The Batman director, Matt Reeves’, big secret Netflix project.

Genre: Short Story (Science Fiction)
Premise: Set in the near future where, instead of criminals going to prison, their memories are wiped and they’re allowed back into society, a family man with no memory of the horrible crime he committed must learn to reintegrate back into his old life.
About: BIG bidding war on this one. Last year Matt Baker had a string of big short story sales. One of those went to Noah Hawley. This one went to Matt Reeves. All the studios plus all the streamers bid on this project with Netflix and Apple duking it out in the finals. Of course Netflix always wins when they want something bad enough, snagging the adaptation rights for 7 figures. Although Matt Reeves hasn’t officially been announced as director, you’d think the bidding war had a lot to do with him saying he’d likely direct it. You can read the short story yourself here.
Writer: Matt Baker
Details: 10,000 words (your average screenplay is about 25,000 words)

Bale for Washington?

We’re going BIG CONCEPT again today, baby!

It’s like we’re back in the spec boom where every project was high concept.

You may have to go into the short story universe to find some of today’s high concepts but they’re still out there.

My biggest question today is, what made everybody so crazy about this? It’s rare, these days, that you get this many entities bidding on something. With such a big premise and so much interest, I’m expecting to get knocked out of the park here. Join me so we can get knocked out together.

Washington, or “Wash,” arrives at his home for the first time in a year. There, he’s reacquainted with his wife, Mia, his 14 year old daughter, Sophie, and his third grade son, Jaden.

The thing is, Wash doesn’t know these people. They know him. But Wash’s memories of them and everything else have been wiped. His episodic memories, at least. Not his semantic memories. That’s when you know what a restaurant is but you can’t remember ever eating at one.

The reason Washington’s memory has been wiped is because he did something that warranted life in prison. And in the future, they’re able to use tax payer dollars to wipe away the parts of your life that led you to do your crime. The more serious the crime, the more memories they erase. Wash’s crime was as bad as it gets. So everything was erased.

He’s occasionally visited by a Reintroduction Supervisor, who explains all this to him. But it doesn’t help much. He’s still sleeping next to a woman he doesn’t know. He’s still eating dinner with children he has no memory of. They say they’re his family but it sure doesn’t feel like it.

However, Washington gradually works through the frustration. He gets a job washing dishes at a diner. He celebrates his anniversary with Mia. He takes the kids bow-hunting. And while there are aspects of his family that remain alien to him, he learns to love them again, even if it’s different from the way it used to be.

One day, while watching Jaylen play baseball, a fellow memory-wiped felon comes up to him for a chat. The conversation leads to the obvious. What did Wash do? Wash says he doesn’t know. They don’t have a computer at their house (Carson note: ????). The felon says they have computers at the library. He can go there.

Once his year-long reintroduction period is over, Wash’s curiosity gets the best of him. He goes to the library, rents a computer, and looks his name up. It’s what we’ve been waiting for for the last 9500 words. We’re finally going to find out what this story is about! What did Wash do!!!??? Well, I hope you’re not someone who likes answers. Because after searching, Wash decides not to click on any of the links. He walks away, content with living in the future instead of the past.

The End.

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh boy.

If you witnessed any steam coming out of your computer just now, that would be originating from my ears. Because that’s how furious I am with the ending of this so-called short story.

Okay. Calm down, Carson. Calllllllm. Stay calm. Don’t freak out.

Grrrrrrrrr.

All right. I’m going to try and analyze this with an open mind.

Whenever you come up with a big idea, there’s a major step that follows that. That step is: WHAT’S YOUR ANGLE? What’s the angle you’re going to tell your story from.

For example, if you came up with a serial killer concept, you could tell that story from the angle of the person investigating the killer. Or you could tell the story from the serial killer’s perspective. You can keep the investigation inside the FBI. Or you can include a notorious second serial killer to help with the investigation.

