Genre: Thriller/Mystery
Premise: Psychologist Dr. Martin Park specializes in working with clients trying to curtail extreme violent urges. However, when a series of brutally murdered bodies are discovered in his small New England hometown, it’s up to Martin to figure out which of his patients is responsible.
About: This script finished in the bottom third of last year’s Black List. The writer has a previous credit, a small movie called, Twelve Days of Christmas.  He seems to like numbers in his titles.
Writer: Michael Boyle
Details: 109 pages

We gotta cast John Cho in this, right?

Did somebody say….. MURRRRRDERRRR?

Ooh, that sounds like a delicious appetizer.

The entree? A little something called SERIAL KILLING.

One of the most reliable spec script subject matters in the biz. Yes, I said ‘biz’ instead of business. Deal with it.

You know what I’ve been noticing? A lot of writers are writing to rounded-off page counts. So, they write 90 pages. Or 100 pages. Or, in today’s case, 110 pages. But, what they actually do is they write one page less (89, 99, 109) so that, with the title page, the PDF doc rounds it out to 90, 100, 110.

I actually think this is a good strategy. It feels more purposeful, like you have discipline. As opposed to if you have some sloppy page count like “114.” Who writes a 114 page script?? Dare I say that person is a psychopath?

Oh, look at that! A perfect segue into today’s script. :)

We’re in a small beautiful town called Raven Lake. Dr. Marvin Park (Korean-American), who’s come here with his gorgeous wife Jessica, is a world-famous psychiatrist who’s known for his best-selling book on how to spot serial killers. Marvin has parlayed that success into becoming the GO-TO guy who treats people with murderous tendencies.

Unfortunately for Raven Lake, that means a bunch of psychopaths have moved into town so they can be treated by him. Marvin’s little practice is going great until his secretary, Zoe, is dismembered and her body pieces spread out all around the office (her arm is even used as a fifth fan blade).

This brings suicidal FBI agent Helaine Ross into the mix. Ross, who’s only doing this job to stave off a shot to the head for a while, immediately starts blaming Martin for this problem. He brought these serial killers to town and now one of them is finally wreaking havoc.

The potential killers include Fred Vasquez, who loves to mix sex and violence. There’s Terry Tomlinson, a closeted black gay man who wants to kill men. There’s Kyle Egan who’s obsessed with his mailman and has lots of dreams about killing him. There’s Dustin Kelly who feels an inherent need to kill any woman who dares to dress provocatively. And there are a couple more suspects.

Once a second victim is killed by burning him alive then roasting marshmallows above his burning body, Martin realizes that this is a lot worse than he thought. You see, Martin’s flaw is that he believes he’s a miracle worker. He believes his work keeps these people from acting out their urges. In order for Martin to help Ross, he’s going to have to come to terms with his worst fear: That there’s someone he wasn’t able to help.

Today’s script suffers from a type of problem that’s hard to explain. The best word I can use to describe it is: inelegance. We’re dealing with intense subject matter – killing – that’s being balanced out through comedy. That requires a deft touch as a writer. If you get even a little sloppy, the ruse is up. We can see behind the curtain. That’s where the inelegance comes in.

For example, the first person who gets killed is Zoe, Martin’s secretary. Not only is she killed, she’s dismembered in horrifying fashion, her body parts spread throughout the waiting room. A day after this happens, Martin asks his wife, Jessica, to fill in for her until he finds somebody permanent.

I know that, at first, Martin is insistent that one of his patients is not the killer. But even so, your job as a husband, first and foremost, is to protect your wife. To place her in the very same situation that led to the brutal killing of his previous secretary doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.

The writer might argue that to do this is funny. Because it’s so ridiculous. Of course you would never place your wife in such a dangerous position. But I’m not buying that. When the writer uses humor as an excuse to do illogical things, they’ve lost me. You do not get to lean on the comedy-card to get away with weak story developments.

And then you had stuff like Agent Ross, who we see putting a gun to her head to kill herself just before she gets the phone call to join this case. Tonally, that’s too dark. Way too dark. You’re using humor when it’s convenient (hey wifey, I need you to take the position that just ended in another attractive woman being hideously murdered) and darkness when it’s convenient (Ross’s suicidal tendencies feel like they were pulled from a deleted scene in Requiem for a Dream).

