Genre: Slasher Dark/Comedy
Premise: A group of job applicants arrive at a sleek highrise for a coveted position, but find themselves trapped and fighting for their lives against a psychopathic assessor known as Cutthroat, who wields a briefcase full of nasty weapons and is out to kill all of them.
About: Last year I did a pitch contest called Blood & Ink where anyone could pitch me movie ideas. I accepted the best 100 of those ideas. The writers then wrote those scripts. Ever since, I’ve been reviewing them on the site, looking for the best one. Already, one script, Wildman, written by Jacob Rainer, got him a manager and possibly more.
Writer: Dean Books (DeanB)
Details: 88 pages

Can today’s Blood & Ink script break the current streak and earn a “worth the read?” Let’s find out!

23 year old Nelson Krell has just found out that his girlfriend is banging his way-too-old overweight uncle. Which makes getting the job today even more important. He needs to get out of this dependent life and become an actual adult!

Nelson shows up at a headhunter’s office in a tall skyscraper downtown. While waiting, he meets douchebag Jeremy, who lets everyone immediately know that he went to an Ivy League school. They’re soon joined by a small nervous girl with colored hair who Jeremy dubs, “Pronouns.”

Girlboss Margi, who is the most competitive person on the planet, arrives next. And then there’s Jayden, a black Greek God. “Oh, we’re screwed now,” Jeremey says, letting Nelson know that DEI just lost them this job. Not long after, looksmaxxing Asian, Josh, shows up.

They are all brought into a conference room and that’s where they meet Cutthroat, this giant pale faced dude with blood tears streaking gown his face adding an extra dose of “uncanny” to his uncanny valley-like face. The dude looks terrifying before he’s even said a word.

“Here’s how it works,” he says. “We’re going to spend the day together in a lovely group interview. I’ll be gauging your skills, weighing your competence. Determining whether you are fit to join the vast capitalist machine. I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto employment except through me. Nod your heads if you understand.”

When Jeremey calls this weird recruiting setup bullshit, Cutthroat calmly takes a hatchet out of his desk and hurls it at Jeremy’s face. Jeremy dead. And that’s when everyone else RUNS. But what they don’t realize is that Cutthroat has modified all his floors in this building to be a killing ground. No matter where they turn, gruesome deaths await.

The worst fate goes to Josh, who is so hungry for the one candy bar left in a vending machine that he sticks his hands up there to get it and the vending machine turns into this whirling wood chipper device, pulling his entire body inside where he’s soon turned into human goo.

Eventually, the only candidates left are Nelson and Pronouns, who figure out that this guy has gone insane and that, maybe, if they can pretend like they’re actual employees who are here to do work, he just might buy it. And Cutthroat does! At least for a while. You see, what neither Cutthroat or the applicants know is that this is a CIA program gone bad. And the CIA is sending in their clean-up guy to take care of Cutthroat AND the applicants…

Even though this script isn’t quite my thing, I have a feeling it’s going to end up being one of the best Blood & Ink scripts when this is all over.

A good script usually starts with a writer who has a strong vision of what they want to do, and then they go out and execute that vision. Dean knew EXACTLY what script he wanted to write. And then he wrote it.

To clarify what I mean, when I read Volunteers, I got the sense that the writer was still trying to figure out the story and the tone while they were writing it. And you can feel that as a reader. There’s a tentativeness to the storytelling. The script keeps trying things instead of confidently telling you, “This is the movie.” That lack of conviction can kill a screenplay.

Meeting a screenplay for the first time isn’t that different from meeting a person for the first time. If somebody can’t look you in the eye, doesn’t speak with conviction, is dressed sloppily, you immediately sense that lack of confidence.

Screenplays give off the same signals. The choices feel tentative. The tone shifts around. The writer seems to be asking you if something works instead of telling you that it does.

That’s what I mean when I say a script hasn’t figured out who it is yet. Dean’s script knows exactly who it is. You may not like that person. You may not want to spend two hours with that person. But there’s never a second where you wonder who walked in the room.

Probably my favorite moment in the script was when Nelson and Pronouns realized they needed to outsmart this guy and so they started pretending they were office workers putting deals together to the classic music of “9 to 5.” I could totally envision that montage up on the big screen.

To me, that’s when the script was at its best.

I also liked that Dean kept reminding us who his characters were again and again so that we knew them. I read so many screenplays where writers are very mushy about their characters. They either have zero defining traits or 10 defining traits. Strong characters have that one overarching trait that defines them that the writer keeps hitting on again and again.

Like Margie here. Margie could’ve easily been a forgettable character. She actually gets cut off from the main group several times, leaving her absent for a large portion of the story. But Margie is this crazy ultra-competitive woman who will stop at nothing until she wins and so even though she’s not in the script that much, we know exactly who she is. Cause she never backs down and is always trying to win. A highlight of the script is her chainsaw battle with Cutthroat.

