Number 5!
One of the big problems screenwriters run into is that they’re good with the writing part but they have no idea how to strategize their career. They don’t know how to break in. Without a concrete plan, they just sort of write stuff and send it out to a few people and if nobody says it’s great, they cry in their Cheerios, spend several months watching bad television and eating a lot of donuts and Reeses peanut butter cups, before jumping back on the horse and trying again.
Much like your protagonist needs a goal in his story, YOU need a goal. Today, I’m going to give you ten goals to choose from in regards to what your plan should be. Once you know what your goal is, you can cater your screenwriting break-in strategy accordingly. Here are the ten best ways to break in as a screenwriter in 2023 from least effective to most effective. Are we ready?
LET’S GET STARTED!
10) Be the ultimate self-promoter – Be someone who’s on every screenwriting message board there is and constantly promote your work. Get people to read it. The trick with this is you have to be genuinely nice about it and reciprocate the gesture. If you’re out there asking everybody to read your scripts, you should be offering to read their scripts too. What’s going to happen if you do this consistently is that you’re going to grow a network and people in the screenwriting community are going to know who you are. And what ends up happening is that, in these bigger networks, there are always industry people dipping in and out of that network. So they’re going to be aware of you. And if people are talking about how your writing keeps improving and then you come out with some great concept for your latest screenplay, I guarantee you a few of these industry people are going to be curious and want to check the script out. We have a few of these promoters here on the site. I will allow them to share with you their secrets in the comments section.
9) Contests – Contests aren’t what they used to be because they used to be the only middle-ground between being a no-one and being a repped screenwriter. Nowadays, obviously, you have this thing called the internet which, if you’re smart, you can use to circumvent the contest route. But the bigger contests still hold some sway in the industry. Managers and agents still pay attention to the people who win a Nicholl Fellowship. They’ll even take a look at your logline if you were a finalist. There are a few more good contests. Austin. Sundance Screenwriters Lab. And I’m sure a few of you will post others in the comments section. Contests aren’t as helpful as they used to be. But you can definitely parlay a good showing in a big contest into representation.
8) Short stories on Reddit – Short stories naturally lend themselves to feature film ideas and one of the bigger trends over the last five years is production companies snatching up the rights to original horror short stories being posted on CreepyPasta on Reddit. I believe they also have subreddits for sci-fi and romance and drama and whatever else tickles your fancy. Although horror seems to be the genre that gets the most attention. The great thing about this is that your story doesn’t need to be crazy elaborate. 2000-5000 words is all you need for a good short story. And that’s just one-quarter of the words you would write in a feature script. You also get instant feedback from readers so you’ll know right away if your story is working or not. If not, you’ll find out why and you can go back to the drawing board, improve, and try again. Short horror stories are one of the avenues that have filled the vacuum of the long lost spec boom.
7) Spec Sale – The days of giant spec sales are long gone. They just don’t happen anymore for a number reasons, the biggest of which is that in the 1990s studios got burned for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on good first acts and terrible second and third acts. So they went the more dependable route and started hoarding IP. However, you can still break in with spec sales under the right circumstances. Those circumstances are writing lower budgeted big concept genre material (horror, sci-fi, contained thriller). You’re not going to get paid as much. But you can sell those scripts and, because they’re cheap, there’s a good chance of them getting made. And now you’re in the system. You know that movie about the two girls who climb up a tower called, “Fall?” Stuff like that you can sell as a spec script.
6) Find some IP and write a script based on it – Industry people like IP better than they like sex. It’s a magical word to them. I bring this up because you’d be surprised at just how interested someone will be in a marginal idea solely because it’s previously established IP. The trick with IP is to go in one of two directions. One, look for overlooked material. Books (or games, or comics) that made a little splash in the 80s and 90s and 00s, but not a big enough splash to become a part of popular culture. I remember Akiva Goldsman got the rights to some unicorn book from the 90s for a bag of pistachios and a half-finished can of Busch Light. You can option these more obscure materials for next to nothing from the authors if you’re charming enough. Cause what else do they have going on? The other avenue is to look for stuff in the public domain. You probably want to stay away from your Peter Pans and Robin Hoods only because everybody picks those. Keep an eye out for books that will be in the public domain A YEAR FROM NOW. That way, you can write the script over the course of the next year and have it ready the second the book enters the public domain. Sites like this one will tell you what’s upcoming.
