Wow.
I’m both excited by how much enthusiasm there was for this opportunity and also a bit frustrated as some of my weekend plans had to be canceled so I could respond to all the entries. :) And a big thank you to Scott for keeping track of all of the madness. I almost felt guilty giving maybes after a while cause I knew how much work it made for him.
If you’re just now coming to the site, I did a pitch session this weekend for horror loglines. If you come up with a good enough horror movie idea, you are in the official screenplay competition. I discuss the specifics on how this works in the original post.
This weekend was always going to be the test bed for this challenge and now that I have a better understanding of how things are going to go down, I can adjust the parameters accordingly.
Don’t worry if you didn’t get through on the first try. We are doing this for three more weekends. You have more shots.
Let’s start with the good news. If you received a “Yes” or a “Strong Maybe,” you are in! You can start writing your scripts RIGHT NOW. And I recommend you do that. As in, START TODAY. The more time on task you get with these scripts, the more ready they’ll be for the official showdown. If you don’t remember, you have until middle to late February to finish.
So, congratulations to everyone who made it through.
A quick piece of advice. If you received a strong maybe (or even a yes), e-mail me at [email protected] and I will let you know what I think is the best direction and tone for the story. You don’t have to use my advice. But it’s probably a good idea that you know what I liked about your idea.
Also, if you don’t know where to start with the writing of your script, just follow the Scriptshadow Write-A-Script schedule, which instructs you on how to write a first draft as well as one rewrite…
Week 1 – Concept (you’ve done this)
Week 2 – Solidifying Your Concept (you’ve done this as well)
Week 3 – Building Your Characters
Week 4 – Outlining
Week 5 – The First 10 Pages
Week 6 – Inciting Incident
Week 7 – Turn Into 2nd Act
Week 8 – Fun and Games
Week 9 – Using Sequences to Tackle Your Second Act
Week 10 – The Midpoint
Week 11 – Chill Out or Ramp Up
Week 12 – Lead Up To the “Scene of Death”
Week 13 – Moment of Death
Week 14 – The Climax
Week 15 – The End!
Week 16 – Rewrite Prep 1
Week 17 – Rewrite Prep 2
Week 18 – Rewrite Week 1
Week 19 – Rewrite Week 2
Week 20 – Rewrite Week 3
Week 21 – Rewrite Week 4
Week 22 – Rewrite Week 5
Week 23 – Rewrite Week 6
Now, I will say this. If you received a maybe or a soft maybe (or any other type of maybe), you will have one shot to pitch that concept again (with a revised final logline) next weekend. I will make a final decision on those concepts from that logline. After that, those concepts are dead. You can’t keep pitching them.
If I were one of the writers with a maybe, I would go to your other writing friends and workshop your logline until it’s the best it can possibly be for next weekend. I will even allow you to workshop it in the comments this week if you don’t know a good writers’ network and the Scriptshadow community is the only community you know of that gives good screenwriting advice.
If you want help direct from the horse’s mouth, you can order a logline consult from me. The benefit of that is that I can tell you exactly what my issue with the logline was and what I need in order for it to cross the ‘yes’ threshold. Those are 25 bucks and include a single reply. You can also order a deluxe consult which gives you unlimited e-mails to figure out the best version of the logline. Those are 50 bucks.
It doesn’t guarantee you’ll get through. Some of these maybes I gave thinking, “There’s something here but I don’t know what.” We may not find the answer in a consult. But at least you’ll be able to adjust the logline with a little more clarity compared to going in blind. Now, I realize that some people may have ethical issues with me charging for these. To be clear, you don’t have to hire me. I will still read your logline for free next week in the comments. If I had the time, I would workshop all of these maybes in the comments but I just don’t. Weekends are supposed to be my free time to get away from work. So I’m already spending time on these that I’m supposed to be spending on myself.
With that said, I’m okay with you approaching it either way. And anyone here can order a logline consult, even if you got a ‘no.’ One of the best things about this weekend has been that a lot of writers have learned what a bad logline looks like. I can give you even more clarity on that difference between good and bad. So, if you want a logline consult, e-mail me at [email protected].
Okay, moving on to next week…
Unlimited pitches are over.
