I had an insane amount of stuff to do this week so I’m going to include the newsletter here on the site, as well as send it out to everyone. Hope you enjoy!
HALF-OFF SCRIPT NOTES DEAL (ONLY 3 AVAILABLE!!!)
I’m currently working with several produced writer-directors on their screenplays at the moment. Every time I give them notes, they tell me that they’ve never gotten better feedback in their life. “Carson, I went to USC for film school and I learned more about screenwriting from these notes than I did the entire time while I was there.” It’s time to stop fooling around. It’s time to get professional feedback that’s going to change your script’s life. Don’t you want to change your script’s life? Don’t you care about your script? If so, you can get some life-changing notes for half-off. That’s $249 for 4 pages of notes on either a feature or pilot script. I’m going to give the first two deals out to the first two writers who e-mail me. Then I’ll give the last one to the 15th person, just to make sure that if you’re in a different time zone and asleep when I send this newsletter, you still have a shot at it. To get a deal, e-mail me the subject line “249” to carsonreeves1@gmail.com!
As most of you know, I’m a big tennis guy. I used to compete when I was younger. I played in college. And I even played some smaller professional tournaments out of college, before realizing that I wasn’t ever going to be able to reach the level required to make it on the pro tour. So I said, “I’m going to do something easier. Become a professional screenwriter!” lol.
But I’ve never abandoned tennis. Usually when I work, I have The Tennis Channel playing in the background. I closely follow my favorite players on Instagram. I still play and try to improve parts of my game. I love it! It never gets old.
Part of this love has led me to discover the rapid emergence of tennis-related social media accounts. It became common, if you were a coach for example, to start a Youtube channel and use it to give tips or commentate on the pro tour. This “tennis influencer” industry has opened up a whole new way for tennis aficionados to engage with the sport.
There’s one influencer, in particular, though, who I want to talk about today. His name is Winston Du and he’s one of the more popular dudes on the tennis social media landscape. His channel is based on a very simple premise. He records himself playing against other players and posts the matches on his channel.
Winston’s channel started blowing up several years ago and it’s not hard to figure out why. He’s an affable sweet guy who really enjoys the sport and, when he started, I don’t think many players were recording their matches and posting them. So he benefited from being the first.
For context regarding Winston’s level of play, the USTA uses a 1.0 – 7.0 rating scale. A 1.0 is someone who just picked up a racket yesterday. A 7.0 is Raphael Nadal. By the time Winston started his channel, he was a 3.5. A 3.5 is a level that you can achieve fairly easily if you play 2-3 times a week for a year.
Now, you have to understand that the way tennis works is that you get better by playing better players. Better players hit the ball harder, forcing you to be faster. They put soft shots away, forcing you to hit harder and deeper. They hit their serves bigger, forcing you to improve your reflexes. They’re more consistent, forcing you to improve your own consistency. And they run you around more, forcing you to improve your cardio. The fastest way to become a better player is to play better players.
But the tennis community has this quirky little bug embedded in its system whereby players only want to play against players who are better than them. It’s kind of like dating. Everybody wants to date someone hotter than them. But if no one is dating down, then nobody ever gets together. This makes it difficult to get better in tennis. Cause the better players don’t want to play with you.
How do you circumvent this? You must get lessons, you must practice, you must play matches. In other words, you must BUILD A STRONG FOUNDATION FOR YOUR GAME. The more practice hours you put in, the better you get. The better you get, the better level of coaching you get invited to. The more tournaments you play, the more experience you get. The more you win, the more times you encounter those better players, the ones who push your game to the next level. All of this takes time. Years in fact!
But Winston Du didn’t have to do any of this. He’s found a loophole in the system that allows you to skip to the front of the line. He gets to play against the 200th ranked tennis player in the world simply by having a YouTube channel. He’s been granted instant access to an advanced level of tennis without having to earn his way there.
Now, why am I going on about tennis influencers in a screenwriting newsletter? Because Winston Du’s Youtube channel is the perfect metaphor for what AI does to aspiring screenwriters. Both are shortcuts that grant you instant access to advanced-level output without requiring you to build the foundational skillset that makes that output possible. Just like Winston’s channel became a loophole that let him bypass years of practice and coaching to play elite players, AI is a loophole that lets new screenwriters bypass years of learning to produce professional-looking scripts.
