My Top 4 Selections from the Submitted Black List loglines

I dug through each and every logline that was submitted on Tuesday (and left comments on each one, so be sure to check those out) and ended up with 12 loglines on my short list.  After careful consideration, I made my Top 4 selections.  I will read the first 15 pages of each of those scripts, in the hopes that at least a few of them will compel me to read the entire submission.

Any scripts I complete that I feel deserve a ranking of 8 or above will be reviewed on the blog in the hopes of drawing more attention to them.

Last time I ended up reading four full scripts of the eight I initially selected, so I didn't have any need to reach beyond the original eight selections.  However, in the event that none of the four scripts really keeps me going beyond the first fifteen pages, I may delve into some of the runner-ups, time permitting.

And of course, I encourage anyone with Black List access to check out these scripts and see if there's anything here that you like.

The Top 4 Selections:

Title: NARCOSIS
Writer: Chris Drzewiecki
Genre: Contained thriller chock full of ghosts, sharks, treasure. All killer, no filler
After their boat is pulled to the bottom of the ocean by a vengeful entity, a Father, his terminal son and a deranged dive captain must find their way back to the surface while suffering from nitrogen narcosis and a boat that is steadily filling with water. “The Descent” meets “Jacob’s Ladder” on the ocean floor.
Link: https://www.blcklst.com/members/scripts/view/10945


Title: SKYJACKERS
Writers: Jeffrey and Susan Bridges
Genre: Action
Logline: A disgraced Air Force pilot is given the opportunity to join a group of sky pirates, who use jet packs to steal millions from planes in flight. But she discovers the head of the organization has a far darker goal, and she must choose between the family she never had or a global nuclear war.
Link: https://www.blcklst.com/members/scripts/view/13077

Title: Home
Writers: Sarah Carman, James Roland, David Veloz
Genre: Suspense/Horror
Logline: When a young couple moves into a new house they find out it is haunted not from the past, but from their own future.
Link: https://www.blcklst.com/members/scripts/view/13838


Title: AMERICAN ANTICHRIST
Writer: Maxwell Heesch
Genre: Supernatural Comedy
Logline: It's 'The Omen' by way of John Hughes when a mild-mannered kid inadvertently sets in motion the End of Days at his high school after discovering that he is the Antichrist. 
Link: https://www.blcklst.com/members/scripts/view/7478 


The Runners-Up -


Title: THE HOTLINE
Writer: Greg Brainos, Joseph Stanton
Genre: Comedy, Dark Comedy
Logline: A young humanitarian bent on saving the world loses sight of his goal when he gets caught up in the big business of a for-profit suicide hotline.
Link: https://www.blcklst.com/members/scripts/view/7925

Title: THREE PERCENT OF NOTHING
Writer: Andrew Friedhof
Genre: Drama / Crime Thriller
Logline: A sports agent fears his protégé turned nemesis could ruin him by stealing his last few clients, so when the biggest name he reps – a Lakers superstar – asks for his help in getting rid of a young woman’s corpse, he reluctantly gets his hands dirty only to later watch his entire life unravel.
Link: https://blcklst.com//members/scripts/view/13761

Title: THE EUNUCH OF NOTTINGHAM
Writer: Thomas Serio
Genre: Comedy
Logline: The Sheriff of Nottingham uses a potion to change his timid, nice-guy image in order to land his dream girl, Maid Marion, who'd rather be with the town bandit Robin Hood.
Link: https://blcklst.com/members/scripts/view/7279 


Title: The Squire
Writer: Rod Thompson
Genre: Family Drama, Coming of Age, Man-Cry
Logline: An imaginative young boy enlists the help of a reclusive Iraq War veteran to accomplish four 'feats of bravery' that he believes will save his dying mother.
Link: https://blcklst.com/members/scripts/view/13067 

TITLE: Pop Hit
Writer: Jeffrey R. Field
Genre: Dark Comedy
Logline: When a one-hit wonder singer-songwriter is hired to mentor the world's biggest teenage pop sensation, he uses the opportunity to secretly sabotage the bratty young singer's career. Think a contemporary AMADEUS with Justin Bieber.
Nicholl Semifinalist Script 
Link: https://blcklst.com/members/scripts/view/13867