Now, a problem that these specific “high concept” scripts run into is that they run out of steam. And the best way to combat that is a midpoint reversal or escalation or twist. Something that gives the script a second life.

Dean gives us that when we cut to the CIA and hear them acknowledging that this Cutthroat Project has gone haywire. This guy was built to be the ultimate decider of who could handle the tough jobs. But he went crazy and turned his business into a killing ground. So, now, the CIA has to take him out by sending in their ultimate fixer, The Benediction.

The reason this adds an extra life to the story is because we’ve just been told that the terrifying guy who’s been trying to turn us into people soup for the last 3 hours isn’t even the scariest guy we’re going to deal with today! There’s a new guy coming in who’s even worse! I love that.

However, this is the one major creative choice in Cutthroat I didn’t agree with. Making “The Benediction” a Cutthroat clone was weak sauce (or Cutthroat was his clone). You promised us something different and scarier yet you gave us the exact same thing.

The Benediction needs to be a completely new scary “fixer” character in a different way. And I think you can have all sorts of fun building this character. Who can possibly be scarier than Cutthroat? It’s been done before. Who could possibly be scarier than Darth Vader? They made The Emperor. So, let’s reimagine this character.

This script still has some growing to do but I think it’s worth the read.

Script link: Cutthroat

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

What I learned: I actually think that most writers under-describe their key characters. Everybody is going by this advice that you have to keep your script moving and therefore you have to describe your characters quickly. That’s true for secondary characters but I think that a deep description, even though it slows the script down in the moment, pays major dividends on the back end for main characters. And this is the perfect example. Cutthroat could’ve easily been described as, “A strange looking man with a plastic complexion.” But check out the description written by Dean. It’s very specific and it allowed me to clearly see who the villain in this movie was: “CUTTHROAT. A handsome monolith with wide shoulders in a dark blue suit with a polka dot handkerchief in the pocket. A plastic complexion. Always smiling. “Uncanny valley” effect. Racially ambiguous. Age-30-55? Perfectly combed blonde (dyed) hair, vivid blue (contact lensed) eyes. A bizarre twitchy Frankenstein of the quintessential corporate overlord.”

Say goodbye to Hollywood doom and gloom talk.

Over this past month, two movies have made 3.6 billion dollars at the box office.

Ironically, those two movies have become huge for exactly the opposite reasons. One is the ultimate zeitgeist popular culture everybody from age 8 to age 80 can go see it and have fun film – Spider-Man. And the other is the adult challenging narratively complex period piece that is The Odyssey.

And I think that’s a good way to look at Hollywood. We have those two main options as writers. We can give them the exactly what they want concept or we can give them what they don’t know they want yet.

Each choice has its own challenges.

You’d think that writing a movie for everyone is easy. You’re literally just writing what everybody likes. But Spider-Man is the diamond version of that film. Disney came out with a movie called Moana not long ago that was supposed to perform just like Spider-Man did. And it bombed. So, it’s never as easy as it looks.

I do think that making a more challenging Spider-Man movie helped. They took some pretty big creative story risks here. Keeping the villain hidden most of the movie.  Making the character sad and lonely. Creating this big metamorphosis within the character. Shifting the movie late to almost make the villain, Jean Grey, the main character.

I’m not saying it all worked. But it’s a better movie than if they would’ve played everything right down the middle and made it a basic silly fun Spider-Man movie.

With The Odyssey, the risk is the idea itself.  Nobody is making these movies right now.  And that’s why I think it was a hit.

The Odyssey has been sitting there for decades, waiting for someone to make it, and nobody touched it. For legitimate reasons. It’s a period piece that costs a ton of money. And period pieces are huge gambles because when they don’t work, they SUPER BOMB. It’s not like Masters of the Universe, which can bomb theatrically and still make a considerable amount of that money elsewhere. Epic period pieces rarely break out. Especially these days.

So the lesson is, you either take the risk within a safe concept or you take the risk on the concept itself.

I have no doubt that’s a big reason why Ballad of the Ember Knight sold. There are literally ZERO scripts out there like it. It had a lane all to itself.

Now, you still have to write a good script. You can’t just say, “My script is different, therefore you have to buy it.” You always have to deliver. And these guys did.

I’ve gotten into a lot of discussions about the script over the last week, and people are constantly asking me what I saw in it that I think helped it sell. I’ve thought about that a lot, and the answer I keep coming back to is: the storytelling.

