Genre: TV – 1 Hour Drama
Premise: The elite special agents of the Investigative Services Branch who are tasked with solving the most complex and heinous crimes committed within the diverse and majestic National Parks of the ISB’s Pacific West region.
About: Kevin Costner is expanding his Yellowstone empire. Not content with his hit show, Costner is doubling down for a more modern exploration of the national park world. This will be Costner’s first ever TV writing credit.
Writers: Aaron Helbing, Jon Baird, & Kevin Costner
Details: 63 pages

It’s a TV Wednesday. Time to get our TV on. As someone who’s spent his only TV time lately watching episodes of Storage Wars, I could use a good show. Let’s see if Costner delivers the In and Out Animal Style burger version of a TV show. I’ll take fries with that, thank you.

Off-Duty ISB (Investigative Services Branch for the National Parks Service) agent Erica Breen is checking out a complaint from a married couple who say a kid broke into their car and tried to steal from them.

Breen finds an old cabin in the Yellowstone National Park area that a family squats in. She heads up to ask if they know anything about this break-in and finds Adele, a white-trashy type, lingering about. As she begins questioning Adele, she spots kids eyeing her sinisterly. And then a few older kids. And then, behind her, a few older kids still. And then young adults. And then adult adults. They seem to be everywhere, lingering in all 360 degrees of the forest surrounding her. As Breen tries to stay calm, they eventually attack. And Breen suffers a horrible violent death.

Cut to a few days later and we meet the rest of the ISB crew, led by 30-something Lincoln Kane and 50-something Cal Foster. They’ve found the body of a dead woman in a lake and are trying to lift her out. While this is happening, they get word that Breen has been missing for a couple of days. Lincoln takes stock of this.

But for right now, the priority is the woman in the lake, and the team is highly suspicious the woman’s ex-husband might be involved. Meanwhile, we meet this nasty dude, Lee, who hikes out into the park with a couple of girls and then shoves them off a cliff to their deaths. It’s one more problem the ISB unit is going to have to deal with. But first, they find a trail camera that recorded Breen’s death. And after witnessing the horrible things the family did to their friend, they stop everything to find and take this family down.

National Parks has the kind of teaser all TV writers should study.

It’s a wonderfully suspenseful scene that follows this out-manned woman observing as more and more people begin appearing around her. The scene takes its sweet time, making us squirm just as much as the poor character. We’re hoping against all hope that she’s going to find a way out. And since I assumed the scene was setting up our heroine, I thought she would figure out a way. So color me shocked when she didn’t.

The reason I want you to study this scene is because I read too many weak TV teasers. Just the other night, I read a teaser where a guy talks to his wife on a phone call in his car. That was it. That was the opening scene of the show! Sure, the scene gave us some insight into the characters and their marriage. But it wasn’t dramatized. It was information. An opening scene without dramatization is like peanut butter and jelly without bread. How do you even get it into your body?

A good way to explore this challenge is by contrasting the first scene in National Parks to the second scene. The second scene is a group of people trying to fish a dead body out of a lake. Technically, there’s something going on here. We’ve got a dead body. We’re not sure who it is yet. You could argue that that mystery creates some drama.

But is it as good as the opening scene was? No. Not even close. The opening scene was turbo-dramatized. This scene had minor drama at best. It’s not like the body was wedged down under a rock in the water that was hard to get to and required scuba divers to go down and release it and then something goes wrong while they’re down there. It’s just logistically getting a body out of a lake.

That second scene is what most writers start their pilot with. Assuming you’re not so clueless that you’re writing that car conversation scene, this second scene, to most writers, feels like it’s sexy enough to start a pilot. I’m here to tell you it isn’t.

If you’re going to start with a dead body scene, it needs to have more going on than simply the logistics of getting a body out of some water. True Detective is a good example of dramatizing a “found body” scene. Here, something much weirder and more sinister took place. Seeing that death scene was uncomfortable. And trying to work out what the killer did and why they did it keeps the scene interesting.

Sorry to go so deep on that but the opening of any script, TV or feature, is so important. And it’s done the wrong way so often I feel it’s my duty to scream from the mountain tops – “THIS IS HOW TO DO IT THE RIGHT WAY!”

Once National Parks gets rolling, it encounters the typical Pilot challenges, namely that you’re introducing a lot of people in a very short amount of space and it becomes hard to remember who’s who. And in more severe cases, there are so many characters that it’s hard to know who the main one is. That’s an issue I had for a while here. I was halfway in when I realized Lincoln was the show’s main character.

