Taking a look at the 5 best concepts in The Blood & Ink Showdown
(Today’s article references pitching for the Blood & Ink Showdown. If you want to learn more about the showdown, here’s the original post).
Now that the fun of pitching horror concepts is behind us, the hard work begins. Many of you wondered what I meant when I said that, by receiving a “YES” from me, the writer would also receive “special treatment.” What is this special treatment you speak of, Carson?
What it means is that I’m going to be taking a more active interest in the development of these five concepts, since they are my favorite concepts pitched to me. Part of that will be featuring the concepts in articles, like today. But I also plan to check in with the writers and, with what time I have available, help guide them when I can.
So, what I want to do today is lay out all five concepts and, based on my experience reading so many screenplays, talk about 1) where these ideas can go wrong and 2) how to get the most out of the ideas. Also, since I know some of the scripts I choose for these showdowns confuse writers, I will tell you exactly why I chose each script.
Let’s get to it, shall we!?
Title: And All The Sinners Saints
Logline: After her family is murdered by the mob, a religious woman lets herself become possessed by a demon in order to get revenge.
Why I chose it: The main thing I’m prioritizing when choosing concepts is whether I can realistically see a path for them to become a movie. The road towards a produced film is riddled with hundreds of obstacles. So, the more clearly a concept is as a movie, the easier it will be to overcome those obstacles. And All The Sinners Saints is the highest ranking Blood & Ink concept based on that criteria. It’s one of those no-brainer ideas. But what really sets it apart is the interesting choice the main character is making at the heart of the story. She’s risking harming herself in order to achieve her goal. Journeys are always more captivating when the main character must pay a tax in order to achieve the objective. The higher the stakes are attached to that tax, the more powerful the story engine will be. Which is this idea in a nutshell.
Where it can go wrong: These concepts fall apart when they choose a generic path. Action scripts can be the most boring scripts to read because 70% of the writing is about running, dashing, ducking driving, shooting, fighting – just really boring monotonous scenes to read. You’re obviously going to have to incorporate some of these things into your action script. But it shouldn’t be page 1 to page 110. Try to be thoughtful with your action scenes instead of writing 30 scenes that we’ve seen in every other action movie. The more I feel that a writer has thoughtfully crafted an action scene (the setting is unexpected, every character in the scene wants something, there’s some x-factor that we don’t typically encounter in an action scene), the more readable that scene becomes.
How to do this concept right: There are two main things you must focus on getting right. 1) Make the main character easy to root for. The whole dead wife and dead dog thing in John Wick was cheap but it did the job of making us sympathetic to him. Once you have that, you need FIVE SET PIECES that COULD ONLY HAPPEN IN YOUR SPECIFIC MOVIE AND NOT IN ANY OTHER ACTION MOVIE. In other words, your set pieces must focus on what is unique to your concept, which is this girl who’s willingly possessed. In other words, if you have a choice between stealing the famous Daredevil hallway fight set piece, and a set piece in a giant church during mass, choose the latter. The former could occur in any movie. A church fight scene is specific to this subject matter.
Title: Bite After Bite
Logline: From bite to bite, we follow the zombie infection as it spreads – each victim’s story unfolding from the moment they’re bitten to when they pass it on.
Why I chose it: I said the main criteria I used in judging ideas was how realistically I could imagine them becoming movies. BUT. I only said that was the “main” criteria. I didn’t say it was the only criteria. About 10% of the entries I picked because they felt different. They’re not your typical movie. I knew Bite After Bite was not a slam dunk. It’s a risky premise. But it reminded me of those mid-90s indie films where filmmakers were taking more risks. And that was exciting to me.
Where it can go wrong: Scripts like this can go wrong quite easily, actually. The second you move away from a single protagonist hero’s journey, you’re flying blind regarding structure. And without structure, screenplays fall apart quickly. Because without a clear objective pushing the narrative forward (kill Thanos), stories can easily wander. That’s going to be the biggest challenge by far.
How do to do this concept right: What I would do is create structure in the form of eight sequences. You don’t have the clear GSU formula working for you. But, if you break things down into eight 12-page sequences, each following someone getting bit then gradually turning, then becoming a zombie on the hunt for its next bite, you’ll get back some of that structure you lost. From there, you want to tell 8 different stories within those 8 different zombie turns. They should all feel different. For example, in one, it’s a mom inside her house with her children. We know she’s turning and will be a threat to her kids soon, but she’s in denial about it. Dad is on the way home but will he get there in time to save his kids when she turns? Then the next is a zombie who’s walking through the neighborhood. In other words, his story is completely different from the story of the mom in her house. And I would treat them each like individual 12-page mini-movies. And, of course, there should be some twists and turns along the way.
Title: Black House
Logline: When the President’s increasingly erratic behavior brings the United States to the brink of nuclear war, a young White House correspondent becomes convinced the most powerful man in the world must be forced into an exorcism.
Why I chose it: This one felt like a movie the second I read it. It’s big. It’s high concept. This is the kind of script that would’ve sold for a million bucks twenty minutes after it was sent out back in 1996. And while these ideas don’t have the same cachet as they used to, big ideas still get lots of interest. And I love new takes on old ideas that raise the stakes considerably. The Exorcist was a great movie but the stakes were local. Here, the stakes are enormous. The president could be leading the world into a nuclear war. That’s as high stakes as it gets.
