister who has a relationship with a high profile transgendered hacker named Darby. Darby thinks what Mo does for a living is disgusting but decides to help him anyway.

As Darby tries to solve the mass-deepfaking algorithm, he becomes curious who hired Mo and suggests they find out. This leads the two on a wild goose chase around town as they track down remote computer servers connected to other remote computer servers that connect back to where the client actually lives. Of course, when the client finds out that they’re snooping, they try to kill Mo and Darby. It will now be up to them to expose the bad guys before they perish under mysterious circumstances.

I can see why this script won Amateur Showdown last week.

It has a really strong first 10 pages, which is what most voters base their vote on. If I would’ve read the first 10, I would’ve voted on Deepfake as well. What’s most impressive is the knowledge the writer has, not just in regards to this subject matter, but with computers in general.

However, little red flags began popping up that the strong start would be temporary. And I want to make clear that I’m not out there actively searching for these flags. They pop up subconsciously. I’ve read so many scripts at this point and have become so aware of patterns that when they happen, a natural, “uh oh, I’ve been here before” warning pops into my brain, like a low altitude warning on a jetliner.

The first flag is that everybody in this script is 23 years old (or 21, or 22, or 24). Why is this a flag? Because, in my experience, it means that’s how old the writer is. And while 23 year old writers can be extremely talented, they haven’t failed through enough screenplay experiences yet to truly understand what works and what doesn’t. More specially, they’re weak with structure and struggle mightily with second acts.

On top of this, while their voice can be exceptional, they often don’t have the life experience to convincingly portray grown-uphood. And this won’t matter as much if you’re writing, say, a romantic comedy about two 23 year olds. But when you’re bringing in giant organizations and global firms and military stuff and the real job world, a lot of young writers don’t know that world well, which results in them, well, ’deepfaking’ them (using approximations based on previous movies and TV shows they’ve seen). You can feel that as a reader. It’s no different than George Lucas writing about love. Him not knowing that world is why we get Anakin and Padme rolling around in waterfalls in Attack of the Clones.

Indeed, those are the two main problems here. On the structural front, the second act gets messier and messier. It feels like the characters are running around with their heads cut off. It feels like the story is running around with its head cut off. It feels like the writer is struggling to keep this thing on the rails. Half the time, I didn’t even know what Mo and Darby were trying to do! It seemed like they wanted to find out who the client was, but all I kept thinking was, “Why??” Cause they’re curious? Should 50 pages of a script be driven by two characters’ curiosity?

And then there was the video itself. The writer never gave us a convincing reason to care about this militant woman talking to a group of admirers. In fact, I still don’t know what the point of deepfaking the crowd was. In the end, the video’s lack of substance was confirmed when we were told it was some random terrorist in some random part of the world attempting to do some vague “bad” thing. Here’s a question writers need to ask more often. Why should we care? Why in the world do I, the reader, care that some fringe terrorist group is going to do some fringe terrorist act 10,000 miles away from my existence? Change number one for this script needs to be to tie it in to where our characters are actually located. The terrorist act needs to affect New York.

I hate to pile on, but every 10 pages was worse than the previous 10 pages. And that happens A LOT(!!!) with young writers. They nail the first act and then they give what they feel is a decent exploration of the idea going forward. DECENT ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH. Let me give you an example. Late in the script, Darby and Mo get into a fight about Mo’s deepfaking job, specifically the fact that he’s taking these girls and putting celebrity heads on them. “Do you get their consent!?” he hells at Mo. “Do you get their consent!?” It’s not that Darby’s concerns aren’t valid. But this isn’t what the story is about!!! It wasn’t about how Mo deepfaked an innocent girl and the rest of the movie is the fallout from that situation. They’re battling an organization that sends out drones that fire missiles at them! Who cares about the moral consequences of what Mo does at this point? You have to understand your theme and what you’re actually trying to say when you’re writing scenes like this. Otherwise, it feels like a grab bag of drama, a writer desperately looking for any conflict he can latch onto.

