Hello everyone. Just wanted to give you a heads up that writer/director Mike Million’s film “Tenure” is playing at the Austin Film Festival this week. There’s a Saturday showtime and a Wednesday showtime. I will be mucho jealous for those of you who get to see it since, as you know, it’s one of my favorite scripts.

If you’ve only recently become a fan of the site, check out my interview with Mike where we discuss the skills he used to make it onto the inaugural Black List. And if you’re as obsessed with the script as I am, make sure to become a fan on the film’s Facebook page.

If you do get to see the film in Austin, make sure to say hi to Mike and that you discovered the film through Scriptshadow, as he’s a fan of the site. Also, don’t forget to send me your review!

First there was The Black List. Then the British got in on the action with The Brit List. But let’s be honest here. The only list that matters is the one created by the people who write the screenplays themselves. You guys. The Shadow 25 represents the Top 25 reader chosen scripts. Over 400 of you wrote in with your Top 10 screenplays. The voting system was simple. I assigned a point number to each choice. The number one script on everyone’s list represented 10 points. Number two = 9 points. Number three = 8. All the way down to number ten, which represented 1 point. I then added up the numbers. The highest point total finished at the top of the pack.

Unfortunately you won’t get to see the number one script today. We’re going to start off with scripts 21-25. On Thursday we’ll do 11-20. And on Friday we’ll do the top 10. No doubt there will be some surprises. I was surprised on a number of occasions. The best thing about this process was no doubt learning about screenplays I hadn’t heard about. Or had heard about but just forgotten about. It’s nice to add some fan favorites to my “Read List.”

Tallying all these rankings for the Reader Top 25 (yes, it’s now going to be the Top 25) has been exhausting. Plus I gotta get ready for Halloween Week as well as prepare for the Logline Contest. That’s a long way of saying it’s time for another guest review. Today’s review is from author Erica Kennedy, whose novel, “Feminista” just recently hit bookstores. She’s a big fan of Scriptshadow and we recently got to discussing a script review. She likes romantic comedies and I’ve been meaning to check out Swingles for awhile so I thought it was the perfect fit. Another interesting tidbit is that Swingles will be Zach Braff’s directorial follow-up to Garden State. For some of you that will sound disastrous and for others it’s great news. I actually like Braff, so I’m interested to see how he’ll squeeze the big-budget high-octane sensibilities of Cameron Diaz into his more restrained view of the world. Here’s Erica with her review…

Genre: Rom-com
Premise: Two people whose best friends fall in love and leave them without their wingman and wingwoman join forces to help each other find mates.
About: This is a spec sale from 2006. Cameron Diaz has signed on to star. Zach Braff is set to direct which will be his first feature since 2004’s Garden State. He’s also doing a rewrite after Duncan Birmingham wrote the original spec, and Jeff Roda took a crack at a draft. And that’s not all. Braff might play a supporting role. They’re still searching for the male lead. This is the original draft by Birmingham that sold.
Writers: Duncan Birmingham

Okay, after reading the summary of this, I was totally down. Every time I’ve seen an article about wingmen/women, I think it’s a perfect movie premise. But I don’t ever start writing one because I knew someone else would and here it is. Even tho I don’t understand Cam’s choices sometimes (was the 2008 release “What Happens in Vegas” locked in a vault since ’03?), I like her as an independent, late 30’s and doesn’t need to be married, surfboarding, moneymaking babe so I could totally see her in the part of the sharp-tongued woman who the as-yet-unnamed male lead can’t stand…and since this is a rom-com, do I need to add “at first”?

We meet Diane, Cam’s character, a high-strung accountant who’s billed as the less glam of the two female friends, by page 4 but the whole first act belongs to Val Danko, an immature 29 year-old graphic designer at Quality Manuals, a company that makes direction manuals for assemble-at-home products. First of all, I love that professional assignation because we know he’s creative but working in a dull-ass job which is succinctly summed up in a brief exchange where his middle-aged boss (who becomes a funny secondary character) chides him about his use of “arial narrow”. Picturing Val in his cubicle in his old concert tees totally made me understand why his whole identity is wrapped up in bagging as many chicks as he can.

Problem is he can’t bag chicks without the help of his wingman, Nathan, a more genuine sort who has outgrown their post-collegiate hijinx and quickly jumps at the chance to move in with (and soon propose to) the smart and pretty Rachel, Diane’s bestie.

Now I have to say here that in the last few months, I feel like I’ve read four scripts that have some variation on this premise: lifelong, now thirty-something buds torn apart by the woman who actually wants to have a serious relationship with — or God forbid, marry — one of them. And this whole “dude, you took her to karaoke? that’s our thing!” schtick feels very, very gay to me. I immediately have a bias against these characters because then I feel like, Dude, what kind of loser/pussy are you?

