Currently one of the best writers in town, Taylor Sheridan is back with another spec that’s expected to start a major franchise.

Genre: ACTION/CRIME
Premise: A former delta force operator is given a unique opportunity by the DEA to take down drug dealers without any oversight.
About: Can life get any better for Tyler Sheridan? The writer of Hell or High Water, Sicario, and Sicario 2, as well as writer-director of Wind River, recently moved into TV, where he took a project that wasn’t on anyone’s radar, Yellowstone, and turned it into a surprise hit. F.A.S.T doesn’t seem to be following the same narrative, unfortunately. Sheridan was in negotiations to direct it with Chris Pratt attached to star, but those negotiations broke down and the studio brought Gavin O’Connor onto the project. Since that point, it’s unclear if Pratt remains on F.A.S.T. But a new Sheridan spec is always a big deal so I’m excited to find out about it today.
Writer: Taylor Sheridan
Details: 132 pages

Will Pratt come back to the project?

I think Taylor Sheridan is one of the best writing successes of the last five years. There are hundreds of thousands of fellow actors writing screenplays. He rose above them all by putting emphasis on the things he knew best – character development and modernizing old-fashioned subject matter like cops and robbers.

The way breaking in works is that you go at screenwriting for a while until you finally write something that people like. Then everyone in Hollywood wants to work with you. Because you’ve been at this for so long, you have 2-3 scripts in the hopper that are almost there. These scripts allow you to keep the momentum going.

But once you get past those scripts, you’re writing from scratch. Now, theoretically, you’re a better writer so you should be able to write a good script faster. But the reality about screenwriting is that you need drafts. No matter how good you are, it takes half-a-dozen drafts before you even start to find your story. This is what famously happened during the writing of The Sixth Sense. That script started off about a boy who drew spooky images about a killer and ended up being about a kid who saw dead people and the psychologist who helped him.

All this is to say that the well appears to be drying up for Sheridan. His first couple of scripts were great. But Sicario 2 was a narrative mess. It was the first script where I thought, “He’s rushing this.” And I’m not mad. Look, you don’t know when the Hollywood truck of money no longer wants to pay you a visit. So you have to capitalize when you’re hot. But I’m worried that Sherdian may be biting more than he can chew. Let’s hope I’m wrong.

Kyle is a former delta force operator in the Middle East. But ever since he’s been back in Baltimore, he can barely make ends meet. His wife and two kids are tired of living in a garbage tract house. If something doesn’t change soon, he’s not sure he’ll be able to keep it together.

One day while bringing his kids home from school, Kyle spots two skinheads – who live on his block no less – carrying his TV and furniture back to their house. Kyle has his kids wait at home then goes over to get his effing stuff back. As often happens with skinheads, things escalate, and within seconds, Kyle’s killed both of them.

Kyle calls his old commander, Sheel, who now works for the DEA, and Sheel comes over to help him clean up the mess. They learn that the skinheads were drug dealers in the area. In a roundabout way, they just helped the community.

This gives Sheel an idea. You see, it’s impossible to get anything done at the DEA. There’s a thousand miles of politics and red tape. So what if you just… didn’t have to worry about that? In the Middle East, the CIA used to run a program called “F.A.S.T.” that didn’t have any laws. If you wanted to take the bad guys out, you just went to their house and did it. Sheel wants to do the same thing, but for drugs. And he wants Kyle to run it. The upside is that Kyle gets any money he finds at the houses.

There are rules, though. You can’t kill anyone. You seize drugs and money and then leave. That’s going to require a very skilled team, Kyle says. “You can use anyone you want,” Sheel replies. Kyle gets some of his best men back together and after carefully prepping their plan, they begin their operation.

The first job goes so well that they keep doing them, and within a week, they’ve done more damage to the local drug trade than the DEA has in 10 years. They’re so good at what they do that word travels to the higher-ups, who want them to take on a higher profile job – IN TURKEY. The group is flown out to Turkey where they’re going to be facing the biggest drug kingpin in the entire country. Will they make it out alive? What do you think?

To answer my earlier question – Sheridan is back!

It’s hard to figure out exactly what Sheridan does better than everyone else. Because when you take a step back and look at his screenplays from afar, they don’t seem that special. They’re covering territory – SWAT, DEA, CIA – that are so often used in movies that they’ve become cliche. And yet he’s clearly better than everyone in this genre. So what’s his secret?

The answer very well may be in the opening scene. When I read any script where a character is a vet, they always have post-traumatic stress syndrome. They’re all having trouble adjusting back into society. The ubiquity of thier condition destroys any weight it may have. The only way you break through that wall is by individualizing the character’s experience. You give them something that sells their PTSD in a way that separates them from characters in other scripts. That separation is what makes us believe they’re real.