I think the reason this happens so much in TV Pilot scripts is because most pilots are written to be made (as opposed to be sold). So they’re not as worried about readers not knowing who’s who. In their mind, that will be taken care of in the casting.

However, it’s good practice either way to make your characters different from one another. The more you can make them stand out on the page, the more distinct the characters will be on the screen. Unfortunately, I don’t know many people willing to go the extra mile to get this right. And National Parks suffers a little in that department.

But the pilot has enough going for it that I was into it until the end. Besides my desire to get justice for poor Erica Breen, it was fun to see the investigation for the second lake murder unravel. Overall, National Parks does it right. It finds a lane in the TV procedural that hasn’t been explored before then makes sure all its major plotlines could only exist in this unique environment. Worth the read!

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

What I Learned: Not taking into account reader assumptions – Often times, we get so wrapped up in our stories that we start assuming the reader knows everything we do. Where this becomes a problem is during major scenes or important plot beats. If you overlook reader assumption, your reader could end up reading a completely different show than the one you intended. The opening scene of this pilot has a group of people killing ISB Special Agent Erica Breen. We then cut forward in time (we’re told it’s been a couple of days) and a bunch of ISB agents are pulling a dead woman (who they can’t yet identify) out of a lake. You tell me what the average reader is going to assume in this moment. 99% of them are assuming the dead body is Breen. One of the agents even gets a call that Agent Breen went missing a couple of days ago. However, it turns out this is a completely different woman and a completely different scenario that led to her death. It took me another four pages to understand that. And that’s something you don’t want the reader to misunderstand. I know it was obvious to the writers that these were two totally different women. But you showed us a woman getting murdered then cut to a dead woman in a lake. Under what circumstances would we NOT connect the two? You either have to rethink putting these scenes up against each other or be VERY CLEAR that two totally different things are going on.

Genre: Comedy/Satire
Premise: (from Black List) When Tabitha, a struggling foster kid, wins a contest to become part of the BIRDIES, a popular daily YouTube channel featuring the radiant and enigmatic Mama Bird and her diverse brood of adopted children, she soon learns that things get dark when the cameras turn off.
About: This one finished with 16 votes on last year’s Black List. The writer, Colin Bannon, has been working in the industry since 2008, when he was a Location Production Assistant for Kingdom of the Crystal Skull! He also wrote another Black List script, “First Ascent,” about a mountain climber who does a climb on a haunted mountain.
Writer: Colin Bannon
Details: 108 pages

One of the many Youtube families.

Have you ever watched these family Youtube channels?

When I was at my brother’s place recently, my niece was obsessed with them. And while, on the one hand, they were fun, I couldn’t help but wonder what psychological effects the channel would have on the children. No matter how you spin it, it wasn’t healthy.

So I was expecting someone to write a script about this sooner or later. It’s too juicy of a topic not to and it’s a fresh take on the child star phenomenon, which is something that hasn’t had a fresh take in a while. Youtube (and social media in general) has created this new fertile plot of land for movie ideas, and today’s script might be the best commentary on that world I’ve seen yet.

Tabitha is a 13 year old orphan who lives in a miserable “Annie” type orphanage. Her only happiness comes form her favorite Youtube reality show, “The Birdies,” about a married couple who adopted a bunch of kids and now has one of the largest audiences on the service.

That’s changing, though. The family’s all-star daughter, Nightingale, has finally turned 18, which means she can legally leave the home and go off-grid, as far away from cameras as she can get. The good news for Tabitha is, this means they need to adopt someone new into the family! And that’s, like, Tabitha’s dream!

So Tabitha sneaks out to Best Buy to record an audition tape on one of the sample iPads. When the blue-shirted Best Buy employee spots what she’s doing, he charges forward to stop her. She rips the iPad off the security chain and goes running through the store while the video waits to upload. Just as she’s at 97%, the employees grab her and kill the upload. NOOOOOOOOOO.

After hours of crying, the other orphans tell Tabitha that her video went viral! Someone else in the store taped her. Which means – you guessed it – SHE GETS PICKED! The next day, Mama Bird (always dressed to the nines), Papa Bird (always holding a camera) and the other five children, all of them a perfect rainbow of diverse ethnicities, run to greet their new sister.

