Script sale! Just sold!

Genre: Thriller/Horror
Premise: A young Asian woman becomes concerned when her Asian roommate begins dating a white man and she slowly starts becoming white herself.
About: This script has gotten a lot of heat in the last 24 hours because the trades announced it had been sold. It’s not clear if the actual sale just happened or it happened a while ago and they’re just now reporting on it. I know that happens sometimes. The script has been floating around for a year now which is good news for writers who feel like their script’s been passed up by Hollywood. You’re never passed up! You just have to find that one producer who loves it. So keep hitting people up. Keep pushing them to read your script. It’s like dating. You can have nine bad dates and on the tenth date, you find the love of your life. But does the love of your life have an artificial face?
Writer: Ran Ran Wang
Details: 96 pages

Sonoya Mizuno for Jo?

At the end of the day, screenplays are subjective.

You like some. You dislike others. It’s all part of the game.

But that doesn’t mean you throw up your hands and give up. You can still weight things in your favor so that you’re more likely to end up in the “YES” pile than the “NO” pile. One of the first things you can do is give us a new twist on an old formula. If you do that, you’re ahead of the majority of screenwriters.

And today’s writer does that. This is a serial killer movie. But it’s a serial killer movie with a twist we’ve never seen before. The killer is dating Asian women, slowly turning them into white women, and then murdering them.

Haven’t seen it! And I’m guessing you haven’t either.

The question is, is that a *good* different idea? Or just a different idea? Cause if it’s only different, it’s not going to get you into the YES pile.

20-something Rina, a Korean American lawyer, is out on a date with 20-something Preston, a very white man, who’s also a lawyer (at a different firm). Usually, Rina hates dating app dates. But there’s something intriguing about Preston. She likes this guy.

Not long after the date, we meet Rina’s roommate, Jo, a lesbian who’s secretly in love with Rina. She’s not happy at all to hear that Rina’s date with Preston went well but because she’s such a good friend, she encourages Rina to pursue him.

But then Jo actually meets Preston and he freaks her the hell out. He’s super pale. He’s socially unaware. And he looks psychotic. Sometimes you’ll be talking to him and he just stares at you. Creeeeeeep-y. Jo notices that Preston keeps giving her sexy eyes when Rina isn’t looking.

As the weeks go by, Jo sees less and less of Rina and whenever she does see her, Rina seems paler. As Rina’s relationship progresses, we keep hearing about these blond girls getting murdered by a serial killer. One night Rina starts looking into these dead girls and realizes that one looks exactly like her Asian friend who went missing a year ago. But how can an Asian woman become white and blonde? It doesn’t make sense!

One day when Rina isn’t around, Preston shows up and corners Jo in the kitchen. He then kisses her, biting her lip. Jo gets away and, over the course of the next few days, she becomes super strong. At this point, she knows something crazy is up with Preston and desperately attempts to get Rina away from him. But Rina is now a blond blue-eyed white girl. Which means Jo needs to act fast.

This is a very ambitious screenplay and I’m not sure I was always able to follow along.

I liked a lot of the early stuff. In particular, I liked the subtext behind Jo being in love with Rina but Rina being obsessed with this new guy she met. In screenwriting, you’re constantly looking to build relationships that allow conversations to have subtext.

So when Jo is poo-pooing Rina’s new boyfriend, she’s not literally hating on the boyfriend. She’s got a dog in this fight. She wants Rina. So of course she’s going to hate on the new guy. But she can’t say she loves Rina out loud and therefore has to convey these things through subtext.

I also liked how casual the writing was. Sometimes we writers can obsess over every single word so much so that we end up with these technically correct paragraphs but those paragraphs read like jagged edges. The action description throughout this script read like butter.

My issues with the script had to do with the mythology.

I had a hard time following it. The antagonist, Preston, is fashioned after a vampire. For example, if he bites you, you gain superhuman strength. And there are many allusions to how pale he is and how pale he makes others. So we’re at least partly in vampire land.

But then I don’t know what that has to do with turning Asian women into white women. That whole aspect of the mythology seemed to have different rules. And once you create a mythology that contradicts itself, the reader gets confused and loses confidence in the story.