This is exactly what goes on in Swingles for the entire first act but Val is so deep in denial and his dialogue is so snappy that, despite my admitted bias, I couldn’t help but laugh. But you know what really made this work for me? Once he and Diane, also wingless and floundering, join forces she says all the things I want to say to these guys and I fucking loved her for it!

At first, she either reacts to his childish antics by ignoring him (precisely) or basically saying, “That’s the dumbest shit I ever heard and why are you wearing that concert tee? Grow up!” But the great thing about her character, a successful accountant who put herself through Yale, is that she’s a desperate singleton too, no doubt about it (sometimes I was almost cringing). But I never felt like she was pathetic. I just felt for her. This is a tricky thing to pull off and I think now that a lot of the big female A-listers – Aniston, Zellwegger, Lopez, Bullock — are aged out of the rom-com ingenue category, it’s something screenwriters need to learn how to do. Because a woman like Diane who has accomplished so much professionally, a sister who’s out there doing it for herself, would probably feel like she shouldn’t care that she’s single but the fact that she does (a lot) would make her feel like a big fat loser. And then she needs a guy like Val to help her? Ouch. I think if you’re writing for an actress we all know is pushing (or beyond) 40, you need to be mindful of this. Because what’s endearing at 29 can easily become sad at 39.

Knowing C-Diaz is playing Diane, I’m really interested to see who they cast as Val because these are both great parts. Remember back in the day when you used to have two big stars in rom-coms like Julia Roberts and Richard Gere or Hugh Grant? (Or even further back, Hepburn and Tracy?) Now when it’s a vehicle for the female lead, the guy is just some random whose name you can’t remember. But Val is a plum comedic part which is another plus about this script. It actually made me LOL quite a bit when most rom-coms are neither rom nor com. (If they even let Dane Cook read this, I WILL lead the boycott.)

This premise is also milked for all its worth. Val forces Diane to hit on a guy at his grandma’s funeral (!) and then once she submits to being his partner-in-cruising, their routines are hilarious and I love that they have names like “Fighting First Date”, “The Gal Pal”… By the time Val drags her to a roller derby and forces her to skate in the amateur round (so HE can impress the chicks) and she busts out with, “I’ve never taken a fall for a man and I’m not about to start!” I swear I almost started cheering.

I hate when the leads in romantic comedies are cartoonishly opposite – she’s a vegan do-gooder and he’s a macho meat-loving corporate raider — but in Swingles, their tension arises from very realistic, relatable differences. He’s an immature poon hound and adult women don’t like immature poon hounds. ‘Nuff said. But we see Val growing because of Diane’s influence and we see her loosen up enough to realize that what she wants “on paper” might not be what she really wants at all.

When the hell is this going into production?

Script link: No link guys. But I’d look to MSP, who might have it.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] barely kept my interest
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: You can write a female lead that is desperate in some ways but not pathetic. I think with a lot of rom-coms she’s either too perfect/strong or too whiny/bitchy, just too something, but this script strikes a nice balance for Diane. I’m impressed that a guy wrote this! Also, if you have a great premise look at all the ways you can push it to the limit.

Okay, so Scriptshadow’s been around for about eight months now. Some of you have had a chance to read upwards of 50-100 scripts. I’m interested in putting together a “Reader Top 10” list so here’s what I’d like you to do. Send me a list of your Top 10 favorite unproduced scripts in order 1 through 10. I’m going to use a complex algorithm to average them out and come up with the definitive list.

Send your list to Carsonreeves1@gmail.com or leave it here in the comments section. Would like to have this up by next week! :)

Many of you know sweet, caring, cute and insightful Kristy over at MSP. Although she’s in the thick of a college semester, she’s found enough time to give a female perspective on a lot of the latest scripts in town. Also, she has a library of scripts on her blog where you just may be able to find some of the script links I’m not able to post. Kristy and I agreed she should do a guest review and it was up to me to decide what script to give her. I thought long and hard and finally settled on M. Night’s first sale script, “Labor Of Love.” Why? Well because what film geek doesn’t like discussing M. Night? It’s like Yankee fans reading an article about A-Rod. Everybody’s got an opinion.

I’m one of those people who thinks that each of Night’s films has been worse than the previous. The Sixth Sense, in my eyes, is pretty much the bar for spec scripts. It would fall into the genius category without question. Unbreakable didn’t cater to my sensibilities. Signs showed his first huge miscalculation on an ending. The Village insulted my intelligence. Lady In The Water felt like I’d been transported to an apocalyptic Candyland after being injected with a week’s supply of LSD. And then of course there was The Happening. Maybe my favorite theater moment this decade was when Marky Mark and his group tried to outrun the wind. My entire theater couldn’t stop laughing. Then a dozen people got up and left, then someone in the back yelled out, “You can’t outrun no wind!” and then a few more people left, one of them declaring, “This is bulllll-shit.” During the rest of the movie, an old lady sitting next to me had a running commentary with her friend about how she didn’t understand what was going on. It was way more entertaining than if I had just seen the movie.