This is what I mean by inelegance. If you’re aiming for a complex tone, you can’t miss. You can’t run a restaurant that serves Olive Garden bread rolls, grade-A prime rib steak, and cinnamon sticks for dessert. It’s gotta be all one thing or all another.

Despite these choices, I was hanging on to this script with the tips of my fingernails because I wanted it to work so badly. Every once in a while, the script would have a moment that pulled me back in, such as some funny dialogue.

But then the script would revert back to another dream sequence. Dream sequences are one of the BIGGEST indicators of weak screenwriting. Unless they’re baked into the story (Nightmare on Elm Street), out of 10,000 scripts I’ve read, there have been maybe 3 that have used dream sequences effectively. There’s something inherently sloppy about them. And if you have any doubts about that analysis, ask yourself if any of your current favorite films use dream sequences. They don’t. They’re the screenwriting equivalent of nuclear waste.

So what about who the killer was? Good reveal?

Unfortunately not. The writer telegraphs who the killer is almost from the very first moment they enter the story. Granted, it’s hard to surprise an audience these days with a killer reveal. We just talked about that on The Best and The Brightest. But it’s possible. It just takes work. You have to push yourself beyond the obvious choices.

This script needed more of a deft touch to handle the tone it was going for. In yesterday’s script, the writer knew EXACTLY what he was going for. As a result, his script felt confident the whole way through. Here, the writer doesn’t know what kind of movie he’s writing so the story feels a lot less sure of itself. What do I mean by less sure of itself? I’ll give you an easy comp: Amsterdam. The tone of that movie was all-over-the-place. It was often unclear where the comedy stopped and the drama began. I felt the same thing here.

I’m not saying you can’t make these scripts work. I thought The Voices (the script more than the movie), captured this tricky tone well. But because the tone can feel like a moving target, if you don’t have an ASSURED PLAN for the execution, it will unravel on you quickly.

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

What I learned: The reason I hate dream sequences so much is that you only have 50 scenes in a script. Each scene, then, is precious. You should want to put the best possible scene forward in each of those 50 slots. If you add a dream sequence – a sequence that doesn’t push the story forward and only operates as a flashy momentary distraction – you are wasting one of those precious 50 slots.

Genre: Action/Thriller
Premise: Two young women are kidnapped, brought deep into the woods, given a head start, and then hunted down by their sadistic captor all for the pleasure of the online fans of “The Nowhere Game.”
About: This script finished with 9 votes on last year’s Black List, by far the writer’s, Alex Pototsky, biggest achievement. Pototsky commutes between Dublin, Ireland and Los Angeles, California. He’s been at this for over a decade. In 2013, at 19, he wrote a musical about Steve Jobs.
Writer: Alex Pototsky
Details: 89 pages

It is a spec script conundrum we all face. Give the reader the fastest read possible but still create enough depth and plot that we care about what’s going on. Can today’s script achieve that? I want to believe!

Note: This is one of those scripts you probably want to read before you read my review because in order to speak about pivotal parts of the script, I have to reveal major spoilers (someone will probably have the script in the comments).

Allie and Carin, both 20, on their way to explore the great white north together, end up getting kidnapped by a man we will only know as The Hunter. The Hunter drives them waaaaaaaay further up than either of them planned on going into the northernmost part of the United States, presumably Alaska (although we’re never told exactly where they are).

When they wake up, they’re in a cabin. The Hunter casually explains to them that they’re about to start a game and that the game will be streamed on the black net. The good news is, he’ll give them 6 hours to get as far away as possible. The bad news is, they’re in the middle of nowhere. So, chances are high that it’s only a matter of time before he hunts them down.

Of the two, Carin is the tough one. She’s the hiker outdoorsy type. Allie is the one who likes to stay in, screw around on the internet, and do nothing. So, naturally, Carin is the leader. And her first order is KEEP MOVING. They quickly get to a maze-like area where there are six directions to go and each is marked with a roman numeral. In other words, this is a very thought-out game.

They hurry off in the direction that seems most promising and soon start coming across notes from some girl named Becca, one of the previous contestants. Becca left these notes in hidden places to help other girls. So they use Becca as their guide. This ultimately takes them to a river but The Hunter catches up to them and is able to shoot and kill Carin. Allie is able to jump in the river before she’s killed, and that river gets her very far away from The Hunter.

