And remember that the First Page Showdown is next weekend! If you want to submit, details are below!

Just a reminder, next Thursday is the deadline for First Page Showdown! And then, over the weekend, the top 5 submissions will compete for your votes. Here’s how to submit…

What: First Page Showdown
When: Friday, February 28
Deadline: Thursday, February 27, 10pm Pacific Time
Submit: A script title, a genre, and your first page
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com

Okay, now it’s time to prepare you!

A lot of screenwriting people will tell you to write a great first scene due to the fact that you want to grab the reader. But, actually, you want to start even earlier. You want to write a great first page.

I can’t even begin to tell you how much the reader is judging the script during that first page. And it’s not that they’re doing it overtly. They do it subconsciously because they’ve read so many scripts and the large majority of those scripts are bad. They’re hoping and praying that this is the one that’s going to be good.

So, actually, they’re picking up on the bad things reluctantly. They’re hoping they don’t pop up. Cause if they encounter 2-3 red flags on the first page, it’s a 99% probability that the script will be bad.

What is it they’re judging? They’re judging if the writing itself is good (the sentences are pleasing to read). They’re judging if they like the writer’s voice (is it strong and assured). They’re judging if the page is building towards something. They’re judging if they like the scene you’ve started off with. They’re assessing whether you’re a storyteller, someone who understands the tools required to tell a good story. They’re assessing your confidence. They’re assessing what level you’re at.

I know. All of that is overwhelming. To be honest, if you tried to check all of those boxes, you’d probably write a bad scene. So, today, I want to give you a simple template that gets you the best chance to hit all those beats. Actually, with this template, you don’t even need to hit all the beats. You only need to hit the most important one, which is to be a good storyteller.

We’re going to do that with an example from the first page of one of the Oscar-nominated scripts, Conclave. It’s not perfect, which proves my point. You don’t have to be perfect to write a strong first page. Let’s take a look at the page and then we’ll discuss what it does well.

Before we get into the analysis, let me ask you a question. What is the most important aspect of a first page?

Anyone?

Here’s the answer: That it makes you want to turn the page.

Nobody can read the rest of your script if they don’t read page 2.

Now that you know that, what do you see within the first page of Conclave? Hopefully, I don’t have to point it out to you.

For the people in the back, the scene starts WITH SOMETHING HAPPENING. Actually, let me recontextualize that. It starts with something OUT OF THE ORDINARY happening.

If something was just “happening,” like a man eating dinner, that’s not enough to get people’s eyes to move down the page. It has to be something that doesn’t happen often. That’s what makes “the happening” unique and worthy of reading.

In this case, a man is sleeping, his window cracks, waking him up. Then he gets a phone call. We then cut to him walking through Rome. And there’s a key word there that you need to include on a first page – “QUICKLY.”

He’s walking “quickly.” That tells us something about that phone call was important. Especially because he left his home in the middle of the night. Something big has happened.

Another key word occurs in the slugline: “VATICAN.”

He’s not quickly walking through Costco. He’s walking through the Vatican.

Not to get sidetracked but this is where concept comes into play. You want your movie ideas to feel big. That way, you have more to work with on the page. If your script includes the Vatican, that’s going to feel bigger than if your script includes Costco. And I’m not saying you can’t write a great script about Costco. There are probably several hilarious comedies you could write with the store as a backdrop.

But in this game where you’re trying to keep peoples’ attention for 2 hours, the more high-powered your weapons are, the better the chance you have of striking your target.

The main reason this page works is because we’ve been thrust into a big situation where we want to find out what happens next.

Now that we know that, let’s look at the scene more specifically. Cause what you’re going to find is that it’s imperfect. But I’ll remind you why that doesn’t matter.

We start in a quiet neighborhood in an apartment, with a window pane that cracks. Now, on the surface, I like this. It creates curiosity. Again, something is HAPPENING. The sooner you can make something happen on your first page, the better. Cause readers then have to figure out why the pane cracked.

The thing is, I don’t think we ever learn why it cracks. So it’s a bit of a cheat. Yeah, I guess it could be “God,” but if it is, the script does a very poor job at making that argument, especially because there isn’t a single other act of God in the script.

From there, the phone rings. That’s another good beat. Phones that ring in the middle of the night usually don’t bring good news. So, again, something is HAPPENING. Something out of the ordinary.

The writer then takes a unique approach to the call – he doesn’t show the character answer the phone. This is a small thing but it’s something that tells me I’m dealing with, at the very least, an above-average screenwriter.

The beginner screenwriter probably includes the conversation from that call. The advanced writer says, “I don’t need it.” Or, he says, “It creates more mystery if I don’t include it.” But even the fact that he didn’t have the character pick up the phone tells me this screenwriter doesn’t waste ink. And that’s usually a good sign.