The next thing Tabitha knows, she’s IN THE BIRDIE MANSION, the home she’s been watching religiously every day for the past 8 years! And she has her own room. And she gets a brand new digital camera, iPad, iPhone, iwatch – everything an influencer needs. Yes, that’s right. Tabitha is now a content creator. And she’ll be expected, just like the rest of the family, to generate content for the daily show.

Tabitha then learns the truth about Mama Bird. When the cameras turn off at 8pm every day, so does big happy charismatic Mama Bird. She’s replaced by a cyclone of depression, of Youtube burnout. Of worry and fear and obsession. All Mama Bird has cared about for the last decade are subscribers and views. And both are plunging every day due to Nightingale leaving. What Tabitha doesn’t know is that Mama Bird is counting on her to save the channel. And for that, she will expect Tabitha to do many things she doesn’t want to do.

The first thing I want to point out about this is the clever setup, which is easy to miss since it’s subtle. Bannon is satirizing the “Youtube Family” genre by doing what any good writer would do. You take someone who doesn’t know that world and throw them into it. They then act as an avatar for us, as we ourselves don’t understand that world either. So when Tabitha is thrust into this family, we feel a connection with her and want her to succeed.

But Bannon faced an interesting problem in this setup. You can’t create a new 13 year old family member out of thin air. So how do get your heroine (Tabitha) into this family? The solution Bannon came up with was to make the entire family orphans. Now it makes sense why they would want to bring someone new into the family.

In addition to this, it adds more edge to the concept, since “adopting” isn’t that different from “casting.” You have to be a certain type of person (bubbly, charming, energetic) to make it into the family. From there, the level of love you receive is dependent on how many views you get.

Which is why this is such a clever idea. In the past, they explored similar concepts (child stars being worked like dogs) on TV shows. But in those shows, you *expected* the producers and executives to be assh*les. It came with the territory. But here, the producers are also the parents. So work and love are intertwined. Which is way more f*cked up for a child than simply needing to get ratings for your boss.

And Bannon understands this concept so well. I read a lot of scripts where the writer has come up with a good idea, but they don’t totally understand that idea, which results in a lot of non-specific scenes and characters that don’t leave an impression. It’s the difference between me making a cheeseburger and In and Out making a cheeseburger. In and Out eats, sleeps, and breathes cheeseburgers. They know that world so specifically that there’s nothing I could do to make a cheeseburger as delicious as theirs.

But let me give you a more specific example from the script itself.

There’s this great moment not long after the first act. Tabitha has just moved into the Birdie mansion, and after they finish taping for the day, Tabitha goes upstairs to see her bedroom for the first time. This is the first time in her life that she’s had her own room. So she breaks down. One of the other kids sees this and gives her a puzzled look. “The cameras are off,” the kid says. Tabitha looks back at him, quizzically. “You don’t have to cry. The cameras are off.”

It’s a perfect encapsulation of what these kids’ lives are. Every seemingly important moment requires a camera-worthy response. They’ve been trained to give that response when needed. If someone’s emoting without a camera taping it, that doesn’t make any sense to them at all.

Also, this script is another point for the power of simplicity – in this case, the power of a simple theme. A writer recently sent me the theme of their movie and it was like 8 sentences long and I chuckled and said, “This isn’t a theme. This is a thesis statement.” Big chunky long themes are not only unhelpful, they can actually hurt your script. The more you’re trying to manipulate the story so that it connects with every component of your giant unwieldy theme, the more confused the reader’s going to be.

The theme here is: The grass isn’t always greener on the other side.

The theme is powerful not only because of how simple it is, but because every person on the planet understands it. Simple almost always means ‘powerful.’ That power comes from the theme sticking with us. Someone who watches this movie is definitely going to remember it whenever they’re thinking of quitting their work or leaving a relationship. Is the grass really going to be greener? Or does the other side of the hill have a Mama Bird waiting for us?

There’s only one part of the script I didn’t get. The midpoint shift has Mama Bird turning Tabitha into Nightingale (signified by giving Tabitha Nightingale’s old wig) to stop the views from plunging. I’m not sure why she would think this was a good idea. The viewers aren’t going to mistake Tabitha for Nightingale. Actually, they’re probably going to get mad. (“why is this girl pretending to be someone she isn’t?”). So I wasn’t gung-ho about that choice. But everything else here is spot on. I enjoyed the heck out of it. Good stuff!

