How to come up with better movie ideas

We’re about two weeks away from our first showdown of the year, the 5 Loglines Showdown. You come up with 5 loglines, submit them to me. If any of them are awesome, they will be featured during Showdown weekend, where your writing peers will vote for the best logline and hopefully crown you the winner. Wanna compete? Here’s how…

What: 5 Loglines Showdown
When: Friday, January 30
Deadline: Thursday, January 31, 11pm Pacific Time
Submit: 5 loglines, each with a title and a genre
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com

You better come correct because there are a lot of writers taking this assignment seriously. They’ve been generating ideas EVERY DAY so that they send in 5 strong contenders.

If coming up with movie ideas isn’t easy for you, don’t worry. We still have plenty of time. So, today, I’m going to give you some tools that will help you generate the best ideas possible.

We’re going to start by going over a list of the best original movie concepts that have come out over the last several years.

Keep in mind, I’m not factoring ‘execution’ into this. Just because you come up with a good idea doesn’t mean you’re going to write it well. Or that the director will direct it well. But these are all the ideas I felt had the potential to be good movies due to their strong concepts.

They are….

Heretic
65
Red One
Here
The Zone of Interest
Cocaine Bear
The Last Voyage of the Detemer
Sisu
The Menu
The Platform
Don’t Worry Darling
Speak No Evil
Free Guy
Old
Promising Young Woman
Leave The World Behind
Copshop
Nine Days

Now, I can already hear some of you moaning, ready to attack my choices. But I would challenge you to look back through the last few years and find more than three original movie ideas that you think were great concepts. It’s hard because the industry has moved so aggressively towards IP, leaving less original ideas out there.

So, after you’re done confirming that I’m right, let’s look at why these ideas are good.

Heretic gameifies the concept of selling religion via a contained horror setting that packs a ton of tension and surprises. 65, which sends its characters to earth 65 million years ago, with less than 24 hours before the infamous ‘dinosaur-killer’ asteroid crashes into the planet, is about as high concept an idea as one can come up with.

Red One mixes spy movies with saving Santa Claus. Genius. “Here” makes the incredibly bold choice of locking its characters into one room over the course of their entire lives. That’s a creative concept if I’ve ever heard one.

The Zone of Interest shows us the power of irony. A movie about a happy care-free family living five feet away from Auschwitz during the height of World War 2. Cocaine Bear shows us what happens when you mix ‘fun’ and ‘bananas,’ going all in on its wild concept.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter is one of the best uses of a contained horror location that I’ve ever come across. Sisu shows us that you can adjust the John Wick equation (make the hero older, set it in a popular time period) in a way that gives you an unexpectedly kick-ass action premise.

The Menu builds mystery around a subject matter that doesn’t typically engage in mystery (high end restaurants and chefs). Not only is The Platform the most inventive high concept on this list, but it somehow manages to say the most about humanity.

Don’t Worry Darling uses time and technology to explore the patriarchy in a unique way. Speak No Evil is what I call “stealth high concept.” It’s a small idea that feels huge due to its nifty setup and continuous reveals.

Free Guy shows us that concepts fly highest when they’re simple. A programmed character inside a game wants free choice in his life and will risk anything to get it. “Old” uses the dependable high-concept variable of time to explore aging, placing a bunch of people on a beach where they’re all aging 20 times faster than the rest of the world.

Promising Young Woman shows us what the intersection between high concept and character-driven looks like. A young woman pretends to be blackout drunk at bars in order to expose rapists, part of a bigger plan to take down those responsible for her friends’ rape and subsequent suicide.

Leave The World Behind has the best ‘end of the world’ premise I’ve come across in five years. A mystery country is attacking the U.S. in a manner that makes it turn against itself.

Copshop is a clever little action movie idea that asks, what happens when bad guys chasing other bad guys end up in the jail cells right across from each other one night. And finally, the thinking man’s high concept, Nine Days, which pits 9 people against one another, all of whom are vying to prove their worthiness to be born and live a life on earth.

These are all good movie ideas. But how do writers come up with them? Unfortunately, we don’t know the answer to that because everyone has their own methods for coming up with ideas.

