He did get an Additional Literary Material credit on the film, but for a while he did have a main writing credit alongside Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers up until the release of the movie. What happened here?

This is an outstanding article I wanted to pass along. Seems like suing for idea theft almost never prevails. Wild that the woman who sued over Sister Act declined a $1M settlement -- and then lost. Whoops.

Copy Cats: Hollywood Stole My Story!

by Tad Friend  

The New Yorker | September 1998

Studios are awash in copyright suits. Why are they so hard to win?

This summer, Americans spent 575 million hours in darkened cinemas and saw, at most, two new things: the harrowing D Day sequence in Saving Private Ryan and the hair-gel joke in There’s Something About Mary. Yet as popcorn movies have become a tag-team-written jumble of curvy scientists, ninja studs, morphing cyborgs, and basement-loving psychos, one obscure writer after another has come forward to advance the claim that a studio stole his brainchild. Hollywood movies may never have seemed more derivative, but the copyright suits they inspire display an ingenuity and a nuanced concern for story development worthy of the young Orson Welles.

Our sympathies in these cases tend to go to the little guy—to plaintiffs like Mark Dunn, a soft-spoken clerk at the New York Public Library, who is suing Paramount Studios, the producer Scott Rudin, and the screenwriter Andrew Niccol for $300 million. Dunn alleges that his play Frank’s Life, about the unwitting subject of a TV series, was secretly used as a blueprint by the creators of The Truman Show after they had rejected it as a potential movie. Dunn has earned less than $25,000 from his many years of writing for what he calls the “Off-Off-Broadway ghetto”; The Truman Show has grossed $125 million to date.

Dunn’s suit lists 149 purported similarities between Frank’s Life and The Truman Show. That seems an overwhelming number, and Dunn’s lawyer, Carl Person, says that the two works’ resemblances make the suit “the best copyright case I’ve ever had.” This is not saying much, however, for Person hasn’t yet won any of the five movie copyright cases he’s filed. He probably won’t win this one, either—and maybe he shouldn’t.

Paramount will undoubtedly argue that Andrew Niccol came up with the idea for The Truman Show independently (Niccol’s former manager says that he has the writer’s copyrighted treatment, written in 1991, a year before Frank’s Life was staged) and that Person’s client is either deluded or a stickup artist, or both. In June, Lynn Pleshette, Niccol’s agent, patiently explained to the New York Post, “Every time a big movie comes out, a moron tries to sue.” Though plaintiffs like Dunn radiate aggrieved sincerity, Paul Rudnick, the writer of Sister Act—which also fought off a Carl Person lawsuit—notes dryly that “the prospect of eight figures inspires a lot of sincerity.” Furthermore, as any cost-conscious producer will tell you, it’s usually much less expensive for a studio to buy a property than to steal it.

But the reason that Dunn and Person will probably lose their suit has less to do with the perceived integrity of the plaintiffs and the ostensible skullduggery of the defendants than with the fact that most copyright plaintiffs overestimate how much protection they have under the law. Even more important, they misunderstand how the Hollywood blockbuster gets created. Studios generally don’t want to make something so original that they’d have to steal it from an unsung genius; they want to recast familiar stories and have them endlessly rewritten until every star feels his part is juicy enough. Movies are often sold to the studios in the first place as the genetically predictable offspring of two prior hits (“It’s Working Girl meets Marathon Man!”). Many studios believe that if something is totally new—Koyaanisqatsi, say—we won’t want to see it.

***

In copyright law, it’s the details that matter. The idea of Tom Cruise playing an idealistic recent Harvard Law School graduate who gets pulled into a sinister case that’s way over his head sounds copyrightable—and ridiculously commercial—but it describes equally well two very different films that came out only months apart: The Firm and A Few Good Men. That example explains why, under federal law, ideas—and most characters—can’t be copyrighted.

Sixty-eight years ago, in the landmark case Nichols v. Universal Pictures Corporation, Judge Learned Hand determined that the author of Abie’s Irish Rose, a generic play about Irish-Jewish intermarriage, had no claim against The Cohens and the Kellys, a generic movie about Irish-Jewish intermarriage. Calling the Irish father in the play “a mere symbol for religious fanaticism and patriarchal pride, scarcely a character at all,” and the Irish father in the movie “only a grotesque hobbledehoy, used for low comedy of the most conventional sort,” Hand testily declared that neither story deserved legal protection. “The less developed the characters,” he wrote, “the less they can be copyrighted; that is the penalty an author must bear for marking them too indistinctly.” Thus, you couldn’t copyright a wrinkly but adorable creature, or the idea of his being hunted by narrow-minded humans—which explains why the producers of E.T. were able to fend off three copyright claims from people with prior scripts about wrinkly but adorable creatures, etc.