I used to go on and on about storytelling on this site until I looked back at a month of posts and realized 90% of them were about storytelling. So I moved on. But I should probably talk about it more because good storytelling is a huge reason this script sold, and the lack of good storytelling is what dooms so many of the screenplays I read.

Too many writers are just trying to hit the beats they’re supposed to hit. They know they gotta achieve “this” by page 5 and “that” by page 15 and “this other thing” by the end of the first act. Then they need that great character introduction scene. Then they need their midpoint. Then they need their low point. Etc., etc.

But all of that stuff is just the entry point. It’s the framework that allows you to tell the story. Ideally, those page numbers and beats are sitting somewhere in the background of your head while the creative part of your brain is focused on one thing:

HOW DO I MAKE THIS AS ENTERTAINING AS POSSIBLE?

That happens on two levels.

First, you’re trying to make the scene you’re writing right now as entertaining as possible. And by “entertaining,” I mean you should be able to make a strong argument that there’s no way the reader is going to stop reading before that scene is over.

Second, you’re building the larger story so that when the scene ends, the reader has a reason to keep going.

That’s really where Ballad of the Ember Knight distanced itself from other scripts.

We have this mysterious knight who we don’t have all the answers about. So we want to keep reading to find out more about him.

Then we meet this teenage boy whose father, the king, has been killed. Which means the boy is now king. But he has to get to the city to claim his crown. Meanwhile, the man currently controlling the country wants to be king himself. So if any of his men find the boy, they’re going to kill him.

Then the Ember Knight runs into the boy and his guard.

Here’s where the storytelling really kicks in.

We know the Ember Knight killed the boy’s father. The boy doesn’t.

The guard may or may not know. He’s suspicious of the Ember Knight. But these three need each other to get through this broken country where people are trying to kill them for different reasons.

Look at how many reasons we now have to keep reading.

We want to learn more about the Ember Knight. We want to know if the guard recognizes him. We know that, at some point, the boy is going to find out that the Ember Knight killed his father. Well, OF COURSE we want to keep reading to see what happens when that bomb goes off.

And on top of all that, people are hunting them. So there’s potential danger on literally every next page.

That’s why the script could still work at 190 pages. The O’Dey brothers made sure you always had a reason to turn the page.  That’s good storytelling to me.  You give the reader a strong reason to turn the page. Or, even better, you give them multiple reasons.

What most screenwriters are doing instead is checking boxes. They want you to know that they know they gave you the inciting incident. They introduced the protagonist correctly. They got out of the first act on time. So there’s this subconscious attitude of, “I did it the right way. I get credit for that, right?”

No.

That’s not how this works.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and I believe you should always lead with instinct, with your eyes on entertaining the reader. Then you fall back on structure, formula, and screenwriting basics.

I like to think of those things (the nuts and bolts screenwriting stuff) as following your creative instincts a few blocks behind. You want them close enough that they can catch up when you need them. If the story starts wandering, structure can come in and straighten things out. If the pacing starts dying, your screenwriting fundamentals can tell you why.

But they shouldn’t be leading the parade.

Your creative side should be leading because that’s the side that’s going to come up with the weird choice, the exciting choice, the dangerous choice, the thing we haven’t seen before. Your logical brain is much better at making sure the story works. But it’s rarely the part that comes up with the thing that makes somebody say, “Holy shit.”

So let your creative instincts run out in front.

Then let structure chase them.

Anyway, I want to find more great scripts. I want to help you guys sell more scripts. But I can’t do anything for you unless you give me the goods. I’m going to try and review 4 more Blood & Ink scripts this week. It’s a busy week for me so it’s going to be tough. But maybe we find the next gem there.

I hope all of you are working hard on your High Concept Club screenplays. Only a few of you have come to me for outline help. I think that’s a mistake. The people who have sent me their outlines and got my feedback can tell you in the comments how much it’s helping them. It’s free feedback, people. Come on!

I’m still thrown by this movie I saw over the weekend, Miracle Mile, from 1988. It’s really stuck with me for some reason. It’s a freaking INTENSE movie. Maybe I’ll check out that director’s other movie later tonight (Cherry 2000).

In the meantime, back to reading!

Genre: Horror/Supernatural
Premise: When a disillusioned magician takes a gig in a remote carnival town, her tricks injure volunteers for real, but the locals act like nothing’s wrong.
About: Last year I did a pitch contest called Blood & Ink where anyone could pitch me movie ideas. I accepted the best 100 of those ideas. The writers then wrote those scripts. Ever since, I’ve been reviewing them on the site, looking for the best one. Already, one script, Wildman, written by Jacob Rainer, got him a manager and possibly more. Stay tuned. One of the criteria for getting into the Blood & Ink contest was that, if I did not personally approve of the idea, it could still get voted in by the public. If you got 15 votes, you got in. This is one of the upvoted scripts.
Writer: Russell Nichols
Details: 99 pages

We’ve got another user-voted in pitch from the Blood & Ink Contest. I’m putting my trust into you guys that I overlooked this one. Let’s find out!