But she knows The Hunter is coming. So she has to prepare. She eventually comes upon the corpse of Becca who, it turns out, escaped The Hunter. But she died out here of starvation. The fact that Becca didn’t get murdered infuses Allie with a newfound confidence. She then gets a crazy idea. She’s going to team up with Becca to take The Hunter down for good.

This script surprised me! The logline was so simplistic that I didn’t think it had legs.

But the script does all the basics well (Goal, stakes, urgency, conflict, likable protagonists, hated villain) and it has a few tricks up its sleeve that elevate it to a double worth the read.

But let’s start with the choice to go with two girls instead of one. That’s a big creative choice you’re making right there. Because, if you go with one girl, which I’ve seen plenty of writers do in the past, you don’t have any dialogue. That’s a dangerous direction to go in because readers need dialogue. If they don’t have it, they don’t have any “breathers” in the script – where they can cover 2 pages in 20 seconds. Readers like those breathers.

On the flip side, two people makes the reader feel safer than one.  So you lose a little bit of the fear you would’ve gotten by placing a girl out here alone.  Personally, I think the writer made the right choice.

I also liked the way he explored it. He starts with Carin as the tough one and Allie as the weak one. And then, late in the second act, Carin’s killed and Allie must become tougher to win. So we get this really nice character transformation.  Every reader (and audience member) loves a good protagonist transformation.

I also noted something interesting about Carin’s death and how it affected the story. Once Carin dies, Allie instantly becomes a much deeper character. Why? Because she’s experienced the death of her best friend. These are the kinds of things that a lot of writers are forced to do via backstory.

For example, in a lesser version of this screenplay, Allie would’ve been kidnapped alone and then we would’ve found out, throughout the story, that she recently lost her best friend. The writer would’ve tried to add depth to Allie’s character through that backstory.

But when we get to see that death with our own eyes, it hits a thousand times harder. And now we’re REALLY rooting for Allie because we feel her past. I know it’s weird to think of it this way but, essentially, if you started this story with Allie waking up after her best friend was killed out here in the forest, Carin’s death is technically backstory.

But what really elevated this script for me was Becca. I’m always looking for ways to create unique characters. Cause how many different ways can you portray a person? Not that many. That’s why it’s so hard to create fresh characters that pop off the page. But clever writers can do it. And this one did it by making a dead character the third biggest character in the movie.

Because all Becca is doing is leaving notes. Leaving trails to follow. Leaving hope. And we even see her, at the end – her body at least. I don’t know if this is going to become a trend but Dead Becca plays a huge role in the climax (we just saw a dead character play a major part in a battle in Deadpool and Wolverine). She’s almost as big of a character as Carin is. That’s really something. To create somebody so memorable who’s not technically in the story.

That triple combo: Losing Carin, Allie’s character transformation, and teaming up with Dead Becca to take down The Hunter, were what elevated this script above your average action-thriller spec.

Something else I liked about this script is that the writer deftly avoided some of the yuckiness that could’ve been attributed to it. You read this logline and it reads like a 2004 logline, 12 years before the #metoo movement where hunting girls in scripts was commonplace. So I was wondering if that would make it feel dated.

But, oddly enough, The Hunter is barely in the story. He’s there at the beginning. He’s there at the end. Very briefly in the second act he shows up. But that’s it. The rest of the script focuses on the girls moving through the forest. We hear him sometimes in the distance. But we never jump back to him. Which had an interesting effect. I think I felt more fear from NOT seeing him. Because, like the girls, I often didn’t know how close he was. So all I cared about was getting further away. It added a ton of intensity to the story.

I’m really happy that I came across this script because it’s a wonderful reminder that if you can tell a simple story well, you’re a screenwriter.

Honestly, I almost gave this an “impressive.” The only reason I didn’t is because it wasn’t making a bigger statement about the world. It was more about survival. And I think the ceiling for that formula is a double worth the read. But it’s definitely worth checking out, especially if you’re studying how to write a kick ass spec-script.

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

What I learned: Learn how to tell a simple story well, like The Nowhere Game, and you’ve set the bedrock for your career as a screenwriter. Cause there’s nowhere to hide in a simple story. You have to be good with plotting and character. Once you’ve proven you can do that, you’ve graduated to being able to tackle more complex stories.