You will now receive FIVE logline pitches per weekend. Which I think will be good for you. Now you have to think harder about what your best ideas are and think harder about how to put the loglines together so that they maximize their chances. I would, again, encourage you to workshop these loglines all week behind the scenes with your writing friends so that you’re coming to the table with your best.
Another thing I’m going to be encouraging next week is upvotes. Upvotes on loglines you like will increase the chances that that logline gets through. I know that my bias and my personal likes are influencing some of my choices and that I may be missing good ideas because they’re not typically my jam. So, please, upvote any idea that you like. That helps me.
NOW! I’m not going to be fooled by “friend-voting.” So I’m not guaranteeing a highly-upvoted logline gets through, particularly if every upvote looks like a buddy of that writer. But it will influence me overall.
A couple of final thoughts about the loglines themselves.
I’m sorry that sometimes I just have to write “No” without an explanation. I hate doing that (and it was one of the reasons I almost didn’t post this challenge) because I know it feels harsh. But I often had to come in and get through a lot of loglines fast before leaving again so it’s all I had time to do. Please don’t take it personally.
Next, we gotta stop with the vagueness, especially at the end of loglines. Any logline that ends with some approximation of, “…and our heroes must outwit a sinister emerging evil,” is an easy “no.” You have to tell us what the “evil” is if you want a shot. Cause if the rest of the logline is generic and the “evil” is the only unique thing that makes your idea stand out, and you’re not telling us what that “evil” is, I don’t care about the idea. BE AS SPECIFIC AS POSSIBLE, especially in the second half of your logline.
Also, the beginning of your logline is often your HOOK. The second part of the logline is often YOUR ACTUAL MOVIE. As in – what the characters will be doing throughout the second act. So, you don’t want to be vague about that. You want to tell us what they’re after and what’s in the way. The more specific, the better. Of course, it’s still gotta be a lean and mean presentation, which seems contradictory. But that’s logline-writing. You gotta figure it out.
Generally speaking, I glaze over words like ‘the Devil,’ ‘Satan,’ ‘go to hell,’ ‘come back from hell.’ Over time, I’ve found that writers who use these words/phrases, on average, construct very lazy ideas, which is why I’ve become so numb to them. So, if you’re going to use any of these words/phrases, make sure your idea is actually clever. It can’t be something like, “Two high school kids make a deal with the devil to become popular but when they change their mind, they risk getting dragged down into hell.” It’s got to be thoughtful and have some sophistication behind it. It can’t rely on those words to do the heavy lifting.
I’m very close to banning serial killer loglines. There were a million of them and 99.9% of them felt lazy, like putting “serial killer” into a logline all of a sudden made it interesting. Not to mention, serial killers aren’t really horror. Just make sure that if you’re bringing a serial killer logline to the table that it’s something clever, and something you feel passionate about – a story you really want to write.
And that’s it!
I am NOT responding to pitches in the comments until this weekend. So, feel free to use today to workshop some of those maybes. Good luck to everyone and thanks for participating in such a fun exercise, even if it did steal my precious weekend away from me. :)
PITCHING CLOSED UNTIL NEXT WEEKEND!
Big announcement today, everyone.
I had so much fun with the showdown that it got me thinking about the fact that I have a direct line to, arguably, the biggest person in horror in all of Hollywood. And this person trusts my taste implicitly. If I send him a script, he’ll literally start reading it within 10 minutes.
And I thought, why aren’t we taking advantage of this on the site? He’s wanted us to work together forever assuming I can find a script he likes. But that’s the catch. He’s also known as the toughest grader in Hollywood. If you think I’m tough, this man is like the Stanford professor who’s never given an A before. But when he really likes something, HE MAKES IT. He’s one of the few people in Hollywood who can ensure a movie will get made.
That’s where my idea for the Blood and Ink Showdown stemmed from. The blood is the script. You got to come up with a great horror script. The ink is when you sign on the dotted line of that spec script sale contract.
How is this going to go down? We’re playing the long game here, folks. This showdown will happen on Friday February 26th. Which gives you six months to write the script. And you will be writing it. You’re not going to be able to enter an already written script. Why?
Heh heh heh.
Let me explain.
One of the things I realized with these showdowns is that 90% of the contestants take themselves out of the running before they write a word of their script. Their concepts are insanely weak. I already know this person won’t look at a script if the concept isn’t good. So I have to make sure the concept is worth writing in the first place.
