Make sure to vote below!

As is always the case when I put these contests together, I experience the highest of highs (“Wow, where has this writer been?? This is great stuff!”) and the lowest of lows (20 entries in a row without a single compelling opening page!). But in the end, I love it because it celebrates you guys and all your hard work.

Now, I have good news if your script didn’t make the showdown. I have ten more entries that didn’t make the cut, but were close. I’m going to do an “Almost Made It Showdown” for those scripts at the end of August. So don’t get too upset if your script didn’t make it. Because there’s a chance that the best script in the entire competition is in that second tier of screenplays.

Okay, now for the rules. At the very least, read the logline and first page of every entry. I’ve also included links to the scripts themselves. If you have the time, read as much of each entry as you can. Then, in the comments section, tell us which script you’re voting for. You are not allowed to half-vote. Mega-Showdown is the big leagues. It’s once a year. So you only get full votes.

The four highest vote-getting scripts will each get their own “Show Day” next week. That means they’ll get five pages posted so that, at the very least, all voters read those first five pages. Then, next weekend, we’ll do the second half of the showdown. The four finalists will go into a final voting round and, once again, you guys will vote for your favorite. The winner gets a review the following Monday.

Something to keep in mind here is that, unlike past showdowns, I didn’t just read the logilne or the first page. I read at least five pages of everyone’s entry. Therefore, if you don’t love someone’s logline down below, I encourage you to still read as much of the script as you can because some of these entries were picked more on the writing than the concept.

VOTING CLOSES SUNDAY AUGUST 3RD AT 11:59PM PACIFIC TIME!

Okay, are we ready? The time is finally here. :)

Good luck everyone!

Title: A Woke In The Night
Genre: Horror/Comedy
Logline: When a home invasion interrupts a family gathering, rational thinking Alice takes evasive action, but her two progressive sisters ignite an evening of depravity.

Title: SNOW AND THE SEVEN
Genre: Action/Revenge Thriller
Logline: After narrowly escaping a hit on her father, a washed-up slacker is rescued by a secretive group of elite mercenaries known as The Seven, who help her recover, then teach her their ways so she can avenge his death.

Title: Worm
Genre: Horror
Logline: When Ada’s sister is brutally murdered in a Victorian London alleyway Ada begins to investigate, and slowly, as women start being murdered in the same fashion across the city, the truth begins to unveil that the killer may not be a man, but a monster.

Title: QB1
Genre: Action-thriller
Logline: A star quarterback hides a twisted secret—he’s a serial killer carving up victims between games. But when a relentless detective starts connecting the dots, his perfect season—and double life—begin to unravel. American Psycho meets Any Given Sunday.

Title: The First Horseman
Genre: Thriller
Logline: At the height of World War 2, a young Japanese-American investigator must race to prevent a terrifying Japanese plot to unleash a devastating plague on the United States. Inspired by true events.

Title: 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.

Title: UNDISCLOSED
Genre: Contained Thriller
Logline: At the height of the Cold War, a combat radar operator working at a remote US military outpost near the Russian border, discovers what they believe to be a rogue UFO, and must find a way to stop it without triggering World War 3.

Title: War’s Last Day
Genre: War/Thriller
Logline: As the last US troops withdraw from Afghanistan, a brash CIA field agent ropes a stray recon team into a hasty, off-the-books rescue mission, taking them high into the impassable Hindu Kush mountains with no way out, no backup, and the Taliban closing in behind them.

Title: The Ballad of the Ember Knight
Genre: Medieval Epic Adventure
Logline: In war-torn 14th century France, a disgraced knight—Roland Chandos, once the legendary Ember Knight—must confront his betrayals, protect the last heir to the throne, and redeem his honor in a final duel against the man who orchestrated his downfall.

Title: SMOKESCREEN
Genre: War-action.
Logline: Shot down by the Red Baron, a Nurse with a photographic memory must navigate the perils of no-man’s land to transport critical intelligence to the Allies that will save countless lives and shorten the Great War.

Accepting entries until 10pm Pacific time!

Good news!  I survived the 2025 West Coast Tsunami!  Which means the contest is still on!!!