The angle is just as important as the concept. This could’ve been about a criminal murderer whose memory was wiped who then gets brought back into a life of crime by his old crew.

Instead, the angle taken here is straight drama. And when I say straight drama. I mean STRAIGHT DRAMA. There isn’t a single cool sci-fi element in this story. It is 100% about a guy trying to reintegrate back into a family.

If you’re judging it strictly on that, I’d probably give it a C. Maybe a B-. Because even the family stuff here isn’t explored that well. I have little to no feel for his wife at all. And the kids even less so. It’s just a circular series of Wash thinking to himself, “I don’t know these people as well as they seem to know me.” And if the whole point of your story is to explore the family dynamic, shouldn’t I know all the characters intimately when I’m finished?

The only thing driving my interest was, what did Wash do? That’s all I care about. Admittedly, it’s a strong reason to keep reading. I was willing to push through all this family stuff to find out what he did. So when we get to that last line only to receive a Sophomore year in college Creative Writing exercise ending of “The End” right before we get our answer, I nearly had a seizure.

THAT’S THE ONLY REASON I READ TO THE END! AND YOU CAN’T EVEN GIVE ME THAT???

If you want to pull off one of these ambiguous endings – which are REALLY hard to do – the rest of your story has to be flawless. And this isn’t. In fact, very little of what happens makes sense. For example, why wouldn’t his family tell him what he did? They haven’t been instructed not to. He’s clearly curious, especially early on. Why aren’t they telling him?

I’ll answer that for you. IT’S BECAUSE THE WRITER DIDN’T WANT TO TELL YOU. Not because the characters didn’t. It’s because it worked better for the writer’s story if he kept that a mystery. So screw real world logic in order to keep us reading to the end. That’s a cheat.

Next, what kind of world are we living in where people don’t own computers? This is supposedly set at least 20 years in the future. There isn’t a smart phone mentioned in this story. Why? Because a smart phone would allow Wash to check what he did and we needed to keep that a mystery til the end. So we’ll just… create a false future where we have the power to erase specific memories in our heads but nobody carries around a smart phone. Sure, cause that makes sense.

I have a sneaking suspicion this is a really old short story this writer wrote way back when the internet started. Cause that’s how it reads. Nobody here acts like they know what the internet is.

Sorry, I’m going crazy trying to wrap my head around how this sold.

Here’s my guess. I have three potential scenarios.

The first is the most unlikely but I concede it’s a possibility. Maybe it’s the very fact that the writer explored this concept as an emotional drama that attracted everyone – that the writer didn’t take the concept down an obvious route. Not to mention, like we were talking about yesterday, this version of the idea is the cheapest version you can shoot.

Option 2 is that Matt Reeves liked the story and everyone was bidding on Matt Reeves, not the story itself. I believe this sold not long after Reeves got The Batman gig, which means he was really hot at the time and everyone was looking to get in bed with him. They simply trusted what Reeves was going to do with the material. He could’ve pitched them a movie about a man repairing a lawnmower and they would’ve begged to be involved.

The final possibility is that Matt Reeves liked THE CONCEPT of this short story but not the execution, which he plans to change. This actually happens a lot with adaptations. I haven’t read The Godfather novel but everybody says that it’s horrible and nothing like the movie. Ditto, Die Hard. So he may well be taking this concept down a more exciting road.

I sure hope he does because if you adapt what the story is now – which is a guy moping around for 90 minutes about his boring life and then going to see who he murdered but changing his mind at the last second? If you give us that movie, there are going to be whatever the Netflix equivalent is of riots in the streets.

I’m kinda baffled here, guys. I was hoping for so much more when I read this.

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

What I learned: Memory is a fun thing to play with in storytelling. Amnesia in Bourne Identity. Rolling memory loss in Memento. Digital memories inserted in Total Recall. If you can craft an idea that plays with memory in a creative way, chances are you’ve got a good screenplay on your hands.