Adam Sandler was just on the Joe Rogan podcast and a big portion of the interview focused on stand-up. Before Adam Sandler became a movie star and even before he was on Saturday Night Live, he did stand-up.

Sandler talks about those early days when he would go up on stage and bomb. The crowd wouldn’t be laughing at ANYTHING. He said that every night he went back home after he bombed and was not phased at all. Cause he just KNEW he was going to make it.

Rogan said the same thing happened to him. He was stumbling around Hollywood not really connecting with anything. But he knew that he would make it. He called it the “value of being delusional.”

When he said this, I knew exactly what he meant. I had the exact same feeling when I first got to Los Angeles. I worked at an editing facility in the Valley and I would use it to edit stuff that I shot. I would put these shorts and videos together in the back editing bays and, occasionally, co-workers would come through and watch them and, most of the time, have very confused looks on their faces. They didn’t really understand what I was doing.

But it didn’t bother me at all. I’d think, “Clearly they have bad taste if they don’t realize this stuff is brilliant. Because it is.” I genuinely thought I was going to be some big director on the level of Quentin Tarantino. I’m not lying. I genuinely believed that.

Not only is it great to be delusional. It’s required. Because what you eventually learn is that you’re not competing against a dozen other people. You’re competing against hundreds of thousands of people. And the top 50,000 of those people will do anything to make it. If you’re not delusional in those early stages, you’ll give up.

That’s what delusion provides you. It provides you with confidence while you hone your craft and actually get good. That’s what happened with both Sandler and Rogan. Their early stuff sucked. But they were delusional long enough to get better until they both got their break (Sandler with SNL and Rogan with News Radio).

But that’s the rub, isn’t it? This only works if you find that first success before the delusion wears off. Once you understand what you’re up against, and how difficult it is to succeed in this town, you start playing scared. Your doubt starts to overwhelm you. Every page you write is the worst page ever. And every script you write that isn’t received well feels like one more nail in your screenwriting dream coffin.

This led me to today’s question: How does one succeed if they never experienced success before their delusion ran out?

Or, more pointedly: What replaces delusion as your main motivational force?

You have to change the way you perceive success. If success is only getting a movie you wrote into 2000 theaters, then of course you’re going to feel more and more like a failure with every failed script. And let me tell you something. I know writers who worked their asses off to finally achieve that feat and you know what almost all of them told me? They’re upset the movie didn’t do better. Or they’re upset that the producers changed things. Or they’re upset at all the b.s. they had to go through behind the scenes which took all the fun out of it.

In other words, even when you find success, you will move the goal post so that you can continue being frustrated.

Happiness, when it comes to screenwriting (or any art), must be internally motivated. It sounds cheesy but in order to succeed at screenwriting after the delusion wears off, you have to love what you write. As long as you sit down and write something and you love writing that story, you’re winning.

Because while you may not be receiving the financial benefits the professional writers are, I can almost guarantee that you’re having a better writing experience than they are. You’re writing something you love. They’re writing to make sure people aren’t disappointed in them.

Okay, that’s all well and good, Carson. Rah rah rah! Write for yourself. Stay poor your entire life. Never find success. The career we all dreamed of. Thanks for the help.

That’s not what I’m saying. I still want you to succeed and I still believe you will succeed. Here’s how that happens: Write the ideas you personally love so that you continue writing. As long as you continue to write, you will keep getting better. If you keep getting better, you have a shot at becoming a professional.

BUT! You still have to be your own agent. With every script you finish, you want to push it out there to as many people as possible. If you don’t know people, pay for contests. If you don’t have money, put your scripts up on message boards and trade feedback. You should be aiming to get AT LEAST 25 PEOPLE to read every script you finish. That’s the bottom required number for you to hit if you want any realistic chance of selling a script, or getting an agent, or getting hired for a job.

You’re going to get a lot of no’s no matter WHAT. Even if you have that ‘in’ at Lionsgate – the number 4 executive there who told you you can send him a script any time. Even if that guy likes it, it may not be the right fit for the company. So you can’t just send the script out to 3 or 4 people then move on. That’s one of the biggest mistakes screenwriters make. They never give their scripts a chance.

If you get your script to 25 people and they all read it and the feedback is underwhelming… MOVE ON TO THE NEXT ONE. If you get your script to 25 people and 5 of them say there’s something interesting there but it needs more development, consider writing more drafts to meet that potential. If you get your script to 25 people and the feedback is good, you may have something on your hands and you should start REALLY pushing that script. To 50 people. To 75 people.

