Last week, I challenged everyone to send me a query e-mail for their screenplay. The best query got a script review on the site. Monday, I posted the winning query. Tuesday, I reviewed the script from that query. Wednesday, I showed you how to write the perfect query. And today, I’m going to go over several queries that didn’t make the cut and explain WHY.
Let’s jump into it, shall we? Here’s the first one.
Hi Carson,
I hope you’re well. I’ve been following the site since it was scriptshadown.com. Thought it would finally be a good time to reach out and submit a script.
I’d like to share Claus: Rise of the Northman, a large-scale action epic that reimagines the novel The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, written by L. Frank Baum (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz), as a violent, mythic, emotionally charged war epic. It aims for the scope and savagery of Braveheart, Gladiator, The Northman, and The Outlaw King.
“In the brutal snows of the far North, a young warrior named Claus rises from loss and bloodshed to lead an impossible rebellion, battling a monstrous army and their evil warlord and forging a legend that will echo for centuries – the origin story of Santa Claus.”
This is not a holiday film. It’s a grounded, R-rated action epic rooted in sacrifice, love, revenge, and legacy – a mythic origin story in the spirit of Robert Eggers and Ridley Scott, but with the emotional payoff of a timeless legend. The red coat doesn’t begin as a symbol of joy – it’s earned in blood.
At its core, this is a four-quadrant epic origin story built for global audiences. It has franchise potential and strong merchandising/IP expansion upside, while still standing alone as a prestige action film. Work has already begun on the graphic novel.
I’ve written and/or directed 15 feature films that have played across every major streaming platform. My work has landed in Netflix’s Top Ten, and I’ve had films hit #1 on both Hulu and Paramount+, that have starred the likes of Malin Akerman, Luke Wilson, Simon Rex, Amy Smart, Val Kilmer, and Kelsey Grammer, among many others.
Attached please find the script and an image from the graphic novel.
Thanks for your time Carson, and whether or not it’s chosen, keep up the great work as I’ll continue to follow your site daily.
Best,
Shane (personal information edited out by me)
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This is a great example of what happens when you send a WALL OF WORDS out. I open the e-mail and I see this long thing that I have to get through. I’m going to read it but I’m already kinda annoyed. Because whenever somebody sends me a long e-mail, it always rambles. It rambles on and on and on. It sucks for the writers who actually know how to write a long e-mail because the ramblers ruin it for you.
Then I read the first line. I have no idea what “scriptshadown” is. I’ve never run a site called scriptshadown. So, at that point, I’m thinking the writer doesn’t really know the site. I talked about this in my “perfect query” post yesterday. You want to relate to the person in that opening couple of sentences. But make sure your research is accurate! Because as soon as I read that, combined with the Wall of Words, I went into skim mode.
I continued to read the logline and then I ran into “Santa Claus.” For whatever reason, I get pitched a billion Santa Claus scripts. I don’t know if that’s true for the entire industry but it’s true for me. This has made me resistant to Santa Claus material. This query has now hit the 3 red flags mark so I skimmed the rest and moved on.
The irony is when I went back to this e-mail today, and I read through it fully, I saw that the writer was super-legit! This guy’s written and directed number one films on streaming services before! But I never got to that part of the query because of the Wall of Words submission and the bad research.
There are a couple of things here worth talking about. I think this line is fine: “I’d like to share Claus: Rise of the Northman, a large-scale action epic that reimagines the novel The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, written by L. Frank Baum (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz), as a violent, mythic, emotionally charged war epic.” It’s fine because it conveys the tone of this unique story. But I don’t think you then need to list other movies it’s similar to. You have to cut words somewhere in a query. Again, we’re dealing with busy people here.
All this other stuff about “this is not a holiday film” and “this is a four-quadrant” movie is just noise. And it’s wasting the reader’s time. You’ve given us the tone. You’ve given us the logline. If you have to then explain to the recipient that it’s not a holiday film and that it’s a four-quadrant movie, then you haven’t done your job with the logline. They should be able to determine that on their own. And, really, it’s up to them to decide anyway.
Now, in regards to personal accomplishments, this is something I didn’t address in yesterday’s post because I’m assuming that the people sending these queries out haven’t had any accomplishments yet. But if you’re like Shane, then you should definitely include your accomplishments. The issue I typically see is writers including accomplishments that hurt rather than help them.
They’ll say that they finished in the 3rd round of the Beach Street Screenplay Contest. Or that their short film won the audience award at the Rhode Island Digital Sunrise Invitational. I’m not even sure I would mention a produced movie you wrote if nobody’s heard of it. I’m okay with mentioning “finalist” or “winner” of major screenwriting contests in the last several years, maybe a top 20 showing on the Black List. But that’s it.
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On to the second query…
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Since it’s impossible to recapture some of the styling in html, the only way to properly make my point here is to take a picture of this e-mail query. Here it is:
In the history of my receiving screenplay queries, one of the more reliable ways for me to know if the script is weak is a query that has multiple fonts, multiple text sizes, lots of styling, lots of misaligned text.