Here, Kyle is engaged in a therapy session with a military psychiatrist. She’s asking him how he’s been doing. Kyle is trying to say all the right things. But between answers, we’re getting quick flashbacks to his time in the Middle East. He’s inside a moving van where ISIS members are taping an attempt to decapitate him. He’s only barely able to get out alive. The psychiatrist asks another question. He answers with, “I’m fine,” and we get another flashback with him casually chatting with a soldier while walking through a city and then an IED evaporates his friend. Back to therapy.

There was something about this three-pronged attack of a therapist asking him questions, him denying anything was wrong, and a flashback that proved the opposite, that sold me that this was a real vet and not that paper-then “vet in name only” character I typically see in scripts. In other words, Sheridan finds a way to sell you on his characters so that you care more about what happens to them.

And he’s so smart about it. Like the way he updates old screenwriting tricks. “Save the Cat,” for instance. The idea behind saving the cat is to get your character to do something nice for/to someone and, once the audience sees that, they’ll like the character. The problem is most screenwriters’ approaches aren’t imaginative enough to create an authentic moment. They’ll just have the hero pass a homeless man five bucks and call it a day.

But Sheridan realizes that “saving the cat” is a much broader tip than merely being nice. It’s anything that makes us like the character. The “save the cat” moment in F.A.S.T. comes when Kyle is bringing his kids home and sees a couple of skinheads walking his TV and furniture back to their house. He puts his kids in a safe room under his garage and walks over, puts a gun to the skinhead’s face, and tells him they’re going to pick everything back up and walk it right back to his house.

The reason we like this is obvious when you think about it. Skinheads are bad. We don’t like people who take our stuff. And therefore, we love anyone who’s willing to stand up to those people. Because, in our lives, we wouldn’t be able to do that. This man represents who we wish we could be.

There’s nothing you can do in a script that pays more dividends than a character people love. You could be an average writer but if you’re great at that one skill, you can go a long way in this business.

The other thing Sheridan does that makes him different is he finds these little cracks inside well-known subject matter and builds stories around them. So he doesn’t just tell a story about the CIA. Or the DEA. He creates a division within them – a totally new type of team that does a very specific job in “F.A.S.T.” You might be sensing a theme here. Sheridan looks for small ways to make his script different than all the other scripts out there. He knows that generic won’t cut it.

Problems? Sheridan sometimes adds one extra plot beat late in the second act that draws the narrative out too long. He did this with Sicario 2 and he’s doing it here as well. Late-story pacing is crucial to driving a script home. If you linger too long in plotlines that don’t matter, you risk the audience’s attention drifting away like dandelion strands on a late August afternoon. That’s the section you gotta keep tight and, despite its title, F.A.S.T. feels slow in that area.

Still, this fortifies Sheridan as one of, if not THE, top gun in this genre. I can’t think of any other writer who does it better in 2019. Can you?

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

What I learned: Dealing with emotion in screenwriting is challenging. It’s easy to oversell it, and when that happens, the moment feels cliché or on-the-nose. When I read the line, “A single tear falls down his/her cheek,” in a script, I literally throw up inside of my mouth. Which is why I’m happy to show you someone who tackles this issue successfully. Here, Kyle is being interviewed by a therapist and she gives him a rorschach test and asks what he sees. He struggles to come up with an answer, and then Sheridan writes this: “He stares at it and smiles, as his eyes well with tears ….” Why is this better than “a single tear falls down his cheek?” Because the reaction is more complex. He smiles WHILE fighting tears away. There’s contrast in reaction (two contrasting things are going on at once) which is way more honest, and therefore, a lot more authentic.

First of all, I want to thank everyone who sent a submission in for Halloween Amateur Showdown. I got a lot more submssions than I thought I would.

BUT!!!

I have to take a moment to plug my logline service (e-mail me at Carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line “logline” for a consult). So many of these submissions shot themselves in the foot due to terrible loglines with fixable issues. If you’ve never received instruction on how to properly write a logline, you should seriously consider a consult. The basic option is just $25 and the deluxe is $40. And, trust me, you’ll have a much better feel for how to properly write a logline after you get one.

Moving on. I tried to vary the TYPES of horror scripts as much as possible. That way we didn’t get 5 contained horror movies. So that may have been why your script didn’t get chosen. Other reasons your script didn’t get picked: There were a lot of loglines that weren’t clear. Some that were too outlandish. Some that sounded so simplistic I thought they were a joke (“A man believes he’s living in a haunted house and recruits his family to help him”). Some that were embarrassingly general (“A group of friends head out to a remote setting and, fearing an unspeakable evil, prepare to face it while also battling demons within.”). Some that sounded too similar to recent entries. And some that may have appealed to others but simply weren’t my jam.