As a reminder, this is THE greatest online screenwriting contest ever. I pick the 10 best entries, post their titles and loglines here on the site, along with their first page. You, the readers of the site, will then vote, over the weekend, which entries you like best. The top 4 vote-getters will then each get their own day next week where I post their first five pages. The following weekend, we have a second round of voting for that Top 4. Whoever gets the most votes wins, and receives a review that Monday! Last year’s winner, the writer of Bedford, got a manager out of it and his script was sent around town. You could be that person this year. Just follow the instructions below!

HOW TO SUBMIT
What: Mega Showdown
When: Friday, August 1
Deadline: TONIGHT by 10pm Pacific Time
Send me your: Script title, genre, logline, and a PDF of the script
Where: [email protected]

Submissions for The Scriptshadow Mega-Showdown Screenplay Contest are due THURSDAY! – Here’s how to submit!

Genre: Comedy
Premise: When there’s a death in the family and his daughter, who’s a very talented ballerina, needs money to get into the top ballet school, hardcore alcoholic Happy Gilmore pulls out the clubs again to go back on the tour.
About: For thirty years, Christopher McDonald (the actor who played Happy’s arch nemesis Shooter McGavin in the original film) pestered Adam Sandler to make a sequel to Happy Gilmore. So dedicated to the cause McDonald was, that he actually started a now successful Twitter account where he tweets as Shooter McGavin. Finally, a couple of years ago, Sandler said… maybe. With the door ajar, McDonald shoved his way in, and a couple of years later, a new Happy Gilmore movie has arrived. The film debuted on Netflix this past weekend.
Writers: Tim Herlihy & Adam Sandler
Details: 115 minutes

The thing I liked best about Happy Gilmore 2 is that it made me appreciate just how great the original movie was. I actually watched the original right before the sequel, which, in retrospect, was a mistake, as the original is truly a laugh-a-minute experience, whereas the sequel is more of a “laugh every half hour” sorta deal.

Now, I had heard Adam Sandler start chirping about how amazing the script was (the best script he had ever worked on!) a year ago. And it’s funny because, after watching the movie, I see exactly why he thought that way. And how the co-writer of the film, Tim Herlihy, thought so as well. There was clearly a lot of thought put into this story and this character.

But the reality is, Happy Gilmore 2 ends up being the kind of script a bad screenwriter would think is a good script. Let me explain.

Happy Gilmore 2 is, at its core, a deep character exploration. It is about an alcoholic man grieving the loss of his wife and, no matter what he does, he seems to be consumed by that loss and cannot move forward.

It is also a real-world commentary on the complex political machinations of what has happened to professional golf over the last several years. For those who don’t know, the professional golf tour was rocked when a rival tour, backed by Saudi Arabia, poached a bunch of its players and began a competing tour. It threw everything about golf into disarray.

It is a movie about family, about a father’s undying love for his daughter and his fear that, unless he sends her off to ballet school, she will be stuck in this dirty shanty sad town that his family has been forced to live in for the rest of her life.

It is a movie that takes the villain of the previous film, explores the complex psychopathy of what happens when you are exposed to the world as a cheater, a fraud, and a loser, then subverts expectations by turning him into an ally of Happy Gilmore.

And finally, it is a movie about a man who’s fallen from grace – who once had everything and now has nothing – and how do you navigate life when the best years of it are behind you?

Do you see what I mean? If you are a screenwriter writing that script, you are thinking, “We’ve got a winner here!”

There’s only one problem.

THIIIIIISSSSS ISSSSS A FUCKIIIIIIINNNNG COMMMMMEDDDDYYYYYYYY

It’s not Manchester By The Fucking Sea!!!!!!

We came here to watch Happy Gilmore thrust pretend penises in the air and beat everyone up. Not spend 90% of the running time moping around and complaining about how sad he is. Jesus H. Christ.

In Adam Sander’s defense, I used to think the same thing about comedy. I read a lot of screenwriting books and they all said the same thing – that if you want people to laugh, you first must ground your story in deep compelling characters that we care about. Then, and only then, can you layer jokes on top of that that people will laugh at.

While there is, of course, some truth to that, it’s not the priority nor should it ever be the priority in a comedy. 90% of your efforts should be devoted to making the reader/audience laugh. That’s it.

I would think that the people in the Happy Gilmore 2 camp would argue that they’ve done that. It’s not like there are no jokes here. Pretty much everybody besides Happy Gilmore is a goofy outrageous joke machine.