Title: INFIDELITY
Writers: Akil Goin and Kareem Richardson
Genre: Courtroom / Crime / Drama
Logline: An ambitious lawyer's heart, morals, career and relationship is tested when she's seduced and blackmailed into defending an old flame for her best friend's murder.
Link: https://www.blcklst.com/members/scripts/view/13846


Title: Mom's Weekend
Writer: Tomasz Walkosz
Genre: Comedy
Logline: With aspirations of proving to the world they aren't some boring soccer moms, three mundane women travel to their kids university with the single goal of reclaiming their youth.
Link: https://www.blcklst.com/members/scripts/view/13085  
 

Title: CRITICAL INCIDENT, KENTUCKY
Writer: Chinaza Onuzo
Genre: Action Thriller
Logline: When a Mad Bomber takes a hospital in rural Kentucky hostage, Amos, an FBI Agent and a recovering sex addict is pulled back into the high stakes world of hostage negotiation and rescue.
Link: https://blcklst.com/members/scripts/view/13222

Updates on TOBY IS NOW FOLLOWING YOU and an offer to read your script

So the last three weeks have been kind to TOBY IS NOW FOLLOWING YOU on the Black List site.  I just got my 16th rating, half of which are 8s and two of which are 9s. My average is 7.5 and I have 45 unique downloads from the site.  That's very promising considering the script has mostly only been promoted through this earlier post and my Twitter feed.

In terms of the stats, 45 downloads is really good.  According to the Black List's stats for their first year, only 15 scripts were downloaded 50 times or more.  The next lowest stat they reveal is that 122 screenplays had 20 or greater unique downloads, which would seem to indicate that at least as far as exposure, TOBY's in some pretty good company.  (In case you're curious 2744 screenplays were downloaded at least once last year.)

Also, TOBY is currently #1 on both the Top Unrepresented and Top Uploaded Lists on the Black List website for the Month to Date, #2 on both for the Quarter to Date, and #4 on the Top Unrepresented for the Year to Date. It's #6 Year to Date on the Top Uploaded List.

I'll do a more complete data dump on TOBY once I conclude hosting, if that interests those of you who might be curious about how the numbers break down week-to-week. I'm already setting up meetings for after the holiday break.

This feels like a good time for another pay-it-forward post.  Same rules as last time - if you have a script currently hosted on the Black List (and one that will be up for at least another week, preferably two), leave your logline in the comments between midnight and 11:59pm on December 31st. That's 24 hours.  When we enter 2014, you've missed the deadline - no exceptions.


Pay attention, because this is important - your logline must sell me on the script.  The only submissions I will read will be those with loglines that interest me, just as if you were sending me a query.  It might be a good idea to look through the comments on this earlier post, where I gave notes on every logline that was submitted.  It could give you a good indication of what I respond to in a pitch, as would this post on the 8 scripts I selected last time.

The genres I'm most like to respond to are action, rom-com, horror, comedy, thriller and anything "high concept." What am I less likely to be drawn to? Period pieces and torture porn.  So keep that in mind if you're considering joining the Black List just to take advantage of this opportunity.

Your comment must include the following - Title, Genre, Logline and a link to your script's page on the Black List.  And remember that a logline is a sentence or a couple sentences.  Be concise, don't write me a paragraph. The link to your script's page on the Black List MUST be in the comments. Do not email me. Do not Tweet me. I will ONLY read scripts publicly pointed out here.

My aim is to select the 4 loglines that intrigue me the most and I will read at least the first 15 pages of each of those scripts.  In the event that you guys deliver a lot of awesome loglines, I'll consider going over that limit, but they're all going to have to be really good for me to consider giving that much time.   I probably will let you know if your logline was or wasn't selected, but I probably won't go into much detail why.  Don't take it personally - some ideas aren't for everyone.

I will offer no comments on any of the scripts I didn't finish reading. Don't ask me what you did wrong. Don't ask me for feedback. I doubt I'll have time to respond to everyone, and so to be fair, I will respond to no one.

I will be holding all scripts to the same standards as the material I read for my job. There's no such thing as "good for an amateur" on this scale. Scripts will be judged according to how they measure up to professional submissions.