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

What I learned: The “Eventually Is Gonna Snap” Character. I recently spotted this character on the show about the finance industry, “Industry.” This one worker was so determined to make it at the firm that he never left work, never went home, never did anything social. You just KNEW he was going to crack. And he did, in a horrible way. Here, we get that character with Bustard, one of the “birdie kids” in the family. Bustard isn’t as quick-witted or charismatic as the other kids and is, therefore, constantly being reminded by Mama Bird to up his game. You can see him desperately trying to do better – going so far as to repeat the word “subscribers” out loud thousands of times so he can say it without his foreign accent. Eventually, Bustard cracks and becomes suicidal. Why do these characters work? It’s the car-crash principle. If there’s a car crash up ahead, you spend all that time inching forward in your car anticipating how bad it could be, and, of course, when you get there, you have to look. A “Eventually Is Gonna Snap” character ensures that the reader will keep reading because they have to stick around to see that character wreck.

The knives are out with today’s question!

A reader e-mailed me yesterday and asked a good question: Do you write a logline before you write the script or do you only write it afterwards? The question stemmed from an idea that “Save The Cat’s” Blake Snyder promoted, which is that he would never write a script until he had the logline figured out.

The reason he gave for this proclamation is that unless you can conceptualize your screenplay in a single sentence, then the idea doesn’t work as a movie. His theory boiled down to good movies have a “point.” They have a “goal.” And as long as you have one of those two things, you should be able to convey it in one sentence.

Parasite is about a poor family that tries to take over a rich family’s home. Invisible Man is about a woman trying to take down her abusive dead boyfriend. Knives Out is about solving a murder. Tenet is about… oooooh, wait a minute. We may have something to discuss here.

What is Tenet about? Tenet is a movie you cannot summarize well in a logline. Is it a coincidence, then, that the movie is unwieldy and difficult to understand? There’s no way to prove it for sure but I just shook my magic 8-ball and it came up with “Signs point to yes.” Christopher Nolan would probably shoot us for saying so but had he sat down and distilled his concept into a logline, he may have discovered its weaknesses and changed some elements around until Tenet became stronger.

One of the biggest enemies of screenwriting is vagueness. Wherever there’s vagueness, there is a story unsure of where to go. So if you’re vague before you’ve written your script, there’s a good chance portions of the script itself are going to be vague. Now in a logline, those portions may amount to a word or two. But in a screenplay, they may amount to 10 to 25 pages at a time.

Let’s take this further and think of a good movie that covers a lot of ground and therefore, theoretically, shouldn’t be able to fit into a single logline. Can The Godfather be summarized in a logline? I did a google search and found this: “The aging patriarch of an organized crime dynasty transfers control of his clandestine empire to his reluctant son.”

This would seem to say “no.” It’s too vague and doesn’t convey any direction in the story. But I’ll give you a logline tip. Always try and write the logline from the point of view of the character driving the story (which is almost always the hero).

Therefore we’d get something like this: “A reluctant son is forced to take over his father’s organized crime dynasty while fending off the other mob families in town who are determined to eliminate his family for good.” This clearly conveys what The Godfather is about without any trickery or vagueness. So I say it passes Blake Snyder’s logline test.

Let’s challenge ourselves further, though. What about Joker? That’s a good movie. But, on first glance, it wouldn’t pass the Blake Snyder logline test. There isn’t a clear goal in the movie. I’m not even sure there’s a clear point. It’s more about a man’s descent into madness and the things that come about due to that madness. It’s also sort of a “divided in two” movie where the first half of the film is about Arthur Fleck trying to make a living as a comedian and the second half is about him fighting back against the city and losing his mind. It’s not easy to write a logline where the direction of the film changes midway through.

We’re getting into a complicated area here that necessitates a nuanced discussion. But, generally speaking, character pieces are harder to confine to a logline because the journey happens inside the character as opposed to outside. And that never reads well in logline form. “A man with mental health problems attempts to deal with his demons in an increasingly violent New York City while trying to become a stand up comedian.” It’s okay. But notice the main thrust of the logline is “deals with his demons.” That’s an internal battle. The logline still lacks plot clarity, which, 99% of the time, means the script is going to wander. It just so happens that Todd Phillips is aware of this pitfall and made sure to troubleshoot it so that the script still worked.

Which is to say, YES, it’s possible to write a good script without having a good logline, but there are mitigating factors. It’s usually a character piece. The writer inherently understands the weakness of his narrative and gameplans a way to counter that weakness.