All a new screenwriter has to do to write a scene now is tell AI what the scene is about and it will write it for him.
It sounds like screenwriting utopia. You don’t actually need to learn the craft anymore!
Right?
Well, not so fast. Let’s talk a little more about Winston Du.
Despite Winston having instant access to top level tennis, he hasn’t gotten much better. He started at a 3.5. And now he’s a 4.0 (he says he’s a 4.5 but he’s not). His backhand has gotten a tiny bit better. His forehand’s improved a little. But his serve hasn’t improved at all. His footwork hasn’t improved either. He continues to make basic mistakes, such as running backwards from hard hitters instead of standing his ground. Overall, his game looks very similar to what it was when he started.
Why is that?
I’ll tell you why. Because he never built a foundation. He never had coaching. He never had someone explain to him how a body-to-ball positioning difference of 3 inches can completely change your swing, losing you 20 mph on your shot. He’s never been told the importance of a deep knee bend on a serve. Or how to pronate your wrist to add more power. He’s never done any footwork drills. He only gets as ready as early he needs to instead of getting ready as fast as possible. Nobody’s ever gone over with him the importance of hitting cross-court as opposed to down-the-line.
In other words, Winston Du never had an education. He doesn’t understand what he’s doing or why he’s doing it. He just sees the other players he invites on his channel and tries to mimic them. He’s playing at a level he hasn’t earned the right to inhabit.
This is exactly what’s happening with AI and new screenwriters. Like I said above, AI can write a scene for you. You can give it all the variables along with some direction and it will give you an approximation of the scene you want. You can then go in there and make some changes, turning it more into the scene you want. And, voila, with very little work, you have a scene.
However, if that’s how you learn to write scenes, you haven’t learned anything. Just like Winston, you’re writing at a level you haven’t earned the right to inhabit. Nobody taught you to come into the scene as late as possible and leave as early as possible. Nobody taught you how conflict is the lifeblood of every scene and how you need to identify where that conflict is coming from for the scene to shine. Nobody taught you how to hide exposition in dialogue. Nobody taught you how each character must have a “want” in the scene. You’re just hoping AI figures out all that stuff for you.
And if AI doesn’t include these things, you’ll never know. Cause you never learned it in the first place. So, if the scene isn’t working, you don’t know how to tell AI how to fix it. This is the same scenario Winston is in. If he’s always hitting the ball late, how does he fix it if he never learned all of the reasons why you hit late in the first place? Winston’s channel, ironically, has done more damage to his game than good. It’s put him in a position of power without requiring him to understand how he got there.
This is what the next generation of screenwriters will look like. They’ll be wielding a sword that’s too heavy for them. Their screenplays will look like screenplays. But they won’t feel like them. Most of the stuff they do, they won’t understand why they’re doing it. They’ll just trust AI with the process.
But guess what? Hollywood is a business of rewriting. The guys who get paid the big bucks get paid to problem-solve and know how to fix things. If you were hired to write Star Wars Episode 11 and your second act is boring as hell, AI is not going to be able to fix it on its own.
Implementing changes in a screenplay is all about understanding the intricacies of how a screenplay works. If Disney wants a protagonist to be more likable, that might mean changing your hero’s flaw. And well-taught screenwriters know that the hero’s flaw is tied to everything else in the movie. So changing the flaw will mean changing numerous other things in the script. AI doesn’t know that!
And even if, theoretically, it gets to a place where it did, it still needs you to guide it. But since you never built your foundation, since you skipped to the front of the line like Winston Du, you won’t know to tell it that. You’ll be just as clueless as the dumb executive who hired you. And if you’re just as clueless as them, why do they need you? They can prompt AI to write a scene just as easily as you can.
So, here’s the cool part about all this. If you’ve been reading my site for more than two years, you are part of the last generation of real screenwriters. Everybody coming up now will know less about screenwriting than you do. They will depend on AI for an increasing amount of the workload and, in doing so, destroy any chance of developing the screenwriting skills they actually need. This means that the studios will want YOU going forward. Not these fake AI screenwriters. And I think that’s pretty fucking cool. That we were the last ones who actually learned the craft. I can’t emphasize how valuable a commodity that is.