From there, we have the character speeding down the tunnel in the Vatican and now, as a reader, I don’t have any choice but to turn the page. Seriously. How can I NOT read the next page? It would be stupid to not at least check it out. Cause I want to know who called him and why he’s felt it important to get up in the middle of the night and run to the Vatican.

That’s the big tip that I want to get across to you here with first pages. You want to create a question within that first page that doesn’t just make the reader curious, but makes it impossible for them not to read the second page.

And you do that by throwing us into the mix of something happening that’s out of the ordinary. It’s very hard to screw up a scene like that.

By no means is this the only way to write a first page. I went through the opening pages of all the Oscar screenplay nominees and nearly all of them approach their first pages differently. But if you want to get the best bang for your buck, do it like Conclave.

Can’t wait to see what your first pages have to offer! :)

Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: A senator and his estranged son must fight to survive when they’re stranded
at a hunting ranch where mythical beasts from global folklore are genetically
engineered as dangerous game.
About: This script finished with 16 votes on the Black List. Grillot has one other Black List script from a year ago called The Tooth Fairy. Here was that logline: A drug addict returning from rehab kidnaps her daughter from her father then tries to skip town, only to end up at an old BnB chased by an evil tooth fairy determined to take her daughter from her. – The guy clearly likes his high concept ideas!
Writer: Chris Grillot
Details: 108 pages

Today’s script reminded me of 1997 Hollywood where every single person you met in Los Angeles had a screenplay and 99.9999% of them were sky-high concepts.

American Monsters leans into that old school approach. You can’t get any higher concept than this. The only problem is, is the pitch “Aliens meets Jurassic Park” still relevant?

It is if the script’s good. And fun! Please, after yesterday’s anger management meltdown, give me a fun screenplay experience! For crying out loud!

Senator Remy Chatelain is up against reelection and it’s not looking good. He recently got caught using dirty tricks to smear his opponent. So maybe it’s good that his old friend, hunter Lane Marlow, shows up and asks him on a weekend trip. He can even bring along his 17 year old son, Zach.

Remy and Zach head to Lane’s highly remote Wyoming compound where he’s secured thousands of acres for his new venture – hunting monsters. Lane is also a bit of a scientist and has figured out how to bioengineer approximations of all the monsters we’ve read in books.

We’ve got chupacabras, ushi onis, giant bat things, and the real prize of the establishment – Yetis. Lane has created a giant hunting ground where you can kill your own monster. And this weekend, he’s going to take Lane and Zach into his creation where they’ll both be able to bag a Yeti. It’s going to be wonderful!

The trip requires going up into the mountains and it doesn’t take long for Remy to realize that Lane doesn’t have it all figured out. He falls into a sinkhole where a giant bull-spider thing easily could’ve killed him if it wasn’t so timid.

And don’t even get Remy started about the Yetis. The Yetis were created to be dumb. But since their creation five years ago, they’ve started to clump into packs. They’ve even created little villages. All of this is starting to feel very wrong to Remy.

Remy also learns why Lane brought him out here. It wasn’t just to catch up with an old friend. Remy has major influence on an upcoming bioengineering bill that, if passed, will shoot Lane’s business into the stratosphere. If the bill fails, however, Lane’s dream, along with the tens of millions of dollars already invested into the venture, will be toast. Sure Lane. First let’s focus on getting off this mountain without being slaughtered by a pack of Yetis!

Something I want you to take note of right off the bat with American Monsters is Lane’s motivation.

When I read bad versions of scripts like this, characters like Lane don’t have motivations. They’re just some knob that the writer uses to open a door for our characters to enter the movie.

The bad version of Lane is a guy who says, “Come on in” and “Let’s hunt.”

The good version of Lane – the one that’s being used here – is much more elaborately constructed. The reason he’s bringing Remy here is because Remy can help him pass a bioengineering bill that will infuse his operation with money. Money that he desperately needs.

Not only does this make Lane a stronger character (due to the fact that he has a goal with high stakes attached) but it infuses all interactions between Lane and Remy with an extra layer of subtext.

If Remy has a scary moment and wants to call the hunt off, and Lane says, “Trust me, what just happened was random. There’s no way it will happen again.” Well, because we know how badly Lane needs this to work, we know that there’s a whole other layer to that assurance. He’s probably lying about it because he needs Remy to buy into his pitch.

Lane is the character who sold me on this script. I can tell that Grillot put a lot of work into him. He’s got a lot lines like this one: “We might not have money, but we’ve got plenty of reach. I’ll pull in Outdoor Alliance, the Ag Coalition, the oil and gas roughnecks, police and fire unions… You fucking name it, I make the call… I bet your opponent drops before the election.”