36 year old Maya Pryce is a magician but she’s not exactly selling out Carnegie Hall. Instead, her current gig is performing once a week for an old folks home where her 65 year old father, Will, stays. Her performances are actually payment for Will staying there.

After her latest performance, the manager comes to her and says that they can’t keep Will there anymore. He’s a menace to everyone. So, their deal is over. Maya tries everything in her power to make them reconsider but they won’t. Instead, they hand her an envelope with another job opening for a magician.

Maya and her dad then get in the car and, with a little coaxing from the dad, they decide to go check out this new gig, which takes place in a small town called La Cuna. It takes them forever to find it but they finally do, and when they get there, the mayor, Mr. Quillford, tells Maya that her contract consists of 3 shows and, afterward, they’ll consider a permanent residence.

Apparently magic is important to this town because they have these rules around how magic shows must be conducted. The main ones are that you have to use a prop from their prop house every night, and you have to use a volunteer from La Cuna.

So, Maya conducts her first show the next day, using a Houdini strait jacket as her prop. She brings a little girl up from the audience and places her in the jacket. But to Maya’s horror, when she takes the jacket off, the girl’s arms are disfigured! The next day, Maya is shocked to see that the girl’s arms have been amputated! And despite all this, the girl and her parents are fine with it!

Maya and her dad then spend some time in town, which has this carnival going on. We’re told early on that everybody is dead and that they died a long time ago but they all believe in pushing forward, or something, so that’s why they’re still kind of alive.

Maya then does another show with one of those sliding cabinets that you put a body inside, and disfigures another woman! And this woman ALSO acts like everything is okay afterwards. What the heck is going on??? It seems to tie back to Maya’s mother, who may have once been a magician herself here at La Cuna. And maybe her dad didn’t guide her here by chance. Maybe he was on a mission all along.

You know how when you’re dating, there are red flags that indicate that person isn’t good for you?

The same thing happens when you read a script. If red flags start popping up early, you know that script is in trouble. And they popped up pretty quickly here.

After Maya performs for the old folks, the manager there, Teresa, pulls her aside to tell her that their deal (Maya performs magic there every week and they, in turn, take care of her father) is over. Maya is upset so she reminds Teresa that they had a deal.

That scene ends and we cut to Maya following Teresa down a hallway doing what? Reminding her that they have a deal. In other words, a redundant scene. We already had this discussion. You don’t want to create two scenes in a row discussing the same thing, ESPECIALLY at the beginning of the script, when things need to be moving the fastest.

On top of this, the deal itself doesn’t make sense. What’s the going rate for a once-a-week magician at an old folks home? 40 bucks? 60 bucks? And the trade-off is that the home has to house, feed, and take care of her father? What’s the going rate for that? 1000 bucks a week? 2000? The math isn’t mathing here.

Two red flags stacked on top of each other have me worried about the script by page 10.

But I read on! Cause I want to review this for you guys and see if there’s anything more to learn from it.

The short version is that this isn’t a movie concept. But I understand why Russell and 15 of you may have thought it was. You have magic. That’s cinematic. It’s also unique and offers some fun opportunities for entertainment. You have this weird town. Weird towns are fun! Right? There’s some mystery here about who these people are and what’s going on with them.

These elements INDICATE that there’s a movie in here.

But take note of that word: INDICATE. A movie idea is not a collage of interesting elements that hopefully combine to form a movie. At its most basic, a movie idea is: SOMETHING IMPORTANT IS HAPPENING, AND OUR HERO MUST DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

A family’s block gets transported back to prehistoric times where dinosaurs roam the earth. That’s a movie idea.

Volunteers is almost the opposite of that. This woman and her father stumble into this town and spend most of the story walking around trying to understand why the town is so weird. There is no strong propulsive protagonist goal.

What would that look like? Well, let’s say a girl has gone missing. That’s the premise behind a similar “go to a weird town” movie, The Wicker Man. And that’s just one of a million directions you could go. But the point is now there’s something actively driving the story forward. It’s the “G” in GSU. Without the G, you’re wondering why you should turn the page.

I suppose the answer is: to find out the mystery of this town. But the characters tell us what’s up with the town right away. It’s a ghost town. Everybody here is dead. There was some fire a long time ago. We know all that early on. So… what’s left to find out? Who caused the fire? Okay. But have I been given a set of circumstances that makes the answer to that question feel important? No.

