Genre: Comedy
Premise: A mystery about what paper jams can teach us about life. After an inexperienced detective starts investigating a death at the Paper Jam department of a major corporation on the verge of its centennial, she unwittingly embarks on a life-altering spiritual journey that unearths her small town’s dark secrets.
About: This script finished in the 11th slot on last year’s Black List. This is the second time Filipe F. Coutinho has made the Black List. He made it last year with his script, Whittier. Coutinho was mentored by Beau Willimon, who created House of Cards.
Writer: Filipe F. Coutinho
Details: 126 pages

Daddario for Jayne?

I’ve been looking forward to reading this.

I love when writers take a highly specific subject matter and build a fun story around it. And I thought it was funny that the writer went so far as to say that our subject matter – paper jams – could actually teach us something about life.

And then, of course, there’s my memory of the greatest comedy scene ever shot, which was the guys in Office Space taking the printer out to a field and bashing it to pieces to the sweet vocals of The Geto Boys. Ever since then, printers have been in the team photo for the funniest things you could build a comedy scene around.

So I think this script has potential. Let’s see if I’m right.

Our movie is set in the small town of Fairport where the Von Brandt Paper Company has been operating for 100 years. The company specializes in making printers. More specifically, Von Brandt is one of the leaders in the industry for troubleshooting paper jams.

In fact, it has an entire department dedicated to fixing paper jams. As we’re told, paper jams are incredibly complex. Here, one of the characters explains it to us: “Paper isn’t manufactured, it’s processed. And that process is complex. First, you gotta turn the trees into wood chips. Then, you mash ’em into pulp and bleach it. And then you run it through screens and chemicals to remove all bio gunk until only water and wood fiber remain. That’s just for starters. Now consider this – in Spain, paper’s made from eucalyptus, but in Kentucky, Southern pine. And they’re expected to go through the exact same machine without any issues… Seems challenging enough, huh? Now multiply that by a million types of paper and factor in the 12 thousand steps that happen from the moment you hit ‘print’ to the moment the sheet lands on the tray. You ask me, it’s a miracle paper isn’t jamming all the time.”

Anyway, one day, a worker named Duarte Alves sees something come into his office and makes a run for it. He goes to the paper jam cemetery and watches as a gigantic industrial printer is pushed on top of him and he dies.

Cut to a day later an we meet detective Jayne Brubaker. Jayne is a no-nonsense type of gal. And while everyone else seems to think this was some sort of accident, Jayne believes there’s more at play here. So she starts interviewing all the people who work at Von Brandt. What she learns is that this place is so obsessed with solving the world’s paper jam problem that they’ve become blinded to just how severely this is affecting their employees. Because it isn’t long before another employee, Chad, dies mysteriously.

Just when Jayne starts making headway on the case, her boss, aka her father, comes in and says “Slow down.” He explains that Von Brandt is all Fairport has. If you expose it as some sort of evil murderous place, you could destroy the entire town. Jayne then has to decide if she wants to keep the status quo or do what’s right. A decision that becomes a lot weirder when Elvis enters the picture. Elvis, you say? Welcome to Jambusters.

One of the harder screenwriting things to discuss in any helpful way is “voice” and “writing style.” These are so personal and so subjective, the extent to which you can dissect comes down to saying you either like the style or you don’t.

But it’s a relevant discussion because it has an outsized effect on the read. Writing styles change how a story moves through your brain. To give you an example, imagine a story about a guy who moves back to his hometown after being gone for 20 years.

Imagine Kenneth Lonergan (Manchester by the Sea) writing that movie and then imagine Quentin Tarantino writing that movie. You’re envisioning two completely different movies in your head, right? That’s the outsized effect of writing style.

I bring this up because today’s script has a very chatty style to it. It’s kind of like reading someone with a colorful personality who likes to talk a lot and who has ADD. Here’s a quick example from the screenplay…

There’s nothing wrong with this writing style. I actually prefer it to the opposite, which is the super-simplified, “only-the-facts-ma’am” style. With that said, this over-stimulated style can start to grate on the reader if the story isn’t keeping up with it. Because it does take a lot of effort to read, which readers don’t like. So you start to feel like, I’m having to work harder than I usually do to get though something that shouldn’t be taking this much energy out of me.