5) Write a Pilot Script – As a feature guy, it pains me to say this. But pilots sell more than features these days. And the great thing about pursuing this avenue is that, unlike fifteen years ago, where you had to be a seasoned veteran to get a show on the air, these days, virtual no-names can get on the air (True Detective, The End of the F***ing World, Severance, PEN15). There are so many slots to fill for networks and streamers that they have no choice but to take a chance on young writers LIKE YOURSELF. So write a pilot, preferably with a juicy concept (think more “Stranger Things” and less “This is Us”), then do your research, see who reps the writers of shows like yours (on IMDB Pro), and START QUERYING THEM!
4) Black List – The Black List continues to be a touchy subject around here. It used to be great. Now the town has learned how to game the system so a bunch of crappy scripts make it on the list. Also, woke scripts get heavily weighted regardless of whether they’re good or not. So the Black List is definitely less prestigious than it used to be. But getting on the list is still going to give your career a bump. And if you make the top 10, it will be a sizable bump. You’ll be able to get meetings with everyone in town and, hopefully, parlay a few of those into writing jobs. How do you get on the Black List? Go through the last two Black Lists. Write down every manager who has more than one entry. Note what kind of scripts they like. And write a script in that universe (woke and biopics are most managers’ entry point). Query them with a logline. They’ll probably want to read it if your script is in any way similar to the kinds of scripts they usually promote onto the list. And if the script is good, they’ll send it out. And now you get to be on the Black List. Simple as that!
3) Write and direct a short film – A short film that gets a lot of views online allows you to e-mail lots of reps and producers in Hollywood and get a meeting with them. It’s the ultimate business card. Because it’s not just a short film. It’s a promise of what you’re capable of if someone gave you the money to make a feature film. And everyone’s going to want to be in on that because they’re going to make money from it. But you have to give us a short film that’s special in some way. It’s got to be legitimately scary. It’s got to be incredibly moving. It has to have a world-changing twist to it. It has to have something shocking in it. It’s got to be controversial in some way. People always say, “There’s a million short films. It’s impossible to stand out.” Well, yeah, if you write some lame handheld mumblecore drama in a one-bedroom Hollywood apartment, nobody’s going to care. But, luckily, you’re a writer. So you know what captures audiences. Especially if you read this site. Use that knowledge and make something memorable.
2) Get on a TV writing Staff – The last time I counted, there were 700 shows on TV. If each of those shows averages 5 writers, which is probably a lowball estimate, that’s 3500 writing jobs. Are you one of the 3500 top writers in the United States? If you read this site and you’ve been at this for while, you should be. Or you should be close. There are just so many of these jobs, mathematically, it’s easier than trying to sell a spec or make the Black List. If you want to get on one of these shows, identify what kinds of shows you would love to write for, then write an original pilot script in that genre. Then query all of the managers and agents who represent TV writers (through IMDB Pro). Then they’ll send your script in to the right people and hopefully you get staffed on one of those shows. You also want to submit to all the studio TV writing programs, which someone can list for me in the comments section.
1) Direct a movie from your own script – By far, this is the fastest way into the system. Because the thing that Hollywood values most is a finished product. And if you do it this way, you’ll have a finished product. The rub is that you have to want to direct and you have to have some money. With that said, part of being a writer is being financially creative. It’s something you’ll be asked to do over and over again when you’re hired for jobs. So try to write something that would be cheap to shoot. A writer recently sent me a script for a consultation that was limited to a computer screen, like Searching. And it was a good script! So it can be done. And if you do it, it really is a “jump to the head of the line” situation.
And there you have it! Did I miss any? Rank them incorrectly? Feel free to let me know in the comments.
Genre: Horror
Premise: After a botched delivery of fresh blood, a world weary vampire and a pregnant nurse team up to rob a hospital of their supply.
