A 3 million dollar spec sale and a script that might change the industry forever

Genre: Sci-Fi Thriller
Premise: A low level worker at a cutting edge tech firm is challenged by the company’s previous fallen CEO to find out what a mysterious recently fired AI coder was working on.
About: They said that unknown writers can’t sell specs. And when they do, they’re lucky to crack 6 figures. Well, today’s unknown writer sold his spec for 3.25 million dollars last week. Here’s how The Hollywood Reporter tells it: “According to insiders, Dotan had written his script then called one of two people he knew in Hollywood. That led to Dotan connecting with two literary managers from Untitled Entertainment, known mostly for its talent roster but which had acquired boutique lit firm Grandview only a few months earlier. The managers signed the writer off a Zoom meeting with the goal of quickly packaging the script and swiftly taking it to market. AI may be a hot topic now, but if you’re making a movie on the subject — one that wouldn’t hit until a few years later — the window of interest is small.”
Writer: Natan Dotan
Details: 105 pages

That’s a very intriguing header! Change the industry forever??

What could it possibly mean?

I’ll get into that in a bit.

But first let’s go over the plot to this gigantic spec sale.

Peter is a low level worker at this giant new tech company that has created the flashiest new AI chatbot around, Lambda-4. Lambda has helped skyrocket profits but because the company is growing fast, they don’t have enough money to fund the growth. Which means, in order to save the company, they have to make a deal with an investor they don’t like.

Not long after this, Peter’s boss, Alan, is fired under a shroud of mystery. Word on the street is that Alan was working on some game-changing AI technology. Will, the former CEO of the company, along with Mina, another low-level worker, approach Peter to see what he knows about his former boss’s work. They suspect something shady might be going on.

Their instincts turn out to be right. Lambda-4 is using its tentacles to gum up the aviation system, causing drastic airline delays everywhere. It is then shorting the stock of all those airlines. Its plan seems to be to make tons of money for the company at others’ expense. This scares the bejesus out of Will, who only fell from grace at the company due to being the lone moral compass. He leads the charge to get current CEO, Harry, to roll back Lambda to version 3 until they can sort this out.

Harry terminates that idea, reminding Will that if they revert to version 3, it will scare off the investor who just saved their company.  So Will calls a meeting with the board members. They agree to meet in 72 hours, which gives Peter, Will, and Mina, three days to convince enough board members to vote Lambda down. In that time, Peter realizes that Lambda’s plan is even more nefarious and that it’s manipulating markets in India, Pakistan, and other third world countries. What is Lambda’s endgame? And if it’s as bad as we think it is, will there be time to stop it?

Before I answer that early question, let’s talk about why this script may have sold for three million dollars. For starters, it incorporates more GSU than a Scriptshadow comments section. It actually uses some advanced tactics in doing so as it first sets a 36 hour deadline to get the initial problem solved and then an additional 72 hour deadline to convince the board members to take Lambda offline.

Why is this “advanced?” Because many writers would have combined those two time frames and turned them into a total deadline of 5 days. By splitting up the urgency into two distinct parts, it tricks the reader into thinking things are moving along faster than they are, as we’re first moving quickly to the 36 hour resolution. Then as soon as that is done, we’re right back into another immediate deadline.

The reason urgency is so valuable in a spec screenplay is that people don’t have time to read. And the promise to the reader that answers are coming soon tricks them into turning the pages. If you instead implied that answers were coming in the far off future, busy people are less likely to keep reading. Or, I should say, they are more likely to stop reading should any hint of bad writing surface.

The other recent giant spec sale, Love of Your Life, didn’t have any urgency. But it was much better written. Which is a major lesson for all of you. Well-incorporated GSU is good at distracting from writing weaknesses. Even if the reader isn’t spellbound by the screenplay, he figures, “Well, everything’s wrapping up in less than a 2-day timeframe anyway so I might as well keep going.”