You need a strong goal. You need stakes. You need a propulsive engine. Not because every movie has to be some giant save-the-world blockbuster. But something has to matter A LOT to somebody. Because if the central situation doesn’t matter enough, you’re going to be fighting an uphill battle in EVERY SINGLE SCENE.

I’ll give you an example. Maya is tasked with giving her first magic show the same day she shows up at La Cuna. So we get this seven-page magic show and the whole time I’m struggling to care. What are the stakes of this show? What happens if Maya bombs? She and her father go back on the road and they’re literally in the exact same position they were in 24 hours earlier.

That’s a problem.

This is where concept and execution are more connected than writers realize. It’s easy to look at that scene in isolation and think, “Okay, how do I make the magic show more exciting?” But that’s a patch. The deeper problem is that the movie hasn’t created a reason for this performance to matter in the first place.

If Maya desperately needed this job because losing it meant losing her father forever, suddenly every trick matters. Every mistake matters.

This is why, when I’m picking ideas in the pitch contest, I’m not just picking anything that sounds sort of interesting. I’m looking for ideas that first, have a strong concept, but then also have a strong goal, real stakes, and an engine that I believe can generate 100 pages. Because those things aren’t screenwriting decorations you sprinkle onto the script later. They’re the fuel that allows you to create compelling scenes in the first place.

About 10 pages past the midpoint, the script starts delivering on its logline. Maya takes people from the crowd for the magic tricks and they get injured afterwards. This adds a little more intensity to Maya’s journey but it definitely has a “too little too late” quality to it. As I’ve stated before, the hook of your movie needs to start at the beginning of the second act. The hook here starts at the midpoint and it’s simply too late. That’s a structural issue.

This is screenwriting, people. You gotta learn the basics first, then you gotta get comfortable with them, and then you gotta be able to execute within them. This script definitely has a “still learning the craft” quality to it and when you drop that on top of a faulty concept, you’re trying to make fire out of sticks.

Script link: Volunteers

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

What I learned: If your concept has weak stakes, those weak stakes will trickle down into every major scene you write. You’ll find yourself creating these big set pieces and pulling your hair out trying to figure out why they don’t feel big. A lot of the time, it’s not the scene that’s broken. It’s the concept. The story hasn’t created consequences that make the scene matter. Give yourself a strong goal, meaningful stakes, and real consequences at the concept level, and suddenly your major moments have weight before you’ve written a single word of them.

Genre: Horror Thriller
Premise: A medical student testing a new memory drug experiences sudden transitions (‘shimmers’) to a past-life working in a Victorian hospital. He’s intrigued – until during one shimmer he learns the year is 1888, his past-self is Jack the Ripper…and that whenever he is in Jack’s body, Jack is back home in 2027 occupying his.
About: Last year I did a pitch contest called Blood & Ink where anyone could pitch me movie ideas. I accepted the best 100 of those ideas. The writers then wrote those scripts. Ever since, I’ve been reviewing them on the site, looking for the best one. Already, one script, Wildman, written by Jacob Rainer, got him a manager and possibly more. Stay tuned. One of the criteria for getting into the Blood & Ink contest was that, if I did not personally approve of the idea, it could still get voted in by the public. If you got 15 votes, you got in. This is one of the upvoted scripts.
Writer: Frank Enscribe
Details: 107 pages

Okay. Yesterday got ugly.

So I’m a little nervous about reviewing another user-voted-in script.

But, with today’s script, we’re dealing with Jack the Ripper. Ripper is one of the most popular “free IP” characters out there. Writers love him. Hollywood loves him. So I’m hoping, today, I’m going to love him. Let’s find out together, shall we?

It’s 2027 and 26 year old Danny Foley is living in London, barely getting by. The dude is taking care of his mother, who has dementia, and he’s so poor that he’s been forced to participate in one of those “drug trials for $$” at one of the local hospitals.

The trial, unfortunately, is causing him to have hallucinations. He’ll briefly think he’s in 1888 London. And as time goes by, these hallucinations last longer, and, within them, he’s inhabiting a medical student named Fredrick Eltham.

In 2027, Danny befriends a local nurse who’s taking care of his mother. Her name is Ava. And he shares his hallucinations with her. They both find them interesting. But the longer they go on, the more Danny starts to think they may be real.

Also, the more that he inhabits Frederick, the more he realizes this is a bad dude. Frederick gets a fellow student pregnant and just ditches her, telling her to figure it out on her own. It’s only when Danny jumps into Frederick’s body seconds after Frederick just slit a woman’s stomach open that Danny figures out that Frederick is Jack the Ripper and all this is real.

Meanwhile, when Danny is jumping to the past in Frederick’s body, Frederick is taking over Danny’s body. And boy does Frederick, aka Jack the Ripper, think 2027 is wild. Just the porn alone blows him away. So, Frederick begins using Danny’s body to explore every hedonistic temptation on the spectrum. Strippers, hookers, chaotic nights of excess, you name it.