Hence, you have to EARN your way into the showdown. How do you do this? You have to pitch me a horror script idea that I approve of. For the next four weekends, you will pitch, in the comments, your title and logline for a horror script. I will answer “yes” or “no.” I will occasionally answer “maybe” if the idea has potential but needs to be tweaked. In that case, you’re going to want to keep pitching different versions of that idea. If I keep saying “Maybe,” you can keep going. But if I feel the idea is toast, I’ll “no” it. You are allowed to pitch as many ideas as you want.
BUT!
If I feel like you’re spamming concepts in the comments or just running over to ChatGPT and copy-and-pasting whatever it comes up with, I will stop responding to your pitches, which I’ll first warn you about, then confirm. I need to feel like these are genuine pitches that you’ve thought about in good faith. I suggest you privately vet your loglines with friends from the site and only pitch the best ones. Again, if I see someone just mindlessly pitching garbage, they’re out.
If you want more of a conversation about your logline pitches, rather than just a ‘yes’ or a ‘no,’ or you want to pitch your ideas in private, you can order my logline service. It’s $25 for a logline analysis (along with a yes or no) and $50 for unlimited e-mails where we potentially workshop a weak logline into something that is contest worthy. There are no guarantees though. You can’t put lipstick on a pig. If you want to use this service, e-mail me at [email protected].
Once we get through the four weekends, that’s it. Whoever makes the cut is in. From there, you’re going to write the script over the next five months. I will be integrating that process into the site occasionally. For example, we may have a First Scene Showdown for the Horror contestants. And I’ll be setting some checkpoints for you along the way to make sure your script is ready come showdown time.
Obviously, the pool of entrants is going to be much smaller. But, since every entry will be a good movie idea, the chances of finding something worthy of being produced will be much higher. There’s an off-chance that if someone comes up with a gangbusters mega-awesome horror idea that this person might fall in love with it and buy it off the idea alone.
I’m also trying to promote good screenwriting practices overall. Too many writers spend years on a script that they never idea-tested. It’s insane to me. You just wasted two years of your life working on a terrible idea, making the writing of the screenplay pointless. What I’m asking you to do here is how you should do it. Get your ideas out there in front of people and test them to see if they’re any good! Only write something when you get good responses from it.
To be clear, I’m not sending this guy an okay script. I’ve sent him scripts before that I thought were good but not great. He responds, in a polite way, with “Don’t waste my time.” So, you have to deliver. It’s not a foregone conclusion that I’m sending this if the winning script is just the best of a bunch of okay screenplays.
The good news is, even if he doesn’t like it, there are other people I can send it to *if I like it*.
So, when does this experiment start?
RIGHT NOW!
You can start pitching horror script loglines in the comments immediately. I will be checking in periodically. Don’t worry if I don’t respond to your idea right away. I *will* get to it by the end of the weekend.
All right. Let’s rock’n’roll!
The big project that landed over at Paramount with Timothee Chalamet and James Mangold
Genre: Crime/Heist
Premise: A guy who uses motorcycles to rob banks recruits his brother to join the party.
About: Timothee Chalamet is reteaming with his “Complete Unknown” director, James Mangold, to make this film for Paramount on the heels of its recent sale to Skydance. The short story was written by Jaime Oliveira, who is adapting it into a script. Oliveira has no previous credits. Which is yet another reminder that you can be a nobody writer and land a big project. It appears that this will be a priority for Mangold and Chalamet, which means that Mangold’s Star Wars project has likely gone the way of every other Star Wars project at Lucasfilm – into the Death Star trash compactor.
Writer: Jaime Oliveira
Details: 50 pages
I was told that this movie was the next “Heat.”
I would agree with that but I would add a slight caveat. It’s the Gen Z Heat. It’s soft. It keeps checking in on you. It gives you warm hugs when you’re feeling down.
The reason Heat was so awesome was that it was relentless. It didn’t care about you. It cared only about being the most visceral experience you were going to have that decade.
If Heat wants to fuck you, High Side wants to cuddle with you afterwards
Which I guess is sort of Timothee Chalamet’s brand. This guy isn’t exactly DeNiro. But I was hoping for a whole lot more than I got with High Side.