The writers who I deal with aren’t even aware that there’s a pitfall in their concept in the first place so, of course, they can’t troubleshoot it. Which results in a messy unfocused screenplay.

Which is a long way of me saying, “Yes, you should try to write a logline BEFORE you write your script. Because not only does doing so force you to learn what your script is really about (distilling anything down to its essence will achieve this). But you may be able to identify holes in the story that you wouldn’t have otherwise noticed.

I received a logline recently that went something like this (I’m going to change some things around to protect the writer’s idea): “An older woman gets a call that the baby who was taken from her 30 years ago wants to meet her.” At first glance, this logline sounds like a movie. There’s definitely something interesting about your baby being stolen from you and never meeting them until they’re an adult. But where is the story? Or, a clearer way to put it: “And then what?” Does her daughter show up, say how much she missed her, and then leave? Where does the movie go? Cause all that you’ve given me is the first act.

Here’s a better logline. I’m writing this literally off the top of my head so I’ll be the first to admit it’s not perfect. But it’s an example of how figuring out the logline can help you discover what your movie is really about. “After an older woman is reunited with her daughter, who was stolen from her 30 years ago as a baby, she begins to suspect that the visitor is not who she says she is, and that her ultimate plan is to harm her.”

Let me reiterate. Not a movie that’s going to be made any time soon. But you can see more of a movie in this version than the previous version. We get the “and then what” part of the story that was missing from the initial logline. Too many writers start writing their screenplays without figuring out the “and then what” part. So when they get to that moment in the screenplay, it’s no coincidence why they run out of ideas.

Now, to answer the original writer’s question, just because you’re basing your movie on the logline you wrote ahead of time, that doesn’t mean you won’t discover a better movie along the way. And, if that happens, you should go back to your logline and write it again. And if your story improves again while you’re writing it, go change your logline again. And when you’re finally done, you’ll write the big final logline that reflects what the script became. This will be the logline you send out to people.

I know lots of screenwriters think loglines are evil. But they can help you write a good movie if you let them. The more vagaries your concept includes, the more you should turn to your logline as a way to figure out the script’s problems.

So go forth and write those loglines, my friends! And if you’re having trouble, I offer two services that can help. One is a quick-and-dirty rating and analysis of your logline that goes for $25. The other is a more involved process where we can e-mail back and forth, collectively working on your logline until we get it right. That’s $40. E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line “logline help.”

KINETIC by Chris Dennis!!!!!

Bradley Cooper for Clay?

Here’s the logline for Kinetic: “Following a harrowing phone call while out on the road, a long haul trucker with a tormented past must deliver a tank of liquid crystal meth before sundown in order to save his pregnant wife.”

If you missed it, you can see all five finalist loglines here.

To be honest, today’s winner was a difficult call. Crescent City, Mother Redeemer, and Kinetic were neck and neck all weekend as I tried to decide who the winner was. The argument for Crescent City was its deep interesting mythology, its modern lead character, its enormous potential as a franchise, and it being the highest concept of the bunch. The argument for Mother Redeemer was that it had the best character development, the lowest budget, and has an amazing third act. Mark my words, when this movie gets made, the line “I’m the Mother Redeemer, motherf#cker,” will be one of the most quoted lines of the year.

In the end, the reason Kinetic edged out the others is that it knew exactly what it wanted to be and gives the audience exactly what they want. This is a good old fashioned action movie. It’s about a dude in a truck who some bad people decide to f*ck with and in the process they unleash the kraken. There’s no other script in the top 5 that has a clearer poster or trailer than Kinetic.

It’s The Equalizer. It’s John Wick. It’s Taken. But wrapped in this dirty messy rural universe. Clay, the main character, feels like a descendent of the cowboys from those old Clint Eastwood movies. And the trucker angle is just unique enough to set this movie apart from its influences. This is the blue collar version of Taken. And I have no doubt there’s a huge audience for that.

On top of all that, I see franchise potential. This main character is such a badass that he could carry three or four more Kinetic movies if we want. That factored into the win as well. Because like I told you guys from the very beginning of this contest. I wanted to find MOVIES. Not scripts. MOVIES. And this is the most movie script of all 2000 entries I received.