This is quite common, actually, especially in the early stages of a screenwriting career. We tend to see mythology as this giant candy store where we can pull out any piece of candy whenever we want. But good mythology is the customer who walks into the candy store and only buys the candy that he really needs.

Cause I had a tough time figuring out what the point was here. I know there’s this “toxic masculinity” theme running throughout the script. But there’s also this toxic friendship theme running throughout the script (Rina is terrible to Jo). I suppose, if you wanted to dig deeper, you could even say that this was a story about toxic heterosexuality since Jo is gay and the two people who screw her over are straight.

That’s not how you present your theme.

You don’t give the reader a bunch of choices and say, “Pick one.”

Yes, good movies explore multiple themes but the best movies have a dominant theme – one message they’re trying to get across.

And the problem with a script like this is that it’s clearly a THEME script. It’s created to be deconstructed for its message. So if that message isn’t clear, then you’re not executing the most important part of your presentation. Us moviegoers don’t need a theme when we watch The Fall Guy. But we do when we watch indie movies like this.

Even the title confuses me. “If I Had Your Face.” At first I think that’s coming from Rina’s perspective. She’s eager to have a white woman’s face. But then, later in the script, we get all these shots of mirrors and Jo’s face becomes Preston’s face sometimes and Rina’s face sometimes and the last dead girlfriend’s face sometimes. It just felt like we were throwing spooky stuff up on the screen even if we didn’t understand why.

By the way, this is something newbie writers do all the time in horror. They write trippy stuff and expect the reader to do the work for them. The writer doesn’t know exactly why they’re doing it but they’re HOPING the reader will come up with an explanation. You never want to write like that. You shouldn’t ever expect the reader to do your work. Even though it’s harder, you should always do the work yourself. You should always write things that make sense.

There’s a good lesson to be learned here, even if it’s a confusing one. I believe that Ran Ran is great with character stuff and dialogue. I think she’s weak in horror and mythology. However, this script doesn’t sell without the horror and mythology. That’s how powerful marketable genres are. Even if you’re not great with them, they give you a much better chance at selling your script, even if you didn’t perfectly execute the genre part. And that’s because producers read the script and see the poster and the trailer. Posters and trailers always look better when there’s a marketable genre popping off them.

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

What I learned:“Running Commentary Description” – Running Commentary Description is when you occasionally use your action lines to commentate on what’s happening. It helps create a more casual read. So, for example, we get this line early on: “Finally, a waiter comes by with two glasses of red wine. A lifeline.” That last part – “A lifeline,” gives the reader a little more information on what that red wine means in the moment. Or later on, when Jo is speaking to a couple of Irene’s work friends and they’re going their separate ways, one of the friends says, “We should all catch up some time.” And the action line that follows is, “They never will.” I kinda like running commentary description but just like anything, if you do it too much, it can get annoying. So be careful out there.

We’re just 11 days away from the Mega Showdown Screenplay Contest. Details on how to enter are here!

The only time when the box office is interesting is when something unexpected happens and we had one of those unexpected moments this weekend when Longlegs shocked Hollywood by pulling in 22 million bucks.

What’s interesting about this is that Longlegs is what I call a “tweener.” It is in between genres. It’s technically a serial killer movie but it’s shot and treated like a horror film. I mean, check out this trailer. Tweeners are where screenwriters go to gamble. Because when you get them right, the rewards are huge. Everybody tells you, “Oh my god, it was genius to mix those two genres!”

But when you fail, you fail spectacularly. We saw that with another tweener movie that came out this weekend, Fly Me to the Moon, a film that did about as good (9.5 mil) as I expected it to when I reviewed the script two weeks ago. It’s part biopic part rom-com??? I’ve seen some questionable tweener combos before but this one is up there.

Getting back to Longlegs, it’s a vindicating moment for me because I remember reviewing Osgood Perkins’ script, February, so many years ago and finding it to be excellent. It’s a strange thing, screenwriting, when you know someone is an excellent writer but the results don’t prove it.

You wonder why so many other less talented writers have these giant credits instead. Hacks like Mattson Tomlin or massively overrated teacher’s pet Michael Waldron. Perkins is a way better writer than either of these guys so why are the coloring book professionals making a million bucks a script?