When ex-bike racer Billy Miller’s father dies, his older brother, Cole, shows up after ten years and says he’s got a new job for him. Billy’s been waiting with baited breath for his brother ever since he left, so he doesn’t put up much resistance.
Cole takes him to his hideout in the middle of Texas, where he introduces him to the crew. There’s the handsome Ricky, the gorgeous but 100% trouble Emily, the mother of the group, Liv, the hacker, Dusty, and the ubiquitous “Chief” characters who’s in all of these movies.
They’re all tough guys and they follow Cole who has created the perfect bank-robbing scheme. Go to a city big enough to have lots of money in its banks, but small enough not to have police helicopters. They don’t need to worry about cop cars because they escape on motorcycles, which no car can catch.
Cole brought Billy in because Billy is the fastest of the fast on a motorcycle. Of course… Billy can’t drive all of the motorcycles at once so I’m not sure why that matters. But anyway.
The group robs a bunch of banks with no problems whatsoever – riveting storytelling when there are no obstacles to your heroes’ objectives. I suppose that maybe the love story between Billy and Emily is supposed to alleviate this. I would most certainly argue that it does not. Eventually, Cole gets word that there’s a fox in the henhouse. One of the group members is an undercover agent. Cole’s response to this – I kid you not – is to do one last job – their biggest yet – in Fresno California, with a haul of 15 million dollars.
This job is the climax of the story and because Cole is the dumbest person in America, he can’t foresee that the entirety of the FBI is going to be waiting for him, seeing as they have a direct line into their plan. This ending is basically the whole reason this movie concept was conceived of – to rip off the famous bank robbery in Heat. Does it succeed? Based on what I’ve told you so far, what do you think?
The greatest heist scene ever, from Michael Mann’s “Heat.”
I don’t even know where to start in explaining how by-the-numbers this was.
It began like literally every movie ever. Dad dies. Brother recruits other brother into crime. Meet the crew. Go do crimes. Hero falls in love with the girl on the team. I was so far ahead of this story that I swear, at one point, I was reading it in Times Square on New Year’s Eve 2026.
It somehow only got more predictable from there. Bring in a parallel FBI agent storyline, which was botched to the nth degree. They introduce this Agent Lennox character like he’s going to infiltrate the motorcycle robbers, only to have him do NOTHING. It turns out his only purpose was to show up at the last second and tell Cole that ANOTHER FBI AGENT had infiltrated his gang.
This then becomes a mystery in the story. Who is the mole?
Which creates an unfixable story situation. Because when you’re saying there’s a mole in the operation, you have to ask as the writer, which character would create the biggest problem as the mole? (Spoilers) Of course, that would be Emily. Because Billy has fallen for her. So, her being the mole creates the most conflict within the group. But that’s also the most obvious person! So we all know it’s Emily immediately. This leaves the writer to either go with the obvious choice or go with a choice that doesn’t matter.
Everything about this story was more vanilla my dance moves.
Here’s a snippet from the story that encapsulates my reading experience.
“One more job,” Cole said. “Then we ride off into the sunset.”
Nobody cheered. Just nods and silence.
Where is the LIFE???????
This is supposedly the biggest moment in the script so far. The response? “Nobody cheered. Just nods and silence.”
That’s how I felt when I read this. A lot of silence. A lot of lifelessness.
Does this story have hope as a movie?
I suppose that if they make some truly memorable motorcycle getaway set pieces, at least the movie will give audiences something to talk about. That’s something that’s hard to measure in a script. The way the motorcycle scenes were described here were vanilla, like everything else in the story. But James Mangold might come in and have some ideas to improve them.
And then you have the final bank heist scene, which is striving to be the Heat bank heist. I don’t know why directors, or writers, do this to themselves. Well, I do. Like I always say, we’re all here to rewrite or remake our favorite movies. And so I’m sure James Mangold is thinking, “I get to do my Heat bank shootout!” But it’s never going to be as good, James! It just won’t be. Even if you do the best job you can possibly do. You can’t beat the scenes and the movies that are in the pantheon. It is IM-POSS-IBLE.
So why not, instead, create your own great scene? Something nobody has done yet? Be a trendsetter, not a trend-follower.