Lines like that tell me RESEARCH has been put into this character.

He reminded me some of Tommy Norris (Billy Bob Thorton) on Landman. The reason that show works so well is the insane amount of knowledge the creator has about that world. So, whenever I feel like characters are smarter than me, I know I’m in good hands.

Cause, for the large majority of scripts that I read, there isn’t a single character who’s smarter than I am. Or as knowledgeable about the subject as I am. I’m serious! I’ll read a script about a nuclear apocalypse and I’ll know more about the science of the fallout than the writer does. That’s when you know the writer is barely putting in an effort.

Whatever the specific world it is that you’ve created for your screenplay, there better be at least one character who knows more about that world than Wikipedia and ChatGPT combined. And that includes pretend worlds.

If there’s a weakness to this script, it’s the competition. Every studio has a “big animals” franchise. And it seems that the bigger the animals, the more lucrative the franchise is. These animals are big but not enormous. On the plus side, our “monsters” are just different enough. If these were straight lizards and gorillas, it wouldn’t work. We’re putting in new variations of these animals and, from there, it’s up to the public to decide if that’s enough to get them interested.

I think most writers and producers in Hollywood attempt the “same but different” formula. You just never know how ‘same’ or how ‘different’ the audience wants. The target is always moving. Would I have thought a basic ‘guy with a gun’ movie like John Wick would become one of the biggest franchises in the industry? No. But it turns out it had that perfect balance of the same (guy with a gun) and different (this light hitman mythology).

This movie is going to open huge. In 1998. Can it open huge in 2025? I don’t think so because the lore and the mythology is not quite up to Jurassic Park standards. With that said, it’s strong! Stronger than most scripts I read in this lane. So I could see this being a big streaming movie. And, these days, that’s what we spec script writers should be gunning for. Get that big streaming feature paycheck and celebrate like it’s 1998. :)

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

What I learned: There’s always a more creative line of dialogue available to you if you take the time to find it. On page 35, Lane is telling Remy that he needs money. He explains that his current investor is running out of cash. If you were having Lane tell Remy this, what line would you write? Most writers say the first thing they think of. Something like: “The problem is, Ko’s (his financier) running out of money.” It does the job, but it’s not very creative. Instead, here’s the real line that was used: “Look, I’ll let you in on another secret, alright? Ko’s deep pockets are getting pretty shallow.” Clearly a more thoughtful line. That’s how most dialogue should read. You can learn all sorts of great dialogue tips like this in my dialogue book. So go get it!

Genre: Drama
Premise: Mary, a hair trigger pool hustler, has her hedonistic lifestyle all figured out until
she meets Ray, a fellow pool shark. Will she change her ways and let herself fall in
love? Or just kill him and make a break for it…
About: This script finished with 24 votes on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Ryan Brennan
Details: 114 pages

When you’re tasked with creating characters a day after the reviewer watched the master at creating characters, you’ve got a tough act to follow. Let’s see how today’s writer did.

30-something Mary is an extremely angry person. How angry? Well, she hates men more than anything on the planet. She not only uses them for sex but she steals all the stuff in their homes afterwards. But she doesn’t stop at men. Early on, we watch as she antagonizes a female restaurant customer for no other reason than she can.

Mary is a pool hustler. She walks into a pool hall, pretends to be decent but mostly lucky, luring in potential marks, before betting a bunch of money on the final game and taking them to the cleaners.

It’s not an easy gig that Mary has. She has a deep set hatred for all of her opponents and thinks that everything on earth is disgusting, evil, terrible, or all three. She’s not above shooting any of her opponents who come after her after losing and though no kills have been confirmed, you can bet your bottom dollar that a dude or two has died at Mary’s hand.

This begins to change once she heads to Texas and meets Ray.  At first, she sees Ray as a mark. But as one game turns into two, two to four, and four to eight, she senses that maybe she’s not as in control of this situation as she thinks she is. In the end, Ray takes her for a cool 5 grand.

Infuriated, it’s now Mary chases after a man for the first time, which then leads to a night of wild sex. Mary won’t admit it to herself yet but she’s starting to like this guy. She has to admit it the next day though when, at a new bar, jealousy swells up as she watches Ray flirt with a female mark.

For the first time in a long time, Mary dates a dude. This is a foreign concept to her so when she begins to experience full on feelings of love, she freaks out. Now, when you or I freak out because we’re falling in love, we might send too many text messages. Not Mary. Mary asks Ray to participate in a fun game of pretend rape in a bar parking lot. When Ray plays along, pushing when Mary says stop, she pulls out a gun and shoots him three times.