First off, congratulations to everyone who got their script in before the deadline. You’re probably wondering how many screenplays I’ve received and the answer is I’m not sure because I haven’t counted them all yet. But it’s somewhere between 800-1200.

I’ve read the first 10 pages of 50 of those scripts. It’s been a fun exercise so far. You never know what you’re going to get. Literally, someone sent me a script with the message, “Fun Fact: I wrote this entire script on my cell phone.” And then, in the very next entry I got a Nicholl winner. So the level of competition is all over the place.

Let’s start by detailing my filtering system. I’ve created four folders. They are, “YES,” “MAYBE HIGH,” “MAYBE LOW,” and “NO.” A “Yes” means the first ten pages were really good! When I go back for my second round of reading, I will read the entire script for any “Yes.”

“Maybe High,” means that the pages held some promise but they weren’t good enough to get me jumping up and down like I did with the yeses. When I go back for my second round of reads, I will at least read these scripts to the midpoint. If I’m bored at the midpoint, sayonara.

“Maybe Low,” is a script that hasn’t kept my interest through the first ten pages but there’s something tugging at me to give it a second chance. It may be that I like the writing. It may be that while the plotting is weak, there’s a character I’m curious about. During the second round of reads, I’ll read at least another ten pages of these scripts and, if they manage to reel me back in, I’ll keep reading.

A “No” script is pretty clear. I’m done with that script. A “no” script can basically be broken down into two categories. There are writers that can’t even write properly, like the “I wrote my script on a cell phone” guy, and then boring scripts. These are writers who obviously know the basic principles of screenwriting but their first ten pages were boring.

And if there’s one big tip to give off these first 50 reads, it’s one we discuss all the time here on Scriptshadow, which makes it all the more frustrating that it continues to be a problem.

That tip is, start off with something interesting happening. Now “interesting” is a subjective term, obviously. Some people found Hamilton interesting. I did not. But here’s a new definition for your screenwriting dictionary. Whatever you think is interesting enough to capture a reader in the first ten pages, TRIPLE that and now your scene actually has a chance at being interesting.

Cause there were a lot of opening scenes where the writer could make the technical argument that something interesting was happening. But the scene was still lame.

For example, a common start to a script is a dead body. Or a murder that just happened. Now you may say to yourself, “That’s INTERESTING!” Except that you’re competing against hundreds of other scripts that start with a dead body or a murder. So what are you going to bring to the table that’s going to make your opening murder scene more interesting than everybody else’s?

And then we have the writers who start with their characters going through their day. They wake up. They make breakfast. They do chores. I mean, come on. Even if you’re attempting a “quiet before the storm” scenario, I’m already bored on page 4 of your script. That’s the last place you a want a reader to be.

The best script I’ve read so far DOES start with a “quiet before the storm” moment but the ‘quiet’ part lasts HALF A PAGE. Not four pages. Or eight pages. Screenplays are like New York real estate. You can’t buy the land and put up some lazy generic building. You’re competing with 50,000 other buildings. You have to stand out somehow.

Anyway, back to my process.

I start off by reading the first ten pages. I do not read the logline. I avoid this because I want to see if the writing and the story pulls me in without a logline. However, if I’m struggling through the first ten, I will go back to the e-mail and check if it’s a good logline. I do this to hopefully give the read a boost, as, assuming it’s a good logline, I’ll go back into the script with more optimism.

I also check the logline after every ten page read regardless.

Now to the results so far. I have 42 “No’s” so far. I have 5 “Maybe Lows.” I have 2 “Maybe Highs.” And I have exactly 1 “Yes.”

What did the yes do that got me to say yes? Hmm, let’s see. It was a very graphic opening scene that grabbed me right away. The writer used some irony in that we start the script with a little girl walking and then she stumbles upon something that is basically the most horrible thing you can imagine. Actually, you can’t imagine it. And that’s actually a good point to note. What the girl saw was literally something I’ve never seen before. 98% of these other scripts are giving me the same stuff I’ve seen already. The same images. The same characters. The same tricks. So it really matters when someone shows me something I haven’t seen before.