If I really like your script I will spotlight it in a post on my blog, but know that it would probably have to rate an 8, 9 or a 10 for me to do that.  I'll do my best to write a review that sells people on the script.  It won't be full coverage, and I won't spoil any major secrets or plot twists.  If you want to get a sense of how these read, check out my reviews of MCCARTHY, DEAD CORPS, ALICE OF OZ, CHAMBERS, H8RZ, and WHERE DEATH FOLLOWS.

So good luck, gang.  I hope to be very impressed by the submissions in the comments.

P.S. This goes without saying, but I'm not making any claim of who I will pass the script on to and I will not attach myself as a producer or anything.  No crazy promises - and no exploitation.

Spike Jonze's "Her"- Siri as Manic Pixie Dream Girl

There's an old expression that dissecting a joke is like dissecting a frog - you can't accomplish the task without killing it.  And so as I dive in to explore my feelings on Spike Jonze's Her, I fear that the same adage would apply to this film.  It's a fantastic film, one of the best films in what has been a terrific year for film.  The more you examine it, the more you're likely to marvel at how effortlessly it accomplishes some rather profound work.

I'm a fan of Jonze's directorial debut, Being John Malkovich, and though Charlie Kaufman scripted that film there's some value in contrasting it with the Jonze-scripted Her.  Malkovich is an absurd film played totally straight, and no matter how grounded it feels, it lives in a world rather different from our own.  That was perfect for the tone of that film, and so it's fascinating to see Her tethered to lees ridiculous world.  You won't find a 7 1/2 floor here, to say nothing of portal's into an actor mostly remembered for his role as a jewel thief.

Her could flippantly be described as a story about man who falls in love with his Siri.  That's not totally accurate.  The computer "operating system" Samantha is a few evolutionary steps above Siri, but not to a ridiculous degree.  Our lead character, Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), is a lonely introvert who's still not made piece with his separation and impending divorce from his wife.  His day job involves writing romantic letters for other people to give to their loved ones on particular holidays.  He spends all day composing poetic and romantic speeches for those who apparently can't do it themselves and then retires to his empty apartment, where he retreats into video games and phone sex with anonymous strangers.

Every part of Theodore's world has a veneer of phoniness to it, so it's not terribly surprising that he'd bond with his newly purchased O.S. "Samantha."  Speaking with the smooth and alluring voice of Scarlett Johansson, Samantha initially seems designed to be a voice-operated program that merely handles all of Theodore's computer functions like organizing his email, keeping his calendar and so on.  And yet, there's something remarkably human about this artificial intelligence.

Before long, Theodore is having ongoing conversations with her as if she was a real person, and she's taking it upon herself to read his emails and comment upon what's going on in his life.  He opens up to her about his feelings and desires and somewhere along the way, this relationship becomes as real to him as anything else in his life.  This is aided, of course, by Samantha's programming expanding as a result of their prolonged interaction.  She might be little more than a simulation, but feed her enough data and she can reasonably approximate what Theodore needs from human companionship.

Except that it's not real, and little-by-little it dawns on us that we're seeing a canny deconstruction of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope. The term apparently traces to critic Nathan Rabin who identifies it as "that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures."  (Prime examples: Garden State, Elizabethtown). 

It's a subversion of the trope because even as we see Theodore coming out of his shell, we're aware of how artificial the relationship is.  Samantha isn't real. She can never be real.  The very nature of her programming would seem to make her Prime Directive to please Theodore.  That she's better at achieving the illusion means nothing.  There's as little substance to this as the phone sex fantasies that Theodore indulges in.  It's a healthy escape, but it's no way to live.

A lesser film might have had Theodore only confront the empty nature of his relationship at the film's climax.  Jonze actually has Theodore open his eyes to this a little more than halfway through the film, and its fascinating to see how that upsets his relationship with Samantha.  And at this point, we've reached the part of the film that I hesitate to examine too deeply.  I think what we take from the final 30 minutes or so of the film is largely going to be informed by our own individual experiences.

A lot of credit for the film's success has to go to Joaquin Phoenix.  He's makes Samantha's interaction so natural that it's easy to forget that most of his scenes have him essentially talking to himself (or likely, talking to an off-screen script supervisor reading Samantha's lines.  It's an even more Herculean task than an actor in a VFX film who is tasked with making his reactions to post-production produced environs believable because Phoenix has to make us feel human emotions for a totally artificial connection.  It's one of the year's best performances while simultaneously being one of its most subtle.