I suppose when you look closer, it makes sense. Perkins lives inside the burn. He lives inside the subtext. Whereas these other writers live inside the party. They live inside the bells and whistles. And those things get more attention. Especially when it comes to the types of movies that make the most money in Hollywood.

But Perkins has finally made a, “Studios take note” movie that will most certainly elevate him to high profile status.

This past week, I’ve been talking with writer friends, I’ve been working with writers as a consultant, I’ve been reading scripts for the site, and I’m even reading a book. A major theme emerged from all this reading and it’s the topic of TRUTH in writing.

There are so many times when I read something where a character will say something or do something that’s not truthful. In other words, whatever they’re saying or doing is not reflective of what one would say or do in real life. And the second that happens in a script, a little switch gets flipped in the reader’s head where they think, “That’s not realistic.”

Every time that switch gets flipped, the reader gets closer and closer to disengaging his suspension of disbelief. It doesn’t take many flips for the reader to give up entirely. It only takes 2 or 3 times depending on the degree to which the moment affects the story. In other words, if a character says something untruthful when he’s joking around with a friend, it doesn’t bother the reader much. But when a character says something untruthful during an important high stakes moment in the story? That could be the end of your script right there.

To understand this, you have to see suspension of disbelief as a balloon. And every time you lie to the reader, it’s the equivalent of throwing a sharp rock at that balloon. Maybe the balloon survives a few throws. But eventually it’s going to pop.

So what does a lie look like in writing?

Let’s start with a simple example. You’re writing a horror script. You have a babysitter in a house. Your plan for the scene is to get the killer inside the house because you need him to kill her. So you have your killer dress like an electricity guy and ring the doorbell. The babysitter comes to the door, the fake electricity guy says there’s an electricity problem on the block and he needs to check the basement. What does the babysitter do?

Does she let him in?

I have news for you. If your answer is yes, you just lied to the reader. You’re lying because the babysitter isn’t going to let a strange man into this house at 9pm at night. At the very least she would tell him to hold on and call the owners of the house to inform them about the man and let them make the decision. But if she just lets him in because he wants to come in, you are lying to the reader. Which is inexcusable.

Okay, let’s look at another example.

Your female hero has been handcuffed and thrown in the back of a cop car, which is on the move. We establish that the cops are dirty and it looks like they’re taking her somewhere to kill her. For context, this is a family woman who’s never been in a situation like this before.

Our hero, when the cops aren’t looking, reaches up, grabs a bobby pin out of her hair, and discreetly goes to work, using the bobby pin to open her handcuffs, and jump out of the moving car.

Would you write that scene?

If so, you have just lied to the reader.

The lie is that this character would a) know how to do this and b) be able to pull it off. Have you ever opened handcuffs with a hairpin? Would you know how to do it? If you don’t know how to do it, why would this character know? You may say, “But that always happens in movies, Carson!” That’s literally the worst response you can use for justifying an action in your script.

“All those sh#tty movies did it Carson. Why can’t I?”

If you want to model your script off a terrible movie, go ahead. But I promise you that’s not going to help you when somebody reads it.

“I wanna go home!”

One of the reasons that The Acolyte has completely fallen apart as a show is because it lies so much. Keep in mind, the audience isn’t aware that this is the reason they’ve lost faith in the show. All they know is they don’t like it. But the writer lying to them so much is the primary reason they don’t like it.

In this most recent episode, we go back in time when the twin girls, Maye and Osha, were still with the witch clan. The purpose of the episode is to show us why Master Sol came after and adopted Osha. It’s a big deal for a man to take a kid from her mothers so it has to be a major reason.

What ended up being the reason? He saw Maye and Osha playing in the forest and got a sixth sense that they were being taught an “incorrect” way of living. Not that they were in danger, mind you. Just that he didn’t like the way he assumed they were being raised.

That’s a lie.

That’s a bold-faced writer lie.

The writers needed to get Master Sol to the witch clan so they had Sol “get a sense,” by watching the two play, that further investigation was needed.