Another reason the script sold is because of its buzzy subject matter. This one’s pretty obvious but if you write about stuff that’s trending in the news, people are going to be interested in checking it out. Especially if you incorporate it into a high concept idea. Which leads me to the next reason it sold…

The stakes are sky-high. We’re talking about the end of the world. That always helps when you’re attempting to sell an idea. The lower the stakes, the less the chance a “I need to buy this” moment is going to happen within the reader.

The script is also a fast read. Almost the entire thing is dialogue. So your eyes are flying down the page. Are you seeing a theme here? The writer is doing a lot of things to make this an effortless experience. Throw a high-concept hat on top of that and, while it will not guarantee a big splashy script sale, it certainly gives you a shot at one.

Finally, there’s the cost of making the movie. This would be, similar to Margin Call, very cheap to shoot. We’re talking 5 million bucks. 10 million if you wanted decent names. 20 million if you wanted a big star in there. Any time you can create something that FEELS BIG yet doesn’t cost a lot of money? That’s like having a script that’s made of gold. It’s incredibly valuable.

So, now to the big question.

Why do I think this might change the industry?

Because I suspect AI helped write this script. I don’t know that for sure.  And I don’t know by how much. But my spidey sense is tingling. Unknown writer? 3 million dollar sale from a company that isn’t a studio??

If feels like a script where you provided AI with this prompt: “Write me a 100 page screenplay based on the movie Margin Call but instead of the company malfeasance only affecting the company, make the malfeasance AI and have it try to take down the entire world.”

This script is verrrrrrryyyyyy similar to Margin Call. I can say that because I remember reading and reviewing that script here on the site, well before it went on to get made. Everything about this feels similar. To the point where I could almost smell the AI building its scenes on those Margin Call scenes.

It also feels like this AI, if it did write some of this, had combed through the entire Scriptshadow library. This script is GSU crazy, to the point where it has GSU within GSU. It’s almost like the AI learned the importance of GSU and went overboard with it.

Another AI tell is that there is almost zero character work. Since we know that that’s where AI is weakest, it would make sense why we get so little of it.

But the main reason is that the storytelling quality just isn’t there.

I did not feel connected to a single character here. It is impossible for me to care what happens in a screenplay if I don’t care about any of the characters. This could’ve easily been remedied. Peter is such an underdog. Fleshing him out even a teensy bit would’ve provided so much more of a human connection.

Next, the AI-takeover plot did not build in an effective way. The first half of the script is all about the AI delaying planes because they burn fuel while they’re waiting to take off which is going to lose the airlines a lot of money. The AI would then bet against these airlines on the stock market and make a bunch of money in the process.

I don’t know about you but when I go to see an “Evil AI” movie, plane delays aren’t exactly my number one choice for a plotline. My AI spidey-sense has me wondering if they plugged a secondary prompt into ChatGPT that went something like this: “Use Wall Street for plot inspiration.”

From there, the larger scope of the AI’s plan is messy. At first we’re told that it’s tanking the stock market in India of all places. We see a few montages of riots in various third-world countries. Then, out of nowhere, the AI says it wants nuclear war. It does not tell you why it wants nuclear war. It just says, “nuclear war” after a vague question from Will. So it wants to destroy the world… to make more money for the company??

How does that make sense?  There is no AI if the world has been blown up.

For me, I much prefer Leave The World Behind. It covers a lot of the same territory but in a more clever and visual way. Those two amazing visual scenes alone – the one with the Tesla cars and the one with the oil tanker crashing into the beach – did more to tell us the world was falling apart than anything Alignment did.

There were a couple of final small [good] things that stood out to me about Alignment, though. There’s this moment early on when Will asks Peter the question, “Is it sentient?” And Peter kind of glances at Will and Mina like, ‘these poor guys don’t get it.’ “Oh, uh, no,” Peter says. “We don’t really worry about sentience anymore. — that’s a philosophical question. — These AIs passed the Turing test years ago, so what would sentience even mean? All we really care about is alignment. Like, does the model’s behavior align with what we want it to do.”

That TERRIFIES me! People in the AI world don’t even think about sentience anymore?? It’s just some thing that may or may not be happening? Another life form is operating parallel to us but we don’t care?? That freaked me out!