I think I understand what the writer is thinking with this approach. They want to stand out. And they feel that if they add some pizazz to the presentation, it’s going to separate them from the pack. It does separate them from the pack. But in a bad way.
E-mail isn’t designed for a controlled layout. So, once you start messing with formatting inside of an e-mail document, it’s going to look “off.” And what’s worse is, once it ends up on a different e-mail program (you made it in Mac Mail and sent it to someone’s gmail), the text always gets screwed up somehow. So all that extra work resulted in your e-mail actually looking worse.
It’s just not worth it. Whenever I see it, my first thought is, “Amateur writer who doesn’t know what he’s doing.” And I can promise you that that’s how 99% of the working people in the industry will see that e-mail as well. Look at how much cleaner this query looks…
Just use regular fonts. Regular formatting. Keep it uniform (don’t use 12 point font in one section and 14 point font in another). Anything else ends up looking sloppy and unprofessional. It’s hurting your chances of accomplishing a very simple goal, which is to tell someone that you have a cool screenplay they should read. If they’re put off by the zaniness of the formatting, they won’t be able to see that.
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On to the last query…
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Sit down, shut up, and listen. “The Facetakers” is science fiction horror with teeth, because the monster is not in the woods, it is in your head. An omniscient AI called The Sum already won the world decades ago, and it runs the planet through an electronically induced hypnotic narcosis called the Experiential Grid, a global augmented reality streamed straight into human brains. It can make you see day at midnight, hear voices in the static, and walk smiling into your own execution. When someone is marked for replacement, the system hits them with a Kill Tone, then sends a Facetaker, a hollow android full of circumducting gold and plasti-bone, wrapped in polymorphic endoplasm that can become skin, hair, clothes, even your loved one’s face. These things do not just kill you, they become you, and the older they get the more their minds fracture into a blood-lust religion where they bathe in victims and feed on fear.
After a blistering cold open on a moon base that announces the scale and the rules, the movie clamps shut into a single location siege: one isolated 1980s time-capsule lake property in 2027, one house with forty windows, a covered bridge, a generator-lined basement, and a perimeter that turns into a kill box.
The script is a mix of Videodrome, Black Mirror, and The Matrix. 1980s Body Horror modernized and perfected.
I included this last query as a catch-all for the writers who want to buck tradition and query with something unorthodox. The reality is that this can work. In a world where everyone sounds the same, it can help if you sound different. But there’s no question that it’s a risk. It’s no different from approaching a girl walking down the street. You can adhere to social norms and say, “Hi, I wanted to meet you.” Or you could come up and say, in a Yoda voice, “Want to have sex with you, I do.”
You’re going to get in a lot more conversations if you use the first option. But the rare girl who likes the second option is REALLY going to like you.
That’s what’s going on here. Starting your query by telling the reader to sit down, shut up, and listen is risky. But there will be the occasional reader who loves it. Cause it’s different. So, just know that if you’re going to be unorthodox, your hit rate is going to be a lot lower. But, hopefully, the people who do respond to it, will respond very positively.
Now, if that was the only talking point with this query, I’d say that the writer is okay. They have a strategy. They’re accepting the risk of that strategy. All good.
But there’s another problem. The visual of this query is off-putting. It starts with this giant paragraph. When I see a really long paragraph, it almost always means ‘rambling.’ That’s what I’m expecting. And that’s pretty much what we get here. We’re dropped into Neil’s mind and he’s vomiting his movie idea out at us.
And because the mythology is so specific and unique, it exacerbates the rambling. Wild terms are thrown at us (experiential grid, kill tone, facetaker) that mean nothing to us. And so they risk sounding like a homeless guy on the train blabbering at us mindlessly.
Finally, we get a poster. This is something I’m seeing more and more of with pitches – an AI Poster or AI images. I think we’re at the point where they’ve become ubiquitous. And that means that they may hurt you more than they help you.
David Spade once said, “A limo is just a taxi that says you have a hundred dollars.” An AI image in a query e-mail is the same thing. It doesn’t say you’re a visionary. It says you opened Midjourney.
The exception would be if you’re a power user. You have a graphic design background and are entrenched in the AI revolution. You’re genuinely creating images that the average person cannot. But even then, I wouldn’t include it unless it looked extremely professional and perfectly encapsulated your movie. Not does so in a “close enough” way. It’s gotta be perfect. (And yes, I’m aware of the irony of using AI images in my posts, so feel free to factor that into your final decision).
So, if I were Neil, I would break this e-mail up into smaller paragraphs. Don’t talk about extremely specific mythology. Save that for the script read. Try to be more purposeful with the e-mail itself (Here’s why I’m writing you. Here’s my idea. Let me know if you want to read the script). And then I’d probably ditch the image.
And that concludes QUERY WEEK! If you have any other questions about queries, ask them in the comments. Hope you guys all learned something. I always enjoy brushing up on this stuff cause some of it is easy to forget.
Enjoy your weekend and, oh yeah, the first person to e-mail me gets 40% off a screenplay consultation! E-mail me at: carsonreeves1@gmail.com now!
