This is it! The Second Annual Mega-Showdown winning screenplay. And we don’t wait around here at Scriptshadow like other contests. We celebrate the script THE VERY NEXT DAY. Hence, here’s the review for… Hard Labor.

Genre: Real-Time Action Thriller
Logline: A heavily pregnant woman is found by criminals she’s been hiding from and the shock makes her go into labor. Now she must awaken old skills to survive this night – because killers are coming…but so is the baby.
About: While Hard Labor finished third in the original voting tally, when it was facing 9 other screenplays, it took the top spot after everyone had a chance to read all four finalists’ first five pages (say that five times in a row!). You can check out those first five pages here. Overall, it was a fairly close competition, with Hard Labor taking in 35% of the votes. That’s 12% higher than the next highest vote-getter. But all four scripts received a solid amount of votes. You can check out the original Mega-Showdown post with the 10 contenders here. And you can check out the finalist post with the top 4 scripts here. For anyone with questions about Hard Labor, I’m sure the writer, Mike, will be in the comments to answer anything you want. Oh, and Mike. CONGRATULATIONS!
Writer: Mike Hurst
Details: 98 pages

Anya Taylor Joy for Tamara??

I noticed that some of you were concerned that this script might come off as goofy with the whole pregnancy angle. And, you know what? I was worried about that too. It was one of the things that made me waver as to whether to choose this script for the competition.

But, as I told you, this competition wasn’t just about the logline. Or even the first page. It was about the first five pages. In other words, I had to make sure that all the writers in this contest could write! And when I read these first five pages, I didn’t have any doubt that this script had to be in.

Nine months pregnant, Susan, is preparing to have her baby. The doctor just told her to get her “go bag” ready. Susan’s response: What’s a go bag? In her defense, she doesn’t need to know a lot about raising babies because she’s giving hers up for adoption after her little girl is born.

Susan heads back to her little apartment that she shares with her gay roommate, Brett. Brett brings home a hookup from work, a guy named Lyle, but Lyle is suspiciously more interested in Susan than he is Brett. It doesn’t take Susan long to figure that old Lyle is a killer. So she utilizes the exploding microwave trick to throw him off balance and then attack and kill him.

Brett loses the desire to get laid pretty fast after that because now he’s got a much bigger problem – There are four more men outside in a car who want to kill Susan. Oh, and her name isn’t really Susan. It’s Tamara. And she’s a hitwoman for one of the most notorious mobsters in the region, Big Red.

Big Red, you say? Yeah, that would be the father of the baby inside Tamara. And he really wants to get that baby before Tamara passes him off to the hospital and the child gets lost in the adoption system, never to be found again. Tamara is determined to deliver this baby because she doesn’t want it growing up in this awful violent life. Getting her as far away from Big Red is paramount.

So, she gets Brett to drive her to the hospital, which immediately results in a chase from Big Red’s main crew. The crew includes the mountainous black bodyguard known as Halsey, and the slick leader of the crew, Ryder, both of whom are determined to kill Tamara (but not the baby!) at all costs, as, should they fail, Big Red will end them.

A chase follows throughout the city. Tamara hides just about everywhere she can (including an active ambulance ride), all while in the middle of labor. But a 120 pound 9 months pregnant assassin can only do so much, and she’s eventually captured. That’s when she drops the bombshell on Halsey (spoilers). This ain’t Big Red’s baby. It’s yours. Halsey, realizing that visual confirmation means he’s dead the second this baby is born, is forced to help Tamara escape. But it may be too late for that. Because Big Red has finally arrived on-site.

Let me start by saying why I chose this script.

Like I said earlier, I was a little skeptical about the setup. I was afraid of that potential goofiness factor. I’ve seen women who are nine months pregnant and their bellies are enormous. That can definitely come off as comical in the wrong hands.

And, the truth is, we won’t know if it works until we see it. Mike has a secret weapon here, which is that the visuals are hidden. Which means we can imagine what we want to imagine. And I imagined a pregnant woman who’s just lean enough to still believably run around like Tom Cruise. Whether that’s how it’s really going to look……? We’ll have to find out.

But the reason I chose the script was because it was one of the few scripts that started the way that I tell everyone to start their script – WITH A STORY. You easily could’ve started this script with a woman in a hospital bed getting an ultrasound. 95 out of 100 writers would’ve done that.