But the most common method I’ve heard, and one that I’ve found to be true with myself, is an “when inspiration strikes” idea. You’re doing something and the idea just hits you, like a bolt of lightning.

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to rely on random moments of inspiration. You can actively generate them by keeping your ‘movie idea generator’ running in the background of your brain wherever you go.

Armed with this weapon, everything you see or experience throughout the day will automatically pass through the “could this be a movie?” filter, allowing you to spot potential stories in even the most ordinary places.

In other words, you should never just see a building. You should see a building that could be taken over by terrorists on Christmas Eve. You should never just see a man acting strangely in the park. You should see an alien from another planet attempting to acclimate to the oddities of his new human body.

If you’re someone who travels a lot, you often find yourself in the most tense anxiety-ridden spaces in the world. There are movie ideas everywhere you look. We just saw one, with “Carry-On” on Netflix. Or “Plane” with Gerard Butler. Or “Hijack” with Idris Elba.

You even want to take this generator into your movie and TV watching experience. A lot of times I’ll be watching a bad movie only to come up with an adjacent movie idea that’s much better. Or an idea that improves upon the many tropes that that genre typically gets trapped in.

For example, what if you were watching a cliched heist film only to come up with the idea of: what if it wasn’t the heist itself that was the difficult part, but rather transporting the money that you stole afterwards (Triple Frontier).

Movie ideas are everywhere! You just have to have your movie generator running in the background to find them. The 2022 Best Picture winner? That idea was literally built on top of an everything bagel (Everything Everywhere All At Once). Yes, you might have won an Oscar the last time you ordered a pastrami sandwich had you been a little more attentive.

So, keep testing those loglines out in the comments. The bigger picture here is to find your next script, which I’m hoping you’ll enter in June’s Mega-Showdown. So, this isn’t just about finding a fun little logline. It’s about writing a script to win a contest, which will get you representation, which will lead to your script getting sent around town, which will lead to directors and actors signing on, which will lead to your movie getting made.

It all starts with a great logline. So, what are you waiting for?

P.S. Feel free to share some good movie concepts that came out over the past five years that you felt I overlooked.

Things get crazy with the #2 script on the 2024 Black List!

Genre: Drama/Thriller
Premise: When taking her daughter to a playdate at a new friend’s house, Alice suddenly comes face to face with her childhood bully, Katrine. An evening of seemingly polite dinner conversation and catching up turns into a night of psychological warfare as the two women reveal the scars of their past while their two young daughters play.
About: This was the #2 script on last year’s Black List. I just reviewed the #1 script last week, if you’re interested. Marie Østerbye is a Danish screenwriter with a ton of TV experience in that industry.
Writer: Marie Østerbye
Details: 97 pages

A lot of times what happens is that a writer writes a killer first two acts then lays an egg with their third act.

This happens for a number of reasons but the main one is that the writer is too “in the moment” while writing those first two acts. They aren’t thinking about how all of this stuff is going to come together in the end. Which is why we here at Scriptsahdow Inc. encourage you to outline. The best way to prep for that third act is to outline because then you’ll be writing those first two acts with a purpose.

Today’s script, however, has the opposite problem. Marie writes an amazing third act. But forgets to give the first two acts the same amount of attention.

That’s what we’re going to discuss today. So let’s get rolling!

50 year old Alice got started late in life. She’s got an 8 year old daughter, Sofie, who she moves back to her old hometown with. This is causing a lot of consternation in the small apartment the two live in since Sofie misses all her old friends.

Luckily for Sofie, another girl at school, Ida, takes a liking to her and asks her to come over for a playdate. Alice is thrilled that her daughter is making friends, espeically because she’s concerned about her daughter’s chubbiness (something she dealt with as a child, too). She knows it’s harder to make friends if you don’t look thin and pretty.

When Alice takes Sofie to the big expensive house she’ll be spending the night at, she’s shocked when Katrine opens the door. Katrine is tall and thin and pretty. She was also Alice’s bully back when they were in third grade.

Katrine doesn’t seem to recognize Alice, invites her in, and Alice must decide what to do. Does she leave? Does she take her daughter and leave? Does she confront Katrine about that fateful year when Katrine made her life miserable?