What follows are the pitches that rose to the top.

Amateur Showdown is a single weekend tournament where the scripts have been vetted from a pile of hundreds to be featured here, for your entertainment. It’s up to you to read as much of each script as you can, then vote for your favorite in the comments section. Whoever receives the most votes by Sunday 11:59pm Pacific Time gets a review next Friday.

Got a great script that you believe can pummel four fellow amateurs? Send a PDF to carsonreeves3@gmail.com with the title, genre, logline, and why you think your script should get a shot.

Title: Genesis
Genre: Creature Horror
Logline: Trapped in a mountain resort by a parasitic fungus that transforms its victims into deadly hosts, a timid CDC epidemiologist must learn to lead the group of mismatched survivors to escape this primordial terror.
Why You Should Read: After my last entry on the site, “The Crooked Tree,” was selected for a previous Amateur Showdown, I received invaluable feedback from the readers that I applied to my latest effort, “Genesis,” which explores the consequences of genetically-altering Mother Nature. Drawing inspiration from a slew of 80s classics, my career as a Registered Nurse, and a few real-life scientific oddities, I crafted a unique creature-feature that serves as my love letter to this subgenre. I hope my entry impresses you enough to select it for a coveted spot in this year’s Halloween Showdown!

Title: Street View
Genre: Horror/Found Footage
Logline: When a Google Street View driver unknowingly captures footage of a murder on a desolate highway, she must figure out what she has and who wants it before she becomes the next victim.
Why You Should Read: Why you should read it: Causeway Films in my native Australia (The Babadook, The Nightingale) recently broke their rule about not accepting unsolicited scripts after my pitch to them but provided only brief feedback about why they ultimately opted against adding it to their upcoming slate, so I believe I’m close enough that the Carson words of wisdom can hone it into something that I can get made. I feel it has the commercial appeal of the found footage/horror genre but also delves into deeper themes regarding the increasing privacy intrusions of big tech in our lives and the increasing divisions between people (particularly city and rural) that stem largely from Big Tech-facilitated ideological echo chambers. The Street View car driving through forgotten towns strikes me as the perfect embodiment of these themes. I’ve also had the awkward conversation of requesting the use of a rural property belonging to a friend of mine to film a home invasion scene where my friend had previously been a victim of a home invasion at that property! I think that chutzpah alone deserves a read. Also, this is the real camera used to take street view photos. The horror practically writes itself!

Title: POSSESSIONS
Genre: Supernatural Horror
Logline: An estranged daughter returns to her childhood home to help with her mother’s extreme hoarding only to discover her mother cursed by one of her many, many possessions.
Why You Should Read: Way back in December (Re: The Interventionist) you asked if anyone had done a hoarder horror movie. And then your review of 10/31 had a hoarder house in it and I was like, damn, I better finish my horror feature already! So after months of it sitting there waiting for it to be rewritten (again), I dug down and got to it. Gone is the Dead Kid Backstory in favor of a story more focused on a woman learning to take care of her aging mother… who happens to be possessed. Yay! I welcome any Marie Kondo / KonMari method jokes. Enjoy!

Title: Catharsis (note to writer: you need to retitle this, “Rage Room”)
Genre: Social Horror
Logline: Following a traumatic incident in a rage room, a spineless office worker develops strength and self-confidence — and an insatiable, murderous aggression that threatens to take over.
Why You Should Read: Rage rooms are simple: pay a small fee to occupy a room for 10-20 minutes and SMASH THE FUCKING SHIT out of mundane, breakable objects. With methods of choice ranging from baseball bats with home run dreams to sledgehammers that have never met something they couldn’t pulverize, you can customize your destruction of plates, printers, and other office or domestic fodder to your heart’s blood-pumping delight. All in the name of “self-care.”

In our current socio-economic and political climate, our globe is warming up to rage rooms in nearly 30 countries, with the US of A boasting 250+ locations that have increased exponentially in the last five years. The real kicker? The pursuit of catharsis often recycles its initial stimulants of stress and aggression. Meaning… this trend ain’t going anywhere soon. And just like escape rooms, you are trying to solve a puzzle: “What do I have to destroy to create a little peace and quiet?”

With this “Catharsis,” great power comes with great responsibility to gain more power, even if the objects in the way are made of flesh and bone. A good horror story should tackle relevant subject matter or universal fears or the dark symptoms of the human condition. Or, hey — crack open this PDF and try to find all three!