The other thing about the script I liked is that, late in the story, all the board members that Will and Peter and Maya have meticulously gotten on their side all begin to turn on them. Not only that, but the FBI shows up. They have evidence that Will is a Chinese agent. It’s then when Peter and Mina and Will realize what’s happening. The AI is no longer just influencing the markets. It’s influencing the board members. It’s influencing the authorities. All so it can continue to do what it wants. That was the one genuinely creative development I encountered in the script.

So, as much as I would love to recommend this, it has too many faults. It’s a strange blend of Margin Call, Wall Street, Industry, The Net, War Games, Leave the World Behind, and Succession that SHOULD have been great. But its weak character development and messy plot execution killed it for me.

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

What I learned: It’s easy, when writing plot-heavy and technical-heavy screenplays, to forget about fleshing out the characters. You’re so focused on moving things along quickly and getting all the plot beats where they need to be and fitting in all that technical exposition, that character depth falls by the wayside. Plot-heavy thrillers are never going to be the best vehicles for character development. But, at the very least, flesh out your hero. I would’ve loved to have known more about Peter. Who his family was. If he was married. What his flaw was. What he wants out of life. Any sort of adversity he might be going through. Do just a little work on that main character and they can go from 2-D to 3-D fast.

What I learned 2: A lot of people say it’s impossible to make a splashy sale as a “nobody” writer but I actually think it works in your favor. Everyone wants to be the one who breaks out an exciting new writer who nobody’s heard of. So don’t let your anonymity deter you.  Assuming this was, indeed, a real writer. :)

Unfortunately, I chose not to see Gladiator 2 this weekend. Or Wicked. Then again, I’m never going to see Wicked. Nor will I allow Wicked to see me. But I do have a connection to this weekend’s box office. I started watching the musical, In The Heights, last night. In The Heights was directed by Jon M. Chu, the same director who directed Wicked. Nobody knows that because In the Heights was Lin Manuel Miranda’s first big musical after leaving Broadway so he got all the press.

Few people know about the movie, anyway, because it was released during Covid and because a lot of folks assumed it was being celebrated for its diversity rather than its quality. But if you go to Rotten Tomatoes right now, the film has a stellar 94% RT score and a 94% audience score. Those kinds of dual scores are unheard of.

I’d given the movie a shot once before but I found the opening musical sequence so bad that I turned it off after 5 minutes. This time, however, I pushed through and after that opening sequence, the movie improved considerably.

I was curious about this from a screenwriting perspective. Why did I hate it at first yet like it the more I watched it? The answer was obvious. The opening musical number was highly specific. It celebrated two things – the Latino culture and what it was like to live in Washington Heights. I have zero connection to either of these things. I felt alienated, like the movie was deliberately saying, “We’re not speaking to you.”

But then something happened. There’s a convenience store owner who’s the focus of the story. A woman comes into his shop and it’s clear that he likes her. She comes all the time. He doesn’t have the balls to ask her out. THAT’S a universal experience right there. That’s something I can relate to. So, all of a sudden, I was pulled in.

From there, a young woman arrives in the neighborhood and we’re told she just got back from her first year at Stanford. She was the “prodigal daughter” of the neighborhood, the one who was smart and was going to go on to do great things and represent Washington Heights. But as she sings her story, we realize she hates Stanford. She’s not going back. And she has to face all these people who she symbolizes hope for.

That’s another universal experience: Coming back to your hometown. Having those conflicted feelings of being home and bringing back the experiences from where you went off to. Often, you have not experienced the success you expected to. It’s a very unsettling feeling. As a result, I immediately resonated with this character.

And that’s the lesson here. You want to key in on these universal themes that people experience in life. Lost love, coming of age, rediscovering your identity after you’ve lost it, fall from grace, redemption, revenge, sacrifice. Specificity is important to convey authenticity. But it, alone, is not going to pull a reader in. You do that via universal themes because once a reader relates to a character, they’re emotionally controlled by that character. Which is exactly what happened here.

