Winner of the "I WILL Read Your F***ing Screenplay Contest"

Can I just say that I'm shocked by the response to my "I WILL read your f***ing Screenplay post earlier this week? All told, between the comments and direct e-mails, I got pitched 19 scripts! And in truth, just about every last one of them sounded mouth-wateringly awesomely bad, perfect for my purposes.

I know I said I was going to give it a week, but that was when I figured I'd get one at most, after several days. To be honest, I was even prepared to beg some of my friends for their worst writing or, failing that, haul out one of my own old specs and tear that apart. (The reason I didn't use mine in the first place is that I knew I could never be objective enough to be as savage as I wanted.)

A few submitters stood out. I was attracted to writers who had written many scripts since this first one. I knew that having at least three or four subsequent specs to their name would make them less attached to the spec script they submitted, and thus, they wouldn't take any shots at the script or the writing personally. I know that when I look back on my writing from ten years ago, I have no problem admitting when it's total shit. So if you came to me with just this spec to your name, or if you implied that you were looking forward to the chance to defend your writing after my review, I decided not to pick you.

Basically, if I got a sense that some part of you still thought the script was good, I didn't want to beat up on you. This will make sense when you see the review, but in some ways I might be going out of my way to be unfair to the script. I'd feel like a real dick doing that to writing that the author still had an emotional attachment to.

However, there were many, many scripts that sounded fully qualified for this contest, and so if we end up doing this again I invite all of you to resubmit. This makes me wish we had some sort of discussion board or archive of bad scripts because if so many of you guys are eager to share your work, it's a shame we can't all laugh together.

But without any further introduction, let's get to the winner. May I have the envelope please?

And the winner of the first-ever Bitter Script Reader "I WILL Read Your F***ing Screenplay Contest" is...

Joe Ollinger, for his 2003 spec "Blooming Season." Joe pitched this sci-fi film as "Space colonists flee their colony planet after an insanity plague breaks out, and then return to earth to find it super overpopulated and everyone's eating each other and shit."

Joe has kept writing since then, and has many other specs under his belt. We'll cover that in the eventual interview, which right now is scheduled to post the week of the 22nd. I haven't read the script yet, but I'm very much looking forward to it.