About: This script finished with 18 votes on last year’s Black List. The writer was one-third of a writing team that wrote the indie film, Samir, back in 2019, about an Arab man who was framed for the September 11th attacks. Otherwise, he has only written and directed short films. Conceivably, he would be directing Sang Froid as well.
Writer: Michael Basha
Details: 90 pages
Joey King for Camille?
Carson, why do you hate the Black List?
Au contraire, mon frère.
I don’t hate the Black List. I hate the practice of campaigning for Black List votes for scripts that don’t deserve them. By the way, these are not debatable selections. The scripts that were lobbied onto the list were clearly lobbied. They are objectively weak.
That’s one of the reasons I do this. I want to celebrate the scripts that truly deserve to be celebrated. And I want you guys to know which ones don’t belong there so that when you read them and you see that they’re terrible and you get super confused because you’ve been told scripts need to be good to make the Black List. Well, now you know that that script only got on the list because it was lobbied.
However, I have great news for you. Today’s script is not one of those scripts. Today’s script deserves its Black List accolades. Let’s check it out.
30-something Paul looks like a boxer who’s just emerged from a 15 round slug fest. Every step forward is difficult for this guy. This guy, by the way, buys drugs every day at the park . Except they’re not drugs. They’re blood. Paul is a vampire.
Paul brings the latest batch of blood back to his Boss Vampire, Samy. Samy acts and speaks like she’s hundreds, if not thousands, of years old. She needs blood every night for her and her minions to survive. Paul is just the assistant. He only gets to keep enough for himself to stay alive.
Paul runs into an unfortunate problem. His blood guy moves out of town. And he’s assigned a new girl. Paul is furious about this. His boss isn’t the kind of person who takes kindly to late deliveries. So anything that could cause a hiccup in Paul’s daily schedule is dangerous.
Paul meets the girl, a scared 18 year old named Camille, and immediately sees that she’s pregnant. This is not what he signed up for so he’ll replace Camille tomorrow. However, today, he has no choice. He has to buy from her. Except just when he’s about to, two cops approach Paul, suspicious of what he’s up to.
Camille freaks out and runs to the bathroom to flush away all the blood. After Paul ditches the cops and learns that Camille did this, he’s furious. He needs that blood TONIGHT. Or else. Or else what? We’re never told. But we get the sense that it’s bad.
Paul convinces Camille to go back to the blood bank she works at to steal more bags. But when they get there, they learn there was a giant 20 car pile up on the expressway and all available blood in the area was picked up and transferred to the hospital. When Paul is confronted by the blood bank security guard, he stabs him. Which means the two of them are now wanted.
Paul and Camille will now have to infiltrate the hospital and get several of those blood bags so that Paul can get them back to Samy on time. But when they run late, Samy sends the big dogs after Paul. Which means now they’re not just trying to get blood, they’re trying to keep the blood that’s already inside them circulating.
There’s a moment in this script that convinced me this material was a cut above what I usually get from a screenwriter.
It occurs about midway through the screenplay. Paul and Camille are getting ice from a convenience store so they can keep the blood cold.
Literally, as they open up the freezer door to grab the ice, the big heavy, Seth, marches down the aisle. This guy is gigantic. He’s strong. He’s terrifying. And there’s no way around him. Their only option is to go through him.
Paul squares up against the guy for a fight.
Now, 99 times out of 100, in a genre screenplay like this, when this happens, our hero (in this case, Paul) channels this amazing ability to beat ass. He turns into this super-fighter and easily disposes of the threat.
Writers do this because it’s easy. And they think it’s going to look cool on screen.
But the truth of the matter is that so many characters do this these days, the audience has become numb to it. They’re bored. Which is why making this choice is boring.
Instead, in this script, Paul is overmatched. He takes a few swings but Seth handles him easily. He’s not just kind of stronger than Paul. He’s a million times stronger than Paul. So Paul gets his ass handed to him.
As I read this, I was so happy. Because this is what you should be doing in screenwriting. You should be making things hard for your hero. Not easy. If it’s easy for them, where’s the tension? Where’s the suspense? Where’s our fear that the hero is in danger?