Title: INFANT
Genre: Horror
Logline: A sadistic rapist/murderer is captured by a quartet of women and infantized (shaved, crippled so he’s forced to crawl, diaper, etc) in order to re-educate him on how to treat women and act in society but the women instead use him for their own dark psychological needs until one decides they’ve gone too far and plots to free him.
Why You Should Read: INFANT is a proton torpedo into the Death Star of current society that was influenced by Frederick Friedel, Canucksploitation movies like CANNIBAL GIRLS and DEATH WEEKEND and LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT.

Genre: Time Loop
Premise: A retired U.S. Army Special Forces veteran finds himself stuck inside the same day where a group of assassins hunt him down and kill him.
About: This script was originally written by Chris and Eddie Borey, who have a knack for high-concept ideas. Their last film, Open Grave, was about a man who “wakes up in the wilderness, in a pit full of dead bodies, with no memory and must determine if the murderer is one of the strangers who rescued him, or if he himself is the killer.” Writer-director Joe Carnahan got his paws on the script and decided to make it. But as one of the best writing directors our there, he gave it the Carnahan rewrite special. The film will star Mel Gibson, Ken Jeong, Frank Grillo, and Naomi Watts.
Writer: Joe Carnahan (original script by Chris and Eddie Borey)
Details: 118 pages

It’s official. Time Loop is a genre.

I still don’t know how this happened but I’m not mad. So far, the format has withstood all the excess use. The most recent time-loop project, Netflix’s Russian Doll, was nominated for an Emmy.

The rules for getting these movies right are the same as they are with any genre. You must answer the question, “What new are you bringing to the table?”

Former Special Forces soldier Roy calmly explains to us in voice over why it’s so easy to kill this trained assassin who’s woken him and his one-night stand up by trying to stab Roy in his face. Ya see, Roy explains, he keeps waking up on the same day – today – with this man trying to kill him. And when he kills this man and the Matrix-like helicopter with the Gatling gun that follows, he runs outside where a woman named Pam starts shooting at him from a car.

He must carjack a car from a man who always screams, “He’s carjacking me!” and if he’s able to outrun Pam, he runs into a sword-smith, Guan-Yin. If he can somehow defeat her, he goes to a local bar and drinks. That’s because no matter what Roy does or where he goes, assassins never stop coming after him until he’s dead. He’s never even reached noon. This is the one place where he has about an hour before they find and kill him. Then his day starts all over again.

How did we get here? We get some insight into that when we jump to yesterday and meet Jia, Roy’s ex-wife and the mother of his son. Jia is a scientist who works at an experimental company called Dynow. Jia is working on a doomsday device for her scary boss, Colonel Clive Ventor. Ventor is getting angry that he’s poured all this money into this project and the device STILL isn’t working. He tells Jia that if she doesn’t figure it out fast, there will be consequences.

Roy knows nothing about all that. In fact, Jia is killed by Ventor before loop day so he can’t call her and ask what’s going on. One morning he decides to look into an old theory – that they’ve hidden a tracking device on him. But he’s never been able to find it. So he goes to a friend who knows about this stuff and asks him where he’d put a tracking device if he wanted to track someone. The guy says, “in your teeth.” Roy says, “Can you check my teeth for me?” “No,” his friend says. “I’d need to see each tooth separately.” So Roy grabs a pair of pliers and proceeds to rip each of his teeth out one by one until they finally find out that, yes, one of his teeth has a tracking device in it.

Armed with this info, Roy can get rid of the tracking device every morning, and now has the drop on all his assassins. He can simply plant the tooth, wait for them to show up, and kill them from behind. But Roy needs to do more than that if he’s ever going to escape this time loop. So he infiltrates Dynow, convinced they’re somehow responsible, where he discovers the doomsday device. Armed only with a secret message Jia told him “yesterday,” he must destroy the device and restore time to its rightful state.

I love me some Joe Carnahan. His scripts almost make me uncomfortable with how confidently they’re written. The guy is the screenwriting equivalent of an alpha gorilla. He plows through the page and all we can do is hold onto the edge and hope we don’t fall off.

Boss Level is a natural fit for him. This is a guy who loves tough colorful characters who shoot big, fight bigger, and talk biggest. He gets to do all of that here but inside a time loop scenario. This adds a level of sophistication to the story that Carnahan sometimes seems uninterested in. Boss Level keeps you thinking while you’re enjoying all the action making the script work like one of those dual level bridges.

Like every writer should, Carnahan deviates from the time-loop formula to add a new layer to the story. Right after the first act, Carnahan cuts to “yesterday.” This allows us to meet Roy and Jia before all of this went down, as well as get some context on what Jia did and how her company is connected to all this.