And who would have thought that one of Scarlett Johansson's most memorable and charming roles wouldn't involve her body at all? She's the other half of that connection, and if it wasn't for her interpretation of Samantha making the audience want to believe in this romance, even just a little, the movie would be far less effective.

There's a deluge of truly great films all coming out around the same time this year.  It's going to be really easy to fall behind.  (My personal "To See" list still includes: The Wolf of Wall Street, Inside Llewyn Davis, Nebraska, All is Lost and Dallas Buyers Club, as well as guilty pleasure Anchorman 2.)  As you're setting your viewing priorities, make room in the upper tier for Her. It's one that everyone's going to be talking about at Oscar time.

Webshow: "How to be a Reader"

One of the most frequent questions I get is "How can I be a script reader?"  Having just walked away from my reader jobs, this seemed like a good time to address that question on the YouTube channel.

Josh Abraham's "Screenplay Heroes" art

I don't usually promote reader's products here.  The real reason for that is that I don't want to open the floodgates to people asking me to spotlight their Kickstarter, their blog, and so on.  When I promote a short film, it's because I'm genuinely impressed with it and when I promote Kickstarters, it's only when I have personally donated to them.

But last week a reader named Josh Abraham sent me a link to his Etsy shop "Screenplay Heroes" and I found his product so damn creative that I just had to share it here.  He's created portraits of screenwriters drawn on excerpts of their scripts  They're available in his shop for $9.99. You can find a number of them on his tumblr as well.

Check out a few samples:

Joss Whedon

Kevin Williamson

Nora Ephron

You can find the Etsy shop here.

Writer/director Eric Heisserer gets a career-defining performance from Paul Walker in HOURS

For obvious reasons, this review is suddenly a lot more complicated than it would have been two weeks ago.

Some time ago, I was lucky enough to see an early screening of HOURS, Eric Heisserer's directing debut, an emotional drama about a young father desperately trying to keep his prematurely-born baby alive in an evacuated hospital during Hurricane Katrina. Heisserer adapted the script from his own short story and it's the perfect sort of material for a director to establish himself with. There are stakes, tension, a contained location, but still great production value. It also is largely a one-man show starring that young father, who for long stretches of the film, is only able to act against either a dog, or a prop baby in an incubator.

That young father is played by Paul Walker.

I haven't seen the film since before Walker's tragic death a few weeks ago. My opinions were set in stone long before he even began production on the seventh FAST & FURIOUS sequel. But most of the audience won't have that luxury. When an actor dies, their last few films are often reviewed kindly. The death brings a baggage that encourages the audience to feel the performer might have been cut down at the height of their potential. That even actors whose work was once maligned managed to offer hints of what they were capable of, if only fate hadn't denied them the opportunity to truly fulfill that promise.

Because of that, I know that it might be tempting to cast a skeptical eye to reviews of Walker's performance in HOURS. "Of course, he's going to be praised," you might think. "What heartless monster would bash a dead man mere weeks after he was buried?" You're probably right. But that doesn't mean these reviews are wrong.

What I can tell you is that I walked into that screening many months ago largely wondering one thing, "If Paul Walker tanks it, I'm going to need to find something I can tell Eric I liked about the movie." See, Eric Heisserer's been a good friend of the blog. I don't know him terribly well. We've certainly interacted a lot on Twitter and traded some emails, but I think we've only met face-to-face perhaps three times. Still, he's been nothing but terrific to me when we have interacted and so I was really hoping HOURS was something I could praise honestly.

But it starred Paul Walker.

Oy. The fratty guy from Into the Blue, I thought. I haven't even seen those car movies he's in, but I don't think they're exactly leaning on his acting. I'm sure he's got his range but this intense drama feels like it's going to be WAY outside of his wheelhouse.

Less than two hours later I dined on crow.

The set-up is efficient. Hurricane Katrina is about to hit New Orleans as Nolan (Paul Walker)'s wife Abigail (Genesis Rodriguez) goes into premature labor and dies. While Nolan struggles to process this (there's a moment where he quite literally seems not to understand what the doctor means when he says there's nothing they could do for Abigail) the storm takes a turn for the worse, forcing an evacuation of the hospital.