That’s why this scene was so captivating to me. Because I feared for Paul. I had no idea how he was going to get out of this. As it so happens, he does get out of it. But it’s sloppy. It’s ugly. Things don’t go his way. But he’s able to take advantage of a couple of small opportunities to barely defeat Seth.
That spirit of dealing with obstacles in this unflattering difficult manner is what separated this script from so many others.
But it wasn’t the only thing. Something this script reminded me of was the power of a desperate character. When characters are desperate, they’ll do anything to achieve their goal. And we got a double dose of desperation in Sang Froid.
Both Paul and Camille are soooooo desperate for tonight to work out. Which necessitated that they engage in things they’d normally never engage in. You don’t break into a hospital to steal blood after the city’s police department has been notified of a man and a woman who just tried to rob a blood bank.
It’s not a smart move. But when you’re desperate, you have no choice. And that’s where things get really exciting in movies – when characters have to do dumb things because their situation warrants it.
Another thing I liked about this script is that it was STORY FIRST, VAMPIRES SECOND.
A lot of times genre writers love their genre so much that they want to spend dozens of pages introducing you to that world and touting the rules and screaming to the rooftops that this is a vampire movie and these are the ways my vampires live and vampire this and vampire that. Then, almost as an afterthought, they try and shoehorn a story into that.
Whereas, with Sang Froid, this was always a story first. Two people desperately need something and they spend the night trying to get that something and, oh yeah, vampire stuff pops up every once in a while. There’s no vampire vanity here. It only comes up when it needs to.
For example, Paul gets stabbed by the blood bank security guard early on and he starts bleeding. But the blood is cold and clear and runny. But we don’t dwell on that. They’re too busy. We’re then off to the next part of the story.
I love that. I love when the story takes precedence. That was my issue with Pinkerton, the JJ Abrams produced script I just reviewed in the newsletter. There were times where the writer seemed to want to get some point across about the world rather than fix the fact that his second act moved like a sloth in molasses.
Still another interesting thing about this script was the implied stakes. I’m usually a “MAKE THE STAKES CLEAR” guy. But they didn’t do that here. We didn’t quite know why Paul needed this blood tonight OR ELSE. We kind of had an idea. But we never went deep into the why. It was the mere fact that Paul seemed so desperate that we understood the stakes were high. At one point, he says to Camille, “What do you need in order to help me? Name your price.” She facetiously says, “A million dollars.” “Fine,” he replies. “You’ll have it by the end of tonight.”
That’s how high the stakes must have been. That he doesn’t blink at that kind of request.
Sang Froid is like the unofficial “grown up” sequel to Let the Right One In. It has that same tone. But it definitely feels more adult. I thought it was great. And I think it’s a great example of how to write a spec screenplay. A few characters. Sparse description. Keep the plot moving quickly. This is what all of you should be doing!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: This script taught me that sexual tension works better when it’s an unexpected pairing. If you take two highly attractive people and they’re around the same age and their lives are going well and you try to create sexual tension off of that, you certainly can. But it’s going to be boring sexual tension because it’s so obvious. If you create sexual tension between people who would normally never be together, that’s a lot more intriguing. This dates all the way back to movies like Harold and Maude. You can see it in sitcoms today as well, such as with Andy and April Ludgate in Parks and Rec. We get most excited as an audience when there’s a spark where there wouldn’t normally be one. Paul is older and broken down. Camille is 19 and pregnant. There shouldn’t be anything here. And yet there is. And that’s a big reason why we keep turning the pages. We want to see what’s going to happen there.
Genre: Crime/Heist.
Premise: In 1960’s Dallas, a desperate wife of a losing gambler forms the Dollfaces, a group of misfit bandits who go on a spree of robbing underground card rooms run by the mafia to win back her husband’s losses.
About: This script competed in January’s Scriptshadow Logline Showdown. It was beaten by the behemoth that was Call of Judy. But it crawled its way off the battlefield and made it back to my computer, determined to get reviewed.