Because you’re going to get a lot of no’s no matter what. Even people who really like your script are going to have to say ‘no’ for one reason or another. That’s why you give it to a lot of people. I think the Black List is suss sometimes but if you can afford 4 reviews, that’s 4 people you just got it to. And if one or two give you an 8, you’re onto something.

You can give it to me. I’m not cheap but you can ask me straight up, “Carson, is this script worth pursuing or should I move on to the next one.” I’ll give you my honest opinion.  What I recommend you do, though, is get multiple logline consultations from me BEFORE YOU WRITE THE SCRIPT so I can save you time on stuff that won’t get reads (e-mail me at Carsonreeves1@gmail.com).

And don’t tell me finding 25 people to read your script is hard. You want to know what’s hard? Finding 25 people to read your script before the internet. THAT WAS HARD. Finding 25 people to read your script when you’re connected to 8 billion people is a piece of cake. I’m sorry but you’re not getting my tears if you can’t figure that out.  Trust me. If you want it bad enough, you’ll find those 25 people.

The way you pursue screenwriting after the delusion wears off is to love the act of screenwriting. As long as you’re enjoying telling stories, you are winning and you are getting better. And as long as you’re getting those scripts out there once you’re finished, you’re giving yourself a shot at becoming a professional.  Never stop doing that and, eventually, your day will come.

So, originally, today, I was going to talk about Noah’s Choice and those pesky video cameras but, after reading Bedford, I’d rather use today’s post on helping Joseph make his script as good as it can possibly be.

When I do these script reviews, half of the review is dedicated to explaining what the script is about so I rarely get the time to suggest actual fixes. That’s what today’s post will cover. And if you like some of the notes I give here, hire me! I can practically guarantee your script will get better and, if you mention “Bedford,” I’ll give you 100 bucks off.

Now that I’ve had a day to think about the script, one of the things I’m worried about is that it does feel THIN. Scott put together a technical analysis of the screenplay and learned that it contained 16,000 words, which is low. You want to be closer to the 20,000 word mark. The low word count made sense to me based on how the script felt. The plot zips along like lightning but, in doing so, there aren’t many moments where you get to slow down and smell the flowers.

This is one of those universal challenges you face when you write a screenplay. You know you have to move things along to keep the reader engaged but you also have to make them feel something in order to stay engaged. And if all you’re doing is moving the plot forward, the experience feels empty.

This leads us to Bedford’s first issue, which is its stilted emotional subplot. Emily has a daughter. The daughter wants to spend more time with her father. Emily is not on good terms with the father. So she’s not supportive of this reunion. The irony, of course, is that the father ends up being on the plane that’s gone missing. Which ties our emotional plotline together.

But is that the best version of an emotional plotline we can get out of this story? I’m not convinced it is.

Let’s look at the father storyline. Emily doesn’t like the father. The father is on the plane. Well, is there much drama in that? If the worst-case scenario happens and the military gets rid of this plane, Emily’s in a pretty good position! Now she doesn’t have to worry about this a-hole father screwing up her daughter’s life anymore.

I know that Joseph would say the reason it works is because, even though it’s no sweat off Emily’s back if the dad disappears, Emily knows that it would destroy her daughter. So, in Joseph’s argument, it’s a more nuanced decision that Emily has to make. Does she save the man she despises in order to make her daughter happy? Theoretically, I understand this argument. But I didn’t feel any emotional way from that choice.

For starters, I winced when I learned the dad was on the plane. It felt too cute. Too “wrapped up in a bow.” You’re already asking for a huge buy-in with everything that’s going on. Throwing “dad on the plane” in there is the equivalent of, after asking a friend for a 500 dollar loan, you then, an hour later, ask them for another 100 bucks.

Here’s how I was thinking we could fix this. Move the father out of the story. The daughter, who’s at college, is flying in tomorrow. We would set this up through a conversation between Emily and Crane. He notes how happy he is that she’s finally taking her vacation days off. She points out that, yeah, her daughter is flying in for the week and she wants to spend as much time with her as possible.