Character motivation is something writers lie about all the time because finding a valid motivation can be challenging. This is where most writing lies are born – in the face of having to do more work. Rather than do the work and find a valid motivation, they’ll lie and hope that the reader doesn’t pick up on it. But I’m telling you, that’s a dangerous game to play. Readers are always smarter than you think. And this Sol moment here became a viral discussion over social media, leading even hardcore fans to give up on the show.

In that same episode, one of the Jedis in Master Sol’s clan, Torbin, gets overwhelmed by the fallout that happens when they encounter the witches and promptly says, “I want to go home.” He keeps whining, telling everyone how uncomfortable he is. He wants to go back to Coruscant. I want to go home. I want to go home. I want to go home.

This is another lie.

For starters, the character is somewhere between 18-22 years old. “I want to go home” is something a 5-10 year old character says. Not an 18-22 year old character. So you’re lying about how a character of this age would react. Second problem, he’s a Jedi. Jedis are trained from a young age to be calm. This reaction goes 180 degrees in the opposite direction of that. So that’s another lie. Finally, they’re not 10 minutes from their home hut. They’re 7 billion miles from their home planet. “I want to go home,” doesn’t make sense within that context. It’s a complete and utter lie.

So when you watch that character freak out and get this overwhelming feeling that it’s inauthentic, this is the reason why. The writer lied three full times within one action.

This is why truth is so important in writing and it’s simpler to incorporate than you think. All you have to do is ask, “Is this how it would happen if we were in the real world?” Keep changing the action of the character until that answer is “yes.”

:)

16 days left to enter the Mega-Showdown Screenplay Contest! Head over to this post for details on how to enter. It’s easy!

Genre: Horror
Premise: A hacker tasked with looking into a strange suicide begins to find herself followed by random crowds of people who she suspects may want to kill her.
About: There are a lot of Jack Hellers. I think this is the producer Jack Heller, who’s produced all of S. Craig Zahler’s movies. This script of his finished on last year’s Black List and was one of the only scripts on the list to get a coveted “must read” rating from me.
Writer: Jack Heller
Details: 97 pages

In the comment section yesterday, we were talking about Eddie Murphy and how he went from the biggest comedic actor in the world to 35 years of missteps.

Here are some of the concepts he signed up for…

The Adventures of Pluto Nash – In the future, a man struggles to keep his lunar nightclub out of the hands of the Mafia.

Vampire in Brooklyn – A Caribbean vampire seduces a Brooklyn police officer who has no idea that she is half-vampire.

Metro – A hostage negotiator teams up with a sharpshooter to bring down a dangerous jewel thief.

Holy Man – An over-the-top television evangelist finds a way to turn television home shopping into a religious experience, and takes America by storm.

Norbit – A mild-mannered guy, who is married to a monstrous woman, meets the woman of his dreams, and schemes to find a way to be with her.

Meet Dave – A crew of miniature aliens operates a spaceship that has a human form. Their plans get messed up when the human form falls in love.

Some of these concepts are misguided (why is the vampire, oddly, Caribbean?), some bland (hostage negotiator tries to take down a jewel thief??), some forced (aliens piloting a person), some lacking a clear comedic angle (Pluto Nash).

The reason I bring these up today, of all days, is to remind everyone HOW IMPORTANT CONCEPTS ARE. When you have a great concept, the majority of the script writes itself. When you don’t, you spend 90% of your time forcing things to work. And they never quite work because the concept itself never worked.

This is why, when you stumble upon a good idea, you must cherish it, like a rare Pokemon. It is worth more than you could possibly imagine.  I mean that.  A good idea could conceivably last CENTURIES.

I would place today’s concept in that category.  Well, it’s maybe not centuries-lasting good but it’s one of the first concepts I noticed when last year’s Black List came out. I wanted to save it for a rainy day. It’s not exactly raining out but I’m in the mood to read something awesome.

Let’s check it out.

We start off by seeing a girl, Tabitha, hurry into a subway with a giant crowd slowly following her. The crowd of people eventually surrounds her and positions her head in the path of an oncoming train and she’s beheaded.

Cut to several days later, where we meet Lou. Lou is one of those “Girl with the dragon tattoo” types. She’s a hacker who does occasional jobs for an insurance company. The company is trying to prove that a girl (Tabitha) killed herself so it doesn’t have to pay out her life insurance.