But that’s boring. Unless something crazy is going to happen during that scene.

Instead, we start with a “story scene” that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. We start with Leo being pulled out of his house, towards his pool. There’s a first act, which starts with a goal: Bad guys need information from Leo (Where’s Tamara?). There’s a second act, with conflict: Leo insists he doesn’t know where she is. And there’s a third act, with the conclusion: They get the information then kill Leo anyway.

Stories are just so wonderful to start your script with because they shift the reader into a “what’s going to happen next” mindset immediately. I’m not asking, “What’s going to happen next?” if a pregnant woman is quietly asking her doctor who’s giving her an ultrasound, “Is it a girl or a boy?” That’s not a story. It’s setup. Setup is just information. It’s not entertainment. I’d guess that 95% of aspiring writers don’t understand this and it’s what cooks half their screenplays.

Granted, we do get some of that setup in the second scene. But, by then, we’re already hooked, because the writer has pulled us in with a story.

Now comes the question: Did the rest of the script live up to the first scene?

For the most part, yes.

Hard Labor is one uninterrupted ride. Which is both its powerful chest and its Achilles heel. The problem when you put your pedal to the metal for 90 pages is that it’s easy for things to become a blur. For example, there was a moment early on when we were in the first car chase where I was losing focus because it was so repetitive. There wasn’t enough variety to keep me focused. And that would happen periodically.

But I’ll tell you how the script won me over.

One of the things I always say is to figure out what it is about your story that’s unique and build the majority of your story’s scenes around that unique thing. If you’re writing a movie about a little girl whose monstrous sketches come to life, I better be getting a lot of scenes that deal with real-life sketches attacking people. At first, I was wondering if Mike was doing that enough here. There were a number of set pieces that could’ve been copy and pasted over to a John Wick film, which worried me.

But I realized that Mike was heeding my advice after all. Just ON THE PERSONAL SIDE OF THE SCREENPLAY. We weren’t getting “pregnant-specific” action scenes. But the pregnancy is definitely integrated into the character and plot sides of the script. One of my favorite developments by far was the reveal that Halsey was the father.

There’s this great scene right after Tamara has told him this and Halsey gets in the car with Ryder, who’s still ignorant of the secret, and Ryder brings up that if this isn’t Big Red’s kid, Big Red is going to annihilate, in the worst fashion possible, whoever the father is. And, of course, since there wouldn’t have to be a DNA test for Big Red to figure out who the father is once this baby is out, Halsey is internally freaking the hell out.

This leads to Halsey helping Tamara later and that’s all you need. You need the unique hook your story is built around to drive the major moments of your script. You can’t write the Halsey reveal or Halsey doing a 180 and deciding to help the heroine in any other script. It specifically comes out of the pregnancy hook. I loved that.

By the way, this script could’ve used more humor. Sometimes we make the error as writers to hide our script’s weakness. But often the best writers shine a light on that weakness and use it to their advantage. A woman running around with a gun 9 months pregnant is kind of a funny image. So why not inject some humor into the script? Brett would be a great character to have more fun with. He could freak out more. He had that capability but I always felt that Mike was putting a muzzle on him.

Check out Anora to see how Sean Baker did a great job with a similar scenario. He had one of the thugs constantly throwing up throughout the story because Anora beat him up earlier. And there were quite a few funny moments even from the serious characters in that movie. I would use that as a template to approach the humor here in a baby’s heartbeat.

In a lot of ways, the script reminded me of Clementine, which came from another Scriptshadow reader, David Williams. That script is now in my Top 10. Is Hard Labor going to make the Top 25? I don’t think so. It’ll definitely make the Top 25 Amateur list. But I think for this script to jump up another level or two, it needs a little more variety, as well as originality in the set pieces. I don’t know if we have a stand out set piece here. We have a lot of solid set pieces. But we need an all-star set piece and then we need a “1a” set piece.

I would love to hear the readers of the site volunteer some ideas for some original set pieces. That’s one of the wonderful advantages of doing this contest. Unlike other contests, there’s community support here and we can all help each other. Because I definitely think Hard Labor could be a movie. Even without a rewrite. But I don’t want to just be the starting point for an average movie. I want something great to come out of this.

Overall, I’m very happy with how you guys voted. And one more final congratulations to Mike Hurst!