But see here’s the weird thing. I went to see *all* of these movies. And I will go to see the next M. Night movie. And the next one after that. Despite everything, in some weird way, I still care about what M. Night makes. So he’s gotta be doing something right, right? Whatever the case, I’d always heard about this script but never knew anything about it. 750k is quite a sale, even back at that time, so the script had to be special, right? Right Kristy?

Genre: Drama
Premise: After his wife’s death, a man sets out on a 3,200 mile journey across country on foot to show his love for her.
About: This was M. Night Shyamalan’s third script, and the first he sold to Fox back in 1993, for 750k. The project failed to get off the ground reportedly because they were unwilling to put M. Night in the director’s chair (I have other theories why it didn’t get made). The script sale led to work on the film “Stuart Little,” which was then followed by his masterpiece, “The Sixth Sense.”
Writer: M. Night Shyamalan
Details: 119 pages

So I told Carson I wanted to do a blog entry for Script Shadow…he was letting everybody else do one and we go way back so it was only fair that I get a shot. My demands were met with a script by a writer who I wouldn’t care a thing about if he didn’t come up with The Sixth Sense and a script written and sold when I was the ripe age of 5. The night before, I was actually discussing to a friend how much we really didn’t care for M Night. That’s karma I guess. To my surprise this has no elements that I’ve seen from MNS in the past. No dead people, no people lying down in front of lawn mowers for no reason, no mermaids, no contained villages. It was just a regular character driven drama.

Labor of Love is about Maurice Parker and his wife Ellen. The script opens up in a way we’ve seen many times before. It uses a shocking flash-forward scene and then skips back so that we have to read and find out how we ended up there. We fade in on Ellen’s fatal car wreck, but we skip back a few weeks earlier to her and Maurice’s seventeen year marriage. Maurice is very much a man settled into his marriage, it’s the same routine day in and day out. Ellen wakes up, walks ¼ one way to get a loaf of raisin bread for Maurice every morning while Maurice fails to tell Ellen how much she means to him. Ellen is basically STARVING for some affection. Sure Maurice says he loves her, but as a female, I know words can only go so far before we start doubting them. Is it too much to ask for someone to show their love every now and then? Apparently it was for Maurice. He got by on the words “I love you” for seventeen odd years to the point where it was just background noise. She wanted flowers, chocolates, anything tangible to represent his love. She asked him once if he would walk across the country for her and Maurice of course says, sure. But how do we know he would? We wouldn’t unless he physically did it.

Maurice decides to have a celebration one night, he just bought a bigger space to move his classic book store into. Just friends, family, Ellen, for a nice relaxed evening. That’s until he gets the news that Ellen was killed in a car accident by a drunk driver, which we already knew. Maurice’s world instantly falls apart. This story very much reminded me of the Garth Brooks song, If Tomorrow Never Comes. The lyrics go a little something like:

If tomorrow never comes
Will she know how much I loved her
Did I try in every way to show her every day
That shes my only one
And if my time on earth were through
And she must face the world without me
Is the love I gave her in the past
Gonna be enough to last
If tomorrow never comes

Well Ellen won’t ever know how much Maurice loved her. He didn’t do his best everyday to show her. This eats at Maurice from the inside out. She begged for his love and he couldn’t give her an ounce of tangible evidence…until now. Here is a scene between him and an old lady in the park that pretty much confirms his future decision:

MAURICE
Where did he go?

OLD WOMAN
He’s getting my sweater from the car. I said there was a breeze.
(shaking her head)
I told him not to go.

Beat.

MAURICE
May I ask you a question that might sound strange?

OLD WOMAN
Yes.

Beat.

MAURICE
How do you know he loves you?

The old woman looks at him oddly.

MAURICE
I mean besides… time — how did you know ten years ago — twenty years ago?

She thinks hard… tough question. No answer for a moment

then –

The old woman sees something out of the corner of her eye — her husband is walking up the path with her white lace sweater over his arm…

She smiles as the answer comes to her.

OLD WOMAN
Because he shows me… he’s not much for words, but he shows me.

It’s like that scene in The Break Up where Jennifer Aniston tells Vince Vaughn she wants him to want to do the dishes. In other words we shouldn’t have to beg for love, or ask you to do the dishes, you should want to do them because you know it will make us happy. I’m not being gender specific when I say you…but yeah men…you J.

