A 3 million dollar spec sale and a script that might change the industry forever
Genre: Sci-Fi Thriller
Premise: A low level worker at a cutting edge tech firm is challenged by the company’s previous fallen CEO to find out what a mysterious recently fired AI coder was working on.
About: They said that unknown writers can’t sell specs. And when they do, they’re lucky to crack 6 figures. Well, today’s unknown writer sold his spec for 3.25 million dollars last week. Here’s how The Hollywood Reporter tells it: “According to insiders, Dotan had written his script then called one of two people he knew in Hollywood. That led to Dotan connecting with two literary managers from Untitled Entertainment, known mostly for its talent roster but which had acquired boutique lit firm Grandview only a few months earlier. The managers signed the writer off a Zoom meeting with the goal of quickly packaging the script and swiftly taking it to market. AI may be a hot topic now, but if you’re making a movie on the subject — one that wouldn’t hit until a few years later — the window of interest is small.”
Writer: Natan Dotan
Details: 105 pages
That’s a very intriguing header! Change the industry forever??
What could it possibly mean?
I’ll get into that in a bit.
But first let’s go over the plot to this gigantic spec sale.
Peter is a low level worker at this giant new tech company that has created the flashiest new AI chatbot around, Lambda-4. Lambda has helped skyrocket profits but because the company is growing fast, they don’t have enough money to fund the growth. Which means, in order to save the company, they have to make a deal with an investor they don’t like.
Not long after this, Peter’s boss, Alan, is fired under a shroud of mystery. Word on the street is that Alan was working on some game-changing AI technology. Will, the former CEO of the company, along with Mina, another low-level worker, approach Peter to see what he knows about his former boss’s work. They suspect something shady might be going on.
Their instincts turn out to be right. Lambda-4 is using its tentacles to gum up the aviation system, causing drastic airline delays everywhere. It is then shorting the stock of all those airlines. Its plan seems to be to make tons of money for the company at others’ expense. This scares the bejesus out of Will, who only fell from grace at the company due to being the lone moral compass. He leads the charge to get current CEO, Harry, to roll back Lambda to version 3 until they can sort this out.
Harry terminates that idea, reminding Will that if they revert to version 3, it will scare off the investor who just saved their company. So Will calls a meeting with the board members. They agree to meet in 72 hours, which gives Peter, Will, and Mina, three days to convince enough board members to vote Lambda down. In that time, Peter realizes that Lambda’s plan is even more nefarious and that it’s manipulating markets in India, Pakistan, and other third world countries. What is Lambda’s endgame? And if it’s as bad as we think it is, will there be time to stop it?
Before I answer that early question, let’s talk about why this script may have sold for three million dollars. For starters, it incorporates more GSU than a Scriptshadow comments section. It actually uses some advanced tactics in doing so as it first sets a 36 hour deadline to get the initial problem solved and then an additional 72 hour deadline to convince the board members to take Lambda offline.
Why is this “advanced?” Because many writers would have combined those two time frames and turned them into a total deadline of 5 days. By splitting up the urgency into two distinct parts, it tricks the reader into thinking things are moving along faster than they are, as we’re first moving quickly to the 36 hour resolution. Then as soon as that is done, we’re right back into another immediate deadline.
The reason urgency is so valuable in a spec screenplay is that people don’t have time to read. And the promise to the reader that answers are coming soon tricks them into turning the pages. If you instead implied that answers were coming in the far off future, busy people are less likely to keep reading. Or, I should say, they are more likely to stop reading should any hint of bad writing surface.
The other recent giant spec sale, Love of Your Life, didn’t have any urgency. But it was much better written. Which is a major lesson for all of you. Well-incorporated GSU is good at distracting from writing weaknesses. Even if the reader isn’t spellbound by the screenplay, he figures, “Well, everything’s wrapping up in less than a 2-day timeframe anyway so I might as well keep going.”
Another reason the script sold is because of its buzzy subject matter. This one’s pretty obvious but if you write about stuff that’s trending in the news, people are going to be interested in checking it out. Especially if you incorporate it into a high concept idea. Which leads me to the next reason it sold…
The stakes are sky-high. We’re talking about the end of the world. That always helps when you’re attempting to sell an idea. The lower the stakes, the less the chance a “I need to buy this” moment is going to happen within the reader.
The script is also a fast read. Almost the entire thing is dialogue. So your eyes are flying down the page. Are you seeing a theme here? The writer is doing a lot of things to make this an effortless experience. Throw a high-concept hat on top of that and, while it will not guarantee a big splashy script sale, it certainly gives you a shot at one.
Finally, there’s the cost of making the movie. This would be, similar to Margin Call, very cheap to shoot. We’re talking 5 million bucks. 10 million if you wanted decent names. 20 million if you wanted a big star in there. Any time you can create something that FEELS BIG yet doesn’t cost a lot of money? That’s like having a script that’s made of gold. It’s incredibly valuable.