Script link: Hard Labor

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

What I learned: Make sure the stakes aren’t just high for your hero but for your villains too. We learn early on that if these thugs don’t kill Tamara, Big Red is going to kill them. So the stakes are very high for them to achieve their goal.

We got the trailer version of this screenplay in the First Page Showdown. Now, it’s grown into an entire script. People lovvvvvved this first page. But can it survive the relentless deconstruction of every single word by the Scriptshadow audience??  You would’ve thought QB1 was an actual serial killer who was best friends with Sydney Sweeney from some of those comments.  The Scriptshadow faithful does not hold back, that’s for sure.  

A quick reminder about how this contest works. This week, the top four vote-getting scripts from the Mega-Showdown last weekend will get their own featured day. Yesterday was QB1. Today is The First Horseman. I will post the first five pages of every script on their day.  I want you to read those pages because, come Friday, we’re having the second half of the showdown where you will vote for your favorite of the four finalists.

To be clear, THERE IS NO VOTING TODAY. This is strictly about reading The First Horseman’s first five pages. Also, if you like what you see in the pages, you can download the entire script. So, everybody give a big returning welcome to our first page lothario, Finn Morgan, and his script, The First Horseman!

Hey! I don’t hear you clapping!

Title: The First Horseman

Genre: Thriller

Logline: At the height of World War 2, a young Japanese-American investigator must race to prevent a terrifying Japanese plot to unleash a devastating plague on the United States. Inspired by true events.

Submissions for The Scriptshadow Mega-Showdown Screenplay Contest are due THURSDAY! – Here’s how to submit!

Genre: Superhero
Premise: As the world’s most famous family, The Fantastic Four, prepare to have their first baby, an evil giant entity known as Galactus threatens to destroy their planet.
About: A lot is riding on this film’s success for Marvel. The movie finished its opening weekend with 118 million dollars. In the much hyped DC vs. Marvel Summer battle of Superman versus Fantastic Four, Fantastic Four lost out to Superman by 7 million bucks. The two films have an almost identical worldwide box office tally, separated by just a million dollars (220 to Superman versus 219 F4). The film received a lot of surprisingly good reviews just before being released, bringing expectations up significantly. I may have allowed those expectations to cloud my judgment.
Writers: Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan, Ian Springer, Kat Wood – characters created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby
Details: 115 minutes long

I’ll be straight up honest with you.

I can’t get enough of this stuff.

My script analysis brain runs at a million RPMs during superhero movies now, making it hard to just let go and enjoy them. Still, I’m fascinated by these films because I know the people behind the scenes are pouring every ounce of their creative energy into them.

I know people think the opposite is true, that they’re just mindlessly churning these films out. Trust me, that is not the case. They know that the profit difference between a bad and a good superhero movie could be as much as 400 million dollars. And the difference between a bad and a great superhero movie could be as much as a billion dollars.

With those numbers, everybody is working overtime to create the best movie possible.

The problem that keeps getting in the way is that studios refuse to take real creative risks on movies that cost over 100 million dollars. And big creative risks are one of the only ways for a film to break out into something great. Instead, their risks have to stay within small-risk territory. So you’re never going to get something that’s amazing.

That’s why I love this stuff. I love seeing what the studios and creatives on these movies will do. How much they’ll push that envelope and if they’ll ever get bold enough to take a real creative risk. Cause they’re getting to that point where they may not have a choice. If people stop coming to superhero movies, they’ll have to get creative fast. So, in a way, you kind of want these things to fail. That will lead to a new era of wilder weirder superhero films.

I guess you could say that Fantastic Four took *some* risks. They came up with this 1960s aesthetic, which feels a little different than your typical superhero film. But, for some strange reason, you get used to it so quickly, that they might as well have set it in modern times.

The movie follows this “family” of superheroes – Sue Storm (invisibility), Reed Richards (stretchy powers), Ben Grimm (a giant rock), and Johnny Storm (fire powers) – on their parallel universe Earth, where they are kind of like the planet’s presidents. And the movie starts with news that Sue is pregnant.

No sooner does this happen than a female Silver Surfer shows up and warns the entire planet that her master, the gigantic galaxy-hopping Galactus, has chosen their planet to eat. That’s right. Galactus goes around eating planets.

She then disappears and The Fantastic Four chart a flight to Galactus’s home world to try and negotiate. Surprisingly, Galactus is open to negotiation. And, to any sane person, his offer is reasonable. He says that if you give me your newborn, I won’t destroy your planet. The Fantastic Four channel Howie Mandel and tell Galactus… NO DEAL!