If you really wanted the dad in here, We could reverse the Emily-Husband dynamic. In this version, the daughter goes to school next to her father and therefore spends most of the time with her father. She rarely comes home anymore. So Emily is making the most of her daughter’s visit. After we establish that backstory via a conversation between Emily and Crane, we would not hear anything else about that storyline for 25-30 pages.

Then, in the midst of the plane mystery deepening, either through the dad texting Emily or the daughter’s friend texting Emily, she learns, shockingly, that her daughter came in tonight on an earlier flight. She’s ON THE ATLAS FLIGHT.

To be clear, I’m still not sold on any family members being on the plane. It’s too much of a coincidence to me. But the reason I like this new version better is because the setup of Emily not coming until tomorrow makes the surprise that she’s on this Atlas flight TRICK the audience into focusing on the surprise rather than the coincidence.

Another reason I like it is because, in these contained movies, you need as many shocking moments as you can get away with. The repetition of the environment necessitates that we find exciting story beats anywhere we can. This would be a good one.

Okay, let’s move on to Mike and his lack of fuel. This is one of those story choices that feels right from a screenwriting perspective. You’re giving this important character a ticking time bomb (he’s running out of fuel and needs to land) which adds an additional layer of suspense and tension to the story.

But not every story component that TECHNICALLY works ORGANICALLY works. Sometimes the coolest screenwriting tricks in the world don’t work within the larger context of the story. That’s how I’d label this choice. We’re so baffled by how dismissive Emily is towards Mike and his SOS situation that we get annoyed by it. The guy’s got less than a gallon of fuel and you’re asking him to fly around and tell you what he sees?? That’s not realistic. For either Emily or Mike (if I were Mike I’d tell her to F off).

This is an easy fix, though. Mike is already in a really crazy situation. He was in the UK five minutes ago. Now he’s in the U.S. What we should do here is establish that Emily isn’t allowed to land a plane that isn’t cleared in the US. But she can try and get a special landing clearance for him, which will take a few phone calls. That allows us to keep Mike up in the air while Emily attempts to solve his problem. And, as long as he’s up there, he might as well help her out.

Getting back to the emotional side of the story, there’s a version of the Mike storyline that’s A LOT DEEPER that allows for a bigger, more impactful, climax. It would go something like this. Similar to Wade Wilson in Deadpool and Wolverine, Mike is not in a great place in life. His life didn’t go the way he imagined it would. And he regrets the fact that he didn’t do something bigger with his life.

In this version of the story, Emily and Mike’s talks would be a little deeper. They’d get into some of that stuff.

This way, when the climax comes around, you could set it up so that the military is about to take down the aliens and the plane. It’s a foregone conclusion. UNLESS Mike sacrifices himself. If Mike could somehow disrupt the shot by crashing into the missile launcher, he could give them just enough time to get away. Essentially, Mike finally does something that matters in his life.

Obviously, that’s a darker ending. I suppose there’s a version of that ending where Mike could still survive the crash. Because I do like the idea someone had of Emily and Mike finally seeing each other in the end (similar to John McClane meeting the cop at the end of Die Hard). You could even hint that there’s some romantic potential there. All of these different choices will alter the tone so you have to figure out which concoction best suits the movie you’re imagining.

As for our ending where Emily and Crane leave the tower and drive out, I’m on the fence about this. On the one hand, it makes the ending different from the first two acts. I like that. All the movement does make things more exciting as well. So I like that.

But it’s also kind of messy, which I don’t like. And Crane is such a weak character that he almost single-handedly destroys this scene. Crane might as well be an AI powered human body, he has so little depth to him. And what’s frustrating about that is that it’s an easy fix.

Let’s establish who Crane is in that first act! I imagine him similar to the sheriff character Jeff Bridges played in Hell or High Water. He’s almost retired. All he cares about is his pension. The guy’s mantra is: Don’t rock the boat. When all this shit starts going down, Crane keeps saying to Emily, “Let it go. It’s above our pay grade.”

That way, when Crane is driving the car at the end, it actually means something. Because he’s transformed as a character. But even without that, note how much better you know my version of Crane than the version in the story. Just by that one paragraph I wrote. That’s how easy it is to give a character depth. So, even if it’s not my version of the character that you go with, come up with your own version. As long as Crane isn’t some faceless wordless shadow in the back of the room.