Mary then goes on the run to Vegas, assuming Ray is dead. But Ray survives! And he recruits his pool buddy, Hal, to find Mary and get his revenge. They both head to Vegas and eventually find her. But before Ray can kill her, Mary is so happy to learn that she didn’t kill Ray that she claims she’ll do anything for him. The two (along with Hal) agree to crash the glitziest pool hall in Vegas and burn it down in a single night, hustling as much money as possible. What could go wrong?

A common thing I keep running into with these Black List scripts, especially post-2017, when the cultural climate became more intense, is anger.

And here’s the funny thing. Most writers are already angry. Not all of them. But, generally speaking, writers tend to be a frustrated lot. And they use their stories as an outlet to get that anger out. Which is good if you know how to manage it.

But when you add this additional post-2017 dose of ‘angry’ to an already angry individual, you get scripts like this and Don’t Borrow Trouble. There’s too much anger to come back from. Or, to put it in screenwriting terms, you can’t redeem a character who’s unredeemable.

Mary is an awful person. On top of her hating everyone and being mean to everyone, she attempts to murder the man she loves for no other reason than she’s angry for making her love him. Why would you think we would say, “Man, I really want to hang out with this woman for another hour and see her get better?” No. At that point, I want her to meet her demise.

And while there is a template for telling these types of stories – they’re called tragedies due to the fact that the character dies in the end due to an inability to change – they’re incredibly delicate stories that are hard to pull off.

One of the most famous ones is Taxi Driver and when you look at that story, Travis Bickle was not introduced to us as this hateful angry person. He was more of a lost soul. That’s something people can relate to. Which is why they got on board with him. If Taxi Driver would’ve introduced us to an already mohawked Travis Bickle, the movie would not have worked because we would’ve hated him.

Which is the issue here. We hate this woman so much that nothing you can do in the writing is going to change that.

I actually respected the late story creative choice of Mary shooting Ray because it was so unexpected. It put the story on this new non-formulaic path. And he does take that storyline to its logical conclusion (spoiler) with Ray getting his revenge. But is it really that satisfying to see your protagonist, who you never liked in the first place, die? It all feels a bit… super depressing.

I don’t know if I’m becoming too goodie-two-shoes. Maybe we grow out of all this dark stuff as we grow older and we want lighter fare that makes us happier. But I’m not convinced that’s what’s going on here. I like dark stuff that’s written well. I liked Kinds of Kindness. I liked Strange Darling. I liked Speak No Evil and Furiosa. This just introduced me to a character I hated so much that I could never get past that. This seems to be this ongoing problem with Black List scripts, where the writers are laying on the anger too thick and not considering how it affects the reader.

Because remember, how you introduce a character contributes to 80-90% of how the reader sees them. Here are some early moments with Mary. Here she is talking about men: “99.9% of these walking, talking, fucking, sucking monsters we share the earth with care about one thing and one thing only: themselves.”

And then: Mary, BORED, decides to PUSH HIM OFF and FORCE HIS FACE DOWN between her legs. He takes the cue and GOES DOWN ON HER. After some hair-pulling instruction from Mary, she ORGASMS. He comes up kissing her, but she’s CLEARLY DONE. MARY: “Ugh, that was great. I’m sorry I’m so… tired all of a sudden. But you’re welcome to finish yourself off. G’night.”

And then: Puts her clothes on, and deftly goes through his apartment, STEALING EVERYTHING SHE CAN. Clearly a routine procedure.

And then: As Mary walks to her car, DAVE FOLLOWS HER. MARY (V.O.) “Just don’t forget, boys and girls, shriveled dicks can be real sore losers. So always come prepared.” He looks like he’s going to BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF HER. But as he GRABS HER BY THE SHOULDER, Mary spins around… …GUN IN HAND. FIRES TWO SHOTS: BANG! BANG!

And then after verbally assaulting a woman at a restaurant for no reason: And just as Mary opens her mouth to verbally TEAR THIS WOMAN A NEW ASSHOLE (which she’s fully capable of)… Just then, a SQUAD OF POLICE CARS BLARE BY, SIRENS and all. No doubt headed for the wreckage Mary left behind. TIME TO GO. But Mary certainly won’t let Neighbor have the satisfaction of feeling like she won this interaction… MARY: “EXCUSE ME, WAITRESS? Sorry, I’m gonna go ahead and pay. This woman just will not stop bothering me.”

This was all within the first 7 pages. That pretty much says it all.