But it wasn’t just that. The writing was colorful. It did a great job pulling me into the writer’s world. This is something that a lot of “NO” writers struggled with. Their writing was generic. Bland. The words and phrasing they used were basic and common. So it was hard to get pulled into their worlds. And, to be honest, when someone wrote like that, it was accompanied by similar problems in other areas. The dialogue would be very basic and bland. The scenes themselves would be unimaginative and bland.

With that said, I’ve read a couple of entries that had the opposite problem. They were vastly overwritten. So even though they were painting a more visual movie on the page than the bland writers, the paragraphs went on for too long, the words became too numerous, and it got to the point where it was gumming up the read.

Lol, so I understand your frustrations. This craft is tough. You have to strike that perfect balance.

Another common scenario I ran into was the abbreviated “exciting” opening that was then followed by 9 boring pages. It’s almost as if these writers said, “FINE, I’ll give you your exciting opening. But then I’m going to set up all my characters and my plot gosh darnit!” So they get the teaser out of the way as quickly as possible so they can say they did their job of hooking the reader right away, then follow that with nine pages of setup sauce.

It doesn’t work that way. You’re not supposed to begrudgingly give the reader their “entertainment” so that you can get on with the “more important stuff.” Regardless of whether you’re writing “fun” or “serious” scenes, they should always ALWAYS be entertaining.

As for how this is going to go moving forward. I’m going to read through this first round of 10 pages. Then I will do my second round where I start reading the good scripts in more depth, which I’ll share with you when that starts. And then I’ll probably have a group of scripts where I have to figure out who wins. Whether that be one person, two people. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried that no script was good to enough to win. That’s happened to me before in a contest. But we’ll just hope that doesn’t happen here, lol.

I think I originally said I’ll announce the winner (along with the close-call scripts) somewhere around mid-September. But that’s going to be pushed back with the extended deadline and all the Covid stuff. So I’m expecting I’ll announce the winner somewhere between mid-September and mid-October. But don’t worry, I’ll be keeping you updated. I’m probably going to use these Thursday entries to talk about the contest. So you can always check back every Thursday to get the latest.

And one last thing. If you ever happen to write a screenplay on your cell phone, don’t use that as your marketing pitch for why people should read your script. :)

Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: A woman wakes up on a spaceship that has landed on a distant planet but has no memory of how she got there or why her uniform is covered in blood.
About: This came from the 2018 Hit List. I’ll paste the info from there about the writer: “Jonni is a German-Brazilian screenwriter who has seen every inch of the globe. Born in Switzerland and raised in Spain, he moved to London to get his degree in Film & Television Production. Since then, he’s worked in advertising and the broadcast department for the London Olympics. He’s recently found himself in New York where he received his MFA in writing from Tisch School of Arts. Since finishing ASH, Jonni is working on several projects for both film and TV.”
Writer: Jonni Remmler
Details: 108 pages

I am hereby petitioning for Sonoya Mizuno to get this role.

It’s been a rough few days. I suffered through ten hours of people singing and dancing about the Constitution. After that, I battled through a script that had more description in it than the Bible if it were translated by Leo Tolstoy. And while my gym has finally reopened, they’ve mandated that I wear the equivalent of a hazmat suit to work out. As if I didn’t have enough excuses not to go the gym already!

It was clear what was needed. The ultimate Scriptshadow picker-upper. The thing that got me juiced to start this website in the first place. The SCI-FI SPEC! To me, sci-fi and spec screenplays are the screenwriting world’s equivalent of peanut butter and jelly, the special sauce in an In and Out burger, the blinking “Hot Now” sign on the Krispy Kreme marquee.