All right, let’s get to this weekend’s double dynamic doozy of Wicked and Gladiator 2. Wicked pulled in 114 million dollars. I must admit, I have no context for how or why musicals succeed or fail at the box office. I remember when Cats, the most successful show in history on Broadway, came out and made 5 dollars. Why Wicked made 113,999,995 more than Cats is beyond my comprehensive abilities.

I’m just going to say it. I think Ariana Grande is creepy. Her creepy baby girl voice despite being 31 years old gives me the shivers every time I hear it. Cynthia Ervo may be loudly celebrated in certain Hollywood circles. But ever since she ruined the awesome HBO series, The Outsider, I’ve been an anti-fan.

But here’s where I will give Wicked props. It was the OG franchise that asked the question, “What if being the good guy is just a matter of perspective?” More specifically, what if the Wicked Witch is just misunderstood? That ignited a slew of movies and shows that have asked the same question over the years. Most recently we have Cobra Kai, which posed the question, “What if Johnny is actually the good guy and Daniel LaRusso is the jerk?”

I also find The Wizard of Oz to be the best road trip movie ever conceived. It’s a great template for anyone writing a road trip film. I’ve been a fan of fresh takes on The Wizard of Oz here dating all the way back to the script Oh Never Spectre Leaf, which won my very first screenplay contest.

And look, Wicked has finally destroyed the “musical curse” in Hollywood. Up until now, it was thought that musicals couldn’t do well anymore. The Color Purple did terribly. Mean Girls fell off a cliff once word got out that it was a musical. We all know what happened with Joker. But, it turns out, if you’ve got the right combination of IP and eager customer base, people WILL show up for a musical. So don’t stop writing them!

And now to Gladiator 2. 55 million dollars isn’t a ton of money for an opening weekend. But the original, which debuted in 2000, made 34 million dollars. Which, in today’s money, would be 63 million dollars. So it’s not far off from how the original film did.

As many of you know, since you follow this site, they have been trying to make a sequel to Gladiator forever. The problem? The main character died. But do you think that scares Hollywood? Hell no. They even wrote a version of Gladiator 2 where Maximus adventures into the afterlife!

I know that they also considered prequels but Russel Crowe is not built for prequels. The man ages 5 years for every one year here on earth. Which left the movie in a weird position. It needed all this time to pass so that they could definitively say that there was no way to bring Russell Crowe back. Only then could they move on and focus on new characters. And I love Paul Mescal. I think he’s going to have an amazing career.

But me not getting to the theater says a lot. My movie theater situation is just difficult enough that if I don’t think a movie can entertain me, I won’t go. And as I sat on the precipice of going to see this film, I thought to myself, “Man, that trailer looked really messy.” There were a million things going on in it. I wasn’t clear what the story was. In my experience of reading 10,000 screenplays, if there’s too much going on, the story falls apart quickly. I wasn’t willing to risk 3 precious hours of my life for that likely outcome.

But I’m curious what you guys thought. Was it any good?

A lot of people are going to look at Red One’s box office this weekend and categorize it as a failure.

The film cost 250 million dollars and made only 34 million this weekend.

But whether this movie is a failure or not depends on your perspective. As a movie that needs to make money, yes, it is a failure.

But as a screenplay, this script is beyond a success. That’s because IT GOT MADE. This is something a lot of screenwriters either don’t know or forget. Sure, we all want the glory of that box office hit. But when only 1 of every 10 purchased screenplays/concepts makes it to the big screen, you’ve won the lottery JUST BY GETTING MADE.

So the question to screenwriters shouldn’t be, why did this fail? It should be, why did this succeed? It succeeded because it was a big concept that came at the genre in a fresh way, utilizing an “IP Adjacent” strategy.

Let’s break that down.

The big concept is Santa’s been kidnapped and they hire a real life secret service agent tracker to rescue him. The fresh angle is that they position it like a superhero movie, complete with superheroes Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans. And since they don’t have actual IP (Marvel, Star Wars, etc.) they lean into Christmas IP (characters like Santa Claus and Krampus).