And I guess this gets into a bigger debate about what screenwriting really is. It started out as purely a blueprint to make a movie. There was no personality at all in the writing because how does ‘personality’ help the set workers know how to dress the set? If you want the set to look a certain way, give us the facts and we’ll make it look that way

Of course, that changed over time, because the screenwriting business got more competitive and writers realized they could better keep a reader’s interest by adding a little personalization to the writing. They could use their voice to give their screenplays a little more pop.

It’s just important to remember that there’s a line by which you don’t want to cross. And that line is when the reader feels like they’re working harder than they want to to understand what’s going on.

And that was definitely going on here. Not a lot. But enough that I started to get aggravated. It’s not an accident that this script is 16 pages too long. What’s that old video series that used to get all that play? Girls Gone Wild? Well, this is Voice Gone Wild. Let’s not let this voice take off its off every ten seconds.

With that said, Coutinho makes a smart decision. He doesn’t just follow the daily exploits of someone who works at a printer factory. He gives us a dead body. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If your idea feels tame in any way, introduce a dead body. A dead body creates mystery and it introduces PURPOSE in to the story. Now someone has to look into that dead body. They have to find out how they died or how they were murdered. Which means we have a goal.

And I did enjoy some of the philosophical stuff about paper jams in comparison to the meaning of life. It did get a little weird, but it was amusing.

In the end, though, this script makes you wade through so much text to get to the relevant plot points, that it violates one of the most important rules of screenwriting, which is that a script is supposed to entertain the reader. The second it crosses over into making them work, you’ve lost them.

And I just felt like I was having to read way too much stuff to get to the point. I suppose watching Jayne share an impromptu dance with her husband isn’t violating any screenwriting laws. But I sure did ask myself after I read it, “Was that really necessary?” I found myself thinking that a lot.

This script is hard to describe. But if I were pressed to, I’d say it’s I Heart Huckabees meets Chinatown by way of Max Landis. If that sounds like your paper jam, check it out and let me know what you think!

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

What I learned: “He’s gangly, with hips like doorknobs and unruly, brittle hair.” Sometimes we writers write stuff that looks good on paper but doesn’t make sense. And for whatever reason, we favor the “looks good” part over the “makes sense” part. Don’t ever do this. The “makes sense” part is always more important. Nobody knows what “hips like doorknobs” looks like. It doesn’t make sense which means, even if you have to switch in a more boring description that *does* make sense, you do so. Cause making sense is always the priority.

One of the most famous spec sales of all time. Why didn’t it get turned into a movie??

Genre: Dark Comedy
Premise: An ultra-masculine airplane mechanic’s wife leaves him for a fruity new age weirdo and must figure out how to get his life back.
About: This is a famous spec sale for a script that never got made. It comes from the spec sale king, Joe Eszterhás. It sold for, I believe, 2.5 million dollars in the late 90s. It was then rewritten by the writing team of Brent Brisco & Mark Fauser, who wrote the monster box office hit, Waking up in Reno, starring Billy Bob Thorton and Patrick Swayze. Okay, maybe it wasn’t a monster hit but there’s a rumor that at least 37 people saw the movie before it went to video.
Writers: Joe Eszterhás, Brent Brisco & Mark Fauser
Details: 122 pages (2001 rewrite)

The Spec King.

He’s a legend this man.

He was also a notoriously angry individual who got in a lot of fights with Hollywood execs. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that the main character in this movie, 46 year-old Frank Jessup, is also a hothead.

Frank is an airplane mechanic who loves his Cleveland Indians and who, one day, after heading out to fix an impromptu problem with one of the planes, comes home to find that it’s completely deserted. His wife, the nature-loving Connie, and his teenaged son, the hip-hop obsessed Frankie, have moved out.

Frank storms over to their new apartment to find that not only has Connie left him, but she’s also with some numb nuts named Jeremy. Jeremy is 2001’s version of a hippy. He just wants peace and for everyone to love each other, man. Which makes Frank really confused. Cause he wants to kill this guy. But Jeremy wants to be his friend!

After Frank gets thrown in jail for nearly killing Jeremy, he learns that he needs to take some sensitivity training after it’s discovered that a ton of people at work have complained about racist and sexist comments he’s made. Things really aren’t looking great for our protagonist.

The thing is, Frank is ignorant to everything that’s happening to him. He doesn’t understand what he did wrong. He doesn’t understand why his wife doesn’t like him anymore. He doesn’t understand why his comments at work are controversial. He’s just being his normal fun self.