Writer: Alex Beattie
Details: 95 pages
So I was sitting there looking for a script to review. I had a few older spec sales that were in the running. As well as the scripts on the most recent Black List. But after Friday’s Logline Showdown Review, I realized that that poker logline from the Logline Showdown was still dancing around in my head. And I thought, “Why don’t I just review that?”
That’s the cool thing about Logline Showdown. If I like an idea, regardless of whether it wins or not, I can still review it! So that’s what I’m going to do gosh darnnit. I hope you all join me.
20-something Peggy Abbot lives in Dallas in the 1960s. Her husband is the world’s biggest loser. In more ways than one. The main way is that he’s gambled his family into an insane amount of debt via these local underground poker games that the mafia holds. It’s gotten so bad that he’s had to pawn his wife’s most expensive piece of jewelry, a pendant necklace.
Peggy is trying to keep it together despite being a month away from being kicked out of her home and having to raise two young children. She’s at her wit’s end. One night she follows her husband to one of these poker games wearing a mask, watches him lose the last of their money, then holds up the whole table with a gun. Due to a convenient distraction, she’s able to scoop up a few thousand dollars and make a run for it.
Peggy then meets a few people. There’s her snobby neighbor, Connie, who bothers Peggy about her unkempt yard. There’s Rhonda, a black woman who performs voodoo themed magic shows downtown. And there’s Rhonda’s roommate, Gertrude, a buff Hungarian woman who could probably beat up all of the Avengers and still have enough strength left for leg day.
Peggy explains what she was able to do all by herself and pitches them becoming a group that routinely crashes these underground games and steals their money. All three women have their own reasons for needing money so they’re in! The team grabs themselves three more masks, becomes the dollfaces, and starts robbing card games.
Everything is going swell until one of the mobsters, a hot dude named Vincent who knows Peggy through other circumstances, figures out she’s a dollface. He takes her out to the middle nowhere to kill her but then, inexplicably leaves her there. It’s then that she realizes Vincent is working undercover for the Feds. But, Vincent says, in order to keep that cover, he’ll have to kill her the next time she tries to rob them. Will Peggy and the Dollfaces listen? Or will she hang up her mask for good?
Loglines are funny things.
Sometimes, you see in them what you want to see rather than what’s actually there.
And with this logline, what I was most attracted to was this idea of a group of women infiltrating these poker games, a traditionally male activity, and beating them at poker. So, basically, beating them at their own game. I thought that would be a really fun movie. Sort of a twist on that movie, “21,”
But it turns out the women just go into these games with brute force and rob the men.
I’m not saying that’s a bad idea. There’s still a movie there. If there’s one thing that sets this logline apart from its competition, it’s that it’s exactly what Hollywood is looking for right now.
One of the things Hollywood loves is when you lean into a trend but find a way where it doesn’t feel so obvious. For example, if everything was the same with this concept, except it was set in 2023, it would be too on-the-nose. It would be, “#METOO #WOMENSEMPOWERMENT.” By setting in the 60s, it feels more genuine and like its own thing.
But the reason I think brute force robbery isn’t as good as the women playing poker games is that brute force robbery does’t take any thought. Indeed, the majority of these robberies require zero thinking whatsoever. It’s literally, “Okay, you act strong. You distract them. You keep the car running. I’ll yell and collect the money.”
It’s so much more satisfying for audiences when your heroes have to outthink the antagonists. Or, in the case of what I was hoping for, beat them at their own game.
Screenplays are a funny thing.
Because when they don’t give you what you hoped for, they never quite recover. Even when the writing is strong. And I do think the writing is strong here.
Alex introduces us to our characters. He sets up their dire circumstances. He shows the bad guys taking advantage of people, so that we’ll want to see them go down. He throws in the occasional twist. And he keeps the story moving at a brisk pace. Maybe the first act could’ve moved a little quicker. But once we got to the second act, we were constantly moving forward.
So why isn’t this a “worth the read?” Is it just because I wanted a different movie?
No.