But that’s the problem. We didn’t come here to watch everyone else try and be funny. We came here to watch Adam Sandler be funny. And for some odd reason, he seems to have no desire to do so. Even when he delivers some of his famous lines (“Somebody hit it farttherrrrrrrrr”), he seems to do so reluctantly, as if it might ruin his Casey Affleck adjacent performance.

But the real issue here is one that critically injures Happy Gilmore 2. It is the knife that cut the artery and bled this movie out before it even hit its second act. You see, Adam Sandler seems to have forgotten why the first movie was this juggernaut of a comedy. It’s because it had this dynamite of an ironic setup. A violent hockey player with anger issues is placed inside the quiet polite country club world of golf. I mean, you don’t even have to think to write funny scenes for that setup. They write themselves!

Look at what Adam Sandler replaced that genius setup with. He replaced anger with alcohol addiction and depression. I mean, not exactly a setup where the jokes write themselves anymore, huh?

But even if the irony wasn’t perfect, it’s a tough setup to create laugh-out-loud moments with. I suppose movies like Bad Santa did it well but usually when alcoholics are the centerpiece of your story, nobody’s howling with laughter.

The other critical mistake Happy Gilmore 2 made was that it took one of the greatest single villains of all time and it made him… an ally? Nooooooooooooooooooo. Shooter McGavin is Happy Gilmore’s arch nemesis. We wanted to see what that furious conflict looked like 30 years later. I didn’t want Shooter washed up. I wanted him as cocky as ever. Shooter’s funniest moments are when he’s being a jerk. He wasn’t a jerk once in this film. They TLJ’d Shooter McGavin!

I want to conclude this analysis by highlighting one of the many things that made Happy Gilmore such a classic. And it’s a great screenwriting tip to boot. I read a lot of comedies and one of the main things you have to figure out is what your main character’s motivation is going to be. Why are they doing what they’re doing? If it doesn’t feel important, then the main character’s journey will feel weak.

The majority of the time, this motivation comes down to money. And there’s nothing wrong with that. The world operates on money. It’s a great motivator. But what most writers do is they throw in a lip service dollar amount that our main character has to achieve – say, they have a mortgage payment or they lose the house – and then we just… never hear about that motivation again. It is a paper thin thing that pushes our character into the second act and then, thank god, the writer says, I never have to mention it again.

Happy Gilmore not only comes up with this deeper more thoughtful motivation of Happy’s grandmother losing her house because she can’t pay the mortgage and owes back taxes (totaling 270k), but he deeply integrates it into the storyline. There’s this whole subplot of the grandma having to go to a crappy living home with an evil administrator. The writers even write in fun twists and turns to the subplot, such as the house going up for auction and Shooter MacGaving buying it!

What this did was it kept the motivation present throughout the movie. I don’t see that level of dedication and thought put into the smaller parts of comedy scripts ever. And boy does it make a difference. We’re more invested in Happy winning and taking down Shooter because we’re never more than four scenes removed from an update on his grandmother’s situation.

Believe it or not, I understand the logic behind why all these creative decisions were made. Creative people don’t like to repeat themselves. They like to evolve. They like to try new things. There was clearly a strong resistance on Sandler’s end to repeat an old version of Happy Gilmore. He wanted to do something different. I can imagine him beaming when the writer said to him, “What if Shooter wasn’t his enemy anymore! What if we have them team up instead!?” Bingo, Sandler thought. That’s different!

But I think any screenwriter would be stupid not to ask himself, “What does the audience want?” Sure, sometimes the audience doesn’t know what they want until you give it to them. But, ultimately, especially with comedy, you want to lean into what works about your idea. And there were so many things that worked well in the first movie that they abandoned here.

Happy Gilmore 2 is a weird golf movie about depression. Which means I’m still waiting for my Happy Gilmore sequel. The one where Happy continues to beat people up and takes on Shooter for the Masters title.

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

What I learned: If your jokes aren’t coming from your premise, where are they going to come from?  If you go into a script like Happy Gilmore 2, where the very premise you are building your story on is not built around a funny situation, you are asking for trouble, my dear.  This is what the original Happy Gilmore did so well.  An angry violent hockey player is placed inside the polite well-mannered world of golf.  Boom.  You can build a million jokes around that without trying.  Why they went away from that goldmine, I will never know!

Submissions for The Scriptshadow Mega-Showdown Screenplay Contest are due THURSDAY! – Here’s how to submit!