Only when Frank goes through sensitivity training does he start to realize that maybe he’s crossed the line in a few areas. But even then, he thinks the world is being too damn wimpy. So, will Frank change and convince his family to come back to him? Or is he so far gone that this is who he’s going to be for the rest of his life?

One of the most confusing things that screenwriters had to deal with back in the day was that screenplays which were objectively bad would get sold for loads of money, sometimes north of a million dollars.

And they would see the subsequent movie, which would often be horrible, and they’d say, “Wait a minute here. This film is bad. Why does this sell for a million bucks and I can’t get the worst agent in Hollywood to call me back?”

The answer to this is kind of complex because there are half-a-dozen main reasons that bad scripts get purchased and bad movies get made. But when it comes to the case of Male Pattern Baldness, the answer is obvious. If you have the most successful spec writer of all time going to market with a new script, it’s going to sell for a lot of money regardless of the script’s quality.

You see, in the movie business, you’re trying to acquire commodities that push a project to the finish line – aka, the movie gets made. The more of these commodities you can acquire, the better the chance the movie has of getting made. Joe Eszterhás had gotten multiple scripts to the finish line when he wrote this script. So this is a commodity that’s worth paying a lot of money for. Just having that name on your project gives you a legit chance to get to the finish line.

But is this script really that bad?

No. It’s actually okay. But it’s not good enough to be turned into a movie.

I get the sense that was a personal project for Eszterhás. I looked at his wiki page and saw that he got divorced in 1994. So maybe he started writing this then?

The thing with personal projects is that they can either go really well or really badly. The authenticity and emotion that comes from a personal experience can be quite powerful. But it can just as easily cross into self-therapy, where the story is more about the writer dealing with their demons than writing an entertaining story. And I think that’s what happened here.

I suppose the script is built on a template that works – Your hero loses everything and must look inside themselves, realize what they’ve become, and try to become a better person. Heck, Alan Ball used this template to create a classic in American Beauty, although I’d argue Ball deconstructed the narrative in a more interesting way (Lester Burnham does some questionable things in his pursuit of changing into a “better” person).

But I noticed that about halfway through the script, the story had no more gas. I’m reading a scene where he’s having an argument with his wife and his kid and Jeremy and I realized, “We’ve already had this scene.” In fact, we’d had it a couple of times. That’s typically a bad sign for a screenplay. When you’re repeating scenes. Because it often means you don’t have enough plot for a feature.

The funny thing about this script is that it’s actually quite relevant to today. Frank is the embodiment of toxic masculinity. He lives in his own world. He operates by his own rules. He says what he wants to say. And he doesn’t care if anyone’s offended.

But it’s done in a way where they show real toxicity. He says something racist to a Mexican. He compliments a woman’s breasts at work. He’s openly violent. It’s actual real problems. Not the sanitized stuff you see today where if you ‘like’ a tweet from a Twitter user who once misgendered someone, you’re branded a Nazi, get your bank accounts drained, and are sent to the gulags in Russia.

It’s funny to see how much the line has moved since 2000. And, for that reason, I don’t think the script could be produced. It would require too radical of a rewrite. All the lines that Frank crosses, you’d have to write kinder cuddlier versions of them.

There are still screenwriting lessons to learn here, though. Eszterhás starts out with a head of steam. Read this opening scene and note how something is actually happening as we’re dropped into the story (Frank is on the phone dealing with an escalating work problem while his family tries to get his attention). That’s important to do with character-driven stories. It is imperative that you don’t start off with a boring scene.

And I loved the inciting incident. Normally, the inciting incident in this story would be Connie throwing up her hands and saying, “I can’t take this anymore. I’m leaving you.” It’s much more effective the way Eszterhás writes it, which is that Frank goes to fix the problem at work, comes home six hours later, exhausted, and finds that his entire house is bare. It really highlights the severity of what’s just happened.

And immediately after that, we get the confrontation scene, where Frank charges over to the new apartment and screams at Connie while getting into a fight with Jeremy. That’s a good scene as well. So the script starts out strong. It grabs you.