So after 22 pages of me not sure where this story was going, Maurice decides he’s going to walk across the country to show Ellen how much he loved and would do anything for her (umm now that she is no longer in existence). This journey starts in Philadelphia and will end in Pacifica, California, that’s over 3000 miles. It doesn’t say at the beginning why Pacifica, CA, but we find out at the very end through a flashback that Ellen once told Maurice that Pacifica was her “heaven.”

Maurice closes up shop. He gets his stuff together and just leaves, heads out west. He’s in his late forties, not technically physically fit, so you can imagine how this is going to go. So it’s a basic struggle itself just to make the trek across the country. Maurice does make some encounters along the way. Nothing strong enough, not for me anyways. He walks by this liquor store and sees these drunks getting into their trucks to drive. Maurice politely asks them not to drive drunk. This pisses the guys off. Not a page later guess who’s coming up behind him? They beat the pulp out of Maurice but luckily a police “happens” to be nearby and stop them. He runs Maurice’s name to find out his niece is looking for him. She is a psychologist and thinks Maurice is a danger to himself and needs to be in better condition before attempting this crazy adventure. She uses her frequent flyer miles to drive all the way to Indiana and pick him up. Well she stops at a gas station, when she gets back in her car she tries talking to Maurice but he’s silent. She figures he’s sleeping (long journey and all). But when she gets back to PA, she realizes she’s been duped. There’s a homeless man in her backseat in place of Maurice.

This journey is mostly about him walking. At one point Maurice does save a woman and her daughter after a car wreck in a snowstorm. This makes him feel a little better about Ellen’s wreck, as he saved someone. It’s not long before words gets out all over the country. Maurice’s friend used to be a newspaper writer and starts writing little columns about Maurice’s story. Maurice isn’t even aware how big a celebrity he’s becoming. In the final stretch he falls off a ledge in Nevada, breaks his ribs, has a minor stroke, ruptures his spleen, and has some bleeding of the brain. He is hospitalized but glad to find out he is still in California. Doctors tell him that if he doesn’t have surgery he will die. Well of course Maurice is determined to finish the last 60 miles. He HAS to feel that California water on his skin or nothing that he did before matters. He sneaks out of the hospital and keeps on truckin’. He’s on his deathbed as he walks. His side is bleeding through his shirt, he can barely walk. It’s a bit sad and strung out. And the ending? Well…let’s just say if it didn’t end this way I’d be mad because the ending was the only real thing in my mind that had an emotional impact. And I don’t mean the fact of whether he makes it or not. I guess you’ll have to read to find out how it ends.

So like I said I got almost 20 pages in and was wondering where in the heck this was going. I thought Ellen’s death would be something that was strung out the entire story and we would find out why at the end, much like Famous Last Words did. By the way, in my mind it is kind of a short cut, some say cheat, by putting a shocking scene in the first few pages to grab the reader then skip back and reveal the events leading up to it. This hooks the reader in for a bit so they keep reading to find out. The problem is with L.O.L , after that wreck scene it takes 15-20 pages to materialize into the rest of the story. My ADD mind starts to wander by then.

So I was for sure getting a MNS script it would be along the lines of what he does now…but a drama? Where did you pull this one out of MNS? In reports it said this didn’t get made because MNS wanted to direct but they wouldn’t let him. I suspect it didn’t get made because the story is boring and uneventful. That’ just my honest opinion. No offense but I don’t want to watch a man walk across the country and every 15 pages something “comes up” putting doubt in our minds that he will make it. The events used were weak and didn’t have the emotional impact that I think MNS was going for. I knew they’d pass the instant they came up. I’m not sure what others would say about this script…maybe the fact that it is 16 plus years old says something. Maybe this was original back then. Now we got people who walk across country, ride their lawnmowers, horses, etc. So maybe that has something to do with the story.

I had a hard time buying Maurice’s journey. Sure his wife’s death was sad, death always is, but I couldn’t latch on to him. I was never in it when she was alive. I didn’t feel any connection with either character or their relationship. The scenes with them together, including the flashbacks, were very OTN and expositional. It’s like they were saying what they needed to say to go along with the story. Maybe it’s me but I don’t know anyone who talks like that. It was almost as if I didn’t care he was walking across country. In my mind, the way their relationship was presented it was more of a, well you had your chance to show her but you didn’t. I know that sounds bad but that’s how I felt. It was hard to buy Maurice’s sudden revelation and arc.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] barely kept my interest
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I Learned: If you are going to do a character driven story then make sure we are on board with the actual character. If we have to sit through their journey for an hour and a half, make sure we care enough to want to listen to them and not because we are forced to. If we don’t feel their needs, wants, emotions then you basically have nothing for us.