Personally, I think Alex approached this story from the wrong angle. Late in the script, Mo threatens to frame a journalist he dislikes by deepfaking their face onto an incriminating video. “That’s not me,” the journalist says. “I’ll prove it’s fake. I’m a reporter. People trust us.” That should’ve been your theme. Fake news. Journalists using this deepfake technology to back up their own narratives. Have a journalist hire Mo to deepfake a video that ends up going viral and changing the political landscape of the country. Sort of like the next step up from what Louis Bloom was doing in Nightcrawler. I don’t see how anyone’s going to get excited about a deepfake story that’s centered around an unknown province in India.

Script link: Deepfake

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

What I learned: Last Second Villain Syndrome never works – We literally meet our villain in the final scene of the script. Come on! You either have to introduce the villain earlier or one of your good characters has to turn.

What I learned 2: Make things hard for your hero. Not easy. Especially when it comes to stakes. Mo’s landlord is a friend of a friend who’s SUPER understanding that Mo is late with his rent. That’s not interesting at all. Make it someone Mo doesn’t know. Make him scarier. And make him demand money now, not whenever it’s convenient.

My friends, it’s going to be a loooooong weekend. That’s right. It’s Memorial Day this Monday. Which means no Scriptshadow until TUESDAY!! How are you going to survive? No idea. But Tuesday I will be reviewing the Netflix movie, “The Perfection.” I heard it was totally bonkers and that you need to go into it knowing nothing. So that’s what I’m going to do. Oh, and you must watch it while eating grilled hot dogs if you want to participate in the discussion. That’s Scriptshadow law.

It’s going to be a fun weekend as I’ve included lots of familiar faces. Should make for a lively discussion.

If you haven’t played Amateur Showdown before, it’s a cut throat single weekend screenplay tournament where the scripts have been vetted from a pile of hundreds to be featured here, for your entertainment. It’s up to you to read as much of each script as you can, then vote for your favorite in the comments section. Whoever receives the most votes by Monday 11:59pm Pacific Time, gets a review next Friday. If you’d like to submit your own script to compete in a future Amateur Showdown, send a PDF of your script to carsonreeves3@gmail.com with the title, genre, logline, and why you think your script should get a shot.

Title: ROXBURY MANOR
Genre: Contained Thriller
Logline: When burglars invade her secluded country manor, a stubborn elderly widow must use her intimate knowledge of the building and her collection of ancient weaponry to defeat them.
Why You Should Read: This script is the result of some real world pain and the desire to understand the grieving process, combined with the commercially appealing idea of Home Alone with a stubborn elderly woman. I think there are a great many talented senior female actors who would love to have a little fun with a role like this. Of course I first need to make sure the script fulfills that potential, so I am turning it over to the SS faithful in the hope that they share their wisdom.

Title: Special Report
Genre: Sci Fi/Action
Logline: After discovering that a new teleportation technology has the power to rid the world of pollution and disease, an ambitious field reporter races to make the information public before the corrupt Secretary of Transportation can stop her.
Why You Should Read: What would happen if a transporter machine actually existed? How awesome would it be to be able to instantly go from one place to another? How would it affect our day to day lives? Air quality? Our economy? These are questions I would ask myself after getting a job that took me far away from my friends and family for years at a time. The answers came to me as a thrilling adventure story that takes place in the near future. Special Report leads you on a race around the world from the transporter’s origins while a corrupt government sect tries to prevent its knowledge from being released to the public. This combination of sci-fi and action became an exciting way for my protagonist to tell her story of the century. I would be extremely grateful for any notes/constructive criticism you would be willing to share with me. Happy Reading!!