Without this foray, the script would’ve gotten repetitive, one of the biggest pitfalls in the time-loop genre. Once we jump back into Roy’s loop, we’re now seeing it through a different set of eyes. We know some things he doesn’t, which means we’re more invested in him fighting off these bad guys so he can find that information and use it to get out of this.

There’s one scene in particular I want to highlight because it’s one of the most memorable scenes in the script. That would be the scene where Roy proceeds to take pliers and pull each and every one of his teeth out so that his friend can inspect them for bugs.

Why do I like this scene? BECAUSE I’VE NEVER SEEN IT BEFORE. In fact, I’ve never seen anything like it at all. And I have tons of admiration for any writer who comes up with an original scene. Seeing as you’re competing against millions of movies to find something different, doing so is almost impossible. And most writers give up. Which is why most movies blow. Writers don’t want to put the effort in to find original scenes.

So how do you find these chupacabra scenes? Is it impossible? No. Not if you use something called “conceptual sequencing.” Conceptual sequencing is an A++ advanced screenwriting technique that only a few people know about. But I’m going to share it with you today.

I’m just kidding. I made that name up. It sounded cool though, right? But the technique is real. To find original scenes, you must IDENTIFY WHAT IT IS ABOUT YOUR CONCEPT THAT IS UNIQUE. Why? Because when you’re trying to find ideas that haven’t been in any other of the 10 million movies, you’ll always fail. But if you only try to find ideas that are original to THE TIME LOOP CONCEPT, it all of a sudden gets easier. They’ve only made 30 of these. You can come up with a scene that hasn’t been in 30 movies.

The trick is to then go into every scene and ask, “How can I use time looping to make this scene different?” Often, you won’t be able to come up with anything. And that’s fine. Not every scene needs to be unique. Just one every once in a while. In the tooth pull out scene, we had a character who suspected that the bad guys had planted a tracker in his tooth. Now the obvious scene here would’ve been to go to a dentist and have the dentist inspect his teeth for the tracker. Only problem with that? IT SOUNDS BORING!!!

So you ask the question, “How can I use time looping to make this scene different?” Well, Roy is going to die in an hour anyway. He doesn’t need his teeth. Especially because he gets them back when he wakes up tomorrow anyway. So he wouldn’t waste any time. He would just start yanking his teeth out right there. And that’s how you find your original scene.

To summarize: If you’re writing a script properly, there should be something about your concept that’s unique. Use that unique quality to find original scenes. If you write enough of these original scenes, your script isn’t going to feel like anything else out there, which means it will STAND OUT.

Another thing that’s cool about this script is that it has a good ending (spoilers follow). This is important because when you’re playing with high concepts, especially concepts that play with time, you’re expected to write a clever ending. It would be weird if you didn’t. So late in the movie, Roy figures out that Ventor didn’t kill his wife last night, like he’d always assumed. He killed her this morning. Exactly 14 minutes after Roy woke up. But Roy never knew that because for the first 14 minutes of his day, he was always running from crazed assassins.

Once he realizes that his ex-wife was killed 14 minutes after he woke up, he has a goal. He must somehow get to Dynow, infiltrate the company and all its security, then get to and kill Ventor, ALL WITHIN 14 MINUTES. It creates the perfect impossible ticking time bomb ending for a movie.

I really liked Boss Level. I probably would’ve given it a higher rating if this was one of the first time loop scripts. But I have to dock it a few points for being in a genre that’s grown ubiquitous.

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

What I learned: When writing character descriptions, use words that have a dual-purpose. They’re both visual AND tell us who the person is. Carnahan is great with character descriptions. Here’s one for Ventor’s co-worker. “Ventor reaches toward BRETT, an overly tan, tribal-barb tatted, squared-jawed juicehead and his second-in-command.” Notice how these words achieve two things. “overly tan.” We can visualize that and imagine the kind of person who chooses to be overly tan. “tribal-barb tatted.” Again, a good visual and there’s a certain kind of person who likes tribal-barb tattooes. Even “juicehead,” while not directly visual, gives us a visual and tells us who we’re dealing with. So make sure you’re using two-in-one adjectives to elevate your character descriptions.

Genre: Horror
Premise: (from IMDB) A group of friends travels to Sweden to attend a reclusive mid-summer festival. What begins as an idyllic retreat quickly devolves into an increasingly violent and bizarre competition at the hands of a pagan cult.
About: Writer/Director Ari Aster was anointed to “next big thing” status when his intense not-for-everyone film, Hereditary, became indie studio A24’s biggest movie ever. Aster didn’t waste any time, using the buzz to launch his next project, Midsommar, immediately. The film didn’t perform as well as hoped, making $27 million domestically compared to Hereditary’s $44 million. Still, Aster’s now loyal following loved it, and it’s expected to do very well on digital.
Writer: Ari Aster
Details: 150 minutes!