Genre: Superhero
Premise: As the world’s most famous family, The Fantastic Four, prepare to have their first baby, an evil giant entity known as Galactus threatens to destroy their planet.
About: A lot is riding on this film’s success for Marvel. The movie finished its opening weekend with 118 million dollars. In the much hyped DC vs. Marvel Summer battle of Superman versus Fantastic Four, Fantastic Four lost out to Superman by 7 million bucks. The two films have an almost identical worldwide box office tally, separated by just a million dollars (220 to Superman versus 219 F4). The film received a lot of surprisingly good reviews just before being released, bringing expectations up significantly. I may have allowed those expectations to cloud my judgment.
Writers: Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan, Ian Springer, Kat Wood – characters created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby
Details: 115 minutes long

I’ll be straight up honest with you.

I can’t get enough of this stuff.

My script analysis brain runs at a million RPMs during superhero movies now, making it hard to just let go and enjoy them. Still, I’m fascinated by these films because I know the people behind the scenes are pouring every ounce of their creative energy into them.

I know people think the opposite is true, that they’re just mindlessly churning these films out. Trust me, that is not the case. They know that the profit difference between a bad and a good superhero movie could be as much as 400 million dollars. And the difference between a bad and a great superhero movie could be as much as a billion dollars.

With those numbers, everybody is working overtime to create the best movie possible.

The problem that keeps getting in the way is that studios refuse to take real creative risks on movies that cost over 100 million dollars. And big creative risks are one of the only ways for a film to break out into something great. Instead, their risks have to stay within small-risk territory. So you’re never going to get something that’s amazing.

That’s why I love this stuff. I love seeing what the studios and creatives on these movies will do. How much they’ll push that envelope and if they’ll ever get bold enough to take a real creative risk. Cause they’re getting to that point where they may not have a choice. If people stop coming to superhero movies, they’ll have to get creative fast. So, in a way, you kind of want these things to fail. That will lead to a new era of wilder weirder superhero films.

I guess you could say that Fantastic Four took *some* risks. They came up with this 1960s aesthetic, which feels a little different than your typical superhero film. But, for some strange reason, you get used to it so quickly, that they might as well have set it in modern times.

The movie follows this “family” of superheroes – Sue Storm (invisibility), Reed Richards (stretchy powers), Ben Grimm (a giant rock), and Johnny Storm (fire powers) – on their parallel universe Earth, where they are kind of like the planet’s presidents. And the movie starts with news that Sue is pregnant.

No sooner does this happen than a female Silver Surfer shows up and warns the entire planet that her master, the gigantic galaxy-hopping Galactus, has chosen their planet to eat. That’s right. Galactus goes around eating planets.

She then disappears and The Fantastic Four chart a flight to Galactus’s home world to try and negotiate. Surprisingly, Galactus is open to negotiation. And, to any sane person, his offer is reasonable. He says that if you give me your newborn, I won’t destroy your planet. The Fantastic Four channel Howie Mandel and tell Galactus… NO DEAL!

They then go back home, break the news to Earth. For some reason, the people of earth are only mildly upset about it. Here the civilians in Superman were, hurling cans of soda point blank at Superman’s face for helping avoid a war yet they merely shrugged their shoulders at the fact that the Fantastic Four didn’t sacrifice one human life for the lives of 6 billion. Um, okay.

But don’t worry! Reed Richards has a plan! It’s called: Project Baby Swap! He’ll lure Galactus into a trap that will send him to the furthest regions of the universe with an empty baby basket. Except he miscalculates how smart Galactus is. When Galactus sniffs out the tomfoolery, it will be a battle to the end right there in New York City.

There is a LOT to talk about with this movie but I’ll start with Pedro Pascal. This dude needs to take a three year vacation from acting. He does so many jobs that it’s clearly harmed his performances. I’ve never seen a more monotone lifeless performance than Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards.

In fact, the worst thing about this movie…. IS THE FANTASTIC FOUR. They’re all boring! How do you make The Thing boring? He’s an awesome character. Here, he’s always tired, like a gassed bodybuilder after a 3 hour workout (“Oh, you want me to pick up this car?” He says, half-heartedly to a group of schoolchildren. “Sure, okay, I guess.”). Then there was the baby drama, which felt like it belonged in a 90s sitcom starring two dads, one named Jesse, the other named Balky, rather than in a 2025 superhero movie.

The closest they got to a compelling superhero was Johnny Storm because at least he had a fun storyline – he fell in love with the Silver Surfer chick.