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

What I learned: If you’re thinking about writing an angry main character, consider instead writing someone who’s broken or lost. You can access some of the same negative emotions that you want to portray your character to have, but broken and lost is much more redeemable. I mean, look through all the movies where an unapologetically angry main character has worked. One of the commenters here will give you about 10, probably. But keep in mind that’s out of half a million movies.

I wanted to see Captain America about as much as I wanted to be on that plane that crashed into a helicopter a few weeks ago. Marvel hasn’t just lost its mojo. It’s lost its soul. So when the latest Captain America film made 100 million dollars this weekend, I had to check to see if that was good or not.

It’s actually not bad. Guardians of the Galaxy 3 made 113 million. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantummania made 106 million. If you go back to Marvel’s best time period – Phase 3 – Thor Ragnarok made 122 million. I think, these days, that’s what you’re aiming for with a Marvel movie, is to get that 100 million dollar opening, which Captain America achieved.

EXCEEEEPPPPPPTTTT.

It’s one big lie.

What you’ll see buried in all of the box office reports of this film is that this is not a weekend tally, but rather a 4-day tally, as they’re including box office from the tiniest holiday of the year, President’s Day. The real tally for Captain America is 88.5 million.

This kind of garbage reporting annoys me because: just be honest. It’s not difficult to be honest. You can’t make something true just by saying it. 88.5 million is a different tally than 100 million. Cause it shows that there is a downward trend in these Marvel movie box office takes. Telling yourself it’s 100 million when it isn’t is preventing you from being real about your product and making the necessary changes to fix it.

Marvel has run into the same problem that every other genre, over time, has run into – which is that unless you’re giving us something new and fresh, we’re not going to be excited to see your film. This new Captain America looked like assembly-line superhero filmmaking. That’s not good enough.

But you wanna know what I *was* excited about this weekend? White Lotus! Season Three! Premiere episode! Mike White – a master screenwriter AND a master caster – is back. What does he have in store for us this time? And what tasty little screenwriting lesson morsels has he left for us peasants to chew on?

This time we’re headed to Thailand. We have Belinda, the masseuse from Season 1 who’s here to learn and improve her skills. We’ve got Rick, 55, and Chelsea, 25, a couple dominated by Rick’s nonstop negativity. We’ve got Timothy and Victoria Ratliff, a successful couple. Timothy is hiding from his fam a big negative article that’s about to be written about his company back home.

We’ve got the Ratliff’s weirdo children, Piper, Lochlan, and Saxson. Saxson is an oversexed weirdo who just wants to get laid. Lochlan as innocent as newly churned butter and is unsure of what he wants to do in life. And Piper is the whole reason the family came here. She wants to get an interview with the big Buddhist celebrity on the island, an interview the family is only learning now that she hasn’t secured yet.

Finally we have Kate, Jaclyn, and Laurie, three childhood friends who lost touch and are reconnecting on this trip. Jaclyn is a TV star. Kate is her cool successful friend. And Laurie looks to be the loser of the group, and therefore is immediately uncomfortable with the trip.

So, question number 1: How does it hold up to the other seasons of White Lotus so far?

I would put it in third place but that’s not as damning a ranking as you’d think. The first two seasons were amazing. This one, so far, is only very good. There are no stand-out characters yet, although there are definitely a few who have the potential to be. Saxson (Arnold Swarzenegger’s son) is super weird and acts utterly bizarre around his siblings. I’m 70% sure that Mike White is setting up an incest storyline between him and one of the other siblings. Things are going to get messy in The White Lotus Thailand!

Like in previous installments, White has started the story in the future, showing or hinting at a death, then jumping back in time. He does this because he knows that this is a character-driven story and, if you don’t add a little bit of jus to character driven stories, they can fell like any other generic TV show. So we hear gunshots in the opening scene, and they’re coming from multiple directions. If I had to guess, I would say that gang activity has spilled over onto the hotel grounds. I don’t think it’s one of our characters who’s shooting.

If you want to get good at character work, watch Mike White play. This guy is like Mozart for character development. Count how many characters are in this story. There are a dozen.

He not only sets up all one dozen of those characters within 30 minutes (by the midpoint of the first episode). But he sets up the conflict within each group. I read a lot of pilots. Writers CONSTANTLY struggle to set up a single character that’s memorable. To set up 12 and already introduce the main form of conflict within their groups is genius-level screenwriting.

With Rick and Chelsea, Rick has clearly come here with a plan. There’s somebody he wants to meet and when he learns that that person isn’t on the island, he’s furious. This creates a lot of tension in his relationship because Chelsea thinks they’re here to have fun. And she can’t even get her boyfriend to look her in the eyes.