I don’t think Peggy was set up well. Her introductory scene has another character, Connie, outshine her (Connie is upset because Peggy’s uncut lawn is driving down the value of Connie’s home). That’s unacceptable. I cannot stress how unacceptable that is.
This is f***ing screenwriting, man. Nobody gives you the benefit of the doubt. You don’t get to introduce the most important character in your story in a passive capacity where she’s outshone by another character.
If you have HBO Max, go watch the opening scene of Enlightened. Watch how that character is introduced. Better yet, here it is.
I’m not saying that every character needs to have a breakdown to have an impactful introduction but you need SOMETHING. A character needs to POP when you introduce them. I was 20-30 pages into his when I realized, “Oh, I guess Peggy is our main character.” That shouldn’t be something I gradually realize.
Another problem here is that the robberies all felt the same. This is why I wanted them playing poker rather than robbing. Because poker allows for unique scenarios every time. Sticking a gun in someone’s face and saying, “Give us the money” can’t evolve that much.
There were some small developments like the bad guys bringing over some OG mafia men from the old country. But the robberies (minus the climax) still felt the same. Also, since they’re robbing the same people over and over again – trained Mafia mind you – you would think that our Mafia would be more prepared. Yet they never are.
You want to do the opposite of that in screenwriting. You want to make things hard for your heroes. Not easy. I would’ve made their second robbery 10 times more difficult than their first. And their third robbery 10 times more difficult than their second. Make your heroes have to work for it. Everything’s too easy here.
This script has some good bones. But it needs to be stuffed inside a nuclear reactor. It’s all a little too casual. Regardless, I wish Alex luck with it. Especially because I can see agents and production companies being interested in a movie like this. So I hope something comes of it.
Screenplay Link: Poker Dollface
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: “I Need To Set Her Up Syndrome” – I Need To Set Her Up Syndrome is when you’re so focused on ticking all the boxes that you want the reader to know about your hero that you forget to actually introduce them in a powerful memorable entertaining way. Sure, I know that Peggy has two young children and her yard isn’t well-kept because they’re low on money and that her husband kinda sucks. Great, I’m glad I have that information. But guess what? I’m bored. That’s the scratch you have to itch first – MAKING YOUR READER NOT BORED. Not the exposition scratch. That should always be the secondary scratch.
No post today. You’ll just have to enjoy the Newsletter. That’s IF YOU GET the Newsletter. And if you don’t get the newsletter, I’d highly recommend that you sign up because we’ve got a whopper for you today. I review a screenplay that JJ Abrams is involved in that is trying to do something that’s NEVER BEEN DONE IN HOLLYWOOD BEFORE. To say that he’s trying to change the very fabric of Hollywood is an understatement. The best thing about the review is I tell you whether he’s going to succeed or not.
I also talk about the DC slate that James Gunn laid out, which I think is awesome. I then discuss the Oscar screenwriting nominees. Things get heated when I start discussing Banshees vs. Everything Everywhere. We’ve got two GREAT screenwriting tips. Some of the most valuable I’ve ever offered in the newsletter. We’ve got a couple of Star Wars cameos. One in relation to JJ and another in relation to an actor whose career was thought to have been destroyed by the franchise who’s made a comeback in, what is shaping up to be, the best movie to come out of Sundance.
So, yes, there’s a lot to talk about!
And if you’d like me to send you this newsletter right now, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com!
Genre: Action/Adventure
Winning Logline: When a lonely kid gets lost in a next-gen VR gaming experience, the only person who can rescue him is his mom, who’s never played a videogame in her life.
About: Today’s logline won the first ever Scriptshadow Logline Showdown. If you want to compete in the next Logline Showdown, get your title, genre, and logline into me by Thursday, February 16th at 10pm Pacific Time. I will pick my five favorite loglines from the entries. Readers of the site will then vote for their favorite and the script will get a review on the site the following Friday. All entries need to be sent to carsonreeves3@gmail.com.
Writer: David Laurie
Details: 99 pages
Yeah baby!
You’ve seen it in the comments.
You’ve seen it in the Showdown.
Now, you see it reviewed on the site.
CALL OF JUDY!