Now, if you are a young screenwriter making your way up, my advice to you is to STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM AI. It’s a shortcut that is going to prevent you from learning. You need to make your own mistakes. You need to read all the screenwriting books. You need to write bad scripts. All AI is, is your dad doing your homework for you. Yeah, it got done. And it saves you time so you can go play with your friends. But you didn’t learn jack shit. And if you’re not continually learning in this craft, you will never get good enough to write a good screenplay. Are you a Winston Du? Or are you a Winston Don’t?
BLOOD & INK SCREENPLAY CONTEST UPDATE
In one of the most popular months on Scriptshadow, thousands of writers pitched their horror movie ideas to try and get into the Blood & Ink Horror Screenplay Contest. 97 pitches were accepted. Those writers are now (hopefully) hard at work writing their screenplays for a finishing date of late February.
I’m trying to do a Blood & Ink related showdown every month in order to keep the participants motivated. I know how easy it is to get derailed while writing a script. What was once so obvious now seems like hieroglyphics in your head. My advice is to STAY THE COURSE. All screenplays have periods of frustration baked into them. You have plots that have lost momentum. You have weak story beats that feel unsolvable. You have characters who are way too boring. It’s all part of the process! Just remember that every single movie you’ve seen has been through the same thing and the writers of those movies always talk about how solving these problems was the breakthrough that opened the rest of the script up. I would go so far as to say, if your script is easy to write the whole way through, it’s probably not very good.
This past weekend, I had a Scene Showdown for the contest. A little less than 40 of the contestants decided to enter. You can take a look at all five of the chosen entries here and see if you agree with the winner of the competition. Keep visiting the site for announcements on when the next showdown will be!
AROUND TOWN
Osculum Infame Begins – Osculum Infame is a script by German screenwriter Bernd Bachmann. It is a script that came to me several years ago for a contest. It’s a real-time contained horror thriller set in the 1600s about a woman assumed to be a witch who’s hanged on a tree and left to die. To this day, it is the single most intense reading experience I have ever had. But it also has a woman getting brutalized for 90 minutes and I didn’t think Hollywood at the time was ready for that. But deep down I knew that its time would come. Recently, I decided I was finally going to expose it to Hollywood. I was nervous but my gut told me that the writing and story were so incredible that someone was going to buy it. Now, you have to understand that, normally, it takes sending a script out endlessly to get a sale. Yet, in the case of Osculum Infame, the very first producer I sent it to e-mailed me 48 hours later and said, “We want to make this movie and we want to make it now.” And so in the past week, both the writer and I have signed deals (myself as a producer) and now we’re in the process of putting the package together and getting financing. It’s a very exciting experience for both me and the writer. But it should also act as a reminder to all screenwriters. Bernd wrote a screenplay that you literally couldn’t put down if you tried. It never lets up. Not for a second. And he does an amazing job of putting his hero into situations where you’re certain she will die and she somehow finds a way to survive. I honestly think that if it’s filmed as written, it will be the most intense movie ever made in history. That’s not hyperbole. And I’d bet that those of you who have read the script would agree. That’s really cool – to be able to do something that’s never been done before. The lesson? Make your script unputdownable. This is a SPEC SCRIPT. Those need to be fast. They need to grab readers and never let go. The slower your spec script is, the harder you’re making things on yourself. — Now I don’t think the production company is okay with me sharing too much information about the movie. I know that part of the plan is to keep this quiet then unleash it upon an unsuspecting world. But I will try and share with you what I can in these newsletters. Assuming you guys are interested. But, very cool success story for both a Scriptshadow writer and Scriptshadow. :)
5 million views in 2 weeks
Pluribus Trailer – Something that’s always fascinated me about Hollywood is how quickly you can fall from its heights. You would think that if someone created an amazing show, they’d be a superstar forever. But tis not the case. What happened to Nic Pizzolatto, who wrote True Detective? What happened to David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, who ran Game of Thrones? What happened to David Chase, who created The Sopranos?? Vince Gilligan is very close to being a member of the ‘What Ever Happened To’ club. Ever since the end of Breaking Bad, he’s been invisible. Better Call Saul was decent (if slow and clunky) but he wasn’t nearly as involved in that as he was Breaking Bad. The man has been MIA, particularly when it comes to new ideas. Well, he finally has a new idea and it’s one that he’s so precious about that he wouldn’t even reveal it to his own family. That idea is finally here in trailer form and… it does not look good. I know that Gilligan is trying to purposefully keep the concept vague but it’s usually a bad idea when your trailer is confusing as hell. And it’s rare that one of those becomes a riveting series. Don’t get me wrong. I like that he’s trying something different. And I will watch because it’s Vince Gilligan and anything from the creator of Breaking Bad makes me curious. But expectations after THIS trailer?? They’re low.
