Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: Told in real-time, a man who recently broke into Area 51 stops at a motel and begins to execute his plan to send the incredible footage he took to the five biggest news sources in the country.
About: This script finished Top 15 on the newest iteration of the Black List, a list of the best scripts in Hollywood. Screenwriter Connor McKnight does not yet have any professional credits.
Writer: Connor McKnight
Details: 108 pages
“Jellyfish” UFO (I’ll explain later in the review)
First of all.
Aliens are coming.
Whether you want to accept it or not, they’re here on this earth and this is probably going to be the year that it’s officially exposed. Social media is preventing the powers that be from controlling that story. What the government is realizing is that if they let this come out randomly (someone posts a UFO video that they can’t debunk), they’ll have no control over the fallout. So it’s in their best interest to officially announce it themselves because at least that way they can spin the situation the way they want to.
All of this is why 10/24/02 was one of the first scripts on my radar when the 2023 Black List came out. Area 51? Aliens? Count me in.
The ONLY thing I’m worried about is if this is gonna be Gooftown 3000. We’ve evolved past the silly treatment of this subject matter that we saw in movies like Independence Day (“Welcome to earth!”). It’s a little more real now. I’m hoping this script reflects that.
We’re somewhere in New Mexico in 2002. A man named John – actually he has a lot of names but he’s John for most of the movie – races into a ratty old motel on Route 66 for the night.
John checks into Room 7 with a mysterious duffle bag and suitcase. He then heads outside and unscrews his Nevada license plate and replaces it with a Florida plate from another car in the lot.
Back inside, he opens up the duffle and we see glimpses of high-tech gadgetry. John then calls a frantic man named “Doc.” Their conversation keys us in on the fact that John just went somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be and took something he wasn’t supposed to take. He’s been driving ever since.
John shares with Doc that he has the computer movie files from inside that area, an area we now know to be Area 51. John plays the audio of one of these files to an orgasmic Doc, who hears what both of them have suspected for so long – that we are indeed in contact with aliens.
John has five copies for five different jump drives, which he has pre-prepped manilla envelopes for, being sent to the Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and the Los Angeles Times. A mailbox across the street picks up mail at 6 a.m. He’s going to place the envelopes in there at 5:55. All he has to do is wait.
Except that 30 minutes later, Doc calls back and tells him to check the news. The news shows that there is a national manhunt for John. That he “killed two men.” John and Doc know that this is serious and they both start freaking out. Especially after a new unmarked car pulls up into the motel parking lot.
Not long after, John’s ex calls and starts screaming at him about the news. We realize that John has been insisting on an alien presence forever and that his wife got sick of it and left him. But this is too far, she says. Even with John pleading his innocence, it doesn’t matter.
And that’s when things get really bad. Two mysterious men all of a sudden move into the rooms surrounding him and a frantic Doc calls back to say that he’s in his car and unmarked cars are chasing him. John hears gunshots. At this point, John realizes this is no longer about getting the truth out there. This is about one thing: SURVIVAL.
I’m going to provide you with a trick. A screenwriting trick, as it were.
If you’re writing a cheap movie that isn’t going to have much going for it – bare-bones production design, minimal locations, barely any actors – SET IT IN REAL TIME. “Real Time” is an automatic movie turbo-booster that costs NOTHING. It nearly makes any idea high concept.
We see that here with 10-24-02. It takes place entirely in and around a motel, and it’s riveting specifically because it’s real time. I don’t see this working if it’s not real-time. Case in point, that movie Bad Times at the El Royale. Abysmal movie. One of the worst of the decade. Just like this movie, it took place at a motel. It had much higher production value, big actors playing lots of parts. But it just SAT THERE. Nothing happened.
Whereas here, even though we only have one character, it feels like a million things are happening at once because of the real-time setup.
In many ways, this is one of those dream ideas. Not because it’s the best idea in the world. But because it’s a high concept idea that can be shot for a thousand bucks in one boring room. That’s what every young producer wants – an exciting idea that can be shot in a room for nothing. I would’ve loved to have snatched this up as a producer.
There’s another thing going on here that’s important to note for anyone writing a single location low-character-count screenplay. It has to feel like you don’t have enough time to tell your story. It can’t feel like you’re trying to fill time up.
There’s a distinct difference and 99% of the time, I see writers doing the latter. They’re searching for anything that will allow them to get up to those 90 pages. It’s a false victory though. You’re like, “Yeah, I did! I wrote a feature-length script!” Sure, but it doesn’t matter if those pages weren’t entertaining.
I genuinely felt like McKnight didn’t have enough space to put everything in here. He had to make choices on what to fit because there was too much story. That’s how you want to feel as a screenwriter. And not just for real-time scripts. For any script.
It’s fine to feel like you’re filling up space in your first draft cause you’re still discovering your story. But by the time you get to that 5th and 6th draft, you should feel like you’re having to take a lot out because you don’t have the space to keep it all in. What then happens is you’re forced to only keep the best stuff. Which is exactly how you want it. You only want your all-star scenes and plot points in the script.
All right, it’s time to leave the fictional world and hop into the real world of alien disclosure. The big video that’s being touted right now is the jellyfish UFO which was caught on video by a U.S. military drone. A lot of you are going to dismiss this just off the fact that it’s a “jellyfish” and that doesn’t sound like aliens, at least the ones we’ve heard about. But you have to understand that these “jellyfish” sightings go back years. A lot of people have seen them. You can google it. This is the first or second time we’ve gotten one on video. I don’t know what it is. I just know that it’s definitely alien. And it’s just the beginning of what’s going to be a crazy 2024 in the UFO space.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: One of the most effective scenes you can write is a character HEARING but not SEEING someone else in danger – the reason being that the individual reader’s imagination does all the work. It’s thinking up what’s happening which is usually more exciting than being given a literal description of what’s happening. One of the most exciting moments in this script is when Doc calls John from his car as he’s being chased by the government. And all we hear is them shooting at Doc, getting closer, him running into a roadblock, and then just terrifying noises. I find that those scenes work really well on the page AND on screen.
What I learned 2: If you are ever at a loss as to what to title your sci-fi screenplay, use numbers. Numbers work extremely well with sci-fi.
