No, this is not my response to the entries! But there is a projectile vomit scene in one of the featured scripts!
Today we’re going to look at ten entries from the Scriptshadow First Act Contest. For those who don’t know my judging process, I give each entry at least 10 pages. From there, I keep reading until I get bored. If the script manages to keep me reading all the way to page 30, it advances to the next round. From there, I’ll re-evaluate every script that advanced, pick five finalists, then choose a winner.
Today, I’ll be letting you know a) what page I made it to, and b) if the script advanced or not. Also, just so there’s no confusion, I’ll often open a script without reading the logline because I want the writing to speak for itself. Therefore, if I seem confused by something in my analysis that’s easily explained in the logline, you know why. By the way, roughly 1 in 30 scripts are advancing, so there’s little margin for error. Let’s get to it!
Title: Haven
Genre: Supernatural Crime Drama
Logline: Held on an isolated farm, three desperate and debt-ridden scientists have twenty-four hours to recreate a failed experiment. When their captors seek to erase the secrets of the site, its full, terrifying potential is unleashed and their logical world descends into chaos.
Writer: Ben Allan Watkins
Analysis: There were a couple of things right off the bat that hurt this entry. First, we have a second page dedicated to the script’s logline. You don’t want to do that. That’s a pretty overt sign that an amateur writer is writing the script. But the more damning mistake was introducing the main character, Sam, without a character description or even an age. You can’t make that mistake. From there, I couldn’t really understand where I was or what was going on. I was in some sort of farm, as far as I could tell. It was a commune, maybe? People were sleeping everywhere. Nobody seemed to be related, which is where I drew the “commune” assumption from. When it’s hard to figure out even the basic building blocks of a story, that’s a script killer. Those early pages cannot, under any circumstances, be confusing. I would encourage Ben to work harder on his clarity. Put yourself in the reader’s shoes. Ask, if you were them, would you easily be able to tell what was going on? If not, add more information.
Read until: Page 10
Advance?: No
Title: Killer Instinct
Genre: Action Comedy
Logline: A man gets injected with a pheromone-based serum that makes anybody who smells him suddenly want to kill him…
Writer: Mike Hurst
Analysis: This entry felt more professional. But it was a mixed bag and, ultimately, I had a couple of issues with it. The first scene is a senator beating up a woman and then throwing her out a window to her death. That’s a dangerous scene to write in a post #metoo world, even if it’s motivated by the concept. But that wasn’t my main issue. My main issue was that the woman was super sick or something. She could barely stand? So she’s got her own weird thing going on (sickness). Then this senator comes in and has a completely different thing going on (rage). So there’s just no consistency across the scene. I suspect it will later be revealed that the woman’s sickness is what activated his rage. But, in the moment, there are too many rules being thrown at us so the scene doesn’t go down easy. By the way, I would recommend switching genders here. Have the senator be a woman. Have the person in the hotel room be a guy. It’s a way more interesting scene if a woman easily beats this guy up. Not bad writing at all. Had a good laugh later in the classroom scene. But that opening scene was problematic enough that I decided not to advance Killer Instinct.
Read until: Page 10
Advance?: No
Title: Too Old to Rock and Roll, Too Young to Die
Genre: Comedy
Logline: When they are mistakenly plucked from obscurity to headline a summer festival tour, a band of middle-aged Dads have four weeks to live out their rock and roll fantasies and learn that not all dreams are quite what they seem.
Writer: David Glitzer
Analysis: Comedy is a funny thing. Just like it’s hard to make a joke funny by explaining it, it’s hard to explain why a joke didn’t make you laugh. Here we open on a guy who works in a bird store and the recurring joke in the scene is all the birds say dirty sexual sexual things (“Lick my balls.” “Tickle my a$$hole”). I just didn’t understand why all the birds were sexual. I thought maybe they overheard the owner having a lot of sex all the time? And they were parroting the things they heard from his dirty sexual exploits? The problem was that the owner was described as a loser who owns a bird store. So that would imply he doesn’t have a lot of sex. Which brings me back to the birds. Why do they scream out sexual things? Frankly, I just didn’t get the joke. That’s followed by a projectile vomiting scene and I was pretty much out from there. As I’ve said numerous times, I think body fluid jokes are lowest common denominator comedy. I like comedy that’s more clever. That’s just me personally. Doesn’t mean the next reader won’t like it. But, obviously, if I wasn’t connecting with the comedy, I can’t advance the script.
Read until: Page 10
Advance?: No
Title: Swift Wing <—- Carson note: Needs a better title!
Genre: Science Fiction/Dramedy
Logline: On a dying wish, two explorers land on a strange planet in search of the legendary Winged Creatures, but the local inhabitants believe otherwise and try to kill the alien invaders.