I also thought Jeremy was a clever character. Usually these characters are jerks. The fact that Jeremy is so nice throws the formula for a curve in a fun way. At one point a lawyer shows up at Frank’s house unannounced and Frank’s like, “Who are you?” He says, I’m your divorce lawyer. I’m the best in the business. Frank says, how do you know about my wife and I getting separated? He says, oh, Jeremy sent me over here.

If you’re wondering what the title means, it refers to a therapist who tells Frank that he has figurative male patten baldness. Which is when you’re too masculine. You have no feelings. You do whatever you want. You’re obsessed with sex. The therapist tells him, I can cure you of this.

Like I said, the script doesn’t have enough going on to warrant anything past the page 60 mark. It’s one of those scripts where the writer starts big out of the gate, but isn’t really sure where the script is going to go. And so every subsequent scene seems to have less punch than the previous one. It goes to show that even the best screenwriters can’t write their way out of a weak concept.

Script link: Male Pattern Baldness

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

What I learned: Character archetypes are meant to be played with. Whenever there’s an archetype in your screenplay, ask yourself if you can play that archetype the opposite of how they’re usually played. Because that will result in a much more interesting character. Jeremy being super supportive of Frank’s attempts to reconcile with his wife was one of the standout aspects of this screenplay because it is the complete opposite of what that archetype usually does.

And what did I really think of The Last Of Us’s celebrated 3rd episode??

A HUGE reminder to everyone here that we’ve got the year’s SECOND Logline Showdown coming up this Friday. For those who don’t know what the Logline Showdown is, anyone can send me a logline at carsonreeves3@gmail.com. It has to be a logline for a completed script.

I choose the 5 best submissions and place them up here, on the site, for you to vote on, over the weekend. Whichever logline gets the most votes, I review that script the following Friday. We’re doing 12 of these, once every month. My goal is to find at least one impressive script and one double-worth-the-read script. And with the talent level of the people who read this site, I know we can achieve that.

If you want to enter, which is 100% free by the way, here are the instructions:

Send me your title, genre, and logline. Nothing more.
Send it to this e-mail: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
Send it by 10pm Pacific Time, Thursday, February 16th.

Can’t wait to see what you’ve come up with this month!

Okay, there’s literally NOTHING going on in the entertainment world at the moment. February is the deadest time of the year. So there isn’t any good scripted entertainment to watch. Which is why, against my better judgment, I’ve decided to go back and watch the third episode of The Last Of Us.

My gut tells me this episode isn’t going to do anything for me. However, as a screenwriting enthusiast, I can’t say I’m not intrigued by the claims that this is one of the best written episodes of television ever. That’s a pretty big claim. So I’ve got my “great screenwriting” checklist out and let’s see if this puppy lives up to the hype.

For those of you who don’t follow the show, it’s another zombie apocalypse series. The two main characters, Joel and Ellie, are traveling across a zombie-infested world to get somewhere. But that’s not what this episode is about.

In this episode, we meet Bill, a lonely prepper, who is more than ready for the apocalypse. After his town is evacuated, he goes right back into his house and starts putting together a defense system for his home and the town. No zombie or soldier will ever get anywhere near him.

But then one man does get near. His name is Frank. He’s headed to Boston and gets caught in one of Bill’s traps. Bill reluctantly saves him and lets him clean up. That clean up turns into dinner. That dinner turns into piano time. Piano time turns into a kiss. And from there, well, it’s clear that Frank is staying for good.

A year passes, then three, then five. It’s not always perfect. The two argue about things. Bill doesn’t want anything to do with the world whereas Frank wants to clean up the neighborhood and even make friends. Which leads to one of the more surprising moments of the episode, where Joel and Tess (Joel’s girlfriend who died in the previous episode) stop by as their younger selves.

Five years turns to ten, then ten to twenty, and now Frank is sick. They never say with what but it looks like cancer. Frank is sick of being a burden and decides one morning that this is going to be their last day together. One last trip around town then down some cyanide. At the last second, Bill downs some cyanide as well, and they go to bed and die together (although we don’t see that part).

As it so happens, Joel and Ellie show up a few days later. Over time, Bill and Joel became frenemies. And Joel was hoping to get some supplies before he and Ellie really set out on the road. Of course, he finds out that Bill and Frank are dead. But Bill left him a note. Take whatever he wants, he says. And that’s the end of the episode!

Okay, so let’s ask the question. Is this the greatest episode of television ever written?

No, it is not.

That’s silly talk.