I resisted seeing this when it came out because it was written and directed by Ari Aster, the writer of the worst screenplay ever, Hereditary.

But conflict lives deep within my heart as I’ve always wanted a great modern day horror film about cults. And while I despised the screenplay for Hereditary, I had to admit its trailer exhibited a talented directing eye. Then Martin Scorsese spent 30 minutes of a recent Q&A talking about how much he loved Hereditary and I finally said, “You know what. I’m going to see if this guy learned anything about screenwriting since his last film,” and popped Midsommar into the old Apple TV.

The premise for the film is a simple one. A 20-something girl, Dani, loses her sister to suicide. Incidentally, the carbon monoxide she used to kill herself also leaked into her parents’ room and killed them too. So Dani is one family down.

Her grad school boyfriend, Christian, is tagging along with his Swedish friend, Pelle, and a couple of other guys, to check out a mid-summer festival in Pelle’s rural Swedish village. Dani decides to join them and off they go.

There’s a strong Heaven’s Gate vibe to the white-clothed hippy community and yet nobody thinks to turn and leave. They can’t, of course, or else there would be no movie.

The people there seem nice (don’t they always), and invite everyone to a ceremony where two elders are brought to an overarching cliff to speak to everyone. Except they don’t say a word. They JUMP! And die. Splat.

In real life, our characters would sprint to the nearest airfield and stow away in the landing gear if it got them away from this psychotic Swedish Manson cult. But no, our characters choose to stay and see what these wily Swedes are up to next. Naturally, these things turn out to be nefarious and one by one, our characters die in awful ways.

Before we get to the script stuff, lots of people were surprised that this film didn’t do as well as Hereditary. Yet the reason is simple: It’s hard to pull horror off in the daylight. You can do it with zombies. But you can’t do it with much else.

The reason horror works so well is because the darkness activates the imagination. It offloads the work from the movie to the viewer. They get to fill in their own fears with what’s in the corner of the dark room, what’s at the bottom of the dark basement stairway, who that shadow belongs to at the end of the dark hallway.

You don’t get any of that with daylight. So you have to find your horror elsewhere, and that can be challenging. So when you see this big bright movie that’s being advertised as a horror film, it’s confusing. And people aren’t going to show up to confusing. They want a good idea of what they’re walking into.

Now from a cinematic perspective, Aster’s choice is exciting. There’s irony in the search for fear in daylight. And outside of some annoying directing choices, Misommar works. That’s because every viewer knows this place is bad news. So as long as you keep a log on the fire for the next looming threat, we’re going to be into it.

Surprisingly, the thing that makes Aster a bad writer also helps him. When your narratives are weak and unfocused, as both this and Hereditary are, it gives the story a natural unpredictability. If you’re not following any common act or scene beats, we’re not going to know what’s coming next. And that’s why I kept watching. I had no idea where this was going.

Aster also put a lot of work into the mythology of this village and it paid off. I trusted that whenever something happened that was tied to this place’s weird rules, it was authentic, because I could tell Aster did his homework. I mean there’s a giant barn where the entire inside is covered in a historic mural of this clan’s history. You can’t make that sort of thing up on the fly. You have to know it and convey it to the art department.

Which is what makes this movie so frustrating. If Aster took some time to learn screenwriting, he would be unstoppable. Cause as a visual storyteller, he’s quite talented.

To give you an idea of what I mean by bad writing, Christian comes up to one of the friends after the two elders kill themselves and tells him he wants to write his thesis paper on this clan. The friend gets mad, replying, “I told you already. I was writing my thesis about this place!” Not only did I have no idea that either of these two were writing theses before this moment. But I didn’t even know they were in school. That’s how poor the writing was. We’d find out major story components after the fact.

There were all sorts of character issues here. Why doesn’t Pelle warn his best friends that they’re about to watch two people kill themselves? Why wouldn’t he brace them for that? Tell them that if it’s too much, they might want to sit the ceremony out? I’ll tell you why. Because if he did, Aster wouldn’t have been able to write the scene.

A bad writer says, “Well I’m just going to do it anyway.” A good writer says, “I have to figure out a believable way in which he wouldn’t tell them.” Why do bad writers always go with the former? Because it’s eaasssssyyyyyieeer!! It’s easier not to do the work! Are you telling me I may have to sit down several hours a day for a few days until I come up with a believable reason for why my character wouldn’t warn his friends about this? Screw that. It’ll take too long!