There's just one problem - the newborn needs to stay in an ventilator that can't be evacuated with everyone else. The baby has to remain inside for 48 hours. Nolan is told to stay with her while everyone else leaves the hospital, promised that someone will return for them. And thus begins the one-man show portion of the film.

There's a wonderful moment where Nolan looks down at his helpless child and Walker doesn't play the expected note where this new father melts at the sight of his baby girl. Far from it. He tells the baby "I don't know you" and then says that he'd rather have his wife back than have the child. His wife was the one more excited about having a child, and Nolan is clearly angry not just over her loss, but the manner of her loss.

From here, the script turns into a master class of raising the stakes. Power fails and the ventilator only has a backup battery that can hold only a three minute charge. This means that every three minutes, Nolan needs to crank the generator in order to keep his baby alive. If he tries to get supplies, he needs to be back in three minutes. If he seeks out food, he needs to be back in three minutes. If he attempts to call for help, he must be back in three minutes. In one intense sequence, Nolan races to the roof to try to let a helicopter know there's still someone inside the hospital. Tell me, do you think it's easy to run all the way upstairs, get a chopper's attention and then make it back downstairs in time to recrank the generator.

Oh, and did I mention that three-minute time limit actually gets shorter as time pases? Nolan gets more and more sleep-deprived and hungry, but actually has to remain extra alert to keep cranking the generator constantly.

I confess, there are moments where the film does seem to cheat the three-minute limit. One moment in particular seems to stretch the disbelief that Nolan could not only get into a situation within the three-minutes, but that he would allow himself to not even attempt to return to the child until the time is up. Once his watch alarm goes off, Nolan encounters another delay that leaves the impression the baby was left off the ventilator for a perilously long time. But then, I'm not a doctor so perhaps it's entirely reasonable that the child could be revived within that window.

In any event, Heisserer knows how to generate tension far more effectively than pretty much any of the directors who've interpreted his prior scripts for the screen. However, his greatest accomplishment might be getting a performance from Walker that few would have though him capable of.  In fact, by the end of the film, Walker no longer seems an unlikely pick for this role so much as his film personae makes him the perfect person to headline this story.

When a sensitive guy cries, as emotional as it is, it's also expected.  For some reason it's far more affecting when the stoic or the unflappable types break down.  The cockiness that usually defines Walker's characters is present in Nolan, but this entire ordeal is an exercise in breaking down that armor.  These are the most important 48 hours in Nolan's life and little by little, Nolan endures increasing mental and physical exhaustion.  To Walker's credit, he's not scared to go to some very vulnerable places on screen to really make us feel that along with him.

I walked out of that screening both impressed by the film and humbled that I had been arrogant enough to presume the lead actor wasn't up to the task of carrying the emotional drama in the story.  I may have also been a bit smug, knowing that I had a head start on the rest of the filmgoing public in declaring that Paul Walker was an actor whom everyone had underestimated.  I definitely felt I'd witnessed something that would later be pointed to as a turning point in that man's career.

So much potential, snuffed out right on the verge of being realized.  One lesson to take from the story of HOURS is to never take our loved ones for granted. Nolan never expected to lose his wife on the day she bore their daughter.  I'm sure it goes without saying the posthumous release of HOURS itself carries a similar message.

Hours is opening in limited release this weekend and is available on a number of VOD platforms. For a list of theatres carrying the film, click the picture below:

Brian Scully's review of my script TOBY IS NOW FOLLOWING YOU

As I explained in yesterday's post, I'm not purchasing a review from the Black List readers, in part because the timing means that the value of the review might be questionable.  However, I've invited some of my trusted industry associates to offer their opinions on the script, starting today with Brian Scully.

I first met Brian via Twitter a couple years ago. I admit, after a few conversations, I followed him mostly because I thought he was the Brian Scully who wrote for The Simpsons, and after I'd discovered the truth it was too awkward to unfollow.  Fortunately he turned out to be a pretty cool guy, and a rather talented writer.  In fact, he started writing "professionally" at 14 when Star Trek: Voyager, and later Star Trek: Enterprise, gave him a standing invitation to pitch to them after submitting a spec to them.