For this script to have any hope, it needs a massive rewrite from someone who understands clichéd and obvious choices.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: This is an absolutely terrible way to introduce a character: “Then came Emily. She moved quiet, calm. Wore her gear like it was part of her. Her eyes—dark, unreadable—found mine without blinking.” What in the world have we learned about this character from this intro? NOTH-THING!!! Nothing. That’s the only criteria that matters when introducing characters is – DOES THE DESCRIPTION TELL US WHO THEY ARE? This description does not and therefore it is a failure.
What I learned 2: You’re probably wondering, after this scathing review, “Well then why did Timothee Chalamet sign onto it?” Simple. Motorcycles. Seriously! That’s it. He gets to ride motorcycles and the director promised him that he’ll get to be in his own Heat bank shootout scene. It also helps when you have 4 months to pitch someone an idea (as Mangold did on the set of Complete Unknown).
The best family film of the decade.
Genre: Family/Fantasy
Premise: A town is thrown into chaos after a young girl, grieving the loss of her mother, has her sketchbook full of monsters come to life.
About: Writer-director Seth Worley made a bunch of short films, one of which was the short version of this movie, which allowed him to get the money to fund the feature version that I’m reviewing today.
Writer: Seth Worley
Details: 93 minutes
This was actually a really funny moviegoing experience.
I took a friend to this and told them ahead of time that I had absolutely no idea what the movie was about. Which was the whole point. I follow the industry so closely that, even for films where I haven’t already read the script, I usually know a ton about the film.
With this, all I knew was that Tony Hale was in it, who I love, what the poster looked like, which I also loved, and that it had a high Rotten Tomatoes score.
Well, I started worrying almost immediately once the trailers started. There was a really cheesy trailer about a real-life kid who was burned on 100% of his body who became a successful public speaker or something. That was followed by the Zootopia trailer. Which was followed by some real-life faith-based adoption story.
I then began to look around and see that all of the audience surrounding us was… families with young children. I thought, “Uh-oh.”
The person I went with looked at me as if to say, “What have you gotten me into?” I quickly pulled up my phone to see when the next Weapons showing started, and was frustrated to learn it was a good hour and a half away. It looked like we were stuck here.
The beginning of the movie didn’t inspire a ton of confidence. There was a cheap quality to the direction, with most shots looking like they belonged in a sitcom. And you could feel the lack of money on the screen immediately.
I settled in for a long boring experience.
10 year old Amber, who’s always loved drawing, has been drawing much darker material as of late, ever since her mom died. She’s got an entire notebook of evil doodles doing evil things. It’s enough for the school to call her dad, Taylor, in, and let him know that they’re concerned. All of these drawings, of course, are a reaction to Amber’s grief.
Back at home, Taylor and Amber’s 12 year-old brother, Jack, are having an easier time getting over mom’s death. They just block it out and charge on. Taylor even takes down all the pictures in the house of his wife. Out of sight, out of mind!
One day, after visiting the strange little pond in the nearby forest that their mom always used to frequent, Jack drops his broken phone in it. When he fishes it out later, he realizes that it’s magically fixed. Long story short, he later drops Amber’s sketch book in the pond, and, uhhhhh, well, let’s just say he has a baaaaaaaad feeling about this.
The next day while on the school bus, Jack and Amber, along with the most annoying kid in the world, Bowman, notice a truck in the middle of the road that’s covered in… BLUE POWDER?? Emerging from the nearby field is a giant blue sketch monster that immediately begins chasing the school bus. Uh-oh.
The bus crashes and the three kids must try and make it back to their home while being attacked by a myriad of monsters that, just hours ago, were little sketches in a book. They’ll have to get creative to survive. They’ll also need to find closure in their own ways if they’re going to truly defeat this improbable nightmare come to life.
Okay, back to my viewing experience.
I’m not going to lie. The miserly production value on this movie had me squirming in my seat for the first 20 minutes. Also, the movie was clearly geared towards children so a lot of the humor was simple and juvenile (lots of “I gotta go to the bathroom jokes”). Getting through those early scenes felt like a chore.
But then something funny happened. Tony Hale (who played “Forky” in Toy Story 4) was great. He’d have these funny little lines here and there but he’d never go overboard, like he usually does. He was playing a much more mature character – a character who was grieving – and pulling it off perfectly.
And then there was the actor who played Jack, the son. He was REALLY GOOD. Every time he spoke, I believed in his character more and more.