Before Alice can decide, Katrine invites her in for a drink, and then later, dinner. As the alchohol starts flowing, Alice stops pretending, and confronts Katrine on what she did to her back then, which amounted to forcing her to eat an entire cake in front of all the other kids at lunchtime as a way to emphasize how fat she was.

Katrine plays ignorant at first but, eventually fesses up to remembering. She argues, however, that it wasn’t nearly as bad as Alice remembers, which triggers Alice even more. Alice becomes more aggressive, demanding the apology she never got. But Katrine won’t give it to her, forcing Alice to go to the most extreme measure of all.

Do you love dessert?

What if I told you that you could go to a restaurant where the main course was going to be terrible but the dessert was amazing?

Oh, and you weren’t able to skip the main course. You would have to sit through it, even if you didn’t eat it, before you could order the dessert?

Would you still do it?
That’s today’s script. In more ways than one.

Cause the whole story is built around cake, strangely enough. And I was struggling with it. I would go so far as to say, for 70% of this script, I was convinced the Black List voters were brain dead. That some virus had infected their bodies, preventing them from being able to identify good writing.

There was one moment in particular where, if I had been reading a hard copy of the script, as opposed to a PDF document on my laptop, I would’ve hurled it across the room.

That moment occurs near the halfway point, when Alice and Katrine are going through their old elementary school yearbook (they had those??) and Katrine leans in and kisses Alice.

When I see moments like this, I smell desperation. Writers tend to only break out shocking moments when the script isn’t working. I’ve been guilty of this myself. You can tell your script isn’t firing on all cylinders. You’re not sure why. So, you think, maybe if I make something shocking happen, it will fix it.

It never fixes it. It only ends up confusing the reader. There is nothing in the story or characters that have been set up whereby Katrine trying to kiss Alice is authentically motivated. It’s all writer-created.

So, I pushed on, begrudgingly, trying to get to page 97 as quickly as I could so I could call it a day.

But then the writer finally started writing.

What do I mean by this?

One of the ways to make your script stand out is to do things that you’re not supposed to do. You move off of the main road and implore the readers to follow you. Once the writer started to use the children as pawns and placed them in serious danger, I understood why the script made the Black List.

Cause that’s a risky thing to do. And to be a good writer, you must take risks. Here you have your protagonist, someone we’re supposed to be rooting for, and she’s holding Katrine’s child’s life in her hands and using it to force Katrine to confess.

It’s done in a very clever way. If Alice had held a gun to Ida’s head, that’d be too much. Ida injured herself on her own. Alice is a nurse. She has the ability to save her or the ability to let her succumb to her wounds. It’s an off-the-nose way to threaten Katrine.

What I thought was going to happen was that we get this “chaotic” ending that wasn’t really chaotic. It’s only chaotic in the “writing” sense, whereby you could argue it was chaotic in a book club meeting. For these stories to work, you have to go beyond that. You have to make them genuinely chaotic, which likely means going further than you’re comfortable going as a writer.

That’s an important detail right there. We all have our pre-established boundaries that we won’t cross as writers. Maybe we don’t want to be too silly, or too violent, or too serious, or too quirky, or too structured, or too weird, or too emotional, or too wild. But how do you grow if you’re never pushing beyond those boundaries into uncomfortable places? Nobody’s ever grown by standing in the same place.

I’m just having a hard time reconciling reading through 70 pages of YUCK to get to 30 pages of WOW. Is that a ‘worth the read’ if I’m sending you guys to the sarlacc pit for the first three-quarters of this script?

I guess I’ll say it is. But this is another example of the Black List 3.0, where the list is more about scripts with potential than scripts that are finished products. And this script does have potential. It just needs some sprucing up in those first two acts.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: If there’s a lesson to this script, it’s that, if you have a great third act, that does not give you permission to “bide time” throughout your first two acts. If you don’t know whether you’re biding time or not, pay attention to how many scenes are setting up that third act as opposed to being entertaining in their own right. There are too many scenes here setting up the relationship between Katrine and Alice, as well as what happened in their past. We get it by the halfway point. You don’t need to tell us seven different ways to Sunday that Katrine was mean to Alice in elementary school. Trust me. We got it after the first eight times. Check out Speak No Evil for how to do this correctly. There’s a scene near the midpoint, for example, where our evil couple takes our ‘good’ couple out to dinner and it becomes very uncomfortable due to how the evil couple acts. That’s how to entertain readers before your big third act.

