I dug into my 2020-2021 archives and found the ten best screenplays of the last two years!
If you’re anything like me (and if you’ve been on this site for long enough, I’m assuming you are), you’re wondering, “What happened to all the great scripts?” These days, an “impressive” on Scriptshadow is as rare as a Twitter user admitting they were wrong. Paula Cole had this soulful moody tune where she asked, “Where have all the cowboys gone?”
Well I’m asking a similar question: “Where have all the screenwriters gone?”
My first thought was that I was a victim of recency bias. I was probably forgetting some great scripts just because the current strawberry crop was yielding such tiny berries. So I decided to go back through my posts and find the last ten “impressives” that I gave. I scrolled down through one page of entries – didn’t find my ten impressives. Then a second page. Still hadn’t gotten ten. Then a third! Keep in mind, these WordPress pages list 100 blog entries per page!
At a certain point, I stopped looking for impressives and just looked for scripts that left an impression on me. They might not have been great. But they were memorable. Which is almost as good. I forget most of the screenplays I read within a week of reading them. Which is a lesson unto itself. Because when you boil down screenwriting, what you’re trying to do is create something that sticks with a reader – that gets inside of them. How many elements from your screenplay can you say are unique enough or strong enough to be memorable?
So here are the ten. After we go through them, we can talk about what we learned.
Title: Towers
Genre: Drama
Logline: A businessman’s obsession with his competitor leads him down a rabbit hole of self-discovery, fantasy, and delusion.
Rating: [x] double worth the read
Analysis: This is one of the most unexpected scripts on the list because I typically don’t like these types of screenplays – where the writer is playing with reality in such a way that you don’t know what’s real and what isn’t. I’ve found that most writers use this approach as an excuse to get sloppy and write fantastical questions they never have to worry about answering. In short, they’re always messy. But Towers is different. It’s weird. It reminded me of the underrated, “Little Children,” about how the fragile mind deals with a mid-life crisis. I always say if you’re going to write something weird, don’t be afraid to be weird. Towers has its buttoned-up middle-management main character become obsessed with drag racing. It’s odd in a really cool way.
Title: Birdies
Genre: Comedy/Satire
Logline: When Tabitha, a struggling foster kid, wins a contest to become part of the BIRDIES, a popular daily YouTube channel featuring the radiant and enigmatic Mama Bird and her diverse brood of adopted children, she soon learns that things get dark when the cameras turn off.
Rating: [x] impressive
Analysis: Birdies is a great example of mixing the old with the new, which is one of the best ways to come up with good ideas. The script is basically a reverse “Annie” with a social media twist. The thing I remember most about the script was how it nailed the pressure of succeeding in this emerging entertainment world, and the lengths people will go to keep those views up – namely, abusing children. One of the best ways to make a script memorable is to go to dark places. And what’s darker than exploiting children for money and fame? What’s impressive is that the script somehow manages to do this while also being funny. That’s a fine tightrope to walk.
Title: Lakewood
Genre: Thriller
Logline: Told in real time, a young mother out for her morning jog gets word that there’s been a school shooting at the high school her son attends.
Rating: [x] impressive
Analysis: While weird scripts get the nod for “most memorable” in most cases, I’m a sucker for a bare bones good idea with great execution. That’s what Lakewood is. It does two things really well. First, it takes an old idea and comes at it from a fresh angle. A school shooting where we’re never at the school. Instead, we stay with a mother of someone at the school who’s trying to get information on what’s happening. Second, the execution is flawless. It’s hard to write a bare-bones story, which is what this is. It’s one woman with a phone. Chris Sparling is the master at taking a stripped-down premise and keeping the train moving. He knows exactly how much character development the audience needs. He knows exactly how much exposition they need. And everything else is about propelling the story forward. Great stuff.
Title: Ambulance
Genre: Action
Logline: After a bank robbery gone wrong, two brothers attempt to use a stolen ambulance as a getaway car.
Rating: [x] impressive
Analysis: “Ambulance” is a lot like Lakewood in that it moves fast. But the plot is way more intricate. And that’s what drew me in. I loved how the writer, Chris Fedak, followed different characters along different paths before finally bringing them together into this wild ride on this ambulance. I mean you talk about ‘energy’ – which is a word I don’t often use when referring to screenplays – but there is a clear energy on these pages that I rarely see. It was like each of these paragraphs were being blasted out of a nuclear reactor. This is such an intense script.
Title: Voicemails for Isabelle
Genre: Rom-Com
Premise: A low-level TV writer struggles to cope with the death of her little sister by continuing to leave her voicemails chronicling the shitshow that is dating in LA. When the phone number is unknowingly transferred, a cocky New York real estate agent begins receiving the voicemails, and feels compelled to meet their creator.
Rating: [x] double worth the read
Analysis: Voicemails for Isabelle is easily the most unlikely entry on this list. In addition to rom-com bias (I enjoy, maybe, one romantic comedy script every 18 months) this concept isn’t exactly fresh. Nobody leaves voicemails anymore. So how did this script overcome that issue? Because of writer Leah McKendrick’s incredible ear for dialogue. The dialogue SINGS in this script, so much so that you literally forget you’re reading a script every time a new scene starts. The interesting think about Leah is she never formally learned screenwriting. She just really liked writing dialogue scenes between people. Clearly, she’s amazing at it. Cause this rom-com rom-rocked.