Lou, who’s at the tail end of a long journey to end her conservatorship for, presumably, mental instability, starts looking into the video of Tabitha’s death, which shows… NO CROWD. Only Tabitha. But Lou curiously finds a strange blur moving towards Tabitha that warrants more investigation.

So she goes to the last person who saw Tabitha before she died, the subway ticket guy. That guy doesn’t want anything to do with Lou’s questions and goes home. Lou follows him and oddly sees the guy screaming to random nothingness, “Get away from me!” 20 minutes later, back at his home, he kills himself.

Lou then begins having dreams of a crowd of people in her bedroom watching her while she sleeps. It creeps her out enough that she reconnects with her ex-boyfriend, Wes, who assures her she’ll be fine.

But as Lou starts to move around the city, she notices crowds starting to form, sometimes following her, sometimes just looking at her. It becomes apparent that she is in some sort of chain of people who are killed by a crowd. She must figure out how to stop this crowd before it makes her its latest victim.

The first question that pops into a reader’s head after a script is, “Is this script good enough to recommend?” If the answer is yes, the writer is in a very good place. Because it’s hard as hell to get people to recommend a script.

The section question that enters a reader’s mind is: “Could this be a movie?” A screenplay is a proposed blueprint for a movie. So readers want to know if the blueprint could be successful.

Now here’s the part that drives aspiring writers crazy. You can get a “no” on the first question, a “yes” to the second question, and people will still want to buy your script. That’s because “Can it be a movie?” is the only question that really matters.

The Crowd is a movie. Potentially a very successful one. It’s as if someone combined It Follows and Smile and injected the offspring with several performance-enhancing drugs.

Crowds are scary. The fact that nobody has thought to make a horror movie about one is shocking. And the writer knows exactly how to milk fear from a crowd.

I love how the crowd kills. It keeps following you and following you until it’s surrounding you. Then, it keeps moving in, moving in, and soon, it’s crushing you. And it doesn’t let up. It keeps crushing and crushing til bones start snapping, til eyeballs start popping. The crowd is ruthless.

And I love how the writer didn’t stop there. In addition to the crowd, there’s an individual within the crowd – a sort of alpha demon of sorts – and as the crowd holds you in place, the demon weaves through the crowd, getting closer and closer. It’s another scary element within an already terrifying element.

The crowd can also appear momentarily. You can be walking somewhere in the city and then, all of a sudden, everybody stops and turns to you. In this iteration, the crowd only wants to watch. Or to warn.

It’s genuinely spooky stuff.

And I liked what the writer did with the main character as well. We meet Lou at the end of a long journey where she’s been trying to get herself out of a protective conservatorship (think what Britney Spears parents were doing to her), which gives her a personal goal that works, concurrently, with the plot goal (find out what this crowd is before it kills you).

As someone who’s read a million and one characters, I don’t remember a single script where a character was trying to get out of a conservatorship. I love writers who go the extra mile and come up with unique angles like that.

But I do have one beef with The Crowd.

There isn’t enough crowd!

When you have an idea this original, you want to take advantage of it! So much of this script is about the investigation into how the crowd came to be and how it ended up with her. I don’t go to a movie about scary crowds to spend 75% of the time watching characters look at computer screens and say stuff like, “Yeah, that person in that video clip DOES look strange.”

I want my character in CROWD SITUATIONS!

I actually thought this script was going to be one long real-time story where the main character must make it through the city with crowds moving in on her wherever she goes.

I’m fine that that’s not the case but, at least give me 25% of that!

I’m guessing the writer thought that if there was too much crowd stuff, it would lose its impact. I suppose that’s an okay argument. But not if you get inventive. I already liked this rule he created where sometimes the crowd just watches. It doesn’t move in on you. So I know the writer has the creative ability to come up with different variations of the crowd. I would like to see more of that variety.

I’ve said it once, I’ll say it a million more times: GIVE US WHAT’S UNIQUE ABOUT YOUR MOVIE. That’s the one thing of value you possess – that unique asset.

Any time you are not focusing on that asset, you are focusing on things MOVIEGOERS HAVE SEEN BILLIONS OF TIMES ALREADY. You know how many investigations I’ve seen in movies? 11 billion.

