A thousand Twit-Pitches have been narrowed down to one winner. Was your favorite chosen??
Months back, I decided to try an experiment (at the worst possible time, mind you – I was creating a new site and writing a book). The experiment was to allow people to tweet me the loglines for their screenplays. The catch was that they only had one tweet to do it in. So they had to boil down an already boiled down logline to even LESS words.
I took the Top 75 of those loglines and I read the first 10 pages of each, tweeting live reviews on Twitter. It was a pretty cool experiment. I wanted writers to be able to get into the head of a reader AS HE WAS READING their script. You could see exactly what they were thinking as they were thinking it. And I didn’t hold back. If something was dumb, I’d say it was dumb.
The top 20 of those first 10 pages moved on to the final round, where I read the entire script and reviewed each of them here on Scriptshadow. So how did the experiment end? What did I learn from all this? Well, I’m not sure I learned anything definitively. But I will say this. The winner and runners-up of Twit-Pitch stood out for two different reasons. The first because it took chances, pushed the envelope, and didn’t go where you expected it to. The second and third because they had smart contained concepts and were well written. None of these scripts were home runs. They all had their problems. But I do think there’s a good lesson here. You CAN stand out by pushing the envelope or just with good old fashioned solid writing on a strong idea.
And with that, let’s get to the winners. Here they are…
***FIRST PLACE***
Proving Ground by James Topham – (Original Twit-Pitch Logline) 9 strangers wake in a deserted Mexican town besieged by killing machines: they must discover why they’ve been brought there to survive.
**RUNNER-UP**
Fatties by Matthew Ballen – (Original Twit-Pitch Logline) When a lonely masochistic chubby chaser is abducted by two fat lesbian serial killers, it’s the best thing that ever happened to him.
*THIRD PLACE*
Guest by Matthew Cruz – (Original Twit-Pitch Logline) After checking into a hotel to escape her abusive husband, a woman realizes guests in the next room are holding a young girl hostage.