They then go back home, break the news to Earth. For some reason, the people of earth are only mildly upset about it. Here the civilians in Superman were, hurling cans of soda point blank at Superman’s face for helping avoid a war yet they merely shrugged their shoulders at the fact that the Fantastic Four didn’t sacrifice one human life for the lives of 6 billion. Um, okay.

But don’t worry! Reed Richards has a plan! It’s called: Project Baby Swap! He’ll lure Galactus into a trap that will send him to the furthest regions of the universe with an empty baby basket. Except he miscalculates how smart Galactus is. When Galactus sniffs out the tomfoolery, it will be a battle to the end right there in New York City.

There is a LOT to talk about with this movie but I’ll start with Pedro Pascal. This dude needs to take a three year vacation from acting. He does so many jobs that it’s clearly harmed his performances. I’ve never seen a more monotone lifeless performance than Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards.

In fact, the worst thing about this movie…. IS THE FANTASTIC FOUR. They’re all boring! How do you make The Thing boring? He’s an awesome character. Here, he’s always tired, like a gassed bodybuilder after a 3 hour workout (“Oh, you want me to pick up this car?” He says, half-heartedly to a group of schoolchildren. “Sure, okay, I guess.”). Then there was the baby drama, which felt like it belonged in a 90s sitcom starring two dads, one named Jesse, the other named Balky, rather than in a 2025 superhero movie.

The closest they got to a compelling superhero was Johnny Storm because at least he had a fun storyline – he fell in love with the Silver Surfer chick.

But from a screenwriting standpoint, they made a critical error early in the screenplay. They created a family WITH ZERO CONFLICT. Since when has there ever been a family without conflict? What a bizarre choice. But, even worse, IT WAS A BORING CHOICE. Cause we meet this family and they all like each other and chum around and that’s not why we come to movies. We come to movies to see conflict resolved. There was no conflict with this family! That alone made it nearly impossible for the movie to succeed.

And here’s the kicker: It almost did succeed.

Why?

Cause, for the first time since Thanos, Marvel had some badass villains! Galactus was a badass! I loved him. I can’t remember the last time a villain with gravitas entered any superhero film. This guy felt like a legitimate threat. Whenever his eyes lit up, I got scared goosebumps.

And Silver Surfer Chick was badass too! I loved the sadness within her. Her action scenes were fun to watch. I wanted her and Johnny to get together. I found myself rooting for her a lot.

Maybe this is why Marvel doesn’t make more badass villains. Because they’re afraid of what’s happened here, which is that the villains outshone the heroes.

One thing that The Fantastic Four taught me, though, is the value of setups and payoffs in these big movies. Again, you don’t have a lot of leniency in your creative choices with these scripts. The higher forces give you nowhere to go but in the most obvious directions.

You can combat this, however, with strong setups and payoffs. Setups and payoffs, as simple as they are to do, create this feeling of cleverness whenever they’re executed. In other words, they make a movie feel smarter than it is. In many ways, it’s your last line of defense in making these big generic movies feel satisfying.

For example, there’s this nice late moment where Johnny Storm decides to sacrifice himself to help push a struggling Galactus into the teleportation zone so he’ll be sent to the furthest regions of the universe. Johnny’s plan is to push him in, which means he’ll have to go as well. So he’s shooting towards Galactus and, at the last second, the Silver Surfer bumps him off his path and sacrifices herself instead.

The movie gave these two – Johnny Storm and the Silver Surfer – five scenes together setting up their complicated relationship and Johnny’s attempt to turn the Silver Surfer, which she had, up until this point, resisted. That was the setup. So, to see her finally come around, to the point where she sacrificed herself for him, was a great payoff. And it felt good!

It was a reminder, though, of just how frustrating this movie was. It had these little flashes of greatness but then it would destroy them with these major character or structural errors. This family was sooooooo boring. And then, for the majority of the script, you had the dreaded “waiting around narrative.” That’s where all our heroes do is wait around. Which DESTROYS story momentum – that they had to wait around for Galactus to show up.

All of this steeped on top of, probably, the most special effects driven movie I’ve ever seen. I’d be surprised if there were even half-a-dozen tangible things on screen. It looked like every frame was created in a computer. And that drives me nuts.