There’s one more thing that pushed Kinetic over the edge. The main character, Clay, is surprisingly deep for an action movie hero. Chris Dennis, the writer, explains what he was thinking when he conceived of the character:

“Clay isn’t your typical one-dimensional hero seen in this sort of script. He’s broken. He’s unsure of himself. He’s planned out this life with his wife but he’s not sold on it. Only when he realizes that he’s about to lose it all does he steel himself to recover it at all costs. There’s been mention of the cocaine scene in the truck, the one where Clay is forced by his captor to snort it off the steering wheel. The cocaine isn’t his ‘Popeye spinach’… no. It’s symbolic of this life he’s worked desperately to put behind him. The hurt, the loss, the pain of everything he’s experienced encapsulated in that thin white line. And when that asshole puts a gun to his head and forces him to partake, Clay sees that life he’s built starting to crumble, and realizes that the only way out is if he takes matters into his own hands. It’s devastating for him in the moment, but if he doesn’t act, what follows will be even more heartbreaking!”

If you’re wondering how Chris wrote such a great script, his story should be inspiring to all of you. It’s basically what I’ve been telling you guys all along. Keep writing, keep reading, and keep learning. You do that long enough, you’re going to write something great. Here’s Chris on how he got to this point:


“For a brief time I thought I wanted to direct films, even went to school for it, but as I became more aware of the movie making process, I was instinctively drawn to how films looked on the page, which led me to buying Syd Fields’ classic, “Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting.” From there, I started to track down the screenplays of my favorite movies to read and compare them with how they looked on the screen, which helped me understand how the written word is translated visually (I also read a certain spectacular blog! – Carson note: I added the word “spectacular”). I played around with writing screenplays for a bit, wrote some absolutely utter crap, but it was around ’08/’09 that I fully committed to taking writing more seriously, to really try to hone my craft and find my voice. I scheduled time to write; tried to never miss a day unless I absolutely had to. Ever since then I’ve made it a goal to write 2-3 feature length screenplays a year – some years it’s easy, others it feels like a monumental task (and that was in pre-pandemic times!).

“A lot of people pause when I tell them I’ve been at this for over a decade now without ‘breaking in.’ Sure, it’s a loooooooong time, I know, but I keep going because deep down I love screenwriting. It satisfies some strange desire in me, and I figure if I love it enough to do it for free, it’ll be that much more fulfilling the moment someone wants to write a check for me to do it. Plus I’m an optimist… I just know my next script is going to be my best. I won’t say the journey’s been easy… not at all. The entire time I’ve been writing I’ve had to juggle a ton of obligations, ranging from full-time jobs to being a husband and a father to 3 kids under the age of ten. But I still find time to write. I wake up at 3 am before the rest of my day starts to write. I stay up late on the weekends to write. And much to the chagrin of my wife, I often skip out on non-essential family functions to write. Why? Because I love it, and because deep down I know that I still need to hone my craft.

“Though I’ve yet to ‘break in,’ I have some modest success in contests along the way, which keeps signaling to me that I’m on the right path. I’m a 3-time Page Awards winner (Grand Prize shy of the Grand Slam), a 3-time Launch Pad Feature Finalist, WeScreenplay Feature winner, along with high placements in several other contests. Now I can add another to this list — THE LAST GREAT SCREENPLAY CONTEST!!!!!!!!!!”

I also asked Chris what inspired him to write Kinetic specifically:

“The seed of the idea came to me while driving and listening to the song “Thinking On A Woman,” by Colter Wall. The song is kind of a lamentation on the tragic side of long-haul trucking… about missed time, lost love, and the vices a man turns to in order to ease his troubled mind. I had been on the search for an idea that was somewhat contained, so I took the character of this song and flipped his situation. What if he’s overcome his demons? They’re there, sure, but he’s managing to keep them at bay. And what if he’s on his last haul, heading home to a pregnant wife to leave this lonely life on the road for good? But what if that happy life he’s heading home to is suddenly put into jeopardy? What lengths would this man go to in order to preserve that little slice of heaven that he’s built?

So with that as my jumping off point, I molded this truck driving character, Clay Cutler, as a disgraced Special Forces veteran and a recovering addict, who’s nearly got his life back in order when the shit hits the fan and he has to overcome obstacle after obstacle to get that life back. I set out to write an old school action flick with no filler, semi-contained (pun intended), with one hero and one goal: to get his wife and unborn child back, no matter what it takes. And once Clay makes that decision, there’s nothing that’s going to stop him.”