13 year old Brooklyn kid, Bop Tan, a Chinese-American, is lucky that he has gaming. Because his life is pretty sucky. His mother and father are divorced. His mother is always working (as a janitor at a superstore). And he gets chased by bullies every day.
Luckily, Bop has been invited to a big launch event for Virtue-Ally, a top tier virtual reality game world that’s going to revolutionize the industry. At least according to its CEO, Oswald Merriweather.
As Bop reminds us, this is the most important day of his life. Which is why, for once, his mother, Judy, is going to move mountains to make sure she gets out of work early and can attend.
The event takes place in a blocked off street with a big black pyramid in the middle and thousands of screaming gamer fans outside. There is a big screen that allows for the crowd too see what’s happening inside the virtual game.
But when Judy gets to the event, she can’t find her son. So she stumbles into the pyramid (I’m not sure how she was able to get in while the thousands of screaming fans were not) and, after some smoky theatrics, she finds herself plummeting onto a World War 2 battlefield, where she meets three English soldiers, Tom, Dick, and Harry.
Judy just wants to find her son. But Tom, Dick, and Harry say they’ve got more important matters to take care of – namely eliminating a gun nest at the top of a hill. Judy tries to tell the soldiers that they’re in a video game but they don’t seem to know what a video game is.
After several dust-ups with the enemy, Judy and Harry get transported to a different game, this one a three-dimensional side-scroller that’s a virtual take on “Don’t Fall In The Lava.” At this point, an injured Harry starts to understand that he’s not in Normandy anymore. But he still doesn’t really know what’s going on.
It’s there that Judy meets Duck, a cute little toy bunny, who’s seen Bop. They travel up and up higher through the levels until they make it to the next porthole, which brings them into Crime City, a sort of Grand Theft Auto meets Fortnite game. There they have to deal with a psychotic guns-obsessed female villain named Amy.
After somehow surviving her, Judy finally finds Bop and they go home. Or do they? They realize that the last level is actually a virtual mirror of the real world, and Judy will have to take down the people in her life she hates the most, her ex-husband and her boss. Thank God she has her son’s game expertise to help her do it.
First of all, I want to congratulate David on winning the first ever Scriptshadow Logline Showdown.
I also want to scream at him because, after reading this, I now want to buy a game system.
As for the script, I thought some of the set pieces were fun. But I had a tough time getting into this story. Full disclosure, I’m short on time so, if I didn’t understand something, I just kept reading. I didn’t go back and try and figure it out.
For anyone crying foul about that, I have bad news for you. This is how everyone in Hollywood reads scripts. If they’re not clear on something the first time through, they don’t go back and re-read.
But, in fairness to David, if anything was unclear to me, he may be able to point out that it was, indeed, explained at some point.
My main issue with the script was the first act. It’s hard to follow. Bop is going to this video game event but it’s mostly shrouded in mystery. We don’t really understand it. We just know it’s important on some level to him.
We then have Judy, who, I believed, was coming to this event to see her son perform in the game. However, when she gets there, she sort of stumbles inside the pyramid structure that’s the center of the event, looking for Bop.
Once inside, the place fills up with smoke, and she’s sent into the virtual reality game without explanation. Once she lands in World War 2, only then do we start to put two and two together and realize that the creator of this virtual reality purposefully trapped Bop in the game so that Judy would have to find him.
It’s kind of hard to understand because I don’t know how Oswald knew Judy would come and why he concocted this plan by which he makes a mom find her son. It seems very random. I mean, he’s the head of a trillion dollar company. Isn’t he more worried about selling millions of systems?
This felt like it needed a clearly defined “lost child” scenario. Bop goes and beta tests this video game for Virtu-Ally. To Oswald’s shock, Bop gets lost in the game and they can’t find him. They look but he’s nowhere to be found. Finally, they have no choice but to inform Judy. And maybe Oswald thinks that the only person who’s going to be able to find him is the mom. So he asks her to go in.
It’s much simpler.
The vagueness through which this journey begins basically kills the script before it gets started. Cause if the “how” of the journey is confusing, the audience is going to decide then and there that they’re not going to go on the journey with you.