The Marvel Universe is in a really tough spot now. The Fantastic Four did okay. But it’s not going to create a rabid fanbase for more Fantastic Four films. And the reason that’s relevant is because they’re supposedly building these next two Avengers films around Reed Richards being the new Tony Stark.

Oooooooh boy will that be interesting. We’re talking about one of the most charismatic characters ever put on screen being replaced by a piece of cardboard – a piece of cardboard, by the way, who will be shooting seven other films at the same time as Avengers, turning his cardboardy performances even more cardboardy.

For hardcore Marvel fans, this film should be satisfying. Anybody else, though, is going to forget this one within a week.

[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: If your movie is built around a group of heroes, I would highly advise building SOME FORM OF CONFLICT into that group. While there is probably a good movie somewhere that’s based around a group of people who have zero issues with each other, it’s extremely rare.

I’m giving out one ‘40% OFF’ SCRIPT NOTES DEAL. If you want it, e-mail me the subject line “FORTY” at carsonreeves1@gmail.com and it’s yours!

AI be coming for our jobs.

Will it succeed?

I don’t know. I still don’t think it will ever grasp the kind of honest authentic character development that good scripts have. Then again, a lot of regular writers struggle with creating honest authentic characters as well.

Either way, it got me thinking, how do we defeat AI as screenwriters?

I think I know the answer.

You see, the reason AI is good at mimicking most of screenwriting is because a screenplay is the second most mathematical of the writing mediums (the first being poetry). And that’s what AI is good at. It’s good at recognizing patterns and structure and mimicking them.

However, what I’ve learned over time is that the scripts that stand out the most are the ones that have an X-FACTOR. They have some invisible secret sauce that CAN’T BE MEASURED, which makes them stand out in some way.

When a writer taps into an x-factor, the read stops feeling like a script and starts feeling like an experience. It’s like you’re really there, that you’re being taken on a journey that’s so unique, you know you’ll never be taken on that same journey again for as long as you live.

And if you want to take it to its logical conclusion, you can say that the x-factor is what gives your script a SOUL. Guess what? No matter how hard AI tries, it will never be able to inject a screenplay with a soul.

So, the trick, then, is to simply LEARN ALL OF THE X-FACTORS available to you and make sure you’re applying one of them to whatever script you’re currently working on. You can then sleep peacefully knowing that AI will never be able to replicate what you do.

Now, before I get into what those x-factors are, I want to highlight a recent example of an x-factor script. And by “x-factor script” I mean a script that cannot be replicated by AI. That script is “Goblin.” Goblin is a recent spec script sale that I reviewed in my newsletter about a young man who learns that his father has a goblin chained up in their basement.

Whether you liked this script or not, YOU WILL REMEMBER IT. You will remember it far more vividly than you’ll remember Monday’s script, Road Test. When you’re trying to quantify what an x-factor is, the differences between these two scripts – Goblin and Road Test – are the perfect example of the difference between what AI can replicate and what it can’t

With that in mind, let’s identify what all of the known x-factors are.

X-FACTOR #1 – IGNORANCE

Ever wonder why a lot of a screenwriter’s best work occurs early on in their career? A solid chunk of the reason is that they didn’t know what they were doing. And when you don’t know what you’re doing, you do things “the wrong way.” Ironically, when you do something the wrong way, it’s more original than doing it “the right way.”

Christopher McQuarrie famously said that he couldn’t write The Usual Suspects today because he was so new to screenwriting when he wrote it that he didn’t know the rules you were supposed to abide by. So he made “mistakes,” and some of those mistakes were heralded as what made the script so good. These days, he would follow the “proper” formula, and his screenplays are lesser for it.

Let’s not pretend that ignorance is the be-all end-all advantage, though. It mostly results in making your script worse. But it does occasionally send you down an “incorrect” path that leads to gold. Or, at the very least, originality.

There’s this old 90s romantic comedy called Say Anything (it’s the one where John Cusack holds the boom box over his head playing Peter Gabriel’s “Your Eyes”) and in that movie is this really weird subplot about the girl’s father stealing money from the old people’s home he runs. It’s odd. It’s miscalculated. Cameron Crowe never would’ve written it ten years later. But it’s also what helps make that movie unique and stand out.