As I’m reading back Chris’s answers, I’m reminded of something else I loved about the script – the recklessness of both the story and its hero. I’ve been reading a lot of screenplays lately where the writers let up on the gas, which leaves the script feeling neutered. Kinetic, true to its title, barrels forward in a way that other writers are scared to do. It’s almost like they’re afraid they’ll be unable to keep it up til the last page. Kinetic is this don’t-stop-til-the-last-credit-rolls force of nature. It really wants to deliver on its promise for a great fun action movie. And it does that.

So what’s next for Kinetic, Chris, and myself?

GETTING THIS MOVIE MADE, BABY!

I’ve just started talking to close contacts about Kinetic. I’m trying to find out which production houses want to make a movie like this. I’m going to be coming after Original Film (Fast and Furious guys). I’m going to be coming after 87Eleven (Stahelski and Leitch’s company). G-Base (Gerard Butler’s company) is going to get a call. Atlas Entertainment. Village Roadshow. Thunder Road. Millenium.

And hey, if you’re a production house that makes movies like Kinetic and you’re reading this post right now, E-MAIL ME (carsonreeves1@gmail.com). I’ll jump on Zoom with you tomorrow and if we click, we’ll set this up somewhere by the end of the week! I see this as a slam dunk. It’s not a matter of if it will get made. It’s a matter of who makes it with us.

Congratulations to Chris Dennis one more time. By this time next year I hope we’ll be sharing with you all the crazy stories from the set. :)

WANT YOUR OWN SCRIPTSHADOW GLORY? – This is a reminder that the next Amateur Showdown (High Concept Showdown – where only high concept scripts can compete) is coming in March! So get those scripts ready! If you don’t know what a high concept is, check out this post here…

Amateur Showdown Genre: HIGH CONCEPT
Where: Entries should be sent to carsonreeves3@gmail.com
What: Include title, genre, logline, why you think your script deserves a shot, and a PDF of your script!
Entries Due: Thursday, March 4, 6:00pm Pacific Time

P.S. Tomorrow, the SCRIPTSHADOW LAST GREAT SCREENPLAY CONTEST finalists are announced!

We’re almost there!

We’re exactly one day away from the announcement of the finalists in the Scriptshadow Last Great Screenplay Contest.

But before we get there, I wanted to share some final thoughts about the competition. When you’re reading 3-4 screenplays a day, a clarity comes over you about why some screenplays work and others don’t. It has something to do with seeing good writing and bad writing side by side.

The biggest difference between an okay script and a good script is that okay writers put the onus on the reader while good writers put the onus on themselves. What I mean by that is, okay writers feel that the very act of writing a screenplay should get them points from the reader. “I spent all this time on this. I created all these characters. I wrote seven drafts. You owe me your appreciation.”

Good writers don’t care about that. They know that’s the last thing that is going to affect a reader’s interest in their screenplay. Instead, they know only one thing matters: Does the reader want to keep reading?

Do they want to keep reading after the first scene?
Do they want to keep reading on page 10?
Do they want to keep reading at the end of the first act?
Do they want to keep reading at the midpoint?

Having a vague belief that the reader wants to keep reading at those checkpoints is not what I’m talking about. I’m saying you’ve specifically designed your story in a way that you’re using story devices in those moments that keep a reader interested.

You’re using suspense. You’re using mystery. You’re creating intrigue. You’re creating worry. You’re creating tension. You’re offering questions that need to be answered. You’re using conflict. You’re throwing difficult challenges or complications at your characters. You’re building a sequence towards a clear climax. You’re setting up interesting unresolved problems between characters (that readers have to stick around for to see them resolved).

Let’s look at yesterday’s script, which did a great job keeping the reader invested all the way up to its climax. The first part of the script is a “building” sequence. That means you’re clearly building towards a mini-climax (a climax that’s going to come within the next 8-15 pages). Tom meets Sandra and they start dating. Everything is going well. But, uh oh, Sandra’s troubled brother enters the picture. He owes a lot of money to someone and if he doesn’t pay it, they’ll kill him.

This is a complication in the relationship. Readers naturally want to then see if your characters can overcome this complication. We also get the sense that Sandra might not be who she says she is. So we’re worried that Tom may be getting played (another complication). More importantly, we’re still building the storyline. The two get closer. The brother’s problems get worse. Until, finally, they have to deal with it. Tom gives Sandra the money to pay off her brother’s debt. And the next day, she disappears.