4 million views in 2 weeks
Send Help Trailer – It’s hard for me not to get excited about a spec idea. By the way, a “spec” idea is a script with a big concept and a high-octane engine. Everything feels big or fast or intense or terrifying. Or a combination of all four. These are the scripts that sell. Stuff that’s hard to put down. Like Osculum Infame! And the smart writers look to add irony to them. Cause they know irony is the best bang-for-your-buck way to supercharge a concept. Here, we have an asshole boss who makes his assistant miserable. The two then crash land on an island where he gets injured. This means his life is in her hands. The assistant is now the boss. The boss the assistant. These spec ideas do have a trap door, though. Which is that they tend to feel dated. Specifically because spec ideas aren’t as popular anymore. So it feels like we’re going back to a time past. Honestly, Send Help is giving me those vibes. It feels like a movie that could’ve come out in 2003. But look. I was one of the few people who liked Flight Risk, another spec idea. So, who’s to say I won’t like this too?
Something is Killing The Children – Blumhouse is panicking. The little horror house that could made its name on producing 3 million dollar horror movies with no stars, with one out of every 3 of them breaking out and becoming a money-printing machine. Then M3gan 2 happened, scaring the bejeezus out of everyone there. Since that fateful opening, rumor is that people at the Blumhouse offices are “spooked” (ironic, cause they make horror films) and meetings were called. This deal seems to be the first peek into what new company philosophy came out of those meetings. They have officially snatched up the biggest-selling horror comic since The Walking Dead, about a world where children can see monsters but adults can’t. Blumhouse outbid the likes of Lionsgate and Netflix, outfits with much deeper pockets. It’s a total 180 to what Blumhouse was built on, signaling that they’re looking for a big franchise, and maybe to move into TV as well. As for the concept, it goes to show that simple, but big, ideas always hold cachet. However, if it’s excessively simple, like this, it helps to have some visuals as well as some prior success. An interesting side bit about this is that Netflix dumped a lot of money into developing “Children” for a while, with Mike Flanagan guiding the project, but ultimately, the option ran out. Only when it got hot around town again did they decide they wanted it back.
Shiver Spec Sold – If you put Deadpool creator Tim Miller in a project with Keanu Reeves, I’m going to pay attention. And this project comes from one of the more prolific screenwriters out there, Ian Shorr. Shorr has written tons of scripts that got on the Black List, back when the Black List was cool. Many of them were very high concept. But, if I’m being honest, of average execution. He wrote that Mark Wahlberg movie, Infinite. It’s yet another reminder of how important concept is. It can make up for so many other issues in your script. I don’t have a logline for this but it’s said to be about a smuggler who gets double-crossed in the middle of the Caribbean, a sinking occurs, and the smuggler is surrounded by hungry sharks and evil mercenaries. Oh yeah, and this keeps happening over and over again because………… TIME LOOP. That’s right. The loop sub-genre is NOT DEAD YET. A concept like this is interesting because it’s got a lot of flash to it. But there’s not enough connective tissue. You need that connective tissue to create an idea that sounds clever. But, look, it got this package together, which is pretty impressive. And it’s another script success story, which we now have three of in this Around Town section. I’d call that a win. :)
SCRIPTSHADOW TIP OF THE MONTH
Up your concept’s stakes (especially important for TV show ideas)
We talk about stakes all the time on my site but here’s a story that emphasizes just how important they are. Nobody Wants This, starring Kristin Belle, is a breakout show on Netflix about an atheist girl who falls for a Rabbi. They try to make a relationship work despite the fact that “none of their friends or family want this.” What I recently learned was that the creator, Erin Foster, had been pitching this show around town for half-a-decade and nobody wanted it. However, there was a huge difference in her show’s concept back then. It was still about a girl dating a Jewish guy. But the guy wasn’t a rabbi. He was just… Jewish. When she pitched that show, everybody kept coming back with the same note: “It feels too small.” At her wit’s end, Foster brought on one of the co-creators of Modern Family and he demanded an immediate change. Instead of just making the boy Jewish, make him a rabbi. Now, it wasn’t just his family life that could be disrupted, it was his job. The project was purchased quickly afterwards. The lesson here? Look for ways to increase the stakes of your concept. Here, a seemingly minor character profession change created much higher stakes, which then led to a sale. You should always be looking to do the same, ESPECIALLY if you’re writing something on a smaller canvas, like Nobody Wants This.