Now, we cannot go back in time and become ignorant about screenwriting again. But we can retain the spirit of that approach and mimic ignorance in places. Stop holding your screenwriting “musts” so tightly. You don’t have to hit every single Blake Snyder beat at the pre-established page number. If you have an idea you want to explore in your story, but know that, in the past, it hasn’t worked, well, that may not be true for this script. You won’t know until you try. So don’t be such a stickler. You have to take risks somewhere in your scripts or else, I promise, your script will never be very good.

X-FACTOR #2 – VOICE

If you have an original voice, that is the most common x-factor that elevates your script above the competition. “Voice” is basically the unique way in which you see the world and your ability to capture that when you write.

The Daniels (Everything Everywhere All At Once), for example, run towards chaos when they write. They embrace absurdity and their scripts are often about the attempts to bring balance to that absurdity. It stands out because nobody else writes in that specific lane in that specific way.

But voice can be hard to manufacture if it doesn’t come naturally. I remember interviewing a writer once and I asked him how he came up with his writing voice. He said he didn’t know he had a voice until people told him he did. That’s voice. It’s so wrapped up in who you are that you’re not aware you sound different from others.

Voice can be found in THE WAY YOU WRITE as well as WHAT YOU CHOOSE TO WRITE ABOUT. If you write animated, conversational, rapid fire conversations, like Quentin Tarantino, that’s how you stand out through the written word. But you can also choose to write about something very specific, like having sex after car crashes, as David Cronenberg did in his 1996 film, Crash. Even if you didn’t infuse voice into the written word, that script will still have voice due to the fact that the subject matter the writer is writing about is so unique.

And to prove to you just how valuable voice is in its battle against AI, can you imagine any AI coming up with Pulp Fiction or Crash? You can’t. AI would never touch either of those stories nor would it know what to do if it were forced to write them.

X-FACTOR #3 – MESSINESS

Another part of this x-factor journey, I’m realizing, is messiness. Usually, the scripts that I celebrate the most are messy in places. As much as I love a strong structure, if you wring that structure too tightly around your story, it becomes a noose. It becomes this predictable formulaic drag that we feel like we’ve seen hundreds of times already.

It’s a slippery slope, I know. Cause I read plenty of scripts where the writers are too loose with their structure, and those scripts are terrible in their own way. But, usually, that’s because the writer did it by accident. They didn’t know what they were doing. If you’re a seasoned writer and understand the value of structure, I believe you can figure out just how loose you can make some of the sections so that the script breathes like a living beautiful thing.

X-FACTOR #4 – POINT-OF-VIEW

If you present a story idea to AI—let’s say it’s a procedural setup where someone has been murdered and a detective starts looking into it, AI is going to explore that setup through the most obvious point-of-view. It’s going to tell the story from the point of view of the cop, of the killer, or both. What AI is not going to do is tell the story from the point-of-view of the killer’s dog, which is the setup for the script at the top of the 2023 Black List, “Bad Boy.”

But point-of-view isn’t just about concept. It’s everything and everywhere. When you write a scene, you have the choice to write it from any point-of-view you want. When the Justice Gang takes on a giant monster in the middle of the city in “Superman,” 9 out of 10 writers are going to tell that scene through the point-of-view of the Justice Gang. But what does James Gunn do? He shows that fight through the point-of-view of Clark and Lois, who are in her apartment high-rise, casually chatting while the fight takes place in the window behind them.

Not enough writers utilize point-of-view in interesting ways. Yet it’s sitting there for each and every one of you to take advantage of.

X-FACTOR #5 – PASSION

Scott convinced me of this one in the comments yesterday. This specific line he wrote caught my attention: “Cause you can always tell when someone is not passionate about something. The utilitarian workmanship vibe is evident.” Nothing could be truer. When you’re not passionate about the script you’re writing, you are as close to mimicking AI as a human gets. All you care about is hitting the beats. Is putting the puzzle together so you can move on.

Meanwhile, if you’re extremely passionate about something, you will explore every little crevice of it and you will include every gold nugget you find during those explorations. Your script will sing in a different key than a script without passion. This is the best area to focus on if all of these other X-factors are beyond you. By simply loving your story, you will write something that’s more powerful than anything AI could. Even when I don’t like a passionate script, I’ve never not been able to feel the passion on the page. And, at the very least, the script resonates.