But from a screenwriting standpoint, they made a critical error early in the screenplay. They created a family WITH ZERO CONFLICT. Since when has there ever been a family without conflict? What a bizarre choice. But, even worse, IT WAS A BORING CHOICE. Cause we meet this family and they all like each other and chum around and that’s not why we come to movies. We come to movies to see conflict resolved. There was no conflict with this family! That alone made it nearly impossible for the movie to succeed.

And here’s the kicker: It almost did succeed.

Why?

Cause, for the first time since Thanos, Marvel had some badass villains! Galactus was a badass! I loved him. I can’t remember the last time a villain with gravitas entered any superhero film. This guy felt like a legitimate threat. Whenever his eyes lit up, I got scared goosebumps.

And Silver Surfer Chick was badass too! I loved the sadness within her. Her action scenes were fun to watch. I wanted her and Johnny to get together. I found myself rooting for her a lot.

Maybe this is why Marvel doesn’t make more badass villains. Because they’re afraid of what’s happened here, which is that the villains outshone the heroes.

One thing that The Fantastic Four taught me, though, is the value of setups and payoffs in these big movies. Again, you don’t have a lot of leniency in your creative choices with these scripts. The higher forces give you nowhere to go but in the most obvious directions.

You can combat this, however, with strong setups and payoffs. Setups and payoffs, as simple as they are to do, create this feeling of cleverness whenever they’re executed. In other words, they make a movie feel smarter than it is. In many ways, it’s your last line of defense in making these big generic movies feel satisfying.

For example, there’s this nice late moment where Johnny Storm decides to sacrifice himself to help push a struggling Galactus into the teleportation zone so he’ll be sent to the furthest regions of the universe. Johnny’s plan is to push him in, which means he’ll have to go as well. So he’s shooting towards Galactus and, at the last second, the Silver Surfer bumps him off his path and sacrifices herself instead.

The movie gave these two – Johnny Storm and the Silver Surfer – five scenes together setting up their complicated relationship and Johnny’s attempt to turn the Silver Surfer, which she had, up until this point, resisted. That was the setup. So, to see her finally come around, to the point where she sacrificed herself for him, was a great payoff. And it felt good!

It was a reminder, though, of just how frustrating this movie was. It had these little flashes of greatness but then it would destroy them with these major character or structural errors. This family was sooooooo boring. And then, for the majority of the script, you had the dreaded “waiting around narrative.” That’s where all our heroes do is wait around. Which DESTROYS story momentum – that they had to wait around for Galactus to show up.

All of this steeped on top of, probably, the most special effects driven movie I’ve ever seen. I’d be surprised if there were even half-a-dozen tangible things on screen. It looked like every frame was created in a computer. And that drives me nuts.

The Marvel Universe is in a really tough spot now. The Fantastic Four did okay. But it’s not going to create a rabid fanbase for more Fantastic Four films. And the reason that’s relevant is because they’re supposedly building these next two Avengers films around Reed Richards being the new Tony Stark.

Oooooooh boy will that be interesting. We’re talking about one of the most charismatic characters ever put on screen being replaced by a piece of cardboard – a piece of cardboard, by the way, who will be shooting seven other films at the same time as Avengers, turning his cardboardy performances even more cardboardy.

For hardcore Marvel fans, this film should be satisfying. Anybody else, though, is going to forget this one within a week.

[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: If your movie is built around a group of heroes, I would highly advise building SOME FORM OF CONFLICT into that group. While there is probably a good movie somewhere that’s based around a group of people who have zero issues with each other, it’s extremely rare.

I’m giving out one ‘40% OFF’ SCRIPT NOTES DEAL. If you want it, e-mail me the subject line “FORTY” at [email protected] and it’s yours!

AI be coming for our jobs.

Will it succeed?

I don’t know. I still don’t think it will ever grasp the kind of honest authentic character development that good scripts have. Then again, a lot of regular writers struggle with creating honest authentic characters as well.

Either way, it got me thinking, how do we defeat AI as screenwriters?

I think I know the answer.

You see, the reason AI is good at mimicking most of screenwriting is because a screenplay is the second most mathematical of the writing mediums (the first being poetry). And that’s what AI is good at. It’s good at recognizing patterns and structure and mimicking them.