Is this successful screenwriter’s first script better than the one he sold for a million dollars??

Genre: Drama
Premise: A former White House chef who’s fallen from grace and is now cooking for a North Carolina prison has his work cut out for him when a death row inmate enters the facility refusing to eat anything before his execution.
About: I was told by someone I trust that this was a great script. It was written by Justin PIasecki, who is best known for his million dollar spec sale of Stakehorse. He actually wrote this script BEFORE Stakehorse.
Writer: Justin Piasecki
Details: 103 pages

The 5 Loglines Showdown is 17 days away (details to enter here). I see that you guys are testing these loglines in the comments section, which I love. It’s taking all of my will power not to look at them. I want each entry to be fresh when it arrives in my Inbox.

Today is a great example of how to write a logline if you don’t have a high concept. If you’re writing a smaller character-driven story or more of a drama, do what Death of an Ortolan does. USE IRONY.

Look at that logline. A White House Chef falls from grace and becomes a prison chef. That is irony at its best and will hook a lot of potential readers. So don’t think you have to have time travel in your logline for me to pick it. Use irony. In fact, if you’re one of the writers coming up with 5 new loglines a day, do a day of just ironic concepts. You’ll learn a lot.

Okay, onto today’s script. Let’s find out if the execution is “cooked” to perfection.

Walter Karrat used to be the prestigious White House head chef. At just 26! The man was a superstar. But after a mysterious instance of pissing off the president, he’s fired. 23 years later and he’s the head chef… at Durham Corrections Department, aka prison.

Walter walks around with a chip on his shoulder. If even a single inmate doesn’t eat their meal, he stalks them and demands they eat it. Strangely, everyone does. Walter is so intimidating, even the prisoners fear him.

Randomly, one day, there’s a catastrophic water leak in another prison in the southern part of the state, which destroys their foundation of the Death Row prison cells. This means that the Death Row inmates will need to be sent to a new prison until they fix it. That prison? Durham Corrections Department.

This change gives Walter’s life new meaning. He encourages these death row inmates to order anything their heart desires for their final meal. And he delivers. It makes him feel like a real chef again.

Except when he meets Jeffrey Reed. Reed is blind (a result of him trying to kill himself) and on death row. He was a hospice nurse who pulled the plug on one of his patients then stole their money. Reed, who’s pickier than every New York food critic combined, refuses to eat any of Walter’s food. And that makes Walter… pissssssssed.

The two trade barbs every day, as we get closer and closer to Reed’s execution date, until it becomes clear that Reed’s resistance is not personal. He’s on a hunger strike to get the governor’s attention. Reed explains to Walter that he didn’t do it. There’s more to his murder that the state suppressed.

At first wary of Reed’s story, Walter gradually begins to believe him. He eventually ventures to the governor’s office to plead Reed’s case, inadvertently placing him back in the political arena he so adamantly resents. When it becomes clear that they’re not going to help him, Walter must rely on the thing he does best for his final hail mary – cook.

In the comments yesterday, one of you brought up this concept of an “easy read,” – that writers have become too focused on writing these easy-to-read screenplays – simple concepts, lots of white space so the eyes shoot down the page, low character count so the story’s easy to follow. It was this commenter’s belief that the best scripts are the opposite of that – scripts that have some complexity behind them.

I was thinking about that while reading Death of an Ortolan. It’s not a fast read. The themes are heavy. The description is occasionally thick. And it takes a while before you know what the story is about. To the credit of that commenter, the script does hit you harder.

This Friday, that Jamie Foxx Cameron Diaz action-comedy (Back in Action) hits Netflix. It is the epitome of an “easy read.” It is, also, not going to hit you like Death of an Ortolan does. So, is our commenter right? Should we be writing more scripts like Death of an Ortolan and less like Back in Action?

From my vast reading experience, here’s how I’d answer that. You must first learn to write an “easy read” before you can write a complex one. The reason being that “easy reads” are designed to make things move quickly. And the quicker things are moving, the less time the reader has to sit around and question them.