Title: Deepfake
Genre: Thriller
Logline: A film school dropout with a talent for producing AI-generated “deepfake” videos is caught in a global conspiracy when he receives a disturbing commission from a mysterious online stranger.
Why You Should Read: If you haven’t yet seen deepfakes in the news, you will. This emerging AI-powered technology lets anyone with an average gaming PC churn out eerily lifelike fake videos of people. The social and political implications of this technology are huge, and it has politicians, generals, artists, and celebrities freaking out. Someone is going to make a movie about deepfakes. I hope it’s this one, and I think my background in tech makes for a story that’s plausible and well-researched while still being thrilling, unpredictable, and character-driven.

Title: The Profoundly Vulgar Gospel According to Lucy
Genre: Comedy, Fantasy
Logline: In the spirit of Monty Python, God’s wild and foul-mouthed daughter tells her absurdly comic story to a young priest as he wrestles with the idea that she’s actually Lucifer himself.
Why You Should Read: Look: I fully believe I’m going to catch a certain level of hell for this one. But I set out to write a story about fathers and daughters (on a cosmic-scale, mind you) with a tremendously complex and funny female lead role. What resulted is an epically-structured, dialogue-heavy, unabashedly sexual, politically incorrect, profanity-filled and perverse retelling of the whole of Western Civilization from its beginning to its end. Still on board? Well, have fun. I certainly did.

Title: We Are Not Safe Here
Genre: Horror Anthology
Logline: Nine short stories spanning all genres of horror, each following a traveler in search of sanctuary.
Why You Should Read: It’s time for a new FIRST on ScriptShadow: an anthology! WE ARE NOT SAFE HERE is a collection of nine unique horror shorts, each penned by a different writer from the Screenwriters Network Discord server. We teamed up, brainstormed, wrote, workshopped, and wove our stories together with seamless transitions similar to SOUTHBOUND and LOVE, DEATH & ROBOTS. The end result: nine terrifying tales of characters seeking safety from the horrors hot on their heels. Good luck to all the participants!

Genre: Drama/Period
Premise: In Prohibition-era Kentucky, a moonshiner’s plan to save the family farm goes awry when his brother steals a prized dog from a local mobster.
Why You Should Read: Heck is an inventive retelling of Homer’s Trojan War epic. Instead of Trojans vs. the Greeks, my story takes place in 1920s Kentucky, pitting a family of moonshiners against a local crime boss and his Prohibition Agent brother. Part O Brother Where Art Thou and part Lawless, it’s an epic tale of bootlegging, boxing, and of course, a giant Trojan horse.
Writer: Chris Hicks
Details: 109 pages

Oscar Isaac for… something in this?

I am going to propose the impossible.

The irrational.

The sensational!

I don’t know if you guys are even ready for what I’m about to say.

A moment of silence…………

Okay. Here it is. Is “Heck,” A John Wick prequel?

I know it sounds ridiculous. But let’s look at the author’s name. “Chris Hicks.” Hmmmmm… Hicks? Wicks? Hick? Wick? Notice any similarities?

What am I babbling on about?

Well, you see, both of these movies rely heavily on a dog. You could say both rely heavily on an outrageous dog plotline. Somehow, John Wick made its dog storyline work. Did Heck? Let’s find out together!

It’s Prohibition. No alcohol and all that. Heck makes the best moonshine in Kentucky. Not easy when you consider what’s happened to his family. His mom just died. His dad’s got a permanent broken heart. And his little brother, Perry, is a bit of a weirdo. Oh, and they’re four mortgage payments behind with the bank. They need to start making money fast.

Heck goes to the biggest client he can find, Matthias, a boxing manager and secret bar owner. Matthias wants to buy thousands of bottles of Moonshine from Heck. However, right after they strike a deal, Perry secretly steals Matthias’s cute little puppy. Why? Because he thinks it’s cute!

As soon as they get home, Heck has a fit. What are you doing stealing people’s dogs for?? He demands that Perry give it back. But Perry says no. Fine, Heck says. Wow, that was easy. It doesn’t take long for Matthias to find out his dog has been stolen, so he comes to Heck’s farm and demands it back. They say no. Furious, Matthias teams up with the dirty G-Man, Augie, to take Heck down any way possible. Oh, and if it wasn’t obvious, the deal is off.