With Timothy and Victoria, the conflict is more deeply embedded and subtle. They have a happy marriage but it’s clear that the level of love that ignited it isn’t there anymore. There’s a quick moment near the end of the episode where Victoria is trying to cheer Timothy up and she’s telling him how lucky he is with all the stuff he has. She starts by saying, “You have this amazing wife…”. And she looks at him and waits for him to confirm but he hesitates. She looks at him a little more sternly and he says, “Yeah yeah, an amazing wife.” We can already see that she wants more than he does.

Their kids are all really weird. That, in and of itself, creates conflict because nobody is in sync with each other. But really, it’s Saxon, who constantly says or does things that are socially uncalibrated (such as hit on women when it’s inappropriate), which makes his siblings feel uncomfortable.

This is actually a great way to create a character who infuses conflict into a story – build a character who is socially uncalibrated. Pretty much everything they say is going to infuse the scene with an uneven tenor. Scenes can never be boring if that character is around.

With the three girlfriends, there’s this clear hierarchy. Jaclyn is at the top. She’s the TV star. She’s had the most success of the three girls. Then you have Kate, who isn’t famous but her husband is extremely successful, which has given her a lot of power and status. Yet, it’s clear that she’s a little bit jealous of Jaclyn’s success. Finally, you have Kate, who is living a normal life. And that normalcy is being spotlighted now that she’s alone with these two extremely successful women. And it’s starting to eat at her. We can see that she’s the first one who finishes her wine and refills it. Cause it’s hard to stay sober around these two where she’s being reminded of her lack of success.

A great screenwriting lesson to take away from this episode is LOOMING PROBLEMS. You should always be adding looming problems to TV shows because TV shows require a lot more time to be filled up. And, therefore, if you don’t place rewards down the road, the viewers will wonder why they’re hanging around for so long.

Here, we get this scene where Timothy takes an urgent call and learns that the Wall Street Journal is about to publish a very damning story about his company this week. And there’s nothing he can do about it. That’s a looming problem – a reason to keep watching the show. We want to see what happens when that news story drops. Will his entire career blow up?

Also, it does so much work for the character in the meantime. Cause every time we come back to Timothy, we can see the weight of that looming problem on top of him. Whether he’s happy, sad, having a good moment, a bad one, scolding his children, enjoying a fishing excursion – it’s another layer on top of the character.

This is how you create three-dimensional characters, guys. You add these layers so that the character is not just who he’s presenting himself to be in that moment. There are other things going on with him.

Ditto for Rick (Walton Goggins). He isn’t coming into this story naked. He brought a story with him. He’s coming here to do something. We don’t know what it is yet but we know it’s consuming him. Which creates the same effect. Everything he does is complicated by this thing that’s looming over him.

What also amazes me about Mike White is that he was able to set up all 12 of these main characters but then he also sets up 8 other characters! There are smaller characters, such as the two hotel workers who like each other. We have Belinda’s son. We have (spoiler) Tanya’s crazy husband back in the mix! We have a potential female love interest for Chelsea.

I don’t know how he does it.

Even if this wasn’t as good as Season 1 or 2, I was riveted the whole way through. This is easily my number 1 show. I can’t wait for next week. Mike White clearly has a plan here. You can see it in how confident he is in all of these characters. My only real complaint is that the title sequence song isn’t as catchy as the first two seasons.

:)

It’s time to learn WHY certain loglines didn’t have the power to push past my discerning eye and make it into the Logline Showdown.

Remember that I’m one person and, just because I didn’t like a logline doesn’t mean someone else won’t.

Which is the main reason I like posting these articles. It gives you some insight into why I choose (and don’t choose) certain loglines.

Let’s get into it!

Title: The Big Return
Genre: Action Comedy
Logline: Determined to right his father’s wrongs, the son of a legendary master thief embarks on an impossible mission: returning everything his father ever stole — without anyone noticing.

Analysis: I’ve come across ideas similar to this before. There may have even been a Black List script with an adjacent idea. My issue with these ideas is this: What are the stakes? Who cares if he succeeds or not? Let me give you a similar idea that uses stakes to make the concept a lot more exciting. You may recognize it. A history professor recaptures ancient artifacts and puts them back in the museums where they belong. He is then hired to find one of the most famous artifacts of all time, the Ark of the Covenant, before the Nazis get it first and use its powers to win the Second World War. Similar idea. But one adds an incredibly high amount of stakes, which improves the concept considerably.

Title: Help
Genre: Thriller
Logline: When a reclusive billionaire dies, the staff of his secluded estate makes an uneasy pact—hide his death and live in opulence, for once. But as greed, suspicion, and uninvited guests close in, their scheme quickly spirals into chaos.