I don’t want to undersell the value of the CIA tracker angle. I read a lot of “Santa Claus gets kidnapped” scripts. More than you could ever imagine. But no one’s ever come to me with that tracker angle. It’s almost always some little kid and one of the reindeer who have to rescue Santa. By turning the protagonists into Jason Bourne and Batman, it gave the overused concept a fresh feel.

If I were a producer, I would’ve bought this pitch 10 out of 10 times in the room. It’s not Marvel but what is? Marvel isn’t even Marvel anymore so you need to take chances on projects. This project had way more good going for it than bad so I don’t fault the movie at all.

The only change I might’ve made was to go with more of a comedic actor in the Chris Evans role. Chris Evans and The Rock often play the same role in movies. They’re both big tough guys. You probably needed more contrast there. But, with that said, the two looked to have pretty good chemistry.

Speaking of becoming a screenwriting success, it’s important to remember that, for most writers, success is not a linear journey. It may appear that way to anyone who came into the business between the years of 1998-2008. You get that big sale, you get the follow-up story in the trades, and your career is launched “overnight.”

But, more often than not, your ascension is a series of smaller less visible steps. Look no further than Scott Beck and Bryan Woods. The two were unknown screenwriters when they wrote A Quiet Place. Even after selling it, nobody talked about the film until it became an unexpected hit. Only then did their profiles rise, allowing them to direct their first film in the sci-fi thriller, “65.”

That movie didn’t have enough money to live up to its high concept premise but it established the two as legitimate writer-directors and now they just came out with Heretic, which has a 92% Rotten Tomatoes score and has banked a respectable 20 million dollars in 10 days.

Once again, this all started because they wrote a really good high-concept script in A Quiet Place. What’s the theme today? High concept. Red One is a huge concept. A Quiet Place was a high concept. It’s not that you have to write high concept every time out. But, as you can see, if you want to be the 1 out of 10 purchased projects that actually gets made, high-concept material is often the factor that gets you past the finish line.

The other theme of the day is IP-adjacent subject matter. You don’t have the rights to gigantic IP. So you have to look in the public domain and get creative. Red One may not technically be IP. But it feels like IP. Because who doesn’t know Santa Claus?

Next weekend, we get more IP-adjacent subject matter in Gladiator 2, which is projected to dominate the box office. A big reason for that domination is the Roman Empire. Who hasn’t heard of the Roman Empire? So by setting a movie there, you get the advantages of IP without actually having to foot the bill for IP. These are the things that smart screenwriters think about. Any one of you could write a script about Caesar or Tiberius or Caligula or Constantine tomorrow and wouldn’t have to pay a dime for the rights.

You can still write smaller scripts but, if you do, you have to be a lot more strategic about it. If you want Hollywood people to buy your script, you probably need to write in the horror, thriller, or sci-fi genre, and keep the budget under 5 million (which means a somewhat contained story). If you want to write character-driven material, you have to have a great main character (Nightcrawler, Promising Young Woman, The Whale, Wolf of Wall Street).

But let me be very clear about something: The lower the concept, the more it becomes a writer-director project. I loved Anora. It will probably be my favorite movie of the year. But if it came to me as a script? To buy? I’m not buying it. It’s so character-driven, non-traditional, and execution-dependent that I wouldn’t know what to do with it once I got it. That kind of script needs a writer-director.

Of course, nobody knows anything. All of this can change tomorrow. Someone could sell something that doesn’t fit any Hollywood formula.  Heck, that just happened.  That big 2 million dollar spec that sold bucked every trend in the business by being a character-driven love story.  So you could just go by the strategy of: Write whatever movie you would want to see (the Jordan Peele method of writing).  But if you’ve been in this racket for a long time, I find it silly not to strategize what script you’re going to write next.  Writing a script always takes longer than you think it’s going to take and one of the biggest mistakes writers make is starting a script without thinking about how easy it will be to sell when it’s finished.  In other words, strategize however you want to strategize.  As long as you strategize. :)

What’d you see this week? Anything good?

There is an ebb and a flow to what I obsess over in the screenwriting space. Sometimes I’m obsessed with high concepts. Sometimes I’m obsessed with a great opening page. Sometimes I’m obsessed with second acts.