But what really changed the game was the sketches come to life. I was expecting terrible special effects because of the low budget. But the special effects were better than the last three Marvel movies combined! They were all perfectly imagined. Granted, the production was helped by the fact that they were based on drawings rather than real things. But boy did they look great. They say it’s impossible to get suspension of disbelief back once it’s gone. But this movie did it. I was transported into this world the second those monsters showed up.
And here’s the funny thing. Because the monsters brought me back, it allowed me to realize that this movie was about so much more than doodles gone dastardly. It was about grieving. Not just in a cursory way either. They went all in on the storyline. And holy Moses did it resonate. They NAILED the tone perfectly.
(Spoilers) There’s this great moment late in the film where Taylor and Jack have this realization together. This whole time, they’ve been convinced that Amber was the problem because of these disturbing images she’s been drawing. But then they realize that she was the only one who was doing this right. She was actually dealing with their mom’s death while Taylor and Jack were ignoring it. Which allowed them to finally face it. And dare I say that it was one of the most emotionally satisfying endings I’ve seen in years.
Without getting into too much detail, there’s a great scene late in the film where Jack has brought his mom’s ashes out to the pond and Taylor has to stop him. The acting in this moment – as well as the moment itself – were absolutely superb.
The funny thing is, the pitch-perfect ending allowed me to re-see the earlier portions of the movie with fresh eyes. A lot of that stuff that I didn’t like, I all of a sudden liked. Cause we needed to experience all of that to get here, sort of like how you can’t enjoy winning match point without going through that second set tie-breaker meltdown (random tennis reference alert, sorry). I think I was just so convinced I was about to get burned by a terrible moviegoing experience that I wasn’t giving the movie a proper chance.
I want to stress that last part because I do think there needs to be an expectation going into this movie for it to work for non-family raising adults. Which is cheating, I get it. But it’s a unique situation, this movie. It’s an “Angel” production so it carries some baggage with it. Go into it understanding that you’re not being guided by a young Spielberg here. There’s none of that gloss. It’s clunky at times. It’s generic at times. But trust that the movie is going to mature as it goes on and you’ll find yourself having one of the best cinematic experiences of the year.
Loved this!
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I’m not sure how to condense this down into a singular lesson but I want to highlight it nonetheless because I rarely see it. I loved that the screenwriter framed Amber as the character who needed to change. She had done this “bad” thing by creating these sketches. So we think this is about her needing to learn something. But then the writer throws a last second reversal at us. Amber is the only one who *doesn’t* need to change. It’s the dad and the brother who need to arc their characters by grieving properly. They’re the ones who have been going about this the wrong way. I thought that was really smart. I can’t remember the last time I saw a writer use a twist to explore a character arc. Awesome stuff.
What I learned 2: In another great example of “write what you know,” here’s how Seth Worley came up with the idea for Sketch, courtesy of his interview on NPR: “Well, technically, it’s something that – an experience my sister had as a kid, when we were both kids. My sister got in trouble for drawing a picture of her teacher getting pelted with arrows. And there was just enough blood in the picture to concern all the adults involved. And she had to see a counselor, and the counselor said, did you really want to see this happen to your teacher? And my sister said, when I drew it, I did. And I don’t anymore. And the counselor said, well, then I think you did the right thing. I think drawing this was a much healthier choice than actually doing it. And I remember hearing that and thinking, what an incredibly cool thing to say to a kid. Like, this thing that you did that made all the adults in your life sweaty and nervous is actually evidence that you’re a good person making healthy choices with your emotions and processing your emotions in a healthy way. And I just decided that’s the kind of adult I want to be in some kid’s life when I grow up. And then I grew up, and my daughter, who was in kindergarten at the time, one day just started bringing home drawings that were just inventively violent. Like, unprecedented amount of parent death and blood and monsters. And I’m looking at this, and I’m thinking, oh, you can believe two things at once. You can believe that art is the safest place for violence while also believing that your daughter’s a serial killer and it’s your fault. And that tension felt immediately writable to me.
This is it! The Second Annual Mega-Showdown winning screenplay. And we don’t wait around here at Scriptshadow like other contests. We celebrate the script THE VERY NEXT DAY. Hence, here’s the review for… Hard Labor.