Complex reads turn off the big flashy bass-thumping tunes and turn into a slow-dance. The slower your story moves, the better at dramaturgy you must be. It takes more skill to keep readers invested when the plot beats are more spread out. It takes more skill to keep the reader up to speed when you’re cutting between multiple subplots and multiple characters. It takes more skill to build a story around the depth of a character.

So it’s not that you should favor “easy reads” over complex ones. It’s that you must be honest with yourself about if you have the skill level to pull a complex script off. Cause complex scripts written poorly fall apart faster than easy reads do.

The reader who recommended “Ortolan” to me was right. This is a good script. It’s the closest we’re going to get to a modern day Shawshank Redemption. This movie is about friendship at its core. It also has this mystery component of did Reed murder the victim or didn’t he? And it serves both of those plot lines with this fun little side-dish of cooking.

Even though I just went on this entire rant about “easy reads” vs. complex ones, you can still use “easy read” tools in your complex stories. For example, this script has a great ticking time bomb – Reed’s looming execution. This adds our urgency. It adds our stakes. And it also gives us our goal – Walter must convince his political contacts to let Reed go free.

This is basic dramaturgy and it works! It’s a very compelling premise.

My only issue with the script is the same issue I remember having with Justin’s other script, Stakehorse. Which is that the ending got messy. Spoilers follow. Walter is recruited by the newly elected president to cook for her and her team. This pulls him away from the prison during Reed’s execution and uses his big moment to screw over the president.

Meanwhile, Walter’s assistant brings Reed his last meal. I’m not convinced at all that that’s the right way to go. For maximum emotional impact, we should’ve seen Walter make and bring Reed his last meal. We should’ve also shown him watch Reed’s execution. That’s way more important, based on what the movie set up, than screwing over the president.

That seems like a pretty obvious choice to me.

Despite that, I thought the script was really well crafted and it was successful in the main thing it was trying to do – which was make us fall in love with Reed, make us care about Reed and Walter’s friendship, and make us want to keep turning the pages to find out what happened to them.

Here’s the script if you want to check it out yourself! – Death of an Ortolan

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: With endings, we tend to have two options. Deliver the ending that the audience expects, which contains the biggest emotional punch. Or go against the audience’s expectation, deliver a more surprising ending, but lose out on some of that emotional punch. Today’s script went with the latter and I think that’s the wrong way to go. What matters most in an ending is emotional catharsis for the audience. They want to feel a resolution to the conflict that the main characters have endured the whole movie. You should look for an ending that, first and foremost, maximizes that catharsis. Even if it’s a little obvious, the audience will be more satisfied by that than if you use some shocking expectation-subverting choice.

What I learend 2: Don’t take your foot off the gas with your climax.  Do the opposite.  Slam your foot on the gas as hard as you can and keep it there until the last page.

Everybody who wants to be a screenwriter should watch this movie!

I was wearing my new shoes that I got for Christmas today. I hopped over to the corner store to grab a drink, and while waiting in line, heard a guy behind me say, “Those shoes are fire.”

“Too soon,” I said. “Too soon.”

What a weird week.

It’s the beginning of the year. You want to start things off with a bang.

And then… fires.

Fires fires everywhere. You can check out my mini-blogging about the fires in the comments section of the previous post.

Suffice it to say, I might have to end my relationship with fire.

But, since it looks like things are finally calming down, I can focus on the site again.

So I checked the box office numbers over the weekend and, oh boy. What a dumpster fire.

TOO SOON, CARSON!

Sorry, sorry.

Truthfully, there’s nothing wrong with Den of Thieves 2 being the top movie of the weekend. It just doesn’t inspire a lot of passion. You now? So, I finally bit the bullet and paid 20 freaking dollars to rent Heretic. The way I justified it is that that’s what it would’ve cost me to go see it in the theater. So why not?

Best 20 dollars I’ve spent all year.

As someone who loves great screenwriting, there is a particular brand of script that I’m always looking for. It’s the script where the writer has developed a captivating story within an inexpensive scenario.

The reason I’m so obsessed with that setup is that the writer is relying on nothing more than good dramatic storytelling to keep the reader engaged. That’s the purest form of screenwriting. I see so many screenwriters – especially young ones – try to win over the reader with rampant GSU and crazy shootouts and wild car chases and shocking plot twists.