Finally, I want to talk about where this movie ends. I feel like it should end in the tower and I have two examples I want to share for why. The first is Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor is a terrible movie. But there’s one thing I remember from that movie. Ben Affleck plays a pilot who’s the greatest pilot in the entire Navy. When the Japanese start attacking and there’s pure chaos on the ground, all Ben Affleck is trying to do is get up in a plane. Because that’s where he belongs. That’s where he’s the best. He can’t do anything for anyone down here. He’s useless.

I like characters like that. They’re so great at what they do that that’s where they need to be to shine the brightest. Assuming Emily is great at her job, she should know that her best chance at saving the plane is up in that tower. Cause that’s where she shines the brightest.

The second example is Wedding Crashers. In that movie, the writers, Steve Fabor and Bob Fisher, couldn’t figure out their ending for draft after draft after draft. Then one day one of them said, in the most obvious of statements, “Our movie is called Wedding Crashers. It needs to end at a wedding.” And that’s how they came up with their ending.

This script is similar in that, it’s about an air traffic controller. It needs to end in an air traffic tower.

Yes, I understand that that makes the ending LESS cinematic. But if the FBI is guarding that tower and Emily has to sneak back in, there are elements there that can be cinematic (not to mention, it would be cheaper to shoot).

Those are my thoughts on how to improve Bedford. If any of these ideas have inspired you guys to come up with even better ideas, please share them. The more feedback Joseph has going into this next draft, the better. :)

I would even ask Jospeph to come up with a 2-3 page document detailing what he’s going to do for the next draft and I would post it here. That way, we can spot any potential problems ahead of time and adjust the outline accordingly.

Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: The crew of a ramshackle starship, stranded lightyears from the rest of humanity, stages a daring heist to infiltrate a rogue luxury transport, steal the spare warp drive it hoards, and escape the gaze of Eos — a volatile star tumbling toward supernova.
About: This script finished in second place in the Scriptshadow Mega-Showdown Screenwriting Competition.
Writer: Luke Secaur
Details: 118 pages

We sci-fi lovers are starving for a good sci-fi film. And I’m not talking about one of those clever-premised tiny films like Ex Machina. Something with some scope! We haven’t had one of those in a lonnnnnng time. We got Rebel Moon on Netflix. But that movie sat on the screen like a dead elephant.

That’s why I picked this concept for the contest. It’s a cool idea! A heist film in space? Sign me up! To be honest, the logline implied that there was a little too much going on. Maybe that’s something to look at going forward for Luke. Should we streamline this into a more straightforward space heist film? Let’s find out.

The Eos sun is about to go supernova in 10 hours. The last people on a space station in the star system are fighting for the last few seats on the final evacuation ship. Through a miracle, our hero, Nathan, gets his wife and daughter onto the last two seats . He promises them that if he can see them again, he will. And off they go.

Cut to 7 years later and, what do you know, Eos is still burning, the stubborn old star that can’t quit us. Nathan is now the captain of a small ship and crew (pilot Lenora, guitar-playing Diego, droid H3-NRY, and freshman Opal) who dart around looking for leftover spaceships. They scavenge these things for fuel and food, all to live a little bit longer.

But what they’re really hoping to find is an Alcubierre drive. These drives allow ships to jump to light speed, which would allow Nathan to reunite with his wife and daughter. During their latest scavenge, they run into another crew and are able to kidnap one of them, the perpetually sick Mako.

Mako informs them that there’s a ship run by a cult that is set up for a front row seat to the supernova. It just so happens that they have a spare Alcubierre drive on their ship. Which means all they have to do is sneak on, steal the thing, and they’ll finally be able to escape this potentially-but-not-yet-but-will-probably-blow-up-soon-although-we’re-not-100%-sure star. Can they do it???

Outpace The Dawn is better than Rebel Moon. If Netflix made this movie, it would be more popular than that movie. There are some caveats to that – like several rewrites. But the idea is better than Rebel Moon for sure.

I thought the script was okay but something was bothering me as I wrote this review up.  I wanted it to be better and I couldn’t figure out what it was missing.  It was only once I finished the review that it came to me.  Outpace the Dawn doesn’t understand its tone yet.  I think the best version of this story is Guardians of the Galaxy meets Ocean’s 11.

It KIND OF gives you that.  But it gives you a muted version of that.  The characters aren’t as fun.  The jokes aren’t as sharp.  And I don’t know why that is.  I’m wondering if Luke wants to make a more serious version of this story and, therefore, keep the characters grounded.