Genre: Real-Time Action Thriller
Logline: A heavily pregnant woman is found by criminals she’s been hiding from and the shock makes her go into labor. Now she must awaken old skills to survive this night – because killers are coming…but so is the baby.
About: While Hard Labor finished third in the original voting tally, when it was facing 9 other screenplays, it took the top spot after everyone had a chance to read all four finalists’ first five pages (say that five times in a row!). You can check out those first five pages here. Overall, it was a fairly close competition, with Hard Labor taking in 35% of the votes. That’s 12% higher than the next highest vote-getter. But all four scripts received a solid amount of votes. You can check out the original Mega-Showdown post with the 10 contenders here. And you can check out the finalist post with the top 4 scripts here. For anyone with questions about Hard Labor, I’m sure the writer, Mike, will be in the comments to answer anything you want. Oh, and Mike. CONGRATULATIONS!
Writer: Mike Hurst
Details: 98 pages
Anya Taylor Joy for Tamara??
I noticed that some of you were concerned that this script might come off as goofy with the whole pregnancy angle. And, you know what? I was worried about that too. It was one of the things that made me waver as to whether to choose this script for the competition.
But, as I told you, this competition wasn’t just about the logline. Or even the first page. It was about the first five pages. In other words, I had to make sure that all the writers in this contest could write! And when I read these first five pages, I didn’t have any doubt that this script had to be in.
Nine months pregnant, Susan, is preparing to have her baby. The doctor just told her to get her “go bag” ready. Susan’s response: What’s a go bag? In her defense, she doesn’t need to know a lot about raising babies because she’s giving hers up for adoption after her little girl is born.
Susan heads back to her little apartment that she shares with her gay roommate, Brett. Brett brings home a hookup from work, a guy named Lyle, but Lyle is suspiciously more interested in Susan than he is Brett. It doesn’t take Susan long to figure that old Lyle is a killer. So she utilizes the exploding microwave trick to throw him off balance and then attack and kill him.
Brett loses the desire to get laid pretty fast after that because now he’s got a much bigger problem – There are four more men outside in a car who want to kill Susan. Oh, and her name isn’t really Susan. It’s Tamara. And she’s a hitwoman for one of the most notorious mobsters in the region, Big Red.
Big Red, you say? Yeah, that would be the father of the baby inside Tamara. And he really wants to get that baby before Tamara passes him off to the hospital and the child gets lost in the adoption system, never to be found again. Tamara is determined to deliver this baby because she doesn’t want it growing up in this awful violent life. Getting her as far away from Big Red is paramount.
So, she gets Brett to drive her to the hospital, which immediately results in a chase from Big Red’s main crew. The crew includes the mountainous black bodyguard known as Halsey, and the slick leader of the crew, Ryder, both of whom are determined to kill Tamara (but not the baby!) at all costs, as, should they fail, Big Red will end them.
A chase follows throughout the city. Tamara hides just about everywhere she can (including an active ambulance ride), all while in the middle of labor. But a 120 pound 9 months pregnant assassin can only do so much, and she’s eventually captured. That’s when she drops the bombshell on Halsey (spoilers). This ain’t Big Red’s baby. It’s yours. Halsey, realizing that visual confirmation means he’s dead the second this baby is born, is forced to help Tamara escape. But it may be too late for that. Because Big Red has finally arrived on-site.
Let me start by saying why I chose this script.
Like I said earlier, I was a little skeptical about the setup. I was afraid of that potential goofiness factor. I’ve seen women who are nine months pregnant and their bellies are enormous. That can definitely come off as comical in the wrong hands.
And, the truth is, we won’t know if it works until we see it. Mike has a secret weapon here, which is that the visuals are hidden. Which means we can imagine what we want to imagine. And I imagined a pregnant woman who’s just lean enough to still believably run around like Tom Cruise. Whether that’s how it’s really going to look……? We’ll have to find out.
But the reason I chose the script was because it was one of the few scripts that started the way that I tell everyone to start their script – WITH A STORY. You easily could’ve started this script with a woman in a hospital bed getting an ultrasound. 95 out of 100 writers would’ve done that.
But that’s boring. Unless something crazy is going to happen during that scene.