So, now to the big question.
Why do I think this might change the industry?
Because I suspect AI helped write this script. I don’t know that for sure. And I don’t know by how much. But my spidey sense is tingling. Unknown writer? 3 million dollar sale from a company that isn’t a studio??
If feels like a script where you provided AI with this prompt: “Write me a 100 page screenplay based on the movie Margin Call but instead of the company malfeasance only affecting the company, make the malfeasance AI and have it try to take down the entire world.”
This script is verrrrrrryyyyyy similar to Margin Call. I can say that because I remember reading and reviewing that script here on the site, well before it went on to get made. Everything about this feels similar. To the point where I could almost smell the AI building its scenes on those Margin Call scenes.
It also feels like this AI, if it did write some of this, had combed through the entire Scriptshadow library. This script is GSU crazy, to the point where it has GSU within GSU. It’s almost like the AI learned the importance of GSU and went overboard with it.
Another AI tell is that there is almost zero character work. Since we know that that’s where AI is weakest, it would make sense why we get so little of it.
But the main reason is that the storytelling quality just isn’t there.
I did not feel connected to a single character here. It is impossible for me to care what happens in a screenplay if I don’t care about any of the characters. This could’ve easily been remedied. Peter is such an underdog. Fleshing him out even a teensy bit would’ve provided so much more of a human connection.
Next, the AI-takeover plot did not build in an effective way. The first half of the script is all about the AI delaying planes because they burn fuel while they’re waiting to take off which is going to lose the airlines a lot of money. The AI would then bet against these airlines on the stock market and make a bunch of money in the process.
I don’t know about you but when I go to see an “Evil AI” movie, plane delays aren’t exactly my number one choice for a plotline. My AI spidey-sense has me wondering if they plugged a secondary prompt into ChatGPT that went something like this: “Use Wall Street for plot inspiration.”
From there, the larger scope of the AI’s plan is messy. At first we’re told that it’s tanking the stock market in India of all places. We see a few montages of riots in various third-world countries. Then, out of nowhere, the AI says it wants nuclear war. It does not tell you why it wants nuclear war. It just says, “nuclear war” after a vague question from Will. So it wants to destroy the world… to make more money for the company??
How does that make sense? There is no AI if the world has been blown up.
For me, I much prefer Leave The World Behind. It covers a lot of the same territory but in a more clever and visual way. Those two amazing visual scenes alone – the one with the Tesla cars and the one with the oil tanker crashing into the beach – did more to tell us the world was falling apart than anything Alignment did.
There were a couple of final small [good] things that stood out to me about Alignment, though. There’s this moment early on when Will asks Peter the question, “Is it sentient?” And Peter kind of glances at Will and Mina like, ‘these poor guys don’t get it.’ “Oh, uh, no,” Peter says. “We don’t really worry about sentience anymore. — that’s a philosophical question. — These AIs passed the Turing test years ago, so what would sentience even mean? All we really care about is alignment. Like, does the model’s behavior align with what we want it to do.”
That TERRIFIES me! People in the AI world don’t even think about sentience anymore?? It’s just some thing that may or may not be happening? Another life form is operating parallel to us but we don’t care?? That freaked me out!
The other thing about the script I liked is that, late in the story, all the board members that Will and Peter and Maya have meticulously gotten on their side all begin to turn on them. Not only that, but the FBI shows up. They have evidence that Will is a Chinese agent. It’s then when Peter and Mina and Will realize what’s happening. The AI is no longer just influencing the markets. It’s influencing the board members. It’s influencing the authorities. All so it can continue to do what it wants. That was the one genuinely creative development I encountered in the script.
So, as much as I would love to recommend this, it has too many faults. It’s a strange blend of Margin Call, Wall Street, Industry, The Net, War Games, Leave the World Behind, and Succession that SHOULD have been great. But its weak character development and messy plot execution killed it for me.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: It’s easy, when writing plot-heavy and technical-heavy screenplays, to forget about fleshing out the characters. You’re so focused on moving things along quickly and getting all the plot beats where they need to be and fitting in all that technical exposition, that character depth falls by the wayside. Plot-heavy thrillers are never going to be the best vehicles for character development. But, at the very least, flesh out your hero. I would’ve loved to have known more about Peter. Who his family was. If he was married. What his flaw was. What he wants out of life. Any sort of adversity he might be going through. Do just a little work on that main character and they can go from 2-D to 3-D fast.
What I learned 2: A lot of people say it’s impossible to make a splashy sale as a “nobody” writer but I actually think it works in your favor. Everyone wants to be the one who breaks out an exciting new writer who nobody’s heard of. So don’t let your anonymity deter you. Assuming this was, indeed, a real writer. :)