But I think Aster’s taught me the secret to getting these daytime horror movies right. Just follow two rules. One, be weird. Be really really weird. You don’t have the darkness to hide behind so, instead, have a bunch weird crap happen. This is why Wicker Man is still the champion of this sub-genre. You’d have little kids joyously singing about sex through choreographed dances. Or naked women singing about boning you while banging on the other side of your hotel room wall.

The other tool to use is shock. And this is something Aster is becoming known for. I mean he killed a main family member in his last film by having her stick her head out the window and get it decapitated by a telephone pole. Watching an uninterrupted shot of a woman jumping to her death and her head splattering over a rock in real-time certainly jolted me awake.

Now Aster just needs to figure out character. I had no idea who Christian was throughout this. None. Is he a good boyfriend who will do anything for Dani? Is he a bad boyfriend who takes her for granted? Every scene would vacillate between those two extremes to ensure that you never knew the guy.

Seasoned screenwriters know that if a character is unclear, you go back to their introductory scene and you use that scene to make it abundantly clear who the character is. When we meet the Joker, what is he doing? He’s looking in a mirror desperately trying to squeeze his lips into a smile. I know more in three seconds of that scene about that character than I do about Christian from watching this entire movie. That says something.

I’m going to log this as a step forward for Aster. It’s more interesting than Hereditary. And I watched til the end, which says a lot since this is 150 minutes. But keep working on your writing man. Or find a screenwriter you connect with. That could really skyrocket your career.

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

What I learned: Here’s a simple test to see if your characters are acting realistic or not. If you were in their shoes, would you do it? If you had just watched two people jump to their death in a pagan ritual, would you stay for another three days? Or would you leave? If the answer is leave (which it is), then you need to come up with a realistic reason why the characters would stay. (This is why so many horror films have their characters stuck somewhere. That way, they never have to worry about this question)

Last week’s Amateur Showdown was basically a 3-way tie (14 and 1/2 votes for Money to Burn, 13 votes to Odyssey, and 13 votes to The Black Petrel) with some hints of suspect voting, which means I get to decide which of the three I want to review. I went back and forth between Money to Burn and Odyssey. I know that Jay (Money to Burn author) can write. And I get a sense through some e-mails with Alex (Odyssey) that he knows what he’s doing as well. When it comes down to calls this close, there’s only one solution –

FIRST. PAGE. SHOWDOWN.

[echo] showdown…showdown…showdown

That’s right. Here at Scriptshadow when scripts need to be picked and the picking ain’t easy, the written word is the only solution. So here we go. This is the first page of Money to Burn…

And here’s the first page of Odyssey…

Let’s start with Odyssey. Its opening is fine for a movie or cinematic TV show. I can envision the gentle dolly back of the camera from the painting and into the room. But as a script opening, it’s not very good. Scripts aren’t about camera moves. They’re about grabbing the reader. With that said, the writing is strong and detailed and I feel like the writer has a good grasp of the craft.

Moving over to Money to Burn, we’re in a helicopter, a sniper’s looking for his target. Something’s happening! This is a much better opening – dropping us into the thick of things. But like any good Amateur Showdown, there’s a twist. I look to the top of Money to Burn and see… 123 pages??? For a heist flick? That’s a loonnnng script. And Jay’s been at this for awhile. He should know how much high page counts affect readers.

I’m torn about which one to go with but when reading one script gives me an entire extra hour to my evening (Odyssey is 63 pages), that’s the script I’m going to choose. So I’m going with Odyssey.

Genre: TV Pilot/Western
Premise: A fierce pregnant widow makes a deal with a degenerate grave-robber to help her escort a herd of cattle across the Old West while the psychotic creditor that drove her husband to suicide and murdered her father stalks her across state-to-state, determined to make her pay up, or worse.
Why You Should Read: My bread-and-butter trademark is to take a tried and tested genre and write a new interpretation of old tropes. I think we all love westerns for the grizzled stares, the melodramatic music, and the collective fantasy of a lawless land. I do too. But I’m more interested in what the genre can do in the modern-day, not confined by what your Dad might like to watch on a sleepy Sunday afternoon. Odyssey is a pilot for a mini-series that honors what has already been done in the genre, but also takes it forward into new, exciting directions.
Writer: Alex D. Reid
Details: 62 pages

it’s 1891 and 20-something Cassandra Lane is pregnant. Being pregnant back in the 19th century was no picnic but you know what’s less of a picnic? Joseph Dalton, the mean-mugging creditor who Cassandra’s husband owes 5000 dollars to. Joseph’s shown up to the couple’s home in New York to get his money. There’s only one problem. They don’t have it.

