Today (Thursday) is the deadline for First Page Showdown. You submit the first page of your screenplay. I pick the five best first pages and post them tomorrow. The site votes on their favorite. Whoever wins gets a script review next Friday.
What: First Page Showdown
Send in: Title, Genre, Logline, and a PDF of the first page of your script
Deadline: Thursday, September 21st, 10:00pm Pacific Time
Where: e-mail all entries to carsonreeves3@gmail.com
Out of curiosity, I went back and looked at the opening page of the last five scripts I gave good reviews to ([xx] worth the read or higher). Here they are:
Black Kite – After a devastating wildfire wipes out a small California town, a teenage girl is missing and presumed dead. A year later, an obsessive mother and cynical arson investigator begin to suspect that she’s still alive…and in the clutches of a predator.
Wayward Son – When her estranged son returns and takes her grandson in the night, a veteran park ranger sets out to rescue him from the clutches of a mysterious cult deep in the Oregon woods.
The Decameron – During the Black Plague, a group of rich Italians head off into the countryside to party out the plague in a beautiful villa.
Wild – A werewolf living on a remote farm with her older sister takes in a thief on the run just 72 hours before the next full moon.
The Pack – A documentary crew in contention at the Emmys for their film about wild Alaskan wolves is hiding several big secrets about their troubled 3 month shoot.
You’ll notice that not all of them start with a great first page. I’d say that both Decameron and Black Kite start strong. Wayward Son starts out all right. A little bit of mystery there. Wild throws in the “scar necklace” which makes me want to keep reading so that one was pretty good. And The Pack starts off fairly weak. This would seem to dispel the myth that a strong script is synonymous with a strong first page. Which would seem to indicate that our little showdown this month is irrelevant.
Ahhhh, but it so very much is relevant, my friends.
You see, a script read can be broken down into two categories. Those categories are, “Hafta Read” and “Give It A Shot.” “Hafta Read” is when the reader has to read the whole script whether he wants to or not. Every script I read for the site is a Hafta Read because I need to be able to discuss the story in the review!
However, nobody in the industry has a screenplay review site. For that reason, many of them read scripts from a “Give It a Shot” perspective. They’ll read the whole script if it’s good. But if something rubs them the wrong way early or they just don’t like what they’ve read, they’ll give up on it. And they’ll do it quickly.
Some of you might be confused about when this happens because, say, if a production company wants coverage on a script and gets their secretary to write that coverage then that secretary is in a “Hafta Read” scenario. There are many instances throughout the industry where someone has to read the whole script.
But a lot of scripts make it into peoples’ hands through favors. And unless the reader is close with the writer, those favors almost always exist as “Give it a Shot” reads. This just happened to me recently. I went to visit extended family and one of my family members who knew what I did had a friend who had written a screenplay and asked me if I could check it out for them.
So I did. But I did so under a “Give it a Shot” pretense. If it was good, I’d keep reading. If it wasn’t, I was out. Particularly because I had a ton of work to do at the time. It was clear to me right away that the writing wasn’t up to professional standards. So I didn’t make it past page 5. And I was being generous. I probably went 3 pages longer than I needed to.
Favors are so prevalent when it comes to reading something that most of the scenarios you’re going to be in are of the “Give it a Shot” variety. You’ll cold e-mail a manager who likes your logline and says he’ll check out your script – send it along. I guarantee you, you are not in “Hafta Read” territory with that manager. They’re giving you five pages tops.
That’s the thing with “Give it a Shot.” It means something different to every reader. For some it might mean giving the script 10 pages, others 5, and still others, 1. And the less close the reader is to the writer, the lower that number gets. If I get a script from a friend of a cousin of a friend, I have .0001 level of commitment to that person. So when I open that script, I’m ready to bail if you don’t hook me by THE FIRST PARAGRAPH.
I bring all this up to remind everyone reading this post that it’s highly likely that any industry person you can get your script to is a “Give it a Shot” situation. And because of that, writing a great first page matters. Cause the reality is that these people will be putting outsized importance on your first page and using it to determine whether they like you as a writer and if they want to keep reading.
Even if you have a few people in your rolodex who will give you “Hafta” reads, what happens if they like your script and decide to pass it up to the more important people, the ones with the power to greenlight, the ones with the money? All of a sudden you’re right back in “Give it a Shot” territory, and what are you going to do? Tell your contact to hold off while you write a new first scene? Why not write a good first page already so you can win over both of them?
Okay, Carson. But some of those scripts you gave good reviews to were able to overcome average first pages. So how did they find success? Look, there is a “luck” component to all this. Sometimes you give your script to the right person at the right time and they’re looking for something exactly like that so they’re giving your script a lot more leeway than on a normal read. And if you get somebody with power who likes your script, your script all of a sudden has buzz and becomes a “Hafta Read.”
Even if I wasn’t reviewing scripts for the site, I would still consider the top 5 Black List scripts “Hafta Reads” because they’ve been vetted and that gives me enough confidence to read through any trouble spots the scripts might have.
But most of you aren’t there yet. I wouldn’t even consider low-tier professionals in Hafta Read territory.
You know, the bar for opening pages used to be a lot lower. Even back in the 90s, when the competition was fierce, most readers just wanted to see that the first page was well-written. That the writer could construct proper sentences, the prose was easy to read, and the eyes moved down the page quickly.
But these days, with our mega-ADD addled brains, that’s no longer enough. You need to have that AND you need to have something compelling going on, something that pulls the reader in right away. It’s a lot to ask of one page but if you were hoping for a quiet relaxed career in the writing world, go be a librarian. This is professional screenwriting. It’s where the big boys play. The bar is high.
It’s going to be interesting to see what pages make the cut for tomorrow’s Showdown. Maybe I surprise myself and include a page where nothing is happening but the writing is outright stellar. I just don’t know. But I’ll tell you this. I’m excited to find out. And I’m even more excited to see how good the winning script is.