I needed a shot of all those things directly into my bloodstream. So take a trip with me into outer space, Adam Driver Inside Llewyn Davis style. Link hands script friends and pour yourself a milky way sarsaparilla. Actually, pour the drink first, then link hands. We’re about to be blasted off into spec script nirvana. At least I hope we are…

28 year-old Riya has just woken up in a strange futuristic room. Her uniform is covered in blood, seemingly from a large gash in her forehead. The large metallic room has all its furniture pushed up against the only door. Riya stumbles over and looks through the window in the door. There’s a hallway with a large blood stain in it. Uh-oh, don’t want to go in there.

Luckily, there’s an automatic food processor in the room so Riya can easily stay fed. In the meantime, she tries to figure out how she got here, and we experience that with her via flashbacks. She remembers earth, something about the planet dying, and possibly being part of a crew that may have fled the planet.

Eventually, Riya gets out of the room and starts seeing dead members of her crew, who all seem to have been beaten to death. She also finds a window to the outside, and that’s when she realizes she’s on some distant volcanic planet. Riya continues to remember bits and pieces of her past and zeroes in on how one member of her team, Jones, is missing. She must be the one who’s killing everybody.

Before Riya can test this hypothesis, a man named Brion shows up. He says he came down from an orbiting ship that’s part of the same team she’s on. And that he’s here because SHE sent a distress call. Since a sand storm is moving in, they’ll have to wait two days to walk back to his shuttle.

In the meantime, they try to find Jones. But, of course, there is no Jones. (spoilers!) Brion ultimately reveals himself to be the killer. And to make things worse, he’s not even human. He’s an alien entity from this planet who has slipped inside Riya’s own brain! Which means that Brion isn’t even real. Brion, aka the alien, is Riya herself. Unable to process that she’s the killer, Riya asks what happens next. Brion explains that he will slowly consume all her brain functions and she’ll cease to exist. The End.

There’s nothing bad about this script. In fact, it would’ve easily passed the Last Screenplay Contest First 10 Pages Challenge. Waking up into a strange situation with no memory of how you got there is an easy way to quickly pull readers in.

But this is the definition of what all screenwriters should be wary of: the standard execution screenplay. Standard Execution is when you have a concept and you execute it the same way 99% of other screenwriters would’ve executed it.

A girl wakes up on a spaceship with amnesia.

There’s a mystery about someone killing crew members.

A mysterious man shows up outside. Wants to be let in. He appears to be friendly. But is he?

I’ve read this exact scenario in screenplays, maybe 250 times. Not long ago, we reviewed a script about how earth lost all its oxygen and a family in a bunker lets in a couple of strangers. So it’s a common setup. And to be clear, it’s used a lot because it works. But it only works when you play with the formula in unexpected ways.

And while I wouldn’t say this feels exactly like other films. It’s familiar enough that you’re always ahead of it. That’s where you don’t want to be as a writer. ESPECIALLY if it’s a mystery script like this one. Because the whole point of adding a mystery is to give the reader an unknown experience, something where they’re constantly trying to figure out what’s going on and then you keep pulling the rug out from under them.

I’m not sure anybody reads this and doesn’t know that Riya is the one who killed everyone long before the third act reveal occurs.

Another thing I wanted to point out was there’s this prevailing belief that budgetary constraints lead to more creative choices. When 90s vagabond director Robert Rodriquez was the hottest thing in Hollywood for making an $8000 movie, he would talk about this all the time.

But I’m not so sure this is true. Because while I read this, it felt like a lot of uninspired choices were made due to wanting to keep the movie cheap. Like the fact that there’s an alien involved, but he’s always strategically in human form. Humans are cheaper to shoot than aliens. But aliens are so much cooler than humans. So did budgetary constraints in this instance really make the movie better?

And now that we’ve had some distance from Robert Rodriquez’s filmmaking heyday, can we really say that the choices in his movies made them any better? He’s certainly good at making a lot of goofy nonsense. But maybe we shouldn’t be taking advice from a guy who’s basically become the D-level version of James Cameron.