SCREENPLAY REVIEW – KITTEN
Genre: Horror/Action
Premise: When a brilliant but reckless inventor accidentally shrinks himself and his sister to six inches tall, they must outwit her suddenly monstrous house cat and survive long enough to reverse the experiment before it’s too late.
About: There’s a guy in Hollywood who’s the only person I’ve been able to find who reads as many screenplays as I do. And I asked him the other day if he’d read anything lately that he liked. He immediately sent over this screenplay. Let’s see if our tastes mesh!
Writer: David Christopher Bell
Details: 116 pages
Here kitty-cat!
Here kitty kitty kitty!
Come on kitty!
To me, the most fun scripts to write in the world are the ones like this. You come up with a wild premise then you think up as many ways as possible to exploit that premise. That’s the main way I judge these scripts. I’m looking for AMAZING SET PIECES. Cause that’s what the concept promises so that’s what you gotta deliver. Remember, Steven Spielberg went to David Koepp and said, “I need these five set pieces in Jurassic Park. You figure out how to connect them together.” That’s how important he knows set pieces are FOR THESE TYPES OF MOVIES.
Ironically, Jurassic Park is a great comp for today’s script. Cause the danger is similar. Let’s take a look.
30-something inventor Garth Chapman (think a young Doc Brown) lives in his loft with his slacker, 20-something sister, Nahla. Nahla has absolutely zero going on in her life besides streaming shows she likes and hanging out with her cat, Kitten. Meanwhile, Garth has turned the sauna on the ground floor of his loft into a shrinking machine.
Garth is shocked when billionaire Noel Monk, who invented a rideshare app, and who Garth has been informally talking to, says he’s coming over right now to check out the machine to potentially invest in it. This is how Noel likes to work – on the fly. Noel brings his wife (who’s also his business partner), Alice, his security guard, Leonard, and decides to also bring along the rideshare driver who’s driving them, Adnan.
When they get there, a nervous Garth shows them how the machine works. You have to turn the safety switch off upstairs then go downstairs to the sauna room to operate it. Everybody THINKS the safety switch is on. But Kitten goes exploring on top of the control panel and accidentally turns it off.
I think you know where this is going. The group heads into the sauna, there’s a crazy ass explosive noise, and the next thing they know they’re all six inches tall. While everyone else is freaking out, Noel is celebrating. It works! This is going to make him billions! Until he sees what’s just outside the sauna door. It’s Kitten! And now, compared to all of them, Kitten is the size of a bus!
When they realize that the only way to fix this problem is to head back up to the control panel to reverse the process, and that if they stay in this sauna for too long at this size, they’ll overheat and die, a plan needs to be made quickly! But while nobody’s looking, an unafraid Noel just walks out of the sauna, decides to try and calm the kitty down, then proceeds to get sliced and diced by the cat, who treats him like a cat toy. A cat toy that must be destroyed until there’s nothing left of it.
Uh oh.
The rest of the group freaks out and realizes they need a REAL PLAN now. They decide to split up, one group to try and distract the cat, the other to get to the control panel. This results in Garth and Alice attempting to pull a cat wand up the back of the refrigerator and dangle it so the cat obsessively watches it. That half of the plan doesn’t go well for Alice. Nahla and Leonard then head for the control panel. That doesn’t go well either when Leonard sees an open window and figures he has a better chance outside than in here with this monster (he doesn’t). Meanwhile, Adnan goes rogue – full Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator.