X-FACTOR #6 – A STRANGE HOOK

What you’re looking for here is a strange or offbeat idea that’s still accessible. The best example ever of this is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The idea is offbeat for sure – People get portions of their minds erased so they don’t have to remember the pain of having their hearts broken. And it’s accessible. I mean, who hasn’t had their heart broken?

A lesser known example would be Colossal, about a woman who discovers that, when she gets blackout drunk, she’s mysteriously controlling a giant monster wreaking havoc in Korea. It’s obviously an offbeat idea. But, at its core, it’s a movie about alcoholism and learning to control addiction. Trust me – AI will never be able to write either of these movies. Which is why you want to learn how to excavate those strange hooks from your subconscious. Just the other day I saw a trailer for a movie about a guy who lives next to this intersection that has an unusually high number of car crashes. That’s another strange hook there is no risk of AI stealing from you.

X-FACTOR #7 – GOING OFF THE RESERVATION

Finally, the last way to tap into your inner x-factor is to go completely off the reservation with your story. Whatever the setup is, take it as far as you can take it. Then, take it further. And when you get to the end of wherever that is, keep going. We just had one of these movies hit the theater – The Substance. Look at where that script began and where it ended. Coraline wrung every ounce of story out of that setup.

Another example would be the Black List script, Roses, about a guy who takes his girlfriend to a remote house with a swimming pool. He then learns that whenever you swim in the pool, you replicate, and what comes out is a copy of you, that’s a little messier than the original. Once the copies start playing in the pool, creating copies of copies, this script goes so far off the reservation, it’s no longer on the same continent.

These probably aren’t the only x-factors available to you. In fact, if you can think of any other x-factors, include them in the comments. The more of these we know, the more we’ll be able to combat the evil that is AI Screenwriter. :)

The Scriptshadow Mega-Showdown Screenwriting Contest is Coming August 1! You have until July 31st to enter. Here are the submission details. And it’s free!

Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: A biologist is recruited to go back into “The Zone,” an inhospitable super rain forest, where her mentor disappeared 20 years ago.
About: This book was purchased by Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes, which means it will be a Paramount movie. This is your monthly reminder that Paramount is the little kid on the block, at least for now (I don’t know what they’ll be when they get purchased by Skydance). The little kid on the block has to take risks, which, in Hollywood terms, means they have to purchase original material or “original-adjacent” material, such as today’s book (a tiny sci-fi story no one knew about until it was purchased). Therefore, they’re a great studio to target if you’ve got a spec script with a genre angle. Platinum Dunes (A Quiet Place), in particular, is aces in this category.
Writer: Adrian Tchaikovsky
Details: 95 pages

This is the second novella I’ve reviewed in two weeks. The other was Collision, by Don Winslow. I think this is the much better format for adapting movies. Short stories are glorified trailers. Whereas, with a novella, you can get into the meat of your story. And they’re probably about 20% longer than screenplays, which means you’ve got room to cut, rather than having to come up with a bunch of stuff to put in.

We’re at some point in the near future. Doctor Jasmine Marks, a biologist, has become a recluse over the years, after the trauma she endured in “The Zone” two decades ago. She was part of a team sent to an ultra-tropical region on the planet to figure out if it would be possible to tame it, possibly for farming purposes.

But her boss, Dr. Elaine Fell, walked deep into the jungle one day and never came back . Which was better than what happened to the rest of the team. Some didn’t even make it out alive.

Now, 20 years later, Marks works from home. One day, she’s approached by the assistant of a very rich man named Mr. Glasshower. Glasshower flies Marks out and says that someone went into The Zone and they’re putting together a team to find them. They need Marks’ scientific expertise to help.

A couple of days later, two dozen people are flying into The Zone, which is like a super-intense version of a rain forest. You can’t even walk there without a special suit because the unique conditions will cook your body from the inside out.

We find that out immediately when, the day after they get there, the tent that houses all the military people breaks and everyone in it dies. Glasshower is not giving up, though. He insists that they move on to find this missing person. Marks is incredulous but what is she going to do? She has no ability to call anyone herself. So, deeper into The Zone they go.

A day later, they see a strange looking green man and, in a bout of shock, shoot him. He dies and they inspect his body to find that he looks to have adapted to The Zone somehow. This is when Glasshower comes clean.

They were never going in here to find a wayward individual. Glasshower has information that suggests Dr. Elaine Fell went underground and has been breeding people who can live in The Zone. What that means is that they’re going to continue traveling into this hellhole, a la Apocalypse Now, until they find her… and then kill her.