It is a good episode of television. And it’s well-written.

Love stories can be tricky because the temptation is always to lean hard into the love part. But the love part isn’t where we invest in the couple’s story. We invest in the conflict, in the resistance, in the challenges, in the external pressure. And then you want to mix little moments of love in there.

Which is exactly what this episode does.

It also gets the “love story” formula right. The love story formula is simple. But it’s also something writers screw up all the time. And the formula works like this.

We need to like him.
We need to like her (or other him).
And we must want them to be together.

The biggest risk the show takes is making Bill this cantankerous dude who hates everyone and the world in general. Those characters can easily become unlikable. But this is offset by the fact that Bill is so darn good at surviving. Audiences love capable people. One of the first things Bill does after the apocalypse is go steal generator parts from the local electrical substation and build his own generator. He then starts building sophisticated defenses and traps. We love people who can do things that nobody else can do. We admire expertise. And so even though Bill is cantankerous, we love him.

Frank’s character is much simpler. He’s just a sweet guy with a good heart. So we like him immediately. This is a good screenwriting tip. There’s typically one person in the relationships who’s really complex. And then the other person is simpler. Look at Titanic. Rose is super complex whereas Jack is about as simple as they come.

Another thing a lot of writers get wrong is that they get blinded by screenwriting books that tell them there MUST BE IMMENSE CONFLICT in a relationship or else the relationship will be boring.

While it’s true that you need to spice the relationship up to keep it interesting, you don’t want to overdo things. You don’t want to make two people scream at each other all the time for no reason just so you can have conflict. Instead, the better option is to give each person in the relationship different worldviews. This way, the characters will organically butt heads every once in a while. But not in an over-the-top forced manner.

Bill wants to keep the world out. He has zero faith in humanity. Frank wants to bring the world in. Frank still has faith in humanity. That simple difference in worldviews provides just enough conflict in the relationship so that it’s not lovey-dovey all the time.

Which is important. Cause if it’s lovey-dovey all the time, it becomes grating (see Attack of the Clones).

So why don’t I think this is the greatest episode of television ever, like the internet would have you believe? A few reasons. But the main one is they kinda botched the ending.

We’re ten years into their relationship and, one night, they get attacked by a militia. Bill, our apocalypse survival superstar, stands out in the middle of the road, no cover anywhere, to shoot at the militia. Of course, they easily shoot him and Frank is able to pull him back into the home.

We think Bill is going to die. But then, as he’s struggling to stay alive, we smash cut to 10 years later, and Bill is fine… but Frank has cancer?????? What a weird jarring cut. You set up this one person to look like they’re going to die only to cut to a decade later and the  is now going to die?  With no context or setup at all?  It was sloppy enough that I was pulled out of the episode for the first time.

And then Frank says he wants to have his last day together, AND GET MARRIED.  Nooooooo!  I rolled my eyes. That’s the schmaltzy stuff the writers of this episode did so well to avoid the whole time. That’s something the bottom writer in the Grey’s Anatomy writer’s room comes up with. You’re supposed to be writing the sophisticated version of this story.

That bothered me because, if those two things didn’t happen, this rates a lot closer to the praise it’s getting.

Another strange thing about this episode is that I realized I liked Joel and Ellie much more (they have a cameo at the beginning of the episode and also come in at the end) in background roles. When they take center stage, they’re not compelling enough for me to care.

And nothing proves that more than how strongly we feel about Frank and Bill – two characters who actually resonate with leading men qualities. I would much rather be watching these two try to get through the zombie apocalypse than Joel and Ellie.

So I guess that leads us to the final question: Will this episode inspire me to keep watching? Well, probably not. Because Bill and Frank are dead. They were your two best characters on the show so far and you killed them off. So why would I keep watching? Joel is still boring. Ellie is still annoying. What’s the incentive to continue?

Either way, I’m happy that I checked this episode out. It was much better than I thought it was going to be.

[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Find the mistakes in moments to bring some authenticity to them. A great little moment in this episode is when Frank sees the piano after their first dinner and goes over to play. Normally, in these scenes, Frank would sing a surprisingly stunning loving version of a song that would make Bill’s heart melt. No. Frank is terrible. To the point where Bill has to pull him away from the piano. That’s smart writing. Those mistakes always feel more authentic than somebody delivering the perfect response in the perfect moment.

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.