This forces Heck to strike a deal with Apollo, a guy who runs an underground bar in the next county. Like, literally. They deliver the moonshine to this guy in underground caves. Unfortunately, Augie and Matthias round up a mob to ambush Apollo’s place and a lot of people are beat to a pulp.

Heck realizes that the only way he’s going to square this situation is to fight Matthias’s best boxer. While Heck ain’t too shabby in a ring, he’s no match for Beast Mode Gideon, Matthias’s guy. Gideon beats Heck to a pulp. It looks like Heck is going to lose the farm and go to prison. It will be up to Perry, who started all this, to come up with a plan to save his brother.

A couple of things I want to say right off the bat. I haven’t read “Homer” since high school. So I have no memory of what it’s about. And I don’t think it’s the best idea to write a script like O Brother Where Art Thou on spec. O Brother is 75% direction and 25% script. It’s too hard to convey semi-humorous offbeat tones on the page. It’s difficult for the reader to know just how funny something was meant to be and just how serious other things were meant to be. This is why these scripts are almost always a package deal with the writer and director being the same.

With that out of the way, how was this?

Heck was really well written. We can start there. Regardless of what you think of this script, it’s the embodiment of professional and easy to read. This isn’t even my jam and, still, my eyes were flying down the page.

However, the second the dog thing happened, my brain left my body. I felt suspended in confusion. Your brother steals a dog of the man who’s going to help you save your farm. And when said brother says he wants to keep it, you let him? How does that make sense?

Somebody might throw this back in my face if it’s a direct plotline from Homer. But even if it is, one of my pillars of screenwriting no-no’s is to NEVER HAVE shaky inciting incidents. The inciting incident is the entire reason the movie exists. So if it’s weak or murky or nonsensical, you’re building your story on a shaky foundation. Not to mention, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a inciting incident that was initiated BY our heroes. Inciting incidents are supposed to happen TO our heroes.

How this directly relates to this script is that a lot of people, like me, are going to say, throughout the movie, “Why don’t you just give the dog back?” It solves every problem. Or, if they’re not going to give the dog back, provide us with a convincing reason WHY they wouldn’t give it back. That explanation definitely never came in “Heck.”

Maybe Chris’s counter-argument would be that it’s supposed to be funny. And that’s my point about quirky humor. We’re not sure how much leniency on plot issues we’re supposed to allow because of humor. Am I just supposed to laugh at the glaring plot hole and go with it? Sorry but I can’t.

With all that said, the dialogue here is good. The structure is top-notch. The characters all have big personalities and therefore pop off the page. So it’s not like Heck doesn’t have anything going for it. But when you plop me down 100 years ago, you’re already at a disadvantage. It’s so not my jam. Therefore, I never quite saw this as anything other than a curiosity. I was interested but I was never invested. So as strong as the writing was, I can’t give it that ‘worth the read.’ I will say that the writer is worth keeping an eye on though. If Chris has got any other scripts set in present day that are more marketable, submit them to Amateur Offerings.

Oh, and one last thing. If Chris is doing a rewrite, I think it would be funny to give Apollo a dog and have Perry steal him too. I’m joking of course. But that would be funny.

Script Link: Heck

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

What I learned: Something every writer should take into consideration when they’re deciding what to write next is: Is this the kind of movie that excites people? Both the kind of people you need to get the movie made and the people who buy the tickets. Because I read a lot of scripts like this one, where I nod my head afterwards and say, “good job.” But the script doesn’t get me excited enough to tell other people about it.

What I learned 2: A fun easy way to spice up dialogue is to use role play. No, not that role play. You create a fun moment where the characters can address each other as something other than themselves. Remember that characters talking directly to each other about what’s in their head is the definition of on-the-nose dialogue. So you should always look for ways to play with the dialogue instead. This is one of the easiest ways.