Analysis: I wanted to include this one because I worked on it with the writer. This is a good example of how a logline and a concept must work in tandem. If they’re working against each other, you’ll always feel like something isn’t clicking. My issue here was not with the logline, but with the concept. My argument to the writer was, why would you risk everything to live in opulence for a week tops? Sooner rather than later, people are going to show up asking what happened to the billionaire. They’re then going to learn he’s been dead for a while and that you didn’t report it. You probably won’t get in a lot of trouble. But you’ll get in some. And for what? To waltz around the same grounds you’ve always waltzed around but this time without having to do any work? Where’s the upside? I told the writer we need a different angle for this to work. For example, add a murder-mystery to the plot. That gives the concept a lot more flexibility.

Title: Trust
Genre: Allegorical Thriller / Crime Drama
Logline: A farming couple on the brink of collapse is further divided when one secretly agrees to smuggle cocaine inside pineapples for a deceptive drifter. As tensions rise, a venomous snake slithers through their farmhouse—an ominous force that threatens to destroy them both in this modern allegory of Adam and Eve.

Analysis: You don’t want to send out loglines that put the burden on the reader to figure out the movie. The logline is supposed to do that for them. This idea starts off being about a struggling couple who decides to engage in criminal activity to pay the bills. Okay, it’s a small idea but it hints at a conflict that could drive a narrative. But then, out of nowhere, a snake arrives. Instead of explaining how this snake will engage in the plot, we’re thrown the very vague explanation of “an allegory of Adam and Eve.” Now it’s my job, as the reader, to guess what’s going on. My first thought is, “Well, if there are three people, then it’s not an allegory of Adam and Eve, is it?” This is what happens when you ask the reader to do the work for you. They will come up with things that I guarantee were not part of your plan.

Title: Override
Genre: SciFi/Action
Logline: When a suicidal but indestructible robot hitman botches his latest assassination, he teams up with the young girl he was supposed to kill when she agrees to give him the code that can rewrite his program and allow him to die, but only if he can help her escape to safety. -Leon the Professional, Logan in a cyberpunk world

Analysis: In my experience, when a logline starts to feel like a run-on sentence, it’s failing. NOT EVERY TIME. But, like, 95% of the time. That’s how this feels. Override is actually a pretty good idea when you break it down. I like the team-up between the hitman and the person he was supposed to kill. And their exchange of duties at the end makes sense based on everything that’s been set up. But there’s something about the abundance of wording that makes it hard to comprehend the logline on a single read. Case in point, I didn’t pick up the word “suicidal” until the third time I read it, which is probably because “suicidal but indestructible robot hitman” is a mouthful. Likewise, when you’re trying to work out the exchange of duties at the end, it doesn’t enter the brain smoothly. You really have to focus hard to get what’s happening. Reading a logline should be effortless. As proof, think of all the loglines that have worked for you. You understood and enjoyed everything after one read, right? You didn’t need an abacus.

Title: The Hunt for the White House
Genre: Action / Sci-Fi
Logline: A defeated Presidential Nominee must convince and unite his former military associates and incoming legislative friends that the opposition party and its nefarious worldwide allies are collaborating when they commit the most traitorous and audacious act in history – utilize radical technology to teleport the White House to an unknown location and exploit the President for their covert demands.

Analysis: This is an example of a cool idea – the White House gets teleported somewhere. It’s a concept I haven’t come across before that contains several different cool story directions it can go. But then you have to wade through a bunch of word salad to get to that part. When I read a logline like that, I think, “If the writer can’t come up with a cohesive presentation of their idea in the logline, why would I expect them to be able to tell a cohesive story through 110 pages?” Either that or they haven’t thought deeply enough about their idea yet to present it. You see, sometimes we come up with pieces of a cool idea rather than a full idea. It’s your job, then, to mold that crumb into a cake. And don’t show anybody that cake until it’s out of the oven!

Title: Omega Critical
Genre: Sci-Fi
Logline: When Miranda finally gets the chance to run her dream D&D campaign before graduation, she creates an epic, mind-bending adventure where her friends play as different heroes every session. But as the game nears its final showdown, the game begins to mirror her real-life battle for respect and validation from her long-time crush, the group’s former leader.

Analysis: This is the kind of logline you are forced to write once you’ve written a low-concept script. With any movie concept, you’re looking to generate a “special attractor,” that thing that makes the movie stand out from every other movie. Omega Critical has Dungeons and Dragons, which is slightly original. But it’s not big enough to drive people to the theater. That leaves us with the rest of the logline, which is essentially a woman who has a crush on a guy. That’s certainly not big enough to generate box office since anything that can be a subplot in another movie will struggle to be a main plot in its own movie. I bring this up because a lot of people come to me for logline help with these small ideas and they want me to juice them up, make them sound amazing. I can help make loglines sound as good as they can possibly sound. But I can’t make small ideas sound big. To be clear, I think this could be a good script! I’m not knocking its potential at all. But I’m judging it from the perspective of a producer. They read this and think, “Okay, that sounds like… maybe it could be okay.” The only chance you have of someone requesting this script is if they’re really really really into Dungeons and Dragons.

