Logline Showdown deadline is just a couple of days away!
Genre: Horror
Premise: When a group of teenagers repair an old clock with a mysterious 13th numeral,
they are granted an extra hour where their actions have no consequence.
About: Anna Klassen first made waves with her J.K. Rowling biopic, When Lightening Strikes, which made the 2017 Black List. She would later win the ScreenCraft Fellowship that year.
Writer: Anna Klassen
Details: 116 pages
Madeline Cline (from Outer Banks) for Nell?
Welp, we’re almost there, guys.
The 5 Loglines Showdown!
If you’re just revisiting Scriptshadow after a break, here are the details…
What: 5 Loglines Showdown
When: Friday, January 31st
Deadline: Thursday, January 30th, 11pm Pacific Time
Submit: 5 loglines, each with a title and a genre
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
In order to get you revved up, I looked through the entire 2024 Black List to find the snazziest logline – the kind of concept that represents what you should be shooting for.
I definitely found it.
I’ll be surprised if someone comes up with a better logline this Thursday but I’m rooting for it! Let’s see if the script delivered.
We open on 18 year old Andrew Tate wannabe, Blake, recklessly driving his car down a mountain road, cops in tow, then purposefully shooting off a cliff to his death. Cut to four months earlier and we meet the rest of our high school characters.
There’s Nell, who has a sick dad and a young brother, both of whom she cares for. There’s Wyatt, the captain of the football team, and Quinn, his pink-haired girlfriend since 4th grade. And then there’s Lyle, the nerd.
The five of them all get caught cheating during a test so their teacher makes them come in on their off day and clean out the old school library, which hasn’t been used in years. It’s here where Nell finds an old fancy watch with a 13th hour.
Elsewhere in the library, Blake starts picking on Lyle and the next thing you know, he pushes him. Lyle falls back onto an old rusty spike and dies. Everybody starts freaking out. That is until they reset an hour earlier when Lyle was fine. After their initial shock, they realize that this watch gives them the power of a 13th “no consequences” hour each day.
The group starts using that power. Nell burns down her house. Blake gets in a fight-to-the-death with his perfect brother. Wyatt and Quinn have sex in a packed diner. If nothing matters, you can do anything you want!
The ragtag crew then forms their own version of utopia, passing the watch around, each using it to do bigger and crazier things. Wanna rob a bank? Why not! Heck, they even create a Fight Club! That is until one of them accidentally cracks the watch. The next day, Nell’s father remembers her yelling at him during the 13th hour. But that’s not possible!
Now that certain things during the 13th hour can carry over, the group has to be more careful about what they do. But once you’ve experienced that much power, it’s hard to give it back. Blake is the first one to test the limits, and ends up dead because of it. The others realize that they must destroy the clock for good. But will they?
I was just watching Conan O’Brien interview Ben Stiller and Stiller struggling with the reality that he had no idea how people would react to Severance. He didn’t know if they’d think it sucked or if they’d fall in love with it.
That is the journey of every artistic endeavor. You hope it’s going to work. But you just don’t know.
A lot of it comes down to meeting a simple directive: Deliver on the promise of the premise.
This is especially true for high concept ideas. When a producer requests to read your high concept script, their expectations are high. They want to have fun. So if you give them a run-of-the-mill execution, they’re going to be upset.
Is The 13th Hour execution run-of-the-mill?
Good question. And not one that’s easy to answer.
Klassen gets so caught up in the setup of her screenplay that the entire first half is predictable. If I had wanted to, I could skip 10 pages and not be lost. That’s usually an indication that you’re not being creative enough with your story.
This happens a lot in screenwriting. I’ve been guilty of it. Everybody here has probably been guilty of it. “Setup” is the most technical thing in a script (set up the characters, set up the plot, build the three-act structure) and therefore the most susceptible to cliche. It’s easy to lay out those beats and then robotically hit them.
But once the script moved past the setup and into the payoff, a lot changed. The biggest change was the focus on theme. Klassen did a nice job exploring the idea of time and what it means to us. Specifically, how it means different things to different people.
For example, for someone like Blake, it meant he had a release for all the craziest things he’d never be allowed to do in real life. Whereas, for someone like Nell, who has to take care of her father and young brother, it meant just having more time in the day. To relax. Or to practice a skill that she never had time for before.
And there’s something inherently compelling about actions without consequences. There’s some wish-fulfillment rush you get whenever you explore that subject matter. The fight club bit felt like a gag at first. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized, “If you have an hour a day of zero consequences, eventually, that would become boring. What do you do then? Maybe you do start a club where you beat the shit out of each other. Cause at least then you feel something.”
There’s definitely some crossover with The Substance here. Later in the movie, they realize they didn’t read the fine print. An hour of extra time costs 1 week of your life. So you’re aging faster. This meant there was a real cost to continuing to use the watch.
And I thought Klassen explored that convincingly. If you got hooked on an extra hour of no consequences a day, you might kill someone who threatened to take that away from you.
I enjoyed when Klassen went deep like that with the characters. But, unfortunately, it was juxtaposed against a lot of boilerplate dialogue. Whenever these characters spoke, they sounded like cliches.
For example, here’s a dialogue exchange from The 13th Hour. When writing dialogue, the questions you want to ask yourself are: Is this dialogue bare-bones? Is it cliche? Are all the responses expected? Is there little-to-no creativity?
Contrast this with yesterday’s script, Carousel. That script had some problems but dialogue was not one of them. Here’s a random snapshot of the dialogue from that script.
Notice how much more creative the latter is. You could tell there was real thought put into it. Whereas, with 13th Hour, you got the sense the dialogue was formulated in the first draft then never improved upon. Look, guys, most of my complaints regarding dialogue can be solved with effort. Keep going through the scene 30-40 times over the life of the screenplay, and look to improve lines/words/phrasing wherever you can.
By the way, if you want to upgrade your own dialogue, I know an amazing book that will start improving your dialogue WITHIN AN HOUR. Check it out.
Lastly, what I look for in this type of idea is cleverness. If you’re writing in the time-travel genre, you have to be clever. The grandfather of the time travel universe, Back to the Future, has like three-dozen clever moments in it. Where was that cleverness here?? Characters driving their cars off cliffs isn’t clever. I needed more.
Like a lot of scripts on the Black List, this one has some good things and it has some bad things. The story should’ve been set up faster so we could start exploring the premise quickly. I needed more creativity and cleverness when exploring the premise. And the dialogue needed work. This is a teen movie. Teen movies are dialogue playgrounds. You can’t come with your middle reliever. You gotta come with your ace.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If an average writer could quickly come up with equivalent dialogue to the scene you’ve written, that’s an indication you’re not working hard enough to write memorable dialogue.
What I learned 2: Klassen on outlining – “An outline is also my insurance policy against writer’s block. Even on days when I don’t feel compelled to write, I can refer to the outline and produce a rough version of what my more motivated past self envisioned because bad writing is always better than no writing.”