Once you learn the basics of drama, you can put three characters in a room and have the reader on the edge of their seat. Which is exactly what happens here. Two Mormon girls come to a man’s house to pitch their religion. He turns the tables on them, pushing them to convince him their religion is worth joining. And the next thing you know, they’re in danger.

So, what are these basic storytelling elements that are at play in Heretic?

Let’s start with building the initial premise around tension and suspense. Tension and suspense will get you VERY FAR as a storyteller. It doesn’t do everything. You still have to create characters we’re interested in and build a plot that pushes those characters in interesting story directions. But tension and suspense alone can keep many a story exciting.

When Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton arrive at Mr. Reed’s house, we know immediately something is up with him. That’s where the tension begins. We’re suspicious of this guy.

In a way, the scenario works as dramatic irony even if it’s not technically dramatic irony. Dramatic irony is when we know more than the characters do. It works best when we know our heroes are in danger but they don’t know it yet.

So, if we would’ve met Mr. Reed chopping up a body in the back room AND THEN had him greet Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton, that would be a textbook case of dramatic irony, as we would know they were in deep shit.

Instead, we only sense that Mr. Reed is bad, something the girls, at first, do not. That’s what’s creating tension. And it also creates suspense. Now we have to keep reading to reach the moment where the heroes realize what’s going on. It’s very hard for a reader not to want to read until the heroes catch up with the rest of us. Dare I say it’s impossible. So that’s a very powerful tool to use as a screenwriter.

But that’s not all that’s going on here. Beck and Woods understand that setting up dramatic irony (or ‘shadow dramatic irony’ in this case) is just the beginning. As a writer, you want to then play with the tool.

For example, as their initial conversation about religion in the living room proceeds, Sister Barnes becomes suspicious about Mr. Reed. But Sister Paxton is still totally oblivious to it. She’s way too trusting. So now, you’ve split the dramatic irony between the heroes. One senses something is wrong. The other doesn’t. This advances the dynamic in the room, keeping the interaction fresh.

That’s not by accident. Good writers know that every writing tool has an expiration point in the story. You can only use the suspense of a certain situation for so long before the audience demands it come to a head. Therefore, if you want to keep using that dramatically ironic scenario, you must find ways to advance the dynamic of the interaction.

However, let’s say that that’s all Beck and Woods did here. They just used this creepy guy and these scared girls and played ONLY THAT NOTE the whole way through the script. Would it work? No. As writers, you must also expand the context of the scenario, which is exactly what they do.

One of the big early beats in the story has Mr. Reed pulling out a Mormon bible, complete with hundreds of tabs and notes in it. It’s clear that he’s studied the Mormon religion extensively. He then uses that knowledge to challenge the girls. He brings up lots of details about the religion, ultimately landing on Mormonism supporting men taking more than one wife. Do they support this?

The reason this deeper knowledge is important is because it establishes the writers are committed to going beyond a surface-level thriller. They’ve done that extra research which will allow them to make this just as much of a mental exercise as a thrilling one. Which is what happens. The girls are forced to defend their religion, which takes us even deeper into the themes of the story, which amount to faith and trust in one’s religion.

Most of the scripts I read don’t do that second part. The writers would not have done extensive research on Mormonism. They wouldn’t be able to write about it specifically. Instead, they’d focus on the fun stuff, like, what’s Mr. Reed going to do next? Don’t get me wrong. That stuff will still work. But when you bring in specificity and detail, it supercharges the dramatic elements of the story.

Once the writers milk all they can from that first scenario (a full 30 minutes!), they change locations, pulling the characters into a new room, this one with two doors on the far side, which we understand will represent choices the characters will have to make.

Just putting the doors there alone creates suspense. We will now keep watching to see which doors the girls choose. Once you’ve set up a scenario like this, it allows you to play around. That’s an important screenwriting tip so let me repeat it: Once you’ve set up a strong suspenseful scenario, it allows you to play around.

Think about it. If you’ve promised the reader a treat at the end of the scene, they’ll be willing to sit with you in the meantime and hear what you have to say. The mistake many writers make is they never create the suspenseful scenario in the first place. Which means there is no treat at the end. If you then try and play around, it will feel random, purposeless, and the reader will become anxious quickly. Why would they keep reading if there’s no release?