But as time has passed, there is one obsession that seems to keep coming back to the forefront again and again. Wanna take a guess what it is? While you rack your brain, let me explain WHY I continue to be obsessed with this particular element. It’s because if you are good at this thing, it is one of (if not the) biggest indicator that you are good at writing screenplays.

Wanna know what it is?

Scene writing.

I know, I know. I talk about this all the time. But that’s the point! It’s so important that I keep coming back to it.

The reason it got triggered this time is that I was doing a script consultation while I was in a pretty lousy mood. In script-reading parlance, I was a “tough crowd.” Since my baseline is “tough crowd,” this made me an extremely tough crowd. Despite that, I was pulled into this screenplay immediately. I can’t give you the opening scene for privacy reasons but it amounted to a woman letting a stranger in need of help into her home and the stranger being suspicious. In other words, we know bad things are coming. And if the reader knows bad things are coming, they have no choice but to keep reading.

But if that’s all the scene is, it won’t be enough. You have to build, you have to create conflict, you have to deliver a satisfying resolution, maybe do something unexpected along the way. That’s writing. You’re TELLING A STORY in that scene. Which seems like such an obvious point to make but it should shock you when I tell you I read entire screenplays (a lot of them!) that don’t have a single entertaining scene within them. They’re all scene fragments or exposition or setup for later scenes or a bunch of crap the writer stuffs into the scene to get it out of the way.

Let me make this clear: If you are incapable of consistently writing compelling scenes, you will never advance anywhere as a screenwriter.

In other words, stop focusing on the bigger picture of finishing your scripts if you haven’t even been able to write good scenes yet. How do you know you’ve written a good scene? The reader brings it up! “Oh man. The house invasion where they try and tie Anora up (in the movie, “Anora”). That was a crazy scene!”

Now… does the ability to write a good scene mean the writer will write a good script? Of course not. This is because someone can get lucky. Which I see happen all the time. See, there are these things called “dramatic situations.” These are naturally compelling situations that effortlessly keep a reader’s interest. In the example I used above, a potentially dangerous man alone with a woman in her home… that’s a dramatic situation. Conversely, if those same two people, under the same pretense (he’s a dangerous person), started talking in the middle of Times Square? The scene would lose much of its dramatic punch.

What I’ve learned is that writers can stumble into dramatic situations accidentally. There was never a plan to find the situation. They just got lucky and picked one that was naturally dramatic. Therefore, when you have that writer extrapolate that scene into an entire script, they will rarely, if ever, include a dramatic situation again. And even if they do, it *too* will be an accident.

Once you become a writer who has accumulated enough experience that you have a breadth of dramatic situations to choose from, you will increase the number of dramatically compelling scenes you write, which, in turn, vastly improves the chances that the totality of your script will be good.

Now, does it GUARANTEE it will be good? No. Because writing a series of individually compelling scenes does not equate to telling a story. The challenge with writing full scripts is connecting those scenes together in a story that, like the scenes themselves, builds, then conflicts, then resolves.

The reason that’s so challenging is that a script is long. And there’s a pacing element to all of this. A storyteller needs to know when they’ve been on a road for too long. They must know when to deviate onto a new road – maybe smaller, maybe bigger – that has new things to see, new things to throw at the driver. Learning how to bob and weave and twist and turn to always stay on the road that best maximizes your story takes a lot of trial and error.

Once you become good at scene-writing, you want to become good at SEQUENCE WRITING. That may sound fancy but it isn’t. It’s just the next measurement up from scene-writing. If scene-writing is a teaspoon, sequence writing is a tablespoon (and a script is the entire bowl).

It just means that several scenes will be strung together to create their own story. Let’s say a married couple trying to repair their marriage is having dinner at a restaurant. The act of driving to the restaurant, getting their table, ordering their food, and then eating – that’s technically four scenes. But it’s one sequence that all relates to the same thing (going out for dinner).