Writer: Bruce Richardson
Analysis: A lot of times when you read a script, you’re just reading things that are happening. The writer isn’t in that mindset of “I must write a series of events that are so good, the reader cannot stop reading.” That “non-urgent mindset” is what leads to scripts like this one. Nothing here is bad. But nor is it “I must turn the page” good. We’ve got some beginner errors. When characters are introduced, their names are not capitalized. A park ranger is casually shooting and killing people. I suppose, if this is a comedy, casually killing people can work. But it seemed a little *too* casual. It just felt like life didn’t matter in this story, which is a bad way to start any story because it lowers the stakes. If lives are unimportant, then who really cares what happens to anyone? The two aliens who show up were *mildly* amusing. But I needed them to be *highly* amusing to keep reading. This is a classic example of the writer not understanding what the bar is. Cause I think Bruce is a good writer. But he’s not writing scenes that knock you out. He’s writing scenes that casually nudge you along. No nudging please. Readers don’t respond to nudges.
Read until: Page 10
Advance?: No.
Title: Paramedics on Patrol <—- Carson note: Needs a better title!
Genre: Thriller
Logline: A mysterious woman wakes up inside an ambulance to find she’s being abducted.
Writer: David Fabian
Analysis: This is the best of the batch so far. It’s a really fun idea. You wake up in an ambulance. You don’t know what happened to you. Then all of a sudden you start to suspect these aren’t really paramedics. And you may be getting abducted. That’s a movie premise right there for sure. I think the problem David runs into is that he moves the plot along too quickly. I know that’s a criticism that seems counterintuitive since I’m always saying to move the story along fast. But he’s got such a good setup that he should be milking it. I just feel like if we’re on page 20 and we’re already getting into the abducted woman’s secret life and reasons for why this entity wants to kidnap her – I don’t find that interesting. Her having some secret thing going on is a good plot twist but you don’t want to bring that up until the midpoint. Until then, this should be about her gradually realizing she’s been abducted. And instead of screaming at them, “You’re kidnapping me! Stop!” She should be more discreet about it and start to work the problem, figure out a way to escape. In other words, the story is more interesting when both sides are keeping secrets. Once everything’s out in the open, it’s just a screaming contest. I’m going to do something rare and advance this even though I didn’t get to page 30. Even though I feel like I’d need to guide David a lot to get this where it needed to be, the idea has a ton of potential. I would tell David, start writing a version of this where she suspects she’s being kidnapped but doesn’t tell them. And she starts working the puzzle. Trying to figure out who these guys are. Trying to figure out where they’re headed. Trying to figure out how she’s going to escape. There can be a scene where the bad guys are both up in the front for a minute and she tries to reach her phone and contact someone. We want those types of scenes, at least at first, rather than all this screaming nonsense. Oh, and one more quick thing, David. It’s “were,” not “we’re!!!!!”
Read until: Page 23
Advance?: Yes
Title: Gutshot
Genre: Thriller
Logline: A cop-turned-snitch fights to survive a night in the wild as she bleeds out from a gunshot wound sustained during a failed kidnapping attempt by her former partners.
Writer: Caleb Yeaton
Analysis: This script has the right idea. You start by showing a bad guy staking out a house, about to do something bad. Cut to inside the house to show unsuspecting people, in this case, a couple of women (or maybe one woman, with the other one being on the phone, it wasn’t clear) and now we have this dramatically ironic situation brewing where we know the women are in danger. But here’s the problem. None of this was clear. When the bad guy drives up, we’re told there are other people in his car, so I thought it was a family and, therefore, didn’t tab him as dangerous. Therefore, when we were in the house, we get this endlessly boring conversation between these two women where they’re talking about some random trial we know nothing about. This goes on for five pages (!!!). I was fighting to keep my eyes open. Granted, this dialogue plays a lot better if I know the bad guy is lurking outside. But it’s up to the writer to make that clear. I think so many writers are terrified of being on-the-nose that they’re too subtle with the details of their scenes. But the details are everything, especially in a scene like this, where, if we’re confused about even one variable, we miss the point of the whole scene. Also, the dialogue between the women here needs to be 10,000 times better. It just doesn’t have anything going for it. Needed more purpose.
Read until: Page 10
Advance?: No.
Title: Artificial Obsession
Genre: Sci-Fi
Logline: After a video of her goes viral to the world, a small town cop gets caught in the most dangerous love triangle in history when the first artificial superintelligence capable of taking over the planet becomes romantically obsessed with her.
Writer: Gregory Mandaro
Analysis: I’m not in love with the choice of spending the first two pages of the script focusing on an interview on the TV in a restaurant. I understand that we have to get exposition in somehow, especially if it’s complex exposition. But those first ten pages are such valuable real estate that I don’t think spending them on a television interview that doesn’t contain any of our main characters is the best way to go. From there, we get a random Twitch streamer approaching our heroine, who’s waiting for her date at the aforementioned restaurant. This leads to more exposition regarding our heroine’s deaf sister, who, coincidentally, is also a streamer. You’re trying to cram three different things into this scene (TV interview, girl waiting for her date who hasn’t shown up, random Twitch streamer who stumbles up and decides to have a conversation with our heroine). It makes for a clumsy reading experience. It was hard for the script to recover after that. We then get a chase scene (our heroine is a cop) which was fine, with a decent reveal at the end (there was no one in the car she was chasing – it’s A.I. driven). It was nice that Greg gave us a scene with something exciting happening. But that first scene really did the script in for me. That’s not the kind of clear entertaining streamlined scene you want to open a script with. Let’s focus less on exposition and more on entertainment in the next draft (straight up starting the script with the car chase and the “no one inside” reveal would be a much better first scene).