All of this is to say that special effects are getting cheaper by the year. The Stagecraft technology that they use on The Mandalorian shows just how far a dollar can go these days. So yes, you want to be aware of budget as a screenwriter. I’m not telling you to write World War 7 set on Mars in 2744. But don’t let it handcuff you if you have a really cool idea in an otherwise low-budget film.

Again, I didn’t dislike this script. I always get excited when I read a sci-fi spec and I’m always looking for the writer who’s come up with the next Source Code. I’ll continue to champion everyone writing in this genre. But this script played out too predictably for me. It needed to take more chances in its plotting.

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

What I learned: One of the things you should be trying to do in a script is make your characters sound different from one another. But never do this at the expense of logic. So here, Brion comes in and he says things like, “You don’t remember none of that.” He likes to use the word “ain’t” occasionally. Astronauts are some of the most highly educated people in the world and, therefore, would never talk like this. So yes on talking differently. No on talking nonsensically. (note: this is *sort of* explained at the end but not convincingly enough to void this lesson).

Just TWO DAYS LEFT to get your scripts in for The Last Great Screenplay Contest. July 4th. 11:59pm Pacific Time. carsonreeves3@gmail.com. I cannot wait to see what you’ve got in store! But first…

Story time!

When I was a wee little tyke screenwriter, long before the days of Scriptshadow, I made a lot of mistakes. In fact, if there was a mistake to be made, I probably made it. But one of the biggest mistakes still haunts me to this day. Not because, if I hadn’t made that mistake, I would’ve sold the screenplay. But because it was embarrassing. I still cringe whenever I think about it.

When I used to teach tennis, I had a tennis student who was high up on the food chain at a certain prestige cable channel. I had been carefully mentioning my writing aspirations to her every few lessons and, over time, she started asking me what I was working on. It just so happened that the genre of the script I was working on was exactly what the channel was looking for at the moment.

So this lesson of mine put her reputation on the line with the head of the company, saying that she had a script from someone that was just what he was looking for. Long story short, there was this very specific time frame where he could read it. She came to me one day and said, “He can read it this Saturday on his flight. This might be your only chance to get it to him.”

Now, for the most part, my script was finished. But, of course, the excitement of this opportunity got to me and I was determined to make the script as good as it could possibly be in the next five days. I came up with an exciting new opening scene, which I wrote. I realized a chunk in the middle of the script would’ve been better served if I moved it up 20 pages. A secondary character I never quite liked was ditched in favor of a brand new character I came up with on the spot. And then, of course, I went through every single scene, rewriting lines of dialogue and lines of description to make them as good as they could possibly be.

I literally finished 20 minutes before I had to deliver the script. I printed it out (yes, this is when we had to print scripts) and raced to my lesson’s place, proudly handing her the script. For the next three days, I dreamed of my ascension into Hollywood and being the hot new screenwriter in town. It wasn’t even a dream. It was manifest destiny.

But then the next week something funny happened. My lesson canceled. And then, the week after that, she showed up, but she avoided any talk of screenwriting with me, hastily scurrying away the second the lesson ended. “Hey,” I yelled, “We still have to clean up the balls!” Next lesson, same thing. Operation Scurry Off. Finally, I just came out and asked her, “What happened with the script?” And I saw her body crumple as if her entire insides had deflated.

She explained to me that her boss “tried” to read the script. “Tried” being the operative word here. But it was so incomprehensible that he gave up after the first 20 pages. Although she didn’t say it out loud, the vibe I got from her is that this lowered her a peg in the company. This man’s time was extremely valuable and she wasted it on a script that wasn’t even ‘not good.’ But a script that was so bad you didn’t even understand what was going on.

Now being a young defensive screenwriter who believed that everything he wrote was genius, I blamed this on “Hollywood bullshit.” He probably wasn’t paying attention. He never gave the script a chance. Because I didn’t have a big agent, he didn’t give me the same amount of respect as he would an “established” screenwriter.