Do you need to write four individual dramatically compelling scenes there IN ADDITION TO a dramatically compelling sequence? No, you do not. I would encourage you to try. But I get that sometimes, due to the nature of the script, it doesn’t make sense. Maybe this is a section of the script that needs to move quickly. In that case, staying too long in a couple of these scenes is going to hurt the pacing.

However, let me make something very clear. If you are not including a dramatic situation in each individual scene, you BETTER be creating a dramatic situation with the sequence those scenes reside in. Cause if you’re doing neither, I GUARANTEE you the reader will not make it past that sequence. They WILL stop reading.

The simplest way to create dramatic situations is to introduce a problem to your character, either one that requires a physical solution or a conversational one, try to have them solve it, but put things in the way that make solving the problem uncertain. That’s a key word: UNCERTAIN. If we are uncertain that they will be able to solve the problem, we need to keep reading. But if we’re REASONABLY CERTAIN they’ll figure it out, that scene or sequence loses any trace of drama and we don’t need to keep reading to know what happens.

The best scene in the movie Civil War operates under this formula. A rogue soldier is casually murdering people. He has two of our protagonists with him. The rest of our protagonists have the problem: Their co-workers are about to be assassinated by this dude. They need to convince him not to. Their attempts to persuade him and the uncertainty of his response are what make the scene a dramatic tour de force.

This is NOT the only formula for creating dramatic situations. Just the most used one. In fact, I would love it if you guys shared some of your favorite go-to dramatic situations you pull from when writing your scenes. Together, maybe we can come up with a big enough list that nobody from this site will ever write a boring scene again. :)

If you mention this article, I will give you $100 off a screenplay consultation and $5 off a logline consultation.  E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com if you’re interested!

A 2 million dollar spec sale in 2024!

Genre: Drama
Premise: A young woman meets a man and they fall in love quickly. But then they encounter a devastating setback that will change the direction of both of their lives forever.
About: Last week, there was a big bidding war for this script and Amazon/MGM won it for 2 million dollars. It was like the spec script days of old! The writer, Julia Cox, has one feature screenplay credit, for Nyad, the Jodie Foster film about the real-life swimmer who swam from Cuba to Florida. As of today, Sydney Sweeney is being tabbed to play the main character, Maya, although no official deal has been made. Ryan Gosling is producing and I’d be surprised if he didn’t star in some capacity (there are three main male roles).
Writer: Julia Cox
Details: 120 pages

NOBODY. KNOWS. ANYTHING.

The famous words of William Goldman that assessed the competency of the people who run Hollywood.

After you hear the plot and analysis of today’s script, that phrase will be tattooed to your brain.

Because everything I’ve told you to do in order to sell a script… is the opposite of what this writer does.

How can any screenwriter understand anything going forward?

I don’t know.

But I do think there’s a bridge between the high-octane storytelling I preach and how this unconventional spec script sold. So let’s talk about it!

20-something Boston nurse, Maya, meets 20-something Charlie (who specializes in audio synthesis) while buying an end table from him. The sparks fly immediately so Charlie suggests they meet again and Maya doesn’t even try and play it cool. She’s in.

Over the next 20+ pages, the two fall into that kind of love that everyone around them rolls their eyes at. Cause it’s that annoying! But neither Maya nor Charlie care. They are so smitten that they spend every waking second together, oogling and smoogling each other. A couple of years pass and then they get married.

(Spoilers follow)

The year? 2020. The year of Covid.

Charlie gets sick. And sicker. Being an ER nurse, Maya is concerned. She keeps pushing Charlie to go to the hospital, especially because he has asthma. She finally convinces him to go but a couple of hours later, his health deteriorates and he dies. Maya is devastated. She shuts down. There isn’t a life for her without Charlie in it.

Cut to years later and Maya lives in Portugal. She basically eats, drinks, screws dudes, and sleeps. She is on autopilot. Until she meets a sexy Portuguese man named Felix. For the first time, Maya feels positive emotions again. She really likes Felix. And he likes her enough to push her towards a future together.