The ‘playing around’ is really fun here. Mr. Reed goes on a long monologue about the nature of “iterations.” He uses props, explaining that Monopoly was once another board game called The Landlord’s Game. He then plays an oldie record and points out that it’s the tune that would later inspire Radiohead’s “Creep.” Iterations, he explains, is all religions are – repurposed old religions, new and improved. And Mormonism is the newest of them all.

That’s all fun stuff to learn, but if there weren’t two looming doors at the back of the room, I’m not sure I would’ve cared to listen to Mr. Reed’s 12 minute monologue about iterations.

After another 30 minutes, Beck and Woods take you to a third location. It’s a minor thing but an important one. Readers will get bored if they’re in one place for too long. Provide us with new locations that lead to new challenges and it’s like getting a new caffeine hit from a cup of coffee. We’re excited again.

They really do everything right here, the writers.

Probably the most impressive thing they did (warning, spoilers ahead) is making their deus ex machina ending work. A deus ex machina ending is when your hero is dead to rights and then something shows up at the last second to save them. It’s one of those things that SEEMS like it should work, because your hero survives in a surprising way. But it’s an empty feeling because the hero didn’t have to do anything to earn their survival.

However, Beck and Woods cleverly set up a minor rule earlier that ensures when our heroine is saved at the last second, it makes complete and total sense.

If you couldn’t tell, I REALLY liked this movie. I would put it up there with Anora as best script of the year. I knew these two could write their butts off when I read that birth scene in A Quiet Place. They had the misstep with “65” but, as Harry Dunne from Dumb and Dumber would say, “Then you go do this and TOTALLLLLY REDEEM YOURSELVES.” What a good movie! I’ll retroactively add it to my top 10 of 2024.

Number 1 Black List script!

Genre: Romantic Comedy
Premise: Two strangers scramble to find someone to sleep with on the one night of the
year when premarital sex is legal.
About: Travis Braun wrote one of my favorite scripts last year, Dying For You. The guy’s a great writer. So it should come as no surprise that another one of his scripts finished number 1 on the Black List.
Writer: Travis Braun
Details: 98 pages

Pugh for Hannah?

Is this the new rom-com template?

Create a big flashy high-concept way into the genre?

I wouldn’t bet against it. Even though rom-coms have had these little victories over the years, the genre is still nowhere near its former glory. Travis Braun had the idea that, maybe, if you guss it up with a fanciful foundation, it won’t be seen as just another excuse to watch pretty people smile at each other.

Let’s find out if he’s onto something.

In a not-so-slight dig at conservative culture, we now live in a world where, in order to promote family values again, the government has made it illegal to have pre-marital sex. Except for one 12 hour period a year.

Twenty-something pizza-cook, Owen, just got dumped by his girlfriend not only because she doesn’t see a future for them but also because she really really really really wants to have sex with this one guy and since this is the only night to do it, she has to dump Owen NOW.

Cut to Hannah, a personal assistant, who races across town to meet her hot Spanish date for their crazy sex night. They did a Before Sunset thing where they met last year on this day and agreed not to exchange names. Instead, they would meet in this exact spot tonight, a year later. Except Spanish Hottie’s a no-show!

Hannah and Owen both stumble into the night, aware that their only chance to have sex all year just evaporated. You’re probably thinking they’ll bump into each other, right? Correct! They do! And Owen proceeds to throw up all over Hannah’s shoes. It’s what we call, in the business, a “Meet Barf” moment.

They go their own ways. But after Hannah gets arrested for almost having sex with an all-year sex violator guy and Owen falls for a digital honeytrap sending him into Central Park where he’s summarily robbed, the two end up at the police station together.

It’s clear these two are not into each other but when Hannah says she’s starving for some pizza and Owen announces that he’s a pizza chef, there is a slight bit of hope that sex is still on the dough-filled table tonight!

However, just as things are looking up, some too-cool-for-school chick named Nia pulls Hannah off to an exclusive party where she has a chance to not only hook up. But hook up with her celebrity crush! Owen is left alone once again. But only momentarily. He coincidentally ends up at the same party, giving these two one final chance to make sex happen.