That’s my only issue here. More crowd. Cause crowds are scary and the writer did a great job showing that. So show it more.

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

What I learned: Don’t overthink verbs – “Tabitha strolls her eyes to a confusing sight.” If the reader has to stop to try and figure out what “strolling” one’s eyes means, you’ve written a clunky sentence. Just use normal words! “Tabitha notices something confusing.”

What I learned 2: Horror writers. Yeah, I’m speaking to you. YOU ARE NO LONGER ALLOWED TO WRITE SCENES IN BATHROOMS ANYMORE! STAY. AWAY. FROM BATHROOMS.  No bloody sink scenes. No mirrors with monsters behind you in the reflection scenes. No foggy messages in the mirrors. Stop! Stop stop stop! You are writing things that a reader has read in 4 other horror scripts JUST THAT WEEK. If you’re going to write something in a bathroom, it must be something truly original.

Genre: 30 min. Comedy/Period
Winning Logline: A troupe of struggling actors fight for relevancy for their small, dingy theatre located directly across the cobblestone street from Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre at the height of its fame.
About: Dan Martin beat out seven other contenders on Pilot Showdown Day with his clever logline. It is the first comedy pilot reviewed on the site in over four months! Can he do the impossible and win over a Scriptshadow comedy crowd that is said to be even more discerning than the crowds at the Globe Theater???
Writer: Dan Martin
Details: 34 pages

If you had told me I’d be traveling back 5+ centuries TWICE in the same week to review scripts, I would’ve told you… well, I would’ve told you that’s possible because that’s the wonderful world of screenplay-reading. You never know what you’re going to get.

It is the year 1594.

Playwright Thaddeus Longfellow is with his friend (who he secretly loves), and actress, Katherine Greyman, at the world-famous Globe Theater, watching Romeo and Juliet. In the audience is the writer, William Shakespeare, who loves himself more than anything else on the planet. This man’s life is the life Thaddeus dreams of living.

But that life probably isn’t going to happen anytime soon because Thaddeus has had writer’s block for over a year. As he frustratingly picks up Katherine (she’s in tears after the ending of Romeo & Juliet), they head back to their theater, The Silver Theater, across the street.

The Silver Theater, and pretty much everybody who works there, suck. You’ve got Michael the Mute. Kurtus the German (who’s actually from Austria). As well as a number of other not-attractive-enough actors casually awaiting their next play – casually because Thaddeus doesn’t have any new material.

But then Thaddeus has an idea. Through the grapevine, word is that Shakespeare doesn’t write his own stuff. It’s actually ghost-written by a guy named Joseph Noone. So Thaddeus recruits Noone to write the Silver’s next play. The cocky Noone comes in and writes one of the worst plays ever, making the Silver’s acting troupe look even worse than they already are. And the out-of-ideas Thaddeus goes wandering the streets drunk, fantasizing about killing himself.

But right before he takes action, he runs into none-other than an also-drunk William Shakespeare. Shakespeare and Thaddeus get to talking and Shakespeare says it’s lonely at the top. I don’t know if people love my writing or just love it because my name’s attached to it. It would be nice to know if I’m actually as great as I think I am. And that’s when Thaddeus gets an idea: Give me one of your unknown scripts, I’ll play it at my theater, and we can find out together. Shakespeare agrees and that’s the end of episode 1.

I feel a little out of my comfort zone here. Analyzing half-hour comedy is not one of my strong suits. I find that because comedy is so subjective it’s very hard to gauge when the comedy is working and when it isn’t.

I was recently on a Zoom consultation for a comedy spec and the writer and I were talking about some of the jokes in his script. I told him I wasn’t laughing at them and I proceeded to offer some alternatives which he, then, proceeded to tell me were even less funny. And that’s how a lot of generating comedy goes. It’s not easy.

Despite that, my big takeaway here was this: We need more jokes.

When I first read that great logline for the pilot, I thought, “That’s good. That could be really funny.” And the main thing I imagined was leaning into the contrast between the two theaters. We would see perfectly choreographed comedy perfection at the Globe and then quickly cut to the lazy sloppy mistake-prone acts at the Silver Theater.