But let me tell you, a year down the road, I opened that script back up. And it wasn’t just bad. It was unreadable. In the moment, all those last-second changes that I’d come up with made perfect sense. But because I never allowed them to sit and never came back to the script with an adequate amount of time passed and fresh eyes, I couldn’t see just how messy the script was.

All of this is to remind you not to make the same mistake I did. When you have a script deadline – whether it be The Last Great Screenplay Contest, the Nicholl, an important contact who wants to read it this Saturday – you have to understand what you can and cannot do when there’s only a few days left. And I’m going to help you with that right now.

First – your script should be finished. If you’re still writing the last act right now, don’t bother sending your script to me. I’m serious. I will hate it. I can guarantee that. The ending is everything. It ties the story together. It’s the payoff to everything you’ve set up. If you don’t even have that written yet, that means there’s so many things you haven’t figured out about your story.

Second – and this should be obvious – don’t you DARE mess with the structure. This is the fastest way to destroy a screenplay with so little time left. Structure always takes the most time. So, if you’re two days away and you see a structural mistake (“The bank robbery scene should probably be moved to the midpoint”), I’m sorry but you can’t change that. It’s going to have massive ripple effects which you won’t realize for a couple of months.

Third, it’s too late to get rid of, change, or add any characters. Even characters with a limited number of scenes. You’re not going to create any character of substance in two days. Don’t mess with that. Trust me.

Next, don’t f$%# with the first five pages. The first five pages will be the most tempting to play with. But more often than not, a change you make in those first few pages is going to hurt you. A new first scene can change the way the whole script reads. We just talked about this with The King of Staten Island. Originally, the first scene of the movie, Pete driving his car with his eyes closed, was in the middle of the film. They decided to put it at the beginning and it gave you a much better feel for who the character was. But they tested that change. They had people watch both the old and new version before they committed to it. You’d be throwing in a new scene at the last second and hoping it works. That’s not a good strategy when sending a script to anyone.

Next, stop rewriting any lines in the first ten pages – any description, any dialogue – don’t rewrite lines. The chances of you misspelling a word go up 500%. I know this because every time I change a sentence right before I post an article on Scriptshadow, those are ALWAYS the sentences with the misspellings in them.

So what can you do? Proofread. That’s all you should be doing with two days left. Make sure the sentences read cleanly and don’t have any mistakes in them. All your creative work should’ve been done by now. It actually should’ve been done two weeks ago. If you see a truly glaring error that requires you to rewrite a page or a scene… I mean… I guess you can change it. But those changes have a much better shot at hurting you than helping you.

Art is a weird thing. Any change needs time before you can see it objectively. So if you’re rewriting anything of substance this late in the game, do so at your own risk.

A screenplay is not a school assignment where there’s this romanticization of barely finishing the paper on time and getting it to your professor with just minutes to go. A screenplay is your lifeblood. It’s your story. It’s your emotion. It’s what’s inside of you. It’s supposed to be the most beautiful representation of your self-expression that you can achieve through this medium. Therefore, it should be the best you can possibly make it. If you’re having to change scenes with two days to go, your script probably isn’t ready for consumption yet. I want to see your best. Not your rushed best.

Good luck to everyone. I can’t wait to see what you’ve written!

This is not an official post. The following thoughts you read will not be coherent. This show does not deserve coherent thoughts. But since there wasn’t going to be a post today, I thought I’d give you my stream-of-conscious thoughts on Ozark Season 3. A TON of people recommended this season to me. To the point where I was expecting one of the all-time great seasons of television.

That is not what I got.

What I got was shoddy writing, awful acting, and an all-around disaster of a season. But let me start with the good. The bi-polar brother character was good. His storyline worked. But he was the only storyline that worked. Everything else ranged between bad and terrible.

The thing that frustrates me most is that no one on this show knows how to write towards a goal. The season started out with a plan. The Byrds buy a casino boat they can launder money on. Okay, that’s something we can use to build a storyline around. But by the fifth episode, the casino had become background noise, something the Byrds occasionally went over to and checked on.