Once on the journey, we run into more clarity problems. In fairness, this might be because I was not re-reading anything, as I discussed. But the second we land inside World War 2, we’re told that we have to get up to the top of some hill and take out a gun or something. I didn’t really understand what we were doing.
I’m not even sure I knew that Janet knew that the reason she was placed in this game was to find her son. She stumbles into that pyramid and then, bam, she’s in World War 2 for some reason. Nobody sits her down and clearly explains what’s going on, making the narrative confusing to the viewer.
While this is happening, we’re cutting back to Oswald and his two main programmers, and Oswald seems very determined to give Judy the best game experience possible. Which further confused me. Is this movie about a man trying to show our heroine how to enjoy video games? Or is it about a mom trying to rescue her son in a video game? If I were quizzed on this question, I would probably get it wrong.
And then we have Bop himself. Is he in danger? Can he potentially die? I never got the feeling he could. And if the stakes aren’t that Bop could die, I don’t think there’s a movie here. If Bop isn’t truly in danger, then why does Janet need to go looking for him? Go home, wait for Bop to get bored in the game, he’ll come home and you guys can order pizza.
99% of the time, when there’s a problem with a script, it’s in the setup. Something in the setup destroys the reader’s suspension of disbelief. And that’s what I would say happened here. The lack of clarity of what was going on and why Judy needed to enter this game took me out of the script. It had me asking questions left and right.
My biggest note to David, then, would be to have a “HERE’S THE PROBLEM AND HERE’S WHAT WE NEED YOU TO DO” scene at the end of the first act. Think about when the CIA comes to Indiana Jones and tells him about the Ark. We need THAT kind of scene here.
Oswald comes to Judy. He explains that her son is lost in his new game (the PROBLEM). He’s sent people after him but they can’t find him. So, he believes, the only person who can find him is his mom. Which is why he’s come to her. He wants her to go in the game and retrieve her son (“Here’s what you need to do.”).
I also think there needs to be a bigger mom-son conflict here. Similar to the mother’s conflict with her daughter in Everything Everywhere All At Once. Cause, basically, this should be a “runaway” narrative. The son is sick of his mother. So he runs away. The difference is, he runs away in the virtual world instead of in the real world.
That way, this isn’t just about physically finding her son. It’s about fixing years and years of a broken relationship. It’s about truly finding her son, as a person. There’s a little bit of that here, but the whole thing about “Mommy won’t play video games with me” isn’t enough.
One of the ways to look at screenwriting is it’s not just that one day you learn how to wrote a great script. It’s a process. The first stage of that process is learning how to write a first act. Which is challenging because you have to set up your plot, set up your characters, you have to do so in an entertaining way, and then you have to do so with clarity.
Once you learn how to write first acts, you have to learn how to write a second act. That’s its own challenge. You have to learn to escalate the story and keep throwing new and interesting obstacles at your hero, as well as explore the central character’s arc.
Once you figure that out, you have to learn how to write a third act. The hardest thing with the third act is that your story charges towards this obvious inevitable conclusion. Yet you must find a way to still make that compelling. We all know that Liam Neeson is going to find his daughter. But how do we still make that exciting?
At least based on this script, I think David still needs to learn how to nail the first act. It’s just not there. Basic things like clarity are not on point. Hopefully, I’ve given him some ideas on how to improve that. And I’m sure everyone here in the comments will offer equally helpful advice.
Congrats again to David for winning. You can read the screenplay here!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: “Passers-by flicker HORROR at his face.” Be careful about trying to be too clever with your writing. It feels good in the moment. But the only thing that matters in the end is clarity. If we don’t understand what you mean, we’re distanced from your story. “Passers-by flicker HORROR at his face.” What does that mean? I don’t know. If you ever run up against a potentially complicated description, write out the line like you’re writing it for a second grader and then, if you need to, make minor adjustments from there. “As he walks down the street, people stare back at him, horrified looks on their faces.” We understand that sentence, right? So why change it? Why make things harder on ourselves?