Read until: Page 10
Advance?: No.
Title: SYSTEM ERROR (alt: A CYBORG MANIFESTO)
Tag: What happens when you’re the glitch in the system?
Genre: Sci-Fi
Logline: When her brain-implanted medical device suddenly develops a personality, a codependent geneticist must save the rest of a tech-addicted humanity from the same glitchy global update.
Writer: Katie Gard
Analysis: It’s good to finally see Katie get in on the action. She always contributes thoughtful and inquisitive comments. I started off liking this one due to the intense specificity regarding the computer talk. A ton of world-building went into this and it pays off. I liked the stuff where she controls “skins” on the people she’s talking to. So she can make her 60 year old therapist look like Tom Cruise in Risky Business. I can see how that would lead to some interesting character situations. If you were with an average looking boyfriend, in order to make him look more attractive during sex, say, you could just add a skin to him. And he doesn’t even have to know. But what if he suspects that’s what you did because the heroine was more into the sex than normal? Now you have some interesting conversations to play around with. So I like that this setup makes you think. My issue is more on the storytelling end. 10 pages go by and what’s really happened? A woman has talked with her fake AI therapist and we’ve gotten some flashbacks to explain why she has a special ability to control the variables by which she sees the world. It’s essentially all exposition. Where is the entertainment? I suppose some of it comes from learning about this cool technology. But that can’t carry the entire load. You need to come up with scenes that ‘show don’t tell’ and have fun with them. Take my boyfriend example above. Start with them having sex, he’s suspicious after it’s over, he asks if she used a skin on him, something they agreed not to do. Guilty, we see from her POV as he goes from Zack Efron to Paul Giamatti, and now you’ve given us exposition in a more dramatic, and therefore, entertaining way. What I read was not bad but we need the storytelling to come up to the same level as the world building.
Read until: Page 14
Advance?: No.
Title: Druid
Genre: Horror
Logline: After returning to his family home on the wild North York Moors, a failed businessman must battle for survival against the human-hunting worshippers of a prehistoric god.
Writer: Finn Morgan
Analysis: “Druid” has the right idea. It starts off with a big snazzy cold open. A guy in an animal mask in the middle of nowhere throws himself in front of a BMW and gets obliterated. What was that all about? We have to keep reading to find out. We then meet a guy who tries to kill himself but fails. He goes home to his ex-girlfriend. Looks like they’ve broken up. This dude has definitely seen better days. Then he moves from the city back to his farm, I think. And immediately he sees someone in an animal mask chase someone else in an animal mask onto his property and kill them. He then has to run from the killer, and a chase ensues. To Finn’s credit, there’s a lot going on here, unlike many of today’s entries. I don’t know why I wasn’t more into it, though. The main character’s suicide attempt gives him some depth which makes us root for him. I guess my hesitancy comes from already having seen the whole “animal mask” thing before. So maybe it feels a little cliche to me. Not new enough? All I know is that around page 15, I wasn’t compelled to continue reading. I didn’t *have* to find out what happened next. And that’s the ultimate question in a script. Always. Have you created something that readers can’t *not* keep reading? I’d put this in the upper 30th percentile of today’s entries. But it wasn’t quite enough to advance.
Read until: Page 15
Advance?: No.
Title: America or Die
Genre: Action-Adventure
Logline: Post World War III, a fierce backcountry woman is enslaved to the Balkan Federation’s cruel Defense Minister and ends up in a do-or-die struggle for freedom.
Writer: Joe Stevens
Analysis: This is another script that does some things right. After setting up the post World War 3 world we live in via a title scroll, we meet this small community of non-technological people. The people are then attacked by a group with motorcycles and cars and drones. The pursuit soon centers on our heroine, Shelby. But here’s a crucial component to writing that you have to nail. Before Shelby gets chased, you gotta give us a reason to love her, to root for her, so that we care when she’s chased. Cause I didn’t care. The only thing I know about this person is that she thinks prayer is a waste of time. That’s not enough insight for me to say, “Oh my god! I’ll be miserable if these guys catch her!” Whether it’s through a save-the-cat scene or a more elaborate protagonist setup that really makes us like this woman, you need that part. Big action scenes carry with them a natural intensity. So they can be a good choice early on in a script. But if we don’t care enough about the characters involved in that big action scene, we’re not going to care what happens to them.
Read until: Page 13
Advance?: No.
And there you have it! One script advances. Congratulations to David Fabian. Download the scripts themselves above. I’ve provided links to all of them. Tell us what you think. Did I make a gigantic mistake and miss an obvious finalist? Let me have it. If you guys liked this exercise, let me know, and I’ll do another one next week. :)
Happy Weekend!
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