After yelling at Cassandra for awhile, Joseph goes upstair to confront the man in question, Hosea, who, when confronted with the reality that he’s never going to find a way out of this, blows his own brains out. That cowardly move suddenly transfers the 5000 dollar debt on Hosea’s head, and puts it squarely on Cassandra’s. Isn’t that special.

Cassandra manages to flea New York and go back to her home state of Kansas. It’s here where she reunites with her widowed father, Nathaniel, who’s having money problems of his own. He can barely pay rent. Yeah, living back in the 19th century pretty much blew. Between your house burning down every month and contacting polio several times a year, you were constantly getting swept away in the Johnstown Flood.

That big fat meanie, Joseph, along with his gang, follows Cassandra all the way to Kansas and kills her dang dad! It looks like Cassandra’s going to be next. But when the gang members carry Cassandra out to shoot and kill her, she’s saved by a grave-robber named Dante, who, ironically, was planning on grave-robbing her father. But this is far from friendship at first sight. The very next day, Dante steals Cassandra’s father’s cattle, which he plans to take to California and sell.

Back at home, Cassandra is visited by yet another nasty presence, a bounty hunter looking for Dante. When he realizes Dante is long gone, he tortures Cassandra, who uses every last bit of grit and spittle to escape and kill the dude. Afterwards she steps outside to see, guess who? Dante. Who’s had a crisis of conscious. Seems he’d rather herd these cattle to California with their rightful owner. So off they go. But little do they know, the evil Joseph is on their trail.

I had mixed feelings about Odyssey.

I was not a fan of the first scene. It was written like Cassandra and Joseph were alone. Joseph’s creeping up on her. We’re thinking she might be in danger. But then, the guy they’ve been talking about this whole time, her husband, was upstairs. Just kicking it by himself. If he’s here to see that guy, why is he talking to Cassandra? So then we go upstairs and have a secondary scene in the house where Hosea is flinging a gun around, threatening to kill himself, and finally does it. The dialogue here felt very soap-opera-ish. On the nose. Overly dramatic (“I can’t even look after my own goddamn wife and child from–from fucking PARASITES like him! What the hell am I if I can’t do that, huh?” “The man I love.”). It didn’t set the pilot off on the right foot, that’s for sure.

And a funny thing happens when the first scene doesn’t work. It triggers a psychological shift in the reader where they lose a little faith in the writer. They don’t move forward with as much confidence. But hey. I was on the fence with Cop Cam for a while and that script turned around quick. So this was far from a script killer.

What annoyed me, though, was the jumping around in time. I don’t mind storyline jumping that much, but it has to have a clear purpose behind it. And this felt more like we were scrambling up the timelines in an attempt to add some extra flash to fairly plain story. I still don’t understand why we were cutting back to Cassandra, her dad, and some Indian kid. I never cracked the importance of that storyline.

The pilot works best when it’s sitting in its scenes and letting the characters push towards potentially ugly situations. Like when the bounty hunter has Cassandra all alone in her house. It’s one long scene but it properly builds a sense of dread and a fear that Cassandra isn’t going to make it out of here alive.

I also liked Alex’s fearlessness. This isn’t your grandfather’s Western TV show. People die in horrible ways and Alex isn’t afraid to show it. Heck, even Cassandra’s poor dog is offed. And while normally, I’m not a fan of animal deaths, it serves a purpose here, which is to make clear to the audience, nobody is safe in this world. And that’s important in a TV show because we’re more likely to watch if we think people are legitimately in danger. Isn’t that when Walking Dead and Game of Thrones were at their best? When you had no idea who was going to make it out of an episode? Once it was clear every main character was getting out of a season alive, those shows went south.

It’s not easy for me to grade this pilot because there’s plenty of things to celebrate. But between the weird time-jumping and the lack of anything that truly set this Western apart from anything I’ve seen before, I’d have to say this just misses a ‘worth the read.’ But Alex should be proud. There’s plenty of skill on display here.

Script link: Odyssey

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

What I learned: I’m always looking to see if I can simplify a story. And something bothers me about the structure here. We move from New York to Kansas…. so we can move from Kansas to California. Why can’t we redistribute the whole story so that we start in Kansas? That way it’s simpler. We start the movie in Kansas and the pilot is used to set up the rest of the show – which is to move to California. And here’s why plot simplicity is important. The way it is now, Alex is forced to create all of this exposition to explain New York and Joseph and her husband and her father. If we could build this dilemma in Kansas, we wouldn’t have to use precious screenplay energy to rehash a bunch of backstory.