In a slightly hard plot development to follow, Frederick has found a drug back in 1888 that allows him to spend longer periods of time in Danny’s body. This keeps Danny back in 1888 longer, which puts him in more danger of being caught as The Ripper. So Danny has to figure out a way to stop these hallucinations, get back in his body, and somehow kill Freddy along the way.

First of all, a huge salute to Frank for his first three scenes.

All three scenes did something well.

The first scene is one of the better cold opens I’ve read in a while. Download the script below and read the scene then come back here. One of the big issues I see with cold opens is that they’re too short. The writer gives us the BEGINNING of something exciting. But then cuts to the main story without following through.

A good cold open has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And a really good cold open will have a reversal, which this cold open did. We’re watching this butcher chase this woman through the streets. Things get interesting when two other dudes show up. We’re trying to put together the pieces of the Ripper and why he would have two other people with him.

Then this fourth well-dressed man shows up, puts a knife through the butcher’s throat, and just as we think he’s about to escort the woman to safety, he slits her throat. It was a really great scene. Constantly evolving. Keeping you on edge. Great writing overall.

We then meet our hero, Danny, in a coffee shop. I ramble on and on to you guys about how important a hero’s introductory scene is. It’s one of the top 3 most important scenes in a script. Because if you nail it, we’ll root for your hero the rest of the movie.

And one of the best ways to write a good protagonist introductory scene is to have your hero do something clever. We LOVE clever people. Love them. And that’s exactly what Frank has Danny do. Danny is at a coffee shop. He realizes he doesn’t have enough money for a coffee. But he’s desperate for one.

He then hears the barista call out the order for, “ENRICO!” Danny waits for Enrico to get his coffee and leave. He then walks up to the counter and says, “Hey, I’ve been waiting for my coffee forever. Where is it??” “What’s your name?” “Enrico.” The barista realizes that the other guy “stole” the coffee and makes Danny a new one.

Two for two on scenes!

We then have Danny spot the beautiful Ava, a nurse in the nearby hospital. In an attempt to shoot his shot, he tells her he’s a medical student over there. Ava says she’ll give him a ride to the hospital. The dialogue here needed work (and, actually, all the dialogue in this script needs work) but what Frank did well is he KEPT THE STORY MOVING.

We’re literally moving through space constantly. From the coffee shop to the car, form the car to the hospital. They’re walking through the hospital together when Ava gets called. There’s no time to split up so Danny is all of a sudden in an elevator with her to the top of the building.

This propulsion is pushing us through the story and it’s a great way to keep the reader turning the pages. What I mean by that is, if Frank would’ve, instead, had Danny sit down with Ava back at the coffee shop and talk about each other’s lives, that may have brought the script to a standstill. I’m not saying it would have for sure. But my point is that, by physically keeping our characters moving, we keep the beginning of the story moving.

However, after those three scenes, the script never quite found its footing. It had some nice moments. I thought that things got interesting with Jack the Ripper spending time in 2027 (inside Danny’s body). And there was a particularly well-written sequence where Jack keeps a diary of his experiences in 2027 that Danny later reads when he comes back to the present. And it’s a very thoughtful and descriptive account of what the future may have looked like to someone coming from 1888, whether you’re a serial killer or not.

But a lot of the script is all over the place. There doesn’t seem to be any structure. We kind of stumble into 1888 and then stumble back and then stumble into 1888 again. That’s how I would describe the personality of the story: stumbling.

The great thing about a traditional serial killer narrative is that the structure is always clear: STOP THE SERIAL KILLER. Figure out who he is. Capture him. Stop him before he kills his next victim. That goal gives the story a strong structure.

We don’t have that here. Danny spends at least half of the movie confused about what’s going on. He assumes it’s all a dream brought on by these meds. So that period of the story is, basically, a giant dream sequence.

It isn’t until later that he and Ava start taking things seriously and, even then, it’s not like they develop a coherent plan. The plan seems to be off-the-cuff. I’ll go back there and turn myself in as “The Ripper.” The best way to explain it is that it felt like a plan two high school freshmen would’ve come up with. Not two intelligent adults.

I’m trying to decide is this script can get to “sale-worthy” territory through rewrites. Cause I don’t want to send Frank off on a Odysseus-like journey where he’s working on this thing for 20 years trying to fix it. But I suspect that if he started by fixing the structure that a lot of other parts of the story would fall into place.

By structure I mean, let’s have our heroes identify the problem earlier, realize it needs to be fixed earlier, come up with a plan (earlier), and then execute it earlier. We have to get the story moving… earlier.