Title: Seeking Relationship Advice
Genre: Romantic comedy
Logline: A formerly anonymous sex and relationship columnist who based her advice on smutty fanfiction must pretend to be in a relationship with her best friend once her column goes viral and she is forced into the public’s eye.

Analysis: This is a pretty good idea. So, why didn’t I choose it? Because it wasn’t different enough. It feels like a movie seen already. It doesn’t have that unique differentiating factor that makes me want to pull the trigger. Some of you may say, “But Carson, you chose some ideas for the showdown that I felt like *I’d* seen already.” Fair enough. This is the subjective nature of picking ideas and it’s why if you gave 10 people these loglines, they would not all choose the same winners. I will say that with an idea like this, a great way to differentiate it is to modernize it. Can we use apps or programs or web sites or modern pop culture in a way to update the concept? Because a relationship columnist may have been common in the 90s. But not so much in 2025.

Title: Dead Stop
Genre: Horror
Logline: During their morning commute, passengers on a city bus are tested when the bus turns out to be a trap set up by a madman who demands one passenger be chosen to be sacrificed before every stop. (SAW meets SPEED)

Analysis: It’s hard for me to articulate exactly why I’m not a fan of this idea. But it comes down to not being a fan of overly forced concepts. This is what I mean: “A woman has 6 hours to run from the bottom of Manhattan to the top and a series of bombs are positioned across the city that will go off every time her heartbeat goes above 110.” For an idea to work with me, it has to meet a certain organic threshold, where it feels natural and believable (at least by movie-idea standards). I know that’s a vague target. I can’t tell you exactly where the line is. I just know that when I read this logline, it felt forced to me. I could feel the writer’s hand. When that happens, I tend not to connect with the idea.

Title: Hell Hole
Genre: Action/Horror
Logline: When a U.S.-Chinese drilling operation in the Arctic breaches the Gates of Hell, the crew must put aside their differences to seal it before its horrors emerge and destroy the world.

Analysis: This concept finished pretty high up in the contest. Which says a lot. Because, often, when the words “gates of hell” are in a logline, I’m out. Mainly because there’s something generic about it all. I just imagine a bunch of generic demons emerging from the ground and now it’s just a video game. Which is the whole reason I stopped playing video games. Every single game was mutated monsters/demons running at you. It didn’t seem like anyone cared about story anymore. So, I think if I had a better idea of what emerged from these Gates of Hell and what kind of plot resulted from their arrival – that would be the deciding factor of me either going in with this or staying out.

Title: How To Train Your Assassin
Genre: Action/Comedy
Logline: When a financial analyst rescues an amnesiac stranger from a crash, he soon discovers she’s a hitman sent to kill him by his corrupt boss. As they grow closer, he must fight to survive, dodging the crypto crime syndicate hunting them while keeping her from remembering why she was sent.

Analysis: I’ll tell you why I wrote off this idea. The word “crypto.” “Crypto” is a word that has become so ubiquitous that it no longer means anything. To me it’s synonymous with “generic.” Therefore, its inclusion had me imagining a generic movie. In retrospect, I wish I wouldn’t have dismissed it so quickly. Cause I do like the idea of someone rescuing an amnesiac who, it turns out, was sent to kill them. And there is some connective tissue with the main character, since he’s a financial analyst. It feels a teensy bit similar to “Unknown.” But if you could create a unique and expansive mythology around this “crypto crime syndicate,” that solves the main problem I had with the idea – that crypto makes it sound generic. It’s not the most original idea but if I did the showdown all over again, I could imagine this logline making the top 10.

Title: Flooded Cage
Genre: Thriller/Drama
Logline: After a tsunami devastates a prison on a remote island, the warden must lead the survivors to higher ground, but when they discover a second, more devastating wave is approaching and rescue becomes increasingly unlikely, order begins to crumble forcing her to face unimaginable decisions.

Analysis: This was definitely one of the top loglines in the competition. I remember earmarking it early on, bringing it into my “maybe” document. But once I had to cut everything down, it was one of the last ideas to go. What’s clever about this idea is the second tsunami. Cause I think most writers wouldn’t have come up with that. And, by doing so, you add this extra element of urgency and tension within a group that historically doesn’t do well with tension. Looking back at this logline with fresh eyes, I’m thinking maybe I should’ve included it.