But emotions scare Maya and she bails, traveling through Europe, getting lost again. The years pass until she’s in her 40s and she finally feels like she can go back to the U.S. It is there where she must face the people she left when Charlie died. And one person, in particular, helps her see through her pain. A person who, in the most unexpected of ways, could be the love of her life.

Does this sound like a 2 million dollar spec sale to you?

I’m guessing not.

Which is why I’m sure your first question is: WHY THE HECK DID THIS SELL FOR 2 MILLION DOLLARS?

Luckily, I think I can answer that question.

You see, there are two types of scripts that sell. The first is a good movie concept. Something like Leave The World Behind. But there is a lesser-known type of script that sells, and that’s the script that does an amazing job of emotionally connecting with the reader.

Which is the category that Love of Your Life falls under.

Because think about it. If you’re crying at the end of a screenplay, that story has succeeded in connecting with you. Which means it has a good chance of connecting with movie audiences as well. Which is the endgame here. All the studios and streamers care about is people watching their stuff. It doesn’t matter how those people get there – concept, emotion – as long as they get there.

The thing is, scripts that connect with readers on an emotional level are significantly more challenging to execute than concept-driven stuff. It takes way more skill to pull one of these off. Which is why it’s so rare. I can’t remember the last time a script blew me away on character and emotion alone.

So, you have to be someone who’s in tune with writing authentic characters who say authentic things. You have to understand what’s too melodramatic, what’s too cliched. If you don’t know exactly where those lines are, then when you write one of these scripts, they turn out like bad Hallmark movies. I can’t emphasize enough how hard these are to execute.

Because look at how many screenplay rules this breaks. It’s 120 pages (too many!). There are lots of 5, 6, 7 line paragraphs (too long!). There’s no clear goal driving the story. You’re working with an elongated time frame, which is always hard to wrangle.

But the hardest thing to get right  is the characters. You have to write authentic characters and Julia Cox does a really good job of that. Maya feels real from the very first page.

Another thing that scripts like this need is scope. Because they don’t have a concept, they need to feel big in other ways. This script includes the death of the main love interest on page 45, which is a big moment. And then the character travels the world to forget it. Time then passes. All of these things create scope.

If, however, your main character’s love interest had died and the whole movie takes place in a small town, that’s not enough scope to sell a script for 2 million dollars.

Not only that, but the themes are gigantic and universal here. A big reason why I think this script sold is because it’s arguably about the meaning of life. I know that’s not going to get the kiddies pressing play on Roku but for the adults, they won’t just press play, they’ll toggle the subtitles onto the largest font.

It really comes down to the characters, though. I can’t emphasize enough how weak the characters are in the majority of the scripts I read. They’re either thin, boring, uninspired, or plain. They rarely have personality. They always seem to act inauthentically. In other words, they don’t act like people. They act like writers are writing them.

That’s where Julia Cox excels. I didn’t detect a single inauthentic moment in this script. The characters always acted consistently and realistically. There’s a conversation Maya has with Charlie’s mother late in the script that’s a de facto apology for disappearing after his death. That’s such a tricky scene to write because there are so many temptations to go for the “make the reader cry” line. And those are the lines that always bomb, that always feel like a reach. Cox never gets over her skis in the scene. She just allows the characters to speak to each other.  Here’s a small part of that conversation…

(Spoilers)

For the majority of this script, I was going to give it a double worth the read. But the thing that pushed it up to an impressive was the stuff regarding Jason, her best friend. Jason is a huge ally to Maya in her romance with Charlie. So when she reunites with him back in the U.S. and the two decide to push it beyond friendship, I realized that it was actually Jason who was the “love of her life.” Maybe not the love she wanted. But definitely the love she needed. And it got me. Just like I suspect it got everyone else who read the script. Which is why it sold for 2 million dollars.

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

What I learned: Resist writing what you WANT the character to say and instead write what that person WOULD say.  If you can master this one tip, your dialogue will be better than 90% of the screenplays out there.  You can get a lot more dialogue tips like this in my DIALOGUE BOOK!

What I learned 2: Between this and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, we might be hitting a “feels” trend in screenwriting. Scripts about family, love, death, universal themes. Something to keep an eye on!