Our story concludes with Nahla having a face off with her cat. Unlike the others, the cat only decides to play with Nahla. But a cat isn’t the best judge of what “playing” means when dealing with a fragile 6 inch piece of flesh. In one intense moment, Nahla is thrust inside Kitty’s wet cat food that she wouldn’t eat earlier, pushed deep down into it, and almost drowns in cat food goo. (Spoiler) What a way to go that would be! But not to worry. Nahla survives and becomes big again. As for the others? I can’t promise the same.
Ever since this stuff started happening with Osculum Infame, I noticed, subconsciously, that I was reading scripts less from a script reviewer point of view and more from a producer point of view.
When I read scripts as a script reviewer, all I care about is, “Did the script entertain me?” But when I read scripts as a producer, I care only about, “Could this be a movie?”
And with Kitten, I’m on the fence in that department.
I know this. I WOULD MAKE IT!
I think the premise is hilarious and ripe for all sorts of set pieces that nobody’s ever seen before, which is one of the big things you’re looking for as a producer. You want to give people something new.
But the tonal execution must be so precise here that, if it’s even a little bit off, the whole thing is stupid. Because unlike Honey I Shrunk the Kids, which doesn’t really take itself seriously because it’s only got to win over family audiences, Kitten is darker and more serious. If you play that too lightly, it’s silly. If you lean too hard into it, it becomes ridiculous. Cause you have characters acting like they’re in Predator here. Yet they’re in an apartment facing a cat. That’s not an easy note to hit.
But I love this idea so much. I’m always looking for those great ironic premises. And this one hit the bullseye. The least threatening thing in the world all of a sudden becomes a T-Rex.
And I love that Bell didn’t hold back. When the cat jackrabbit scratches the entire front side of Noel off, with all of his flesh and skin splattering up against the sauna door, I was giddy with excitement. We’ve already seen the safe version of this premise. It’s time to get uncomfortable!
And I loved the final “showdown” between Nahla and Kitten.
But goodness gracious me does this writer get in his own way. Every single paragraph is at least double the length it needs to be. A script like this needs to MOVE. But there’s too much description. And it’s not like you shouldn’t describe what’s going on here because we are talking about a scenario that needs the world explained.
But that was ANOTHER thing that was so frustrating. With all the extra description, Bell wasn’t actually describing the things that mattered! I couldn’t figure out, for the life of me, how they kept opening and closing the sauna door. The sauna door would be impossible to open if you’re 6 inches tall. But people kept opening it and closing it no problem.
You’re skipping over the fun part of these screenplays – that the things we take for granted all of a sudden become impossible. Getting stuck in the sauna because you’re six inches tall could’ve been one of the best set pieces in the movie. Cause if they don’t get out, they basically sweat to death. But the writer ignores these possibilities.
And then the set pieces that he does write, he takes for granted what the reader is seeing. It’s strange because he’s overwriting and underwriting at the same time. He’s overwriting all of these unimportant details yet not meticulously describing how the back of the fridge is set up so that we understand what we’re looking at when Garth and Alice are trying to climb it.
I was getting super frustrated because this premise has so much potential. It’s the dark version of Honey I Shrunk the Kids.
And the writer didn’t do his homework trying to figure out what fun situations might come up when you’re this small. For example, there comes a point where they have to enter a code on an iPad to restart the machine. That’s something we take for granted. But if that iPad is really big compared to them, just entering the code alone would become a challenge. I wanted to see more stuff like that.
But I always say that great concepts are the deodorant to poor writing. There’s nothing that covers up the smell of weak writing like a strong concept. Cause all I kept thinking was, “This would be a really fun movie.” And there was the occasional strong moment – like Noel getting killed. Like Nahla’s battle with her cat in the end. It just needed more of that.
And it needs to both slim down all of its unnecessary text while doing a better job at describing what we’re looking at. If it can do all these things, I would hope that some risky production company would make this. Cause I think it could be awesome.
Script Link: Kitten
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Spec scripts – especially high concept contained ideas like this – need to be SHORT and LEAN. This script should not be a single page over 105. Yet it’s 115 pages long. And what was my main complaint? Overwritten. And that’s what overwritten gets you. It gets you to 115 pages. This is not a criticism I came upon in retrospect. I noted it the second I saw the page-count before reading. I saw 115 and thought, “That’s not good.” For simple premises guys: 105 pages. No longer. If you’re writing Oppenheimer, go ahead and shoot for 140. But not ideas like this.
