Tomorrow is the deadline for logline entries in March’s LOGLINE SHOWDOWN! We’ve already found one great script through Logline Showdown. Let’s find some more! Submission details are inside this linked post.
Genre: Horror
Premise: A promising first-round draft pick is invited to train at the private compound of the team’s legendary but aging quarterback. Over one week, the rising star witnesses the horrific lengths his hero will go to to stay at the top of his game.
About: This script finished number 13 on last year’s Black List. The writers wrote a successful podcast called Limetown, which they were able to parlay into a TV production for Facebook. That show would star Jessica Biel.
Writer: Zack Akers & Skip Bronkie
Details: 119 pages
Jake G. for Connor??
I had my eye on this script as soon as I saw the logline on the Black List because I find sports mortality to be an interesting subject. In order to be a professional athlete these days, you have to start playing at the age of 5 and train 3+ hours a day for the next 30 years of your life. In other words, it isn’t just part of your life. It *IS* your life.
And then one day, the train stops rolling. You’re 35, 36, 37. You still have your ENTIRE life in front of you yet you have no context for how to live it. The only thing you’ve ever known is to practice and play. It’s the reason Tom Brady retires then unretires immediately afterwards. It’s the reason Michael Jordan played for the Washington Wizards. They realize that this is the last time they’re going to get a chance to do this.
So to build a story around a character like that immediately gives you a compelling character study. Which is one of the key components that needs to be there in order to write any movie under 100 million bucks. Stories should be about struggle. Not just the external struggle. But the INTERNAL struggle. You want your characters fighting something inside of themselves. If they’re not, there’s a good chance they’ll come off as bland.
The real question here though is, can a movie in the sports genre be a straight-up horror film? That’s what I’m going to try and answer by the end of the review.
Connor Dane is 44 years old and has won six Super Bowls for the Dallas Cowboys. And he doesn’t seem to be slowing down. But the Cowboys are realistic. At some point, there’s going to need to be a change at the quarterback position. And they don’t want to get caught with their tight little football pants down. So they draft the guy everyone thinks is going to be the next Connor, Benny Mathis.
Everyone’s shocked when the Cowboys trade up for Benny. But what’s even more shocking is that Connor calls. He tells Benny that he wants him to come work out with him for five days at his Vegas home. Benny’s handlers think it’s some kind of trap. But what’s Benny going to do? Say no to the greatest quarterback ever and his new teammate?
Benny arrives at the giant compound in the middle of the desert and is alarmed with what he sees. Connor lives in one of those Kardashian type homes. The ones with excessively sparse surroundings. How sparse? Connor doesn’t even have doors! There are doorways. But no doors!
After an intense first day of workouts, Benny hears wild screaming in the middle of the night. He also finds a sheep hanging around outside his bedroom window. Oh, and his bathroom sink is also filled with blood for some reason. When Benny shares these things with Connor, Connor seems aloof. He says not to worry. His handlers will take care of it.
After Connor leaps out of his swimming pool in a single bound, Benny starts sensing something is up. He goes on a trek into the desert and finds a shrine in an old church that has both all of Connors’ achievements pasted to the walls and HIS OWN achievements.
The caretaker pleads with Benny to ask for a night off from Connor and then takes him into the city. At a dance club, he tells Benny that he needs to get out of here. Then Benny sees Connor in the crowd dancing! But it’s not Connor. It’s 20-years-younger-Connor! What the heck is going on??? We eventually learn that Connor may be calling on forces more powerful than our own to achieve the amazing career he’s had. And that he wants to pass that power on… to Benny.
I think it’s cool when writers mash up genres that don’t normally go together. Cause you’re guaranteed to get something different. With that said, there is a risk in making untested creative choices. Because, usually, if you’ve never come across something in the creative world, it’s because it’s been tried and failed badly.
This is probably the case with combining horror and sports. I’m just not seeing any evidence that these two genres can harmoniously co-exist. The biggest problem is that the people who come to these genres come to have a very specific experience. If you’re a sports nut, you want to see that great sports movie. If you’re a horror guy or gal, you want to be scared.
That means every time a scare happens, the sports people are angry and every time competition happens, the horror people are angry.
But the problems in GOAT go deeper. The entire movie is one giant setup for something that we pretty much figure out by page 20. We don’t know exactly what’s going on with Connor. But through the process of elimination, we know there’s some supernatural reason he’s been able to stay good for so long. He probably made a deal with the devil. And, lo and behold, that’s what happened.
I’m not kidding when I say that every single scene in the movie has Connor doing something weird, the subtext being: “Connor’s not normal! There’s something not normal about this guy!” Giving us 30 different variations of that message does not pique our curiosity. Cause we’ve already figured the reveal out. Now we’re just waiting for the writer to catch up with us.
That’s the worst place you can be as a writer. That the reader is waiting for you to catch up with him. You should always be ahead of the reader UNLESS you’re deliberately trying to trick them, in which case you let them THINK they’re ahead of you, only to pull the rug out from under them, which is one of the more fun things you can do in storytelling.
In other words, you would have all these setups towards Connor having made a deal with the devil, and then you’d throw a 180 at us and give us a payoff that we missed because we were following those deliberate bread crumbs pointing us towards the devil deal.
I also wanted more out of the scenes themselves. Every scene felt “first-choicy.” What does that mean? It means that if 100 people wrote this script, 95 of them would’ve also chosen the same scene you wrote. So if you have a scene – like this script did – of Benny lifting heavy weights and Connor being his spotter. That’s a scene 95 out of 100 writers would’ve chosen. It’s low-hanging fruit.
That’s not to say “don’t do it.” The scene has potential. Connor literally holds Benny’s life in his hands if he chooses to move away from the bar at an inopportune moment. But at least try to find some spin on the scene so it doesn’t go exactly as expected. This script wasn’t doing that. It was always giving me the version of the scene I expected.
The script has its charms, though. I love the spec-y nature of it. Contained time frame. Low character count. Organic heavy conflict between the leads. Urgency. And the genre element makes it easier to sell. I was into all that. But the execution felt too basic and repetitive. Very repetitive. For that reason, I can’t recommend the script.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: One of the mistakes writers make is assuming that just because the reader doesn’t know EXACTLY what the big reveal of their script is going to be, but still has a pretty good idea, that they’ll be eager to keep reading. We don’t need to know your twist ahead of time to get bored. We only need to have a good idea of what it’s going to be. That’s the mistake this script made. It put everything on the reveal then proceeded to use every scene to tell us what that reveal was likely to be. There needed to be way less repetition here. And there needed to be more misdirection. This script could’ve benefited from moving the “deal with the devil” reveal up to the midpoint. Because that way, we have no idea where your script is headed. Which would’ve made things a lot more interesting.