You know, it’s too bad that Rian Johnson destroyed the word “subversion.” Because it’s actually an effective writing tool. One of my favorite things writers do is set you up for a journey you’re familiar with, only to pull the rug out from under you, leaving you dazed and confused.

Saturation Point is a total “Aliens” clone in its first act. I was struggling to stay invested due to the fact that everything about the setup was exactly like Aliens, down to the female specialist who had been there before and knew how to cope, and experienced a tragedy to boot. And then the military group that comes with them.

So, when we finally get to the Zone and go to sleep, preparing for our first day of work, you could call me shocked when the first words written the next day were, “They were all dead.” All the military dudes died because they didn’t airtight-clog their tent. As soon as that happened, I was in!

But no sooner had I pledged my undying loyalty to this book, than it began a committed campaign to make me change my mind.

One of the big issues in this story – and it’s an issue I see a lot – is that the main character isn’t active enough. Instead, she’s observant. She watches everyone do things from a distance instead of doing things herself.

I understand why this happens. It can be hard to inject your hero into the mix. It forces you to disturb the carefully processed story you’re trying to tell. There’s something nice and pleasant about sitting on the sidelines and allowing your hero to log every little moment that everyone else experiences, only occasionally popping in to give a brief opinion or, in more rare occasions, advice.

Also, it’s easy to convince yourself, as the writer, that later on in the story, your hero will be plenty active. Because they have to be! The shit’s going to hit the fan and they’ll have no choice but to get involved.

But that’s the trick. When a character has no choice but to get involved, they’re still not being active. They’re being reactive, which is a step down from activity. And it paints your hero as someone who’s not really a hero. They’re just trying to survive.

So the fact that Marks is so casual throughout the majority of this story is frustrating at best and infuriating at worst.

I suppose this is more common in books, where, sometimes, you use your main character as a narrator. That maybe works if you’re writing Love in the Time of Cholera. But when you’re writing a team of people going into the shit where some enemy is going to attack you, you probably want your hero to be active.

I’ve learned this the hard way. I was one of these people who, when I wrote a story, I would play up all the other characters while my hero was over here being the least interesting person of the bunch.

I don’t know why I rationalized this as okay because I’d read all of the advice on the internet about strong active protagonists. I think I felt that just being the center of the story was enough. Which is not true. We, the audience, don’t like someone just because they’re the most featured person in the story. You have to give us reasons to like them. And probably the best way to do that is to make them active – to have them carve their own path as opposed to being hitched on the trailer of your plot and dragged along for the ride.

Back to the story itself.

With these types of stories, the thing that has to work best is: WHAT’S IN THE JUNGLE? What, ultimately, are you going to find? Because if it’s too lightweight or esoteric, the audiences who like these movies are going to be disappointed. Saturation Point reminds me a lot of Anihilation in that sense. We go into this weird place where strange things happen. But there is no clear face to the threat. It’s not like Predator, where we understand what we’re up against. The audience needs that.

You could make the argument that the real antagonist here is nature and, like, global warming or something.  But while that may fly in your college English 101 class, it’s likely to piss off the people who plunked down 20 bucks to see something cool.

I would go so far as to say the enemies they came up with for this story were the stupidest enemies they could’ve possibly come up with. They were basically little green people who shot arrows. LITTLE GREEN PEOPLE WHO SHOT ARROWS! Not exactly face-hugging aliens. Before they showed up, I would’ve given this book a “worth the read.” But the second they showed up, it was dunzoes.

We talk about creative choices on this site. And how important it is to come up with strong ones for the pillars of your story. I would go so far as to say this was the worst creative choice they could’ve possibly come up with for the enemy. It destroyed the book and it’s shocking to me that any author would believe it was a good choice.

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

What I learned: As writers, we are inherently voyeurs of life. We observe things around us so that we can write about them. Our biggest weakness is that we transfer that “observer” nature onto our main characters. We, essentially, turn them into de facto writers. Even if they don’t write for a living, they do something where they’re at a desk alone by themselves. Which is exactly the case with Marks. She’s reclusive. She works at home, at her desk. Much like… A WRITER. But, by doing this, you make your hero inactive. Which is boring. So, as much as it pains you due to the fact that making someone active makes them different from you, it’s better to have an active protagonist. Period.