Now, even if we do that, I’d still be worried about the dialogue. And I’m worried about the Danny-Ava relationship in general. It doesn’t feel true to me. It feels sort of like it was lifted from an abandoned romantic comedy script. This is not that kind of movie. I would make the relationship here more professional. And it’s fine if romantic feelings develop over time. But I would keep the tone more in line with other serial killer movies, like Lambs and Seven.

Cause the rom-commish relationship is leading to some cheesy dialogue that doesn’t feel like it belongs in this movie.

But, overall, I want to commend Frank because I did not vote for this idea to get into the contest and, in retrospect, I probably should have. I underestimated that Frank was going to be able to make the “jack the ripper in modern day” stuff work. And yet, that ended up being some of the coolest stuff in the script.

The script is too clunky to get a ‘worth the read’ but if these changes were made, I could see it getting there.

Script link: The Shimmer

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

What I learned: This is a small detail, but I think it’s a smart one. Scripts can become dated fast, so you want to look for little ways to extend their shelf life. If you’re writing a script that requires you to establish the current year, one trick is to push that year forward. So, if we’re living in 2026, set the story in 2027, which is what Frank does here. That way, if the draft sits around for a while before someone remembers it or requests it, it still feels current. Even if it gets passed to someone in 2028, it only feels a year old. This is also why I advise not putting the date of the draft on your title page. Hollywood is weird. If someone sees 2021 on the title page, their first thought might be, “Oh, this has been around for five years and nobody wanted it. There must be something wrong with it.”

Genre: Horror/Comedy
Premise: In a world where the Grim Reaper has a popular TV show with live random fatalities, a struggling rock artist agrees to become his assistant to protect her marked-for-death band members.
About: For those new to the site, last year I did a pitch contest called Blood & Ink. Anyone who wanted to could pitch me movie ideas. I then accepted the best 100 of those ideas. The writers then wrote those scripts. And, ever since, I’ve been reviewing them, looking for the best one. Already, one script, Wildman, written by Jacob Rainer, got him a manager and possibly more. Stay tuned. One of the criteria for getting into the Blood & Ink contest was that, if I did not personally approve of the idea, it could still get voted in by the public. If you got 15 votes, you got in. This is one of those upvoted scripts.
Writer: Mikael Grahn/TigerMoomin
Details: 114 pages

I made it pretty clear at the time that I didn’t think this concept could work. But you guys voted it in. So, let’s see how you did.

We hop right into the story here. There’s no dilly-dallying. There is a live TV show where the Grim Reaper – like, the real one – kills people. And people watch it. It’s a complicated production run by a couple of guys named Brian and Colin. They have to get cameras in place for all of these kills, as well as make sure everything’s set up ahead of time.

After we watch a plane engine fall off a plane and land on someone, we then see (via a drone camera) a group of teens watching this very show in a house while eating popcorn. But it turns out production made sure that, when this popcorn was made, that a glass broke in the factory and all the pieces fell into the popcorn. So all four of the teens die by their throats ripping up due to the glass they just ate.

We then meet rock and roll lead vocalist Roxanne, who, along with her band Megalotherium are late to their gig. They’re zooming through traffic, and barely get there in time. But then Roxanne notices a mini camera in their green room and figures it’s for the Grim Reaper show. It turns out this whole place is rigged to go up in flames and they’re all supposed to die for the show!

Roxanne makes her case to the Grim Reaper why he shouldn’t do this and the Reaper likes Roxanne so he makes her a deal. He’ll spare her bandmates if she finds him a new person to kill every week for the show.

Roxanne doesn’t put up much resistance so now her life consists of looking for bad people she can mark for killing. The job is fairly easy cause there are a lot of bad people out there. First, a sleazy guy who hits on women in a bar. Second, the magazine writer who gave their last gig a bad review. Then an ICE agent. Then a guy online who says he’s going to suicide bomb a mall.

Can Roxanne keep this up forever, though? Or will she run out of targets, forcing the Grim Reaper, along with the show, to finally take down the rest of her band, Megalotherium?

Tiger?

You might want to turn your head here. This is going to get ugly. There’s no way to sugarcoat this.

I remember early on in my screenwriting days hearing that some people you sent your script to wouldn’t even finish it. I was mortified by that. I’d say for a good year I thought of these people as the worst people in the universe.

These days, I have a slightly different point of view. I’m one of the few people in Hollywood who, when I say I’ve read a script, I’ve actually read the entire script. Because I’m reading them for consultations or script reviews. And that’s given me a great perspective. Because I’ve gotten to see what actually happens after most people give up on a script. I get to see if the writer turns it around.

And I can tell you that after reading 10,000 scripts, that 99.99999% time they do not turn it around. If you run into 7-8 red flags by page 15, the chances that that script is going to somehow get its shit together are basically 0.