Instead, we start with a “story scene” that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. We start with Leo being pulled out of his house, towards his pool. There’s a first act, which starts with a goal: Bad guys need information from Leo (Where’s Tamara?). There’s a second act, with conflict: Leo insists he doesn’t know where she is. And there’s a third act, with the conclusion: They get the information then kill Leo anyway.
Stories are just so wonderful to start your script with because they shift the reader into a “what’s going to happen next” mindset immediately. I’m not asking, “What’s going to happen next?” if a pregnant woman is quietly asking her doctor who’s giving her an ultrasound, “Is it a girl or a boy?” That’s not a story. It’s setup. Setup is just information. It’s not entertainment. I’d guess that 95% of aspiring writers don’t understand this and it’s what cooks half their screenplays.
Granted, we do get some of that setup in the second scene. But, by then, we’re already hooked, because the writer has pulled us in with a story.
Now comes the question: Did the rest of the script live up to the first scene?
For the most part, yes.
Hard Labor is one uninterrupted ride. Which is both its powerful chest and its Achilles heel. The problem when you put your pedal to the metal for 90 pages is that it’s easy for things to become a blur. For example, there was a moment early on when we were in the first car chase where I was losing focus because it was so repetitive. There wasn’t enough variety to keep me focused. And that would happen periodically.
But I’ll tell you how the script won me over.
One of the things I always say is to figure out what it is about your story that’s unique and build the majority of your story’s scenes around that unique thing. If you’re writing a movie about a little girl whose monstrous sketches come to life, I better be getting a lot of scenes that deal with real-life sketches attacking people. At first, I was wondering if Mike was doing that enough here. There were a number of set pieces that could’ve been copy and pasted over to a John Wick film, which worried me.
But I realized that Mike was heeding my advice after all. Just ON THE PERSONAL SIDE OF THE SCREENPLAY. We weren’t getting “pregnant-specific” action scenes. But the pregnancy is definitely integrated into the character and plot sides of the script. One of my favorite developments by far was the reveal that Halsey was the father.
There’s this great scene right after Tamara has told him this and Halsey gets in the car with Ryder, who’s still ignorant of the secret, and Ryder brings up that if this isn’t Big Red’s kid, Big Red is going to annihilate, in the worst fashion possible, whoever the father is. And, of course, since there wouldn’t have to be a DNA test for Big Red to figure out who the father is once this baby is out, Halsey is internally freaking the hell out.
This leads to Halsey helping Tamara later and that’s all you need. You need the unique hook your story is built around to drive the major moments of your script. You can’t write the Halsey reveal or Halsey doing a 180 and deciding to help the heroine in any other script. It specifically comes out of the pregnancy hook. I loved that.
By the way, this script could’ve used more humor. Sometimes we make the error as writers to hide our script’s weakness. But often the best writers shine a light on that weakness and use it to their advantage. A woman running around with a gun 9 months pregnant is kind of a funny image. So why not inject some humor into the script? Brett would be a great character to have more fun with. He could freak out more. He had that capability but I always felt that Mike was putting a muzzle on him.
Check out Anora to see how Sean Baker did a great job with a similar scenario. He had one of the thugs constantly throwing up throughout the story because Anora beat him up earlier. And there were quite a few funny moments even from the serious characters in that movie. I would use that as a template to approach the humor here in a baby’s heartbeat.
In a lot of ways, the script reminded me of Clementine, which came from another Scriptshadow reader, David Williams. That script is now in my Top 10. Is Hard Labor going to make the Top 25? I don’t think so. It’ll definitely make the Top 25 Amateur list. But I think for this script to jump up another level or two, it needs a little more variety, as well as originality in the set pieces. I don’t know if we have a stand out set piece here. We have a lot of solid set pieces. But we need an all-star set piece and then we need a “1a” set piece.
I would love to hear the readers of the site volunteer some ideas for some original set pieces. That’s one of the wonderful advantages of doing this contest. Unlike other contests, there’s community support here and we can all help each other. Because I definitely think Hard Labor could be a movie. Even without a rewrite. But I don’t want to just be the starting point for an average movie. I want something great to come out of this.
Overall, I’m very happy with how you guys voted. And one more final congratulations to Mike Hurst!
Script link: Hard Labor
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Make sure the stakes aren’t just high for your hero but for your villains too. We learn early on that if these thugs don’t kill Tamara, Big Red is going to kill them. So the stakes are very high for them to achieve their goal.