And we do get a little of that here. But not as much as I wanted. Which I think is Dan’s big mistake is he focused more on the plot than anything else. And, with comedy, you have to focus on the jokes. Where do the funny jokes come from? They come from characters. So you want to spend a ton of time coming up with the funniest characters possible.

Instead, we get a ton of plot here. And, to Dan’s credit, it’s good plotting. We set up the contrast between the two theaters. How Silver Theater is barely paying its bills. We set up our hero’s primary flaw, that he’s got debilitating writer’s block and can’t create anymore. We set up the rivalry (or perceived rivalry in Thad’s head) of Thad and Shakespeare. We watch him hatch his plan of recruiting Shakespeare’s ghostwriter. And then we get the big ending reveal, which is that, to save the theater, Shakespeare has agreed to allow them to anonymously use his play.

But because we had to set all that up, we didn’t get enough of the comparisons between the two theaters. I always try and remind writers – especially writers who win these contests with beloved loglines – to lean into that beloved concept as much as possible. Because that’s what we voted for. That’s what excited us. So if you’re spending 80% of the pilot on plot and setup instead, the reader’s going to feel let down.

Now, I’m guessing Dan would argue that the plan is to do exactly that throughout the rest of the show. It’s TV so there will be many episodes to play with this fun concept of the Globe Theater vs. the Silver Theater. Meanwhile, for this episode, he’s got to set everything up! But this is why screenwriting is hard. Readers and viewers don’t care that you have to set things up. If it’s a comedy, they want to laugh NOW. And that’s what I wanted, too.

I’m not going to pretend like I know exactly how to redraft this pilot to achieve this. But my initial thought was we needed to spend more time at The Silver Theater. I want to see just how bad it is there. I want to meet every hilarious character. I want to watch the world’s worst play. And, afterward, I want to see all of them disperse and go to their corners and complain in funny ways about all the reasons why their genius isn’t being allowed to shine.

To me, the most recent example of a great TV comedy ensemble was The Office. And while they didn’t have time in that pilot episode to introduce everyone in the office, they gave us Michael. They gave us Dwight. They gave us the Intern. And we got a few quick scenes with people at the back of the Office. And you were laughing! Cause they were all funny.

When I look at Thad, I’m not sure I find anything funny about him. He’s more of a tragic figure. He’s sad about Shakespeare being better than him. He’s sad about his writer’s block. Where are the laughs? One thing I know is that your lead comedy character needs to be funny. So Thad needs to be reimagined at the very least. You’d be surprised at how that could then open up comedy everywhere else.

Cause think about Michael in The Office. His comedic construction was not only great for him, but it allowed the writers to build Dwight around him, with Dwight being obsessed with Michael and wanting to make him happy no matter what. If you don’t first figure out Michael’s comedic angle, you can’t build Dwight’s comedic angle. So I could see the same happening once you figure out Thad.

Comedy is hard. Pilots are hard. Comedy pilots are, therefore, very hard. That’s what she said. Sorry, I’ve got Michael Scott on the brain. So I’m not trying to kill Dan here. I understand the difficulty of the task he’s up against. But I think Dan was too plot-focused in the writing of this pilot when he needed to be more character and comedy-focused. Give us funny characters, make us laugh as much as possible. Even if this comes in the package of a thin plot, we’ll still watch the next episode.

P.S. It might be funny to add a mockumentary style to this since it doesn’t make sense whatsoever for the time. One of the reasons The Office (and shows like it) were able to establish their comedic characters so quickly is because they could be asked direct questions about themselves in interviews. Which helped the viewer IMMEDIATELY get the characters. For example, in Michaels’s very first interview in The Office, he’s pointing to his “World’s Best Boss” coffee mug. We immediately understand, in that moment, what’s important to him, and where his comedy is going to come from.

Pilot Script Link: Playwrong

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

What I learned: In my experience reading comedy, writers need to write at least twice as many jokes as they actually write. Because you have to remember that some jokes aren’t going to hit. This is something that Judd Apatow will tell his feature writers from time to time: “Go through the script and add 50 more jokes.” Cause the worst thing that can happen when reading a comedy script is the reader doesn’t laugh enough. So make sure they have enough to laugh about.

This contest is bigger than a Star Destroyer!