I gave this script until page 50. Which I’m guessing is more generous than most people will give it.

And I’m disappointed. Not so much with Tiger. But with the people who upvoted this concept because you wanted to be friendly. You sent Mikael on a suicide mission. This script had no chance of being good. The concept was insanely flawed and people still said, “Yeah, go spend six months writing this.”

For starters, we’re dropped into the most ridiculous world ever and asked to just accept it. We live in a world now where the Grim Reaper has a TV show where he just kills people in bloody horrible ways and the whole world watches.

I suppose you can argue that The Running Man and The Hunger Games did something similar. But those are set in the future, where you can buy into the idea that the future got so fucked up these things could happen. This show is set in the present. And there’s no explanation as to how it came to be.

But it’s more than that. We’re already being asked to accept that society has somehow reached a point where watching innocent people get brutally murdered on live television is mainstream entertainment. That alone is a gigantic conceit. But then, on top of it, we’re asked to accept that the Grim Reaper is real and hosts the show. That’s another gigantic conceit. Instead of taking one crazy idea and surrounding it with a believable world, you’ve stacked crazy on top of crazy. And every time you do that, you make it harder for the audience to buy into the movie.

From there, we’re introduced to rules that don’t make sense at all. This show seems to be tracking these deaths via a very elaborate production system that includes drones flying around and hidden cameras set up ahead of time, all so that these deaths can be recorded live. For example, somehow, we have a camera up on a plane to catch its engine falling.

As far as I can tell, this entire production team consists of maybe 10 or 20 people. But they’re somehow setting up and filming multiple elaborate live kills every episode, all over the world. Think about the logistics involved in pulling that off. Wouldn’t this require hundreds, if not thousands, of people working behind the scenes?

Also it seems, at times, that the production team is helping the Grim Reaper kill people. For example, with Roxanne’s band’s gig, some of the production team get there ahead of time to set up a bunch of flammable material in order to burn the whole place down and kill everyone inside the venue.

This despite us seeing the Grim Reaper snap his fingers and make a giant church bell fall to the ground from its perch. So, sometimes the Grim Reaper kills people using his superpowers but other times he needs help from a production crew? I’m so insanely confused by the rules of this story.

From there, we basically get Roxanne looking for really bad people to kill so she can keep her bandmates alive. The problem is, we’ve barely established her relationship with those bandmates. We haven’t seen why she loves them, why she needs them, or why losing them would devastate her. So the entire emotional engine of the movie is built around Roxanne desperately trying to save people we don’t care whether she saves.

I think the official ‘tap out’ moment for me was Roxanne finding some sleazy guy with a pee and poo fetish at a bar, marking him for that week’s death, and then going to his place and setting up cameras so we could see the death on the show and then showing that the sleazy guy, in anticipation of Roxanne coming, fills a tub with poo for their sexual exploits.

This is why I tell you guys – you can’t outsmart a bad concept. You just can’t.

But it’s actually more than that. When you have a weak concept, you eventually run out of story. That’s the problem with bad concepts. They don’t naturally generate scenes. They don’t keep opening new doors. You exhaust the premise quickly and suddenly you’re out on a plank in the middle of the ocean with nowhere to go.

So what do writers do? They start manufacturing increasingly outrageous situations in a desperate attempt to keep the reader reading. Enter the sleazy poo-fetish guy. But outrageousness isn’t story. It’s noise. And by that point, it doesn’t matter anyway, because the reader checked out 20 pages ago.

But look. I learned from my mistakes last time. That’s why I created the “veto” rule for the High Concept Pitch Contest. And I’m okay with going into this new competition with less scripts for that reason. I don’t want anybody spending six months on a script that never had a shot.

I’m actually curious what the people who upvoted this idea saw in it. Can you tell me the movie you were imagining it was going to be? Cause I was 1000% certain there was no way it was going to work. Can you give me a movie like this that did work?

Screenplay link: Untimely

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

What I learned: There’s some confusing advice out there when it comes to generating screenplay concepts that says instead of building your movie around one strong high-concept idea, you should combine it with another one. This supposedly “doubles” the power of the concept. So if you have a zombie movie, add time travel. Two hooks are better than one! I don’t agree with this advice. If Curry Barker had followed this logic with Obsession, Bear would’ve also been a hitman who had to kill five people in the neighborhood. Now you’re not strengthening the original idea. You’re competing with it. The best concepts tend to be simple. They take one strong, easily understood premise and squeeze everything they can out of it. Combining a live television show where people are murdered with the literal Grim Reaper didn’t double the power of this concept. It diluted it. And in this case, it sent the movie straight to the grave.