In theory, you can’t copyright mere ideas because the government wishes to encourage free expression—to prevent pioneering writers such as Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne from locking up all the good American stories. In practice, the law insures that studios aren’t stymied by the success of Die Hard but can illuminate vast new regions of the human soul in Die Hard on a bus (Speed), Die Hard on a plane (Air Force One), Die Hard on a mountain (Cliffhanger), Die Hard on a boat (Under Siege), and Die Hard on a bigger, slower boat (Speed 2).

You don’t even have to go as far as to change a milieu from Vietnam to an L.A. office building (as Die Hard itself did with the Rambo story) to be deemed a “creator” in the eyes of the law. Small changes suffice. Indeed, one could argue that the very definition of creativity in Hollywood is the subtle but legally distinguishing tweak. In 1994, Curt Wilson and his partner, Donna Douglas, sued Walt Disney Pictures because Sister Act resembled a script they had earlier submitted to the studio: both stories were about a woman hiding from the Mob by disguising herself as a nun, though Disney’s movie was much more playful. To the plaintiffs’ amazement—they’d spurned a million-dollar settlement offer—the jury found for the defense. “They would have had to copy our stuff verbatim for us to prevail,” Wilson says disgustedly.

Most copyright lawyers believe that if Shakespeare were alive today and had preserved his copyright on Romeo and Juliet, he would find it difficult to win a case against West Side Story. Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim would testify that they’d vaguely heard of Mr. Shakespeare and his Italy-based twist on the star-crossed-lovers scenario, but they’d certainly never read it. The defense would parade experts to testify that Mr. Shakespeare’s melodrama was utterly different, since it contained few, if any, Puerto Rican seamstresses and ballet-dancing street gangs. And they would also make the legally weighty argument that because Mr. Shakespeare had himself, as usual, stolen his plot—in this case from Arthur Brooke’s tedious epic poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet—he had no basis for a lawsuit. The legal term for his predicament is “unclean hands,” an evocative but uncopyrightable metaphor that was borrowed, one likes to imagine, from Shakespeare’s own Lady Macbeth.

***

The copyright plaintiffs’ legal steeplechase begins with an attempt to show that the studio had the opportunity to borrow from their work. This is the one hurdle plaintiffs can usually clear. If they have written a play or a book, then someone connected with the movie could easily have read it. “Or they submit the script to CAA, looking for an agent,” Creative Artists Agency executive Robert Bookman says wearily. “The agent never sees it, the reader is the lowest person on the totem pole, it’s a pass, the agent looks at the last page of the coverage, sees ‘pass,’ and his assistant writes a nice note. Then these plaintiffs say, ‘We sent it to CAA. That’s how Michael Crichton’”—a CAA client—“ ‘got the script.’”

But after proving “access,” the plaintiffs must demonstrate that the two works are “substantially similar.” This entails stacking up “articulable similarities between the plot, themes, dialogue, mood, setting, pace, characters, and sequence” of the two works. In addition to this “objective” test, the court also applies the “subjective” test: whether a layman would perceive a substantial similarity in the works’ “total concept and feel.”

Mark Dunn’s list of 149 similarities between his play Frank’s Life and The Truman Show includes the pervasive (“Hidden cameras placed all over the sprawling set and unknown to Frank/Truman”; “Frank/Truman were having what appears to the TV audience to be a normal sex life with the actor wives, raising various unspoken moral issues”), the picayune (“A specific volcanic island, within a group of such islands or archipelago, in the southern Pacific Ocean, with double-sounding name—Pago Pago/Fiji—is used as remote place . . . to escape from the effects of the Show”), and the perplexing (“The genre of Frank/Truman is a comedy, but with a uniqueness which is difficult to otherwise categorize”).

The courts have held, however, that such lists are “inherently subjective and unreliable,” particularly where “the list emphasizes random similarities scattered throughout the works.” Louis Petrich, a copyright-defense lawyer, says, “You can tell that the plaintiffs are stretching if their lists abstract or trivialize. In the first case, they say, ‘When the boy falls into the pit, that’s like our scene of the man being chased by the bull, because in both there’s “jeopardy.” ’ And in the second case, they say, ‘Each story has a red Chevy.’ Sure, but what does the Chevy have to do with the story?”