Where it can go wrong: It’s pretty clear where movies like this can go wrong. If you lean too hard in either political direction, you lose half your readers. But that’s okay because it should be easy to not make this political. Anytime you have an outside threat – in this case China (or Russia, if you prefer) – the country tends to unite. So as long as you’re focusing on that and not hot button political topics, you should be fine.
How to do this concept right: I was thinking a lot about how to execute this story. And I realized, you can’t just jump into the possessed crazy nuclear-weapons button-pushing insanity right away. There needs to be a lot of build-up, just like the original Exorcist, which, if you go back and watch it, you’ll be shocked at how much setup there is with her becoming possessed before they bring in a priest. And the way I think I would do this is to have the story focus on a young priest’s assistant. The threat of nuclear war with China is increasing by the day. The main priest liaison to the White House comes in for a publicity photo shoot with the president. He’s going to bless him and pray for peace. But, while there, the assistant priest (who’s a bit of an unorthodox modern priest) notices some things are off about the president. He shares with his boss afterwards that he thinks the president may be possessed. And this starts a chain of events where major religious figures in the area secretly get together and discuss if this could be true. Most aren’t buying it but the young priest is insistent. They come to the conclusion that they need more information. This needs to be handled delicately. So they want to first interview the president. Ask him some questions to covertly find out if he’s possessed. This is complicated by the fact that some people in the White House aren’t at all religious and they have no interest in letting this happen. But the point is, they have to work their way up to confirm that he is possessed and then, once they think he is, they have to perform the exorcism, which is its own shitshow in getting approved. And it’s just a night of total chaos.
Title: RED SHIFT
Logline: His first night on the job, a paramedic must contend with the reality that the city he is working is on the brink of a zombie outbreak, and the patient he’s got in the back of his van is ground zero.
Why I chose it: To me, the most exciting part of any zombie movie is the initial outbreak. That’s where all the chaos is. That’s where you get all the fun stuff. So by constructing a concept that allows you to play exclusively in that period is exciting. But what took the idea over the top was creating this specific job we see the outbreak through: the paramedic. You can create so many fresh movie ideas just by changing the point of view of how we’re watching the story unfold. Rushing around in an ambulance during a zombie outbreak is an extremely exciting angle to tell this story from.
Where it can go wrong: Funny enough, I did not like part of this logline. I never resonated with the patient in his ambulance being patient 0. I just don’t see how that makes the story better. Who cares who patient zero is in the middle of a chaotic zombie outbreak? Patient zero isn’t going to help you now. I bring this up because I want to remind everybody who writes a logline not to think you’re beholden to it. That’s just your starting point. It is not written in stone. If you can come up with a better main character or a better goal for the story, I don’t care if those things conflict with what you originally conceived. You should always make the choices that are best for your screenplay and sometimes those ideas come to you long after you’ve written the logline.
How to do this concept right: Of the five concepts that received a yes, this one should be the easiest to write (no pressure!). I say that because this concept comes with a cheat code. You can create the next bit of story momentum whenever you want by simply injecting a new dispatch. The operator tells him where he needs to go next and then it’s a race to get there, as the outbreak is worsening. And the drama will come from each dispatch being harder to execute than the last. I also suspect that, at some point, he’s going to be placed on a run for a high-profile person needing assistance. And that will be the hardest run of all.
Title: IT’S THE WORST TIME OF THE YEAR
Logline: Two successful, single businesswomen from the big city get trapped in a Hallmark movie nightmare where it’s always fall — but weirdly somehow also always Christmas. They’re forced to open a bakery, enter the pie contest, solve the weekly town murder, and date the impossibly hot plaid-wearing widower — all while trying to find a way to escape before increasingly aggressive townspeople trap them in this hellscape, force them to give up their lives and drink pumpkin spiced lattes….forever.
Why I chose it: This is the most interesting concept in the entire competition, in my opinion. That’s not to say it’s a slam dunk. This is a unique take on a horror film and that means it may not work. But if the writer executes it well, it could be genius. I’ll tell you the exact part of the logline that gave me the hope it could achieve that. It was this part: “…but weirdly somehow also always Christmas.” That line tells me that the writer understands the world of Hallmark movies on a microscopic level. Because that’s exactly what they’re like. They want the best of both worlds – the cozy fall stuff for the romance and then Christmas for the family conflict and something to build the climax around.
Where it can go wrong: When you have unique ideas, you have to be willing to take more risks with those ideas. Because the worst thing you can do when you have a weird idea is to execute it in an obvious, predictable fashion. I will give you some ideas below for the script but I don’t trust those ideas because it only took me one minute to come up with them. You should be spending hours thinking about the directions in which you could take this. And push yourself to explore avenues that the average writer wouldn’t have thought of.
How to do this concept right: I would start by asking the writer, why does it have to be two businesswomen? Shouldn’t it be a man and woman who work at the same company who are here on a business trip, who aren’t attracted to each other at all, but maybe that romance grows over the course of the movie? That way you’d have a real relationship to compare to all these fake manufactured cheesy Hallmark relationships. Or, if you want to go darker, maybe they’re both in separate relationships but cheating on their spouses. That way, they’re also in contrast with the perfect smiling happy couples in Hallmarkville. As for the plot, it should be easy to pull off. Your heroes have a goal: To get out of this. But they have to work within the Hallmark movie structure, which is classic generic screenplay structure (everything is leading up to the big town Christmas dance). And you would somehow set it up so that, if that Christmas dance comes and goes, they’re stuck here forever. So, they need to find a way out before that dance.
Curious to hear your thoughts on where these writers should take their scripts. All ideas welcome!