I say f*&% that.  Let’s have fun here!  This is a fun premise.

The problems start right there in the opening scene.  We’re told that the sun is going to go supernova in 10 hours, which is why there’s a race to get on this final escape ship. But then as soon as the escape ship leaves, we cut to 7 years later and the sun is still there. No supernova.

Sure, this is explained by Luke. Supernovas are not an exact science. Nobody knows when they’re going to blow. But it did feel cheap that we frame the opening with this extreme urgency then, as soon as the scene is over, throw that urgency out like a used Coke can.

This is followed by a scene where our team of scavengers attempts to infiltrate an abandoned ship for spare parts. As they’re scavenging it, another group of scavengers appears and tries to do the same. We just got out of a very rare scenario (a star that’s going to go supernova) and now we’re in another one (what are the chances that right when you scavenge a ship in the middle of nowhere that someone else does so at the exact same time?). Are these ships getting scavenged every 10 minutes?

Those opening scenes, while by no means catastrophic, gave me pause. I would label both of them as sloppy. Or, at least, not as clean as they could be.

But that’s okay because the success of every script comes down to how you deliver on the aspects of the script that matter. For example, if you write a horror script, all that TRULY matters, is that it’s scary. If you write a comedy script, all that TRULY matters, is that we laugh. Every other aspect of the script can be mediocre, as long as we laugh.

When it comes to heist scripts, two things matter – You have to have a great heist and you have to have a fun group of characters. On both those fronts, Outpace The Dawn did okay.

Unfortunately, audiences don’t go to movies for okay. They go to be entertained. Nathan was fine. There’s a decent emotional component to his character whereby he’s trying to reunite with his family. Diego was kinda fun. Lenora and Opal were all right but, if I’m being honest, kinda forgettable. My favorite choice on the character front was Mako. I love the idea of putting a villain on the team, someone you can’t quite trust. So that was cool.

Then there was the heist. The heist had some problems, the biggest of which was that I couldn’t quite imagine the ship we were infiltrating and where we were all the time and what all the different parts of the ship looked like. This is one of the challenges of writing sci-fi and fantasy. There is no frame of reference for the reader visually. So it requires very clear descriptions, something that’s challenging to achieve within the abbreviated format of screenwriting.

But the bigger problem was, the people that we were trying to steal the warp drive from didn’t feel that scary. The thing you want to do with heists is you want to make the heist feel impossible. This was some hippy cult in a ship. Not exactly the most threatening of folks.

I liked that we didn’t have guns. That’s more in line with what you want to do – make the goal as hard as possible. But it starts with the difficulty of the heist itself. And this heist difficulty level reminded me of Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon Jinn going into the separatist ship and being attacked by a bunch of harmless droids.

That doesn’t even broach the fact that I wasn’t sure how many people were on the ship! If you told me it was 3, I would’ve believed you. If you told me it was 303, I’d believe you. Again, we have to know what we’re up against before we head into the ship.

Some of these details may be in the script and I just missed them. I’m sorry if that’s the case. But it’s hard to pay attention 100% of the time in a script where there’s no visual reference for anything. In other words, if I read a romantic comedy script set in New York, I never once have to use my brain to figure out where we are, what’s around us, and what everything looks like. I already have those references in my head.

But in this script, nearly every scene requires me to do some mental work to visualize what’s happening. And if the reader’s forced to do that all the time, I guarantee you even the most dialed-in reader is going to experience some mental drift. Readers don’t like working when they read. They like enjoying.

The last script I read that did a good job with all this stuff was Street Rat Allie. The writer created this entire world but did so in a clear and concise way so that we were always able to visualize what was going on.

So, in summary, I think more work needs to be put into the characters. I don’t want them to be kinda okay. I want to aim for “greatest characters ever.” You won’t get there, of course. Nobody does. But by aiming way higher than you’re aiming now, you’ll upgrade them for sure.  We need things to be more fun, more wild.  The final heist needs to be bigger and more impossible.  And there needs to be an obsession with clarity in the description.

What did you guys think?

Script Link: Outpace the Dawn

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

What I learned: Be careful about trying to have your cake and eat it too. Readers notice that. Is it fair to build your opening scene around a ticking time bomb only to learn, right afterward, that the ticking time bomb was a false alarm? Probably not.