For those of you just joining in on the fun, every Thursday of 2024, I’ve been guiding Scriptshadow readers through the process of writing a screenplay. We wrote the first draft over the course of four months. This week, we just finished our second draft. And now we’re down to the final month, where we polish the script.

I’m going to put up an official announcement for the Mega-Showdown soon, as well as announce it in the July Newsletter (e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com if you want to receive my newsletter). But starting today, you CAN submit your Mega-Showdown script.

Here are the details…

What: Mega-Showdown (Online Feature Screenplay Contest)
What I need: Title, genre, logline, your first five pages
Optional: tagline, movie-crossover pitch
Contest Date: Friday, July 26th
Deadline: Thursday, July 25th, 10pm Pacific Time
Send to: entries should be sent to carsonreeves3@gmail.com
How: Include “MEGA” in subject line
Price: Free

It’s going to be an amazing event. On July 26th, I’ll post loglines for the ten best entries, including the first page. Everybody on the site will vote. The four scripts that get the most votes will move on to the next stage. The very next week, each of the four final scripts will get their first five pages posted on their own individual day.

I’ve heard how guys want to actually see what the writing looks like in these scripts. Now you’re going to be able to dig in and really determine which script is the best written. Then, that following weekend, starting Friday, July 2nd, we will have a second voting process where the four top scripts will be voted on to determine the winner. The inaugural Scriptshadow Mega-Showdown winner will then get a script review on Monday, August 5th.

Okay, now that you’re all pumped up, let’s talk about polishing your script.

Just like a lot of terms in screenwriting, “polish” means different things to different writers. For some, it means dotting their I’s and crossing their T’s. For others, it means a full on mini-rewrite.

How extensive your polish should be will be determined by how much time you have. In this case we have exactly four weeks. Here’s what I can tell you you can do and can’t do in four weeks.

You cannot make any major character changes in four weeks. You can’t, for example, change your main character’s flaw. Or turn them from a man into a woman. Or change their job from a CIA agent to a tech CEO. Those types of changes have tentacles in so many parts of the screenplay that you’re essentially doing a page-1 rewrite. And you don’t have time for that.

Nor do you have time to make major structural changes. If you realize that your midpoint should actually be the end of your first act, you’ll be cutting out 25+ pages. How many of those pages can be redistributed? How much new story will you have to write? Probably too much to do so effectively in four weeks.

If you’re doing a “mini-rewrite,” – in other words, a polish where you’re still making some creative changes – then stick to improving scenes as best you can as well as improving important subplots. Neither of these changes is going to affect the overall parts of the script. So you can fix them quickly.

I encourage you to identify your 5-7 most important scenes and ask yourself, “Are these as good as they can be?” If they’re a suspenseful scene, can you do something to make them even more suspenseful? If they’re an action set-piece, are you being as imaginative as you can be? If they’re a dialogue scene, can you be more creative with the dialogue, or funnier, or more clever?

Those scenes are really going to sell your script so they need to be as good as possible.

When it comes to rewriting subplots, I included a qualifier there: “IMPORTANT.” Minor subplots, such as Allan’s (Michael Cera’s) subplot in “Barbie,” don’t move the needle either way. Those subplots aren’t going to affect how your reader feels at the end of your screenplay. So unless they’re disastrous, don’t worry about them.

But if the Chief of Police’s (Keegan-Michael Key) subplot in Wonka is weak, that’s something worth tidying up because he has a fairly substantial arc in the film as he’s struggling to decide whether to heed the chocolatiers’ wishes and take down Willie Wonka or do what he knows is right.

You’ve got about two weeks to take care of these things before we move on to grammar and spelling. So don’t take on any task that you think may be too difficult to manage.

And I know some of you may be freaking out and thinking you don’t have enough time to do everything you have to do. First off, that’s natural to think as a writer, especially if you’re a perfectionist. But also, consider that when you become a professional writer, one of the biggest adjustments you will be asked to make is writing on a schedule. You will have to hit deadlines. This is the perfect time to practice for that.

Challenge yourself! You’ll be surprised what you’re capable of when you push past your comfort zone.

Mega-Showdown. 30 DAYS AND COUNTING!