However, what I’ve learned over time is that the scripts that stand out the most are the ones that have an X-FACTOR. They have some invisible secret sauce that CAN’T BE MEASURED, which makes them stand out in some way.

When a writer taps into an x-factor, the read stops feeling like a script and starts feeling like an experience. It’s like you’re really there, that you’re being taken on a journey that’s so unique, you know you’ll never be taken on that same journey again for as long as you live.

And if you want to take it to its logical conclusion, you can say that the x-factor is what gives your script a SOUL. Guess what? No matter how hard AI tries, it will never be able to inject a screenplay with a soul.

So, the trick, then, is to simply LEARN ALL OF THE X-FACTORS available to you and make sure you’re applying one of them to whatever script you’re currently working on. You can then sleep peacefully knowing that AI will never be able to replicate what you do.

Now, before I get into what those x-factors are, I want to highlight a recent example of an x-factor script. And by “x-factor script” I mean a script that cannot be replicated by AI. That script is “Goblin.” Goblin is a recent spec script sale that I reviewed in my newsletter about a young man who learns that his father has a goblin chained up in their basement.

Whether you liked this script or not, YOU WILL REMEMBER IT. You will remember it far more vividly than you’ll remember Monday’s script, Road Test. When you’re trying to quantify what an x-factor is, the differences between these two scripts – Goblin and Road Test – are the perfect example of the difference between what AI can replicate and what it can’t

With that in mind, let’s identify what all of the known x-factors are.

X-FACTOR #1 – IGNORANCE

Ever wonder why a lot of a screenwriter’s best work occurs early on in their career? A solid chunk of the reason is that they didn’t know what they were doing. And when you don’t know what you’re doing, you do things “the wrong way.” Ironically, when you do something the wrong way, it’s more original than doing it “the right way.”

Christopher McQuarrie famously said that he couldn’t write The Usual Suspects today because he was so new to screenwriting when he wrote it that he didn’t know the rules you were supposed to abide by. So he made “mistakes,” and some of those mistakes were heralded as what made the script so good. These days, he would follow the “proper” formula, and his screenplays are lesser for it.

Let’s not pretend that ignorance is the be-all end-all advantage, though. It mostly results in making your script worse. But it does occasionally send you down an “incorrect” path that leads to gold. Or, at the very least, originality.

There’s this old 90s romantic comedy called Say Anything (it’s the one where John Cusack holds the boom box over his head playing Peter Gabriel’s “Your Eyes”) and in that movie is this really weird subplot about the girl’s father stealing money from the old people’s home he runs. It’s odd. It’s miscalculated. Cameron Crowe never would’ve written it ten years later. But it’s also what helps make that movie unique and stand out.

Now, we cannot go back in time and become ignorant about screenwriting again. But we can retain the spirit of that approach and mimic ignorance in places. Stop holding your screenwriting “musts” so tightly. You don’t have to hit every single Blake Snyder beat at the pre-established page number. If you have an idea you want to explore in your story, but know that, in the past, it hasn’t worked, well, that may not be true for this script. You won’t know until you try. So don’t be such a stickler. You have to take risks somewhere in your scripts or else, I promise, your script will never be very good.

X-FACTOR #2 – VOICE

If you have an original voice, that is the most common x-factor that elevates your script above the competition. “Voice” is basically the unique way in which you see the world and your ability to capture that when you write.

The Daniels (Everything Everywhere All At Once), for example, run towards chaos when they write. They embrace absurdity and their scripts are often about the attempts to bring balance to that absurdity. It stands out because nobody else writes in that specific lane in that specific way.

But voice can be hard to manufacture if it doesn’t come naturally. I remember interviewing a writer once and I asked him how he came up with his writing voice. He said he didn’t know he had a voice until people told him he did. That’s voice. It’s so wrapped up in who you are that you’re not aware you sound different from others.

Voice can be found in THE WAY YOU WRITE as well as WHAT YOU CHOOSE TO WRITE ABOUT. If you write animated, conversational, rapid fire conversations, like Quentin Tarantino, that’s how you stand out through the written word. But you can also choose to write about something very specific, like having sex after car crashes, as David Cronenberg did in his 1996 film, Crash. Even if you didn’t infuse voice into the written word, that script will still have voice due to the fact that the subject matter the writer is writing about is so unique.

And to prove to you just how valuable voice is in its battle against AI, can you imagine any AI coming up with Pulp Fiction or Crash? You can’t. AI would never touch either of those stories nor would it know what to do if it were forced to write them.