By the way, I’m three seasons into a show about money laundering and I still don’t know how money laundering works. And I’m positive that half the writers on this series don’t know either. Whenever money laundering is brought up, it’s done so in general terms. Some character over in the corner is doing it. Or if Marty is doing it, he keeps to himself about it. There’s never any explanation of how much money is being laundered or what the ultimate goal is other than there’s some guy in Mexico who “needs his money laundered.”

Speaking of Marty, HE HAS NOTHING TO DO ON THE SHOW!!!! The only purpose of this character is to come into a scene when two other characters are arguing and say, “Guys! Guys! We need to focus here. Okay?” I swear he said a variation of that line six million times in the season. Isn’t Marty supposed to be your main character?? Why doesn’t he have anything to do!

In Marty’s one big episode, that I call, “The Laughably Awful Excuse for a TV Episode” episode, Marty is kidnapped and taken to Mexico so the big drug cartel guy can scare him a little. The awfulness of the writing was confirmed to me when they cut to Marty, in a cell, ravenously ripping rice off a bowl with his bare hands, jamming it into his mouth, desperate for food. The problem with this moment? Marty had only been in Mexico for a FEW HOURS!!!! And he’s already starving to the point where he’s ripping food off bowls. It’s classic amateur writer hour. They want all the drama and none of the logic. It’s probably going to take your character longer than a few hours to be starving. This sequence is intercut with some faux important flashback of Marty as a kid waiting in the hospital when a parent is dying and he keeps playing one of the video games down in the waiting area. I’m sure to the writer, this video game had a ton of significance. It was symbolic. It was a metaphor! To us, it was, “WHY THE F%$# ARE YOU FOCUSING SO HARD ON THIS RANDOM STUPID VIDEO GAME??”

Oh, and don’t get me started on Ruth. The actress who plays that character is one of the single worst actresses I’ve ever seen allowed on a professional TV set. She makes the wrong choice on EVERY SINGLE LINE she reads. It’s clearly meant to be read one way and she, without fail, always emphasizes the wrong word or says the sentence the wrong way, completely killing the meaning of the line. It’s actually quite spectacular that you can make the wrong choice that many times in a row. And I didn’t keep count, but she says the word “f%$king” at least 1000 times over the course of the season. It’s one thing to keep a character’s verbiage consistent, it’s another to be plain lazy. Give the character SOMETHING to say other than “f%$king” every single time she opens her mouth.

But I soldiered on. I kept going. Because everyone said the ending of the season was great. I figured this had to all come together somehow. That something world-changing was going to happen.

I guess (spoiler) everyone was talking about the fact that they killed off the brother. And that was a nice moment. But I was expecting more.

And the baffling part about that is they killed him in episode 9. So episode 10 rolls around, after all the air had been let out of the balloon, and as a result they had NOTHING TO DO IN THE EPISODE. It was like watching a real-time 60 minute car crash. It was clear the writers had no idea where to go or what to have the characters do. Every scene was characters either standing around outside discussing something that had already happened or sitting down inside discussing what already happened.

YOUR FINAL EPISODE SHOULD NOT BE ABOUT WHAT ALREADY HAPPENED! IT SHOULD BE ABOUT WHAT’S HAPPENING NOW!

I couldn’t believe what I was watching.

And look, I’m not here to tell anyone who loved this season that they’re wrong. I get that when you become attached to characters as an audience, you don’t see the same flaws other viewers do. So if you cared about these people, your experience was likely different. The only person I cared about was the brother. But every other character was so poorly written (except for Wendy and the lawyer lady at times) that I couldn’t muster even a microcosm of interest in what happened to them.

I feel like I spent 10 hours watching a show where two things happened. You watch a season of Breaking Bad and a million things happen.

I don’t get it. Sorry. I had to get this out of my system.

Curious to hear your reaction. :)