We then cut backwards in time to Sandra months ago. She’s a coked-out hooker. Huh? A mystery (or you could call it a question): Why is Sandra a coked-out hooker? Gotta keep reading to find out! We then build our second sequence. Sandra meets a mysterious guy (mystery!) who offers to help her out. This new guy, Max, then takes her under his wing and builds (a key word here – when the reader can feel you building towards something, they’re more likely to stick around) her into a con artist. But then we start worrying that Max may be doing the same thing to Sandra that Sandra was doing to Tom. And we have to keep reading to find out!

That’s such an important thing I just said so let me repeat it. You want to create a series of situations where the only way for the reader to find out what he wants to know is to keep reading. If you don’t pose any questions, the reader doesn’t need any answers. You need to dangle a series of carrots in front of the reader at all times. If you give the donkey (your reader) any of those carrots to eat, you must replace it with a new carrot. The less carrots you dangle in front of the reader, the harder it is to keep them invested. Most good stories have 3-5 carrots dangling at all times.

Conversely, I was reading a script from the contest and after a strong first scene (which is why the script advanced) it went 25 pages of straightforward setup. Setup of characters. Setup of their situations in life. Setup of where they lived. There was no thought at all put into keeping the reader invested during this time. I was bored out of my mind. Which is what I’m talking about. A good writer never lets that happen. Even when the task is difficult. I would guess that this writer’s argument would be, “Well, I had a lot of characters to set up. I didn’t have a choice.”

No. No no no no no no no no no no.

You never have an excuse to NOT ENTERTAIN the reader. Don’t ever sell yourself that lie. That lie is why you haven’t broken in yet.

Earlier this year, I read an Agatha Christie type script – a bunch of characters come to an island to visit a mysterious rich guy – and the writer had a dozen characters to set up. Did he spend the first 20 pages giving us a boring rundown of each character? No, he set up a few characters on the boat ride in. Then when they get to the house, the caretaker is waiting at the front door but he’s difficult. He has a set of rules about who gets in and who doesn’t. This leads to a few heated arguments. In other words, the writer built a scene around CONFLICT to keep the reader entertained while he was introducing his characters.

Now you may say, “Big deal, Carson. That’s not hard.” Tell that to the thousand-plus scripts I’ve read that introduced their characters in the most boring way possible. This writer could’ve easily had the caretaker be nice. Offer no resistance at all. Open up the door. Everybody walks in. Continue the character introductions for another five pages. And we’re already bored. You have the option, at every point in your screenplay, of asking, “Is the reader entertained right now?” If there is even a small chance that they are not, you need to start troubleshooting and figure out how to keep them invested. Add some conflict. Add some mystery. Build towards an approaching mini-climax (something that’s going to come to a head within the next 8-15 pages).

I realize it’s hard to quantify this stuff into a clear set of rules. But basically you want to change your mindset from being a “writer” to being a “designer.” You’re designing a series of sequences in your screenplay that are constructed to keep a reader’s interest.

You’re not writing “whatever comes to mind” and hoping for the best. If you write like that, your reader will lose interest at some point. Unless you’re one of those 1 in a million writing geniuses. But I wouldn’t bank on that. Instead, design each segment of your story to be impossible not to keep reading.

There’s one caveat to this. You have to know how to create strong interesting characters. Nothing I’ve said above works unless we either like or are intrigued by your main characters. I recently read a script by a beginner writer that technically checked a lot of these boxes I talked about. But the characters were way too thin. They didn’t act like real people at all. So even though the writer created conflict between his characters, even though he came up with plenty of complications for them to endure, I was still bored because I didn’t care about anyone.

I’m not going to get into what makes a good character because that would take another 40,000 words. But I’ll leave you with a tip. Think of each character as their own individual story. Because they are. They’ve lived this whole life up until this movie started. Draw from that life to create the things that make us interested in them. There are a lot of qualities that make characters likable or interesting. The Queen’s Gambit used a popular one – a girl who loses her mother in a car crash and is forced to live in an orphanage. Who’s not going to have sympathy for someone in that situation?

Make no mistake. The writer didn’t just stumble onto that. He DESIGNED it. He designed the character’s life in a way so that you would feel sympathy for her. It was calculated. Which is exactly how you need to be. You need to design characters we like or are interested in. And then you need to design a series of sequences in your screenplay that are impossible not to keep reading.

That takes humility. You are admitting that just throwing your stream-of-conscious thoughts onto the page isn’t enough. You need to design it. Then, and only then, will writers lose themselves in your work.

Seeya tomorrow with the CONTEST FINALISTS!