Title: They Cloned Tyrone
Genre: Sci-Fi/Comedy
Logline: A group of friends in a crime-ridden black community are thrown into disarray when they learn they’re being experimented on by evil white people.
Rating: [x] wasn’t for me
Analysis: The only ‘wasn’t for me’ on the list! So why does it make the list? When I first read this, it came off as too wacky for me. But as I was scrolling through all of the scripts I’d reviewed in WordPress, when I got to They Cloned Tyrone, I remembered it immediately. First off, that goes to show how important a good title is. But it also highlights the power of weirdness and how, if you’re writing a script that hits the same beats as every other script (aka, you’re writing a “John Wick” clone), it’s nearly impossible to make that memorable. But if you’ve got black people discovering that their entire community is being run by a series of underground white puppet-masters who are cloning and experimenting on them… it’s rare someone’s going to forget that. I still think this script is too goofy for its own good. But it’s stayed with me.
Title: Street Rat Allie Punches Her Ticket
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy
Premise: An 18-year-old skateboarding “rat” named Allie finally gets her chance to leave the garbage dangerous futuristic city she’s grown up in. But will she be able to leave her fellow “rats” who must now fend for themselves?
Rating: [x] impressive
Analysis: One of my favorite things about reading is thinking I’m in for two hours of boredom only to end up having the time of my life. Sci-Fi/Fantasy is probably the single hardest genre to get right. You’re not just inventing characters. You’re not just inventing a plot. You’re inventing AN ENTIRE UNIVERSE. And almost every writer I know who’s tried to tackle this combo ends up writing exponentially inferior ripoffs of concepts from Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. Not only did Nicholl-winner McKnight overcome that obstacle, but he constructed an early-Spielbergarian protagonist in Allie. Remember one of the 10 Commandments in screenwriting:. If you write us a sympathetic likable main character, we will want to follow them through anything. McKnight nails that commandment.
Title: Resurrection
Genre: Thriller/Drama/Horror
Logline: A single mother in New York City begins seeing a mysterious older man from her past around town and becomes convinced that he’s come back into her life to kill her daughter.
Rating: [x] impressive (TOP 25!!!!)
Analysis: For someone who claims they hate vague narratives, I sure seem to prop a lot of these vague scripts up. I think what I really dislike is vague narratives DONE BADLY. Resurrection is all about this woman who’s losing her mind. She becomes convinced she’s being followed by a controlling ex-boyfriend who’s back to make her life miserable. Yet the person she believes is this man who keeps telling her he doesn’t know who she is. So it’s another, “What’s real and what isn’t?” plot. But what makes Resurrection stand out is its weird and daring choices. There’s a scene in this movie where the guy tells our heroine that he ate their baby that is so freaky I can’t even begin to describe it. This script is on another level. Another level of f&%$d up.
Title: All The Old Knives
Genre: Thriller
Logline: Two CIA operative former lovers meet for dinner and try to figure out what happened five years ago with a complicated hostage plane takeover in Vienna they were involved in.
Rating: [x] double worth the read
Analysis: I love contrast in screenplays. I love when writers balance one extreme against another. Here, we have this intense horrifying hostage situation being played against a soft easy-going dinner between two former lovers. Usually, movies will opt for one kind of narrative or the other. Rarely do they include both. So while jumping back and forth between these narratives is jarring, it’s also exciting. And each narrative has a compelling question attached to it. What happens during this hostage situation? Does everyone live or die? And, with the dinner, will these former lovers end up together again? The script also has some fun twists and turns. All The Old Knives doesn’t stick the landing. But the preceding handspring into a double front flip sure is entertaining.
Title: The Laborer
Genre: Horror
Logline: A pair of out-of-work immigrant brothers catch a break when they are hired as day laborers for a house in the Hollywood Hills, only to find out that it’s home to a vampire.
Rating: [x] impressive
Analysis: This was one of my more controversial ‘impressive’ picks but I still contend that it’s a great screenplay. I always like when writers combine situations that don’t traditionally go together. When I think of two day laborers doing work on a house, I don’t imagine them discovering a vampire being housed in the basement. From there it becomes this clever commentary of how the rich take advantage of the poor. Also, it’s unpredictable. If there’s any theme that you get from these scripts I’ve celebrated today, it should be that most of them are unpredictable. And that’s often because the writers will write these scenes that take you somewhere you didn’t expect to go. There’s a bath house scene in The Laborer that took me to that place. The Laborer is weird and unexpected in all the right places.
So, there it is! What conclusions can we draw from these scripts? What unifying factor helps them stand out from the pack? Well, there seems to be three distinct lessons here. Number one, “write weird with a purpose.” Write something weird, like The Laborer or Towers or Resurrection, but have a purpose. Don’t be David Lynch where you have no idea where you’re going and don’t care. Even if the parts of your story are vague to the audience, you, the reader, should always know the truth. Number two, twist a familiar concept. Birdies is a 2021 “Annie.” Lakewood is an unexpected update on a mass shooting movie. The writer tells the tale from a new point of view. And number three, be clever with your execution. When I read Ambulance and Street Rat, I was constantly impressed by the way the story evolved and came together. Characters intersected in surprising yet always believable ways.
What about you guys? What have some your favorite scripts been over the last year and what qualities would you say are consistent in them?