I call these ideas “speculative hook” ideas. A world where you can murder one night a year (The Purge). A world where all books are illegal (Fahrenheit 451).

They’re a subset of high concept ideas that focus on creating one shocking societal rule and building a story around it.

I’ve never been the biggest fan of speculative hooks. This type of speculation is so writer-driven, they come off as fake.

But Carson. Aren’t all movie ideas fake? Isn’t Jurassic World fake? Actually, no. That idea makes sense to me. Science has evolved to a point where we can clone animals. So why wouldn’t we be able to clone dinosaurs?

That’s the thing about high-concept ideas. There has to be a line of logic that leads up to their birth. Otherwise, it’s just a writer coming up with an idea and forcing it upon reality.

And yes, I know you can get into the weeds with this stuff. Why do I believe a man can fly around and have super-strength and x-ray vision but not believe the government would limit pre-marital sex to one day a year?

I can’t explain that logically. I can only say that the mythology of Superman, and other superheroes for that matter, is so well-established within our culture that I believe it in the same way that I believe Tom Cruise can cling to the side of a flying airplane.

The result of ideas that don’t immediately meet the ‘suspension of disbelief bar’ is that the reader must climb a steeper hill to get hooked. And other problems in the script become magnified due to the fact that the reader isn’t immediately immersed.

For example, where are the stakes? Why do I care if two adults can’t have sex? What happens to these characters if they don’t succeed? They have to wait a year? Okay. So? There are people in this world, the real one mind you, who haven’t had sex in years. They’re still living their lives.

So, yeah, with every page, I was losing hope.

However…

The script gradually began to win me over with its charm.

Once I realized that, at its heart, it was a romantic comedy, I stopped judging it so harshly. All I care about with romantic comedies is that they meet three criteria. Do I like the guy? Do I like the girl? Do I want to see them end up together?

One Night Only meets all three of those criteria.

A low-key thing that Braun does well is he creates these characters that are fallible. They know they’re imperfect but they still try their best.

I’ll tell you why this is important. I recently watched this show called “Laid.” It’s a high-concept idea as well. This main female character starts to realize that every man she’s slept with is dying. So the show is about her going off and warning all these guys.

In that show, the main character is very dismissive of others, particularly men.  She thinks the world of herself, unable to notice any of her flaws.  She innately believes she deserves Channing Tatum when she’s more on the level of Jonah Hill. She looks down on most of the guys she runs into. They’re always wrong. She’s always right.

Why would I like that character? Why would I want to root for that character?

Hannah wants the best guy she can get, similar to the protagonist in Laid. But she’s not blind to her own weaknesses. She is fallible and knows it. She realizes that if she had her life together, she wouldn’t be in this position. It makes her a lot more likable so that, when Owen shows interest, I was rooting for her to like him back.

The science of character likability may be the most important component in all of screenwriting. It’s so delicate yet so important. If we don’t like your character, we don’t care about anything else. If you go overboard and make them too likable, they don’t feel like a real person.

It’s a fragile balancing act but it’s worth spending a lot of time on to get right. One of the main questions I would ask anybody who reads your script is, “Did you like my main characters?” Cause if they say “no,” or, just as bad, say, “They were okay,” then you have work to do. Stop worrying about your plot and your twists and your dialogue and get back in there and figure out how to make us love your characters. Cause if we don’t. You’re basically f*&%d.

One Night Only is not as good as Dying for You. That script fired on all cylinders. But it’s still good. And it’s a rare example of somebody in the business writing a funny script. After Hollywood sent the comedy genre to the death camps, all the good comedy writers disappeared. Travis Braun is one of the only few left.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: When you meet the three romantic comedy criteria I mentioned above, you can activate the “pull-apart” method. That’s what Braun did here. He kept pulling Hannah and Owen apart. They would meet, they would be pulled apart, they would run into each other again, then get pulled apart. When readers see characters they like pulled apart, they stick around until they come together again. This isn’t just true for romantic comedies. You can use it in any genre. One of the reasons The Empire Strikes Back is considered to be such a good film is because we are anxiously waiting until all the characters come back together again. Up until that point, due to their separation, all we feel is anxiety. But, again, this only works if we actually like the characters.