X-FACTOR #3 – MESSINESS

Another part of this x-factor journey, I’m realizing, is messiness. Usually, the scripts that I celebrate the most are messy in places. As much as I love a strong structure, if you wring that structure too tightly around your story, it becomes a noose. It becomes this predictable formulaic drag that we feel like we’ve seen hundreds of times already.

It’s a slippery slope, I know. Cause I read plenty of scripts where the writers are too loose with their structure, and those scripts are terrible in their own way. But, usually, that’s because the writer did it by accident. They didn’t know what they were doing. If you’re a seasoned writer and understand the value of structure, I believe you can figure out just how loose you can make some of the sections so that the script breathes like a living beautiful thing.

X-FACTOR #4 – POINT-OF-VIEW

If you present a story idea to AI—let’s say it’s a procedural setup where someone has been murdered and a detective starts looking into it, AI is going to explore that setup through the most obvious point-of-view. It’s going to tell the story from the point of view of the cop, of the killer, or both. What AI is not going to do is tell the story from the point-of-view of the killer’s dog, which is the setup for the script at the top of the 2023 Black List, “Bad Boy.”

But point-of-view isn’t just about concept. It’s everything and everywhere. When you write a scene, you have the choice to write it from any point-of-view you want. When the Justice Gang takes on a giant monster in the middle of the city in “Superman,” 9 out of 10 writers are going to tell that scene through the point-of-view of the Justice Gang. But what does James Gunn do? He shows that fight through the point-of-view of Clark and Lois, who are in her apartment high-rise, casually chatting while the fight takes place in the window behind them.

Not enough writers utilize point-of-view in interesting ways. Yet it’s sitting there for each and every one of you to take advantage of.

X-FACTOR #5 – PASSION

Scott convinced me of this one in the comments yesterday. This specific line he wrote caught my attention: “Cause you can always tell when someone is not passionate about something. The utilitarian workmanship vibe is evident.” Nothing could be truer. When you’re not passionate about the script you’re writing, you are as close to mimicking AI as a human gets. All you care about is hitting the beats. Is putting the puzzle together so you can move on.

Meanwhile, if you’re extremely passionate about something, you will explore every little crevice of it and you will include every gold nugget you find during those explorations. Your script will sing in a different key than a script without passion. This is the best area to focus on if all of these other X-factors are beyond you. By simply loving your story, you will write something that’s more powerful than anything AI could. Even when I don’t like a passionate script, I’ve never not been able to feel the passion on the page. And, at the very least, the script resonates.

X-FACTOR #6 – A STRANGE HOOK

What you’re looking for here is a strange or offbeat idea that’s still accessible. The best example ever of this is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The idea is offbeat for sure – People get portions of their minds erased so they don’t have to remember the pain of having their hearts broken. And it’s accessible. I mean, who hasn’t had their heart broken?

A lesser known example would be Colossal, about a woman who discovers that, when she gets blackout drunk, she’s mysteriously controlling a giant monster wreaking havoc in Korea. It’s obviously an offbeat idea. But, at its core, it’s a movie about alcoholism and learning to control addiction. Trust me – AI will never be able to write either of these movies. Which is why you want to learn how to excavate those strange hooks from your subconscious. Just the other day I saw a trailer for a movie about a guy who lives next to this intersection that has an unusually high number of car crashes. That’s another strange hook there is no risk of AI stealing from you.

X-FACTOR #7 – GOING OFF THE RESERVATION

Finally, the last way to tap into your inner x-factor is to go completely off the reservation with your story. Whatever the setup is, take it as far as you can take it. Then, take it further. And when you get to the end of wherever that is, keep going. We just had one of these movies hit the theater – The Substance. Look at where that script began and where it ended. Coraline wrung every ounce of story out of that setup.

Another example would be the Black List script, Roses, about a guy who takes his girlfriend to a remote house with a swimming pool. He then learns that whenever you swim in the pool, you replicate, and what comes out is a copy of you, that’s a little messier than the original. Once the copies start playing in the pool, creating copies of copies, this script goes so far off the reservation, it’s no longer on the same continent.

These probably aren’t the only x-factors available to you. In fact, if you can think of any other x-factors, include them in the comments. The more of these we know, the more we’ll be able to combat the evil that is AI Screenwriter. :)