Scully's script, COUNTERPOINT, a romantic thriller/drama, was recently optioned with financing currently being raised. It also was on last year's Hit List.  It's a really solid script, but it's nothing compared to his current spec, MERCIFUL, an action-thriller that is one of the best scripts I've read all year.

I was in awe multiple times while reading MERCIFUL, which is the story of a woman traveling across the post-apocalyptic remains of the country to reach the daughter she hasn't seen since the start of the chaos.  The script is full of evocative, visceral writing.  There are longer-than-usual stretches of silence, which really lets the visuals tell the story.  I told Brian after I read it that perhaps the biggest compliment I could give was that he genuinely surprised me.

So when it came time to give my script to people who were going to push me, Brian was at the top of the list.  The first few reviews came in and were very positive. You give a script to writers, you're going to get plenty of notes and suggestions because that's what writers do - but most people were really into it. However, I had one reader whose notes ran counter to that, and so I was pondering if perhaps the script needed an overhaul that the others were seeing.

It was in this context that Brian emailed me his notes.  He went in depth, not just talking about the broad premise and characters, but having notes about specific pages and scenes. Often he was writing stream-of-consciousness, describing his reaction to an event as it played out.  And let me tell you - he GOT it.  I don't think I've ever seen someone so completely understand what I was going for in a script.  Every emotion he experienced, every reaction he had, was precisely what I was trying to achieve.  And by this point, I knew that Brian knew what made a great script because he'd written one himself.

That review gave me a lot of confidence that there WAS an audience for what I was writing and that I shouldn't second-guess my instincts.  So because of that, I can think of no one better suited to tell industry members why they should download TOBY IS NOW FOLLOWING YOU on The Black List site.  Take it away, Brian...

We all love GROUNDHOG DAY, right? Everyone should, and if you don’t, you’re fired from life. Well, think for a moment about Bill Murray spending countless days following the same routine to glean even the tiniest new piece of personal information about Andie MacDowell as he attempts to seduce her, and with each new day and each new piece of info he’s “armed” with, he gets closer and closer to what he wants. 

…Have you ever considered how genuinely creepy that is? Ever stop to think that this efforts in slowly accumulating knowledge about her life in order to appeal to her more effectively is really, really disturbing? He’s earnest about wanting to know her better, he wants the two of them to click, so could his efforts really be so bad? Is it just an overreaction? 

Welcome to just a hint of what’s explored so effectively in TOBY IS NOW FOLLOWING YOU. It’s one of the most compelling dramatic thrillers I’ve read in a long while. The idea of our digital footprints, how detailed they are and how actual privacy has become a distant memory, is explored here from all angles, through numerous characters, but especially our rich and complex lead, Toby, and the woman with whom he’s become infatuated, Nina. 

What this script does is lead you gently to the top of what becomes a very slippery slope, letting you see why Toby is a legitimate hero (flawed as he is) and unworthy of scorn… and then the script gives that last nudge so you can start sliding down the slope. Over the course of a brisk and taut 90 pages, as personal lines begin to blur, the true horror of the film builds unrelentingly as Toby loses himself further and further in his obsession. 

But, Toby is no psychopath. He’s not some deranged criminal. He’s not a predator seeking to harm. There’s no malice. Toby is a legitimately earnest, heartfelt and charming guy who could fit very comfortably in even the safest of romantic comedies. And that is PRECISELY why this script becomes so damn haunting and unsettling — because Toby is not a monster. And yet, his actions become monstrous. By the time you finish reading this script, a terrifying realization dawns on you — Toby, by being so incredibly human and well-drawn throughout, could be your neighbor. He could be your best friend. Oh god, he could be your significant other. Oh god… he could be YOU and you’ve never even realized it. 

TOBY IS NOW FOLLOWING YOU is such a good thriller because it holds the mirror up to us and lets us see just how slippery that slope is with our own behavior in this digital age, how easily we may find ourselves crossing those lines in life, and how little we realize it. With our lives becoming more keyworded and searchable by the minute, and the myth of privacy becoming more and and more understood, there is no better time for a strong story to hit home about the world we live in, and TOBY IS NOW FOLLOWING YOU is that story.

Industry members of the Black List site can find TOBY IS NOW FOLLOWING YOU here.

Brian Scully is currently repped by Kathy Muraviov at The Muraviov Company. You can find him on Twitter at @brianscully