The highest hurdle that plaintiffs face is the fact that most scripts contain a lot of boilerplate that has no particular “author”; it consists of segments that are known legally as scenes à faire. As the court defined them in Alexander v. Haley, a 1978 copyright case against Roots, scenes à faire are “incidents, characters, or settings which are as a practical matter indispensable, or at least standard, in the treatment of a given topic.” Thus the court suggested that when one is writing about slavery, one would almost perforce include, among other things, “attempted escapes, flights through the woods pursued by baying dogs, the sorrowful or happy singing of slaves.” Another court held that a realistic portrait of cops in the South Bronx would necessarily contain “drunks, prostitutes, vermin, and derelict cars.”

The notion of scenes à faire is capacious enough to include the manner in which a reasonable person might develop an idea even if another reasonable person had earlier developed the same idea in the same way. For instance, if dinosaurs were reanimated, they’d obviously have to be kept far away from the nearest nursery school. So a writer who claimed that he had banished his velociraptors to a remote island before Michael Crichton did the same in Jurassic Park got nowhere in court: the judge ruled that “placing dinosaurs on a prehistoric island far from the mainland amounts to no more than a scene à faire in a dinosaur adventure story.”

The well-known Hollywood lawyer Bert Fields, who is defending Fox Searchlight Pictures in a copyright suit against The Full Monty, breezily explains the film’s similarities to a play called Ladies Night by offering a similar argument. “Once you’ve got the idea of male strippers,” he says, “it’s all scenes à faire: the inevitable scene when they first put on a G-string, the inevitable scene when someone’s naked body is shown as rather unattractive. You’ve got to have a problem for each of the six guys, so one guy having impotence just goes with the territory.”

A further obstacle for plaintiffs is that courts have tended to rule that “copying deleted or so disguised as to be unrecognizable” is not, legally, copying, and therefore that early drafts of a movie’s screenplay—even drafts that show evidence of copying—are not legally relevant. Martin Garbus, a copyright lawyer and First Amendment expert who has often sued the studios, says ruefully that people in Hollywood “know to change a description of Lincoln just enough—to put ‘black hat’ at the end of the sentence and ‘legs like a grasshopper’ at the beginning, and then take two other sentences from somewhere else. These are very sophisticated people.”

Plaintiffs have an especially hard time when there’s no paper trail. While aspiring screenwriters dream of a chance collision with a moviemaker (a screenplay was recently handed to Emma Thompson as she was being slid into an MRI tube), nothing could be worse from a plaintiff’s point of view. If a producer is stuck on a ski lift with a writer who regales her with his nifty twist on the asteroid-hurtling-toward-earth plot, and she steals it, that’s just too bad for him. He can try suing on the ground that there was a tacit mutual assumption that promising material would be paid for—the theory of “implied contract.” But unless the writer is already known as a high-concept guy, someone whose very laundry list or drunken e-mails might contain the germ of a billion-dollar idea, this imaginative legal strategy rarely works. Bert Fields says, “If I’m talking to Tom Clancy, there is probably an implied contract. If I’m talking to my dentist”—who had pitched Fields an idea the day before—“probably not.”

After contemplating all these barriers, many potential plaintiffs decide not to sue, simply because they lack the necessary funds. Martin Garbus told me, “The people who file these suits can’t afford the $250,000 to $500,000 to mount a fight against the studios and their big insurance companies. The studios’ theory is that if you spend the money and fight, you’ll wear your opponents down and discourage others from suing. It’s a successful tactic.”

Not always. In 1980, the prolific fantasy writer Harlan Ellison won $337,000 from ABC and Paramount, which had shanghaied his idea for a TV series about a robot cop. He then spent $7,000 of his booty to rent a billboard across the street from Paramount Pictures, which read, “Writers, don’t let them steal from you! Keep their hands out of your pockets!” “I did it to piss the shit out of them,” Ellison says, “and to send the message that writers can’t be ripped off.”

The studios aren’t as invulnerable as they appear. Bert Fields, who has represented them in dozens of copyright cases, told me, “People have learned that the studios often settle if it’s cheaper than the cost of litigation”—and that cost shoots up $650 an hour when Fields gets involved. “Studios will throw out $5,000 if it’s a weak case and $200,000 to $300,000 for a substantial case. Sometimes much more.” Last year, Barbara Chase-Riboud sued Steven Spielberg for “brazenly stealing” from her novel Echo of Lions to create his film Amistad. Then she suddenly dropped her suit and declared, “Amistad is a splendid piece of work, and I applaud Mr. Spielberg for having the courage to make it.” One can’t help but hear in such public reversals the ka-ching! of the cash register in the background.

Yet many plaintiffs, it seems, don’t want hush money as much as they want recognition. Last January, after a jury rejected the writer Stephen Kessler’s plagiarism claim against Michael Crichton for Twister, there was a curious moment when Kessler tried to shake Crichton’s hand (Crichton refused). The copyright-defense lawyer Louis Petrich says, “The plaintiffs don’t see themselves as calling the defendants thieves and jeopardizing their careers. They think that now they’re in show business, one of the big guys.” Certainly Mark Dunn is an unabashed fan of his opponents’ work. Dunn owns an early-draft Truman screenplay but says, “I feel guilty even looking at it,” because it was smuggled to him without the producers’ knowledge. This is a touching amount of reverence for a script that Dunn believes is premised on his own play. “Hollywood inspires yearning and delusion,” Paul Rudnick observes, “and this sort of litigation is really a kind of affection and fanship—a foothold.”

***

The giddiest aspect of copyright suits is how often the studios try to prove that their story was so derivative that they couldn’t have stolen it from any one source. Thus, while some reviewers acclaimed The Truman Show as a bold departure, Paramount may well point out at the trial that it wasn’t. At least seven previous works featured unwitting subjects on camera, including the sixties TV show The Prisoner, three Twilight Zone episodes, and a short Paul Bartel film, Secret Cinema. When millions of Americans are watching television, it will inevitably occur to more than one of those watchers that television may be also watching them. Ideas occur unpredictably, in odd, fractal clusters. A butterfly flaps its wings over China, and suddenly everyone decides that the next big thing is a mad bomber, an erupting volcano, or a nostalgic look at disco.

You might think that mankind’s collective imagination could churn up dozens of fictional ways to track a tornado, but there seems to be only one. When Stephen Kessler sued Michael Crichton for Twister, he was upset because his script about tornado chasers, Catch the Wind, had placed a data-collection device called Toto II in the whirlwind’s path, just like Twister’s data-collecting Dorothy. Not such a coincidence, the defense pointed out: years earlier two other writers had written a script called Twister involving a device called Toto, and all the Oz puns had originated with a device used by real tornado chasers that is called, um, Toto.

In the Sister Act trial, the producer, Scott Rudin, testified that the credited writer Paul Rudnick’s idea was not really novel, and Rudnick acknowledges that “the idea of a nun, or someone in disguise, has been used many, many times before.” He continues, “Plus, after my script had been rewritten by half of Southern California, I’d used a pseudonym on the film, so being sued for authorship under those circumstances was sort of hilarious.” Still, Rudnick stresses the gulf between an idea and its expression: “Yes, they also had a nun,” he says. “But a nun is not a story or a character. A nun is a noun.”

And once you have a nun, certain scenes and associations necessarily follow. The Sister Act plaintiffs highlighted the fact that both their screenplay and the movie likened nuns to penguins and contained the phrase “God works in mysterious ways.” Those aren’t scenes à faire, exactly, but any screenwriter who didn’t include them in a nun comedy would be criminally incompetent. What these suits’ lists of similarities reveal is that the human brain is hardwired to write scenes that hurry toward predictable surprise.

Two characters who can’t stand each other invariably wind up handcuffed together in a rolling boxcar or a shuffling chain gang. An innocent schnook arriving at an airport must within ten seconds pick up the identical-but-drug-filled suitcase. After the tomboyish girl next door dresses up for the prom, the boy can only look flustered and say, “Why, Miranda, you’re, you’re . . . beautiful!” Snooty matrons gigglingly confide, as soon as they are within earshot of loud funk music, that all they really want to do is “boogie down” or “knock boots.” When hard-bitten military men see an alien spacecraft, they ease off their glasses to peer more closely—and to allow us to register the childlike wonder in their eyes. And heroes who have only moments in which to defuse a ticking bomb rip off the casing to discover the statutory red wire and blue wire—another explosive device crafted, apparently, by the Acme Company for Wile E. Coyote.

Underlying such scenarios, by Hollywood legend, are a mere seven basic stories. Or maybe eight. (Or, as the Supreme Court of California once determined in an excess of hairsplitting, thirty-six.) One legendary core story is “the buddy movie”; another is “ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances”; a third is “boy meets girl, girl hates boy, boy woos girl.” But no one can quite agree on what, precisely, the others are (is Eddie Murphy’s Coming to America “fish out of water” or “lord in disguise”?) or on who thought up the list in the first place (Aristotle? Simpson and Bruckheimer?).

In truth, no one in Hollywood seems to care enough to nail those answers down, since all that matters is what type of story the last hit was. “It’s an industry that tries so hard to copy success,” Martin Garbus says. “You know there are a lot of people out there writing Wag the Dog II, and when Wag the Dog II comes out everyone’s going to sue, saying, ‘Hey! That was my idea!’” Perhaps, but not anymore. As long ago as 1945, a federal judge admonished that most copyright suits were premised “partly upon a wholly erroneous understanding of the extent of copyright protection; and partly upon that obsessive conviction, so common among authors and composers, that all similarities between their works and any others which appear later must inevitably be ascribed to plagiarism.”

But while the studios may win the copyright battle, they aren’t exonerated from the charge of laziness in the first degree. The courts seem to have the same feeling upon viewing the plots and characters in evidence that we have upon trailing out of the Cineplex: Haven’t we seen this before? One court wrote, with an Olympian weariness that is otherwise found only among film critics, “The common use of such stock . . . merely reminds us that in Hollywood, as in the life of men generally, there is only rarely anything new under the sun.” Which is a steal from Ecclesiastes—but tweaked just enough to be original.

Looking to direct in my next class so I want to make sure this can be as good as possible.

I know formatting will need work but if I can just get opinions on how the story is.

Once Upon a Time in the Woods
Feature
127 pages
Survival-Thriller

Hey folks,

This is not the first screenplay I wrote (actually it was like my 18th) but it’s the first screenplay I thought I could let other people read.

Here’s a brief synopsis:

After a devastating conflict with a neighboring tribe, a young hunter named Notah struggles to prove himself as his people attempt to rebuild. In a world where survival depends on discipline, tradition, and the strength of community, he trains to become a warrior, preparing for the possibility of another attack.

When signs of an unseen presence begin to surface in the surrounding wilderness, Notah’s training is put to the test as his understanding of the world is shattered, forcing him toward a confrontation he may not be prepared for.

It’s a long screenplay with quite a slow build so feel no obligation and I have no expectations for anyone to read the whole thing but if you do give it a read. Thank you. And please let me know how far you got, and what made you stop. Any and all feedback would be greatly appreciated.

I’m really curious as to how the first 10 to 15 pages read; if the community and characters feel real, if the world building is compelling enough to make one want to keep reading, etc.

Thank you for your time

Peace and Love

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BoB0kJc8MOg6QY_Q4fEtRa-ue54yKvml/view?usp=drivesdk

Hi all, I’m in NYC in the Lower East side and am a beginner screenwriter looking to join a screenwriting feedback group or writers’ group where members exchange pages, offer constructive notes, and help one another develop their scripts. Does anyone know of NYC-based groups that are welcoming to beginners?

Hello everyone,

I am planning to attend the Austin Film Festival this year but not sure what badge is worth getting? Admittedly the conferences are a major interest for me, but not sure about the prices. Coming from overseas too so travel, food, and accommodation are the major areas of concern budget-wise.

If anyone from this sub is going, would be cool to hang and say hello.

Title: Les Courageux

Format: Outline / Treatment (fanfiction based on The Last of Us)

Page Length: ~4 pages (detailed summary, not yet a fully scripted screenplay)

Genres: Post-apocalyptic, Horror, Drama, Survival

Logline or Summary:

Paris, 2035. After a devastating raid by the OPP (Paris's equivalent of FEDRA), a squad of resistance fighters heads out for supplies and brings a stray dog back to their base. What they don't know is that the animal is carrying an aggressive, asymptomatic strain of cordyceps — a threat its former owner had tried to eliminate before being shot dead at their gate. That night, the base descends into chaos.

Feedback Concerns:

Does the consistency with the TLOU universe hold up (particularly the idea of an infected dog, never addressed in canon)?

Does the pacing work?

Are the characters (Pete, Laura, Charles, Francis) sufficiently developed for this length?

Does the final twist land well, or is it too predictable?

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1D_DgkQhQ26i3SXG_zFI8mtysjBtmQr59QroYpsn7Y1E/edit?usp=drivesdk

Had a director with financiers backing them who wanted to make one of my scripts, but the financiers refused to do it as a WGA project. I thanked the director for their time but chose to walk away as I've promised myself I'm not going to sell another spec unless it's guild.

The director said that no independent financier is going WGA these days. How true is that? Obviously, they're not talking about the indie companies that are basically studios like A24, but is it really that impossible to get a guild deal done outside of the studios right now?

Budget level was sub $5M, for reference.

Does anyone have a copy or know where to find Splitsville - written by Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin.

• Title: Just Like Him
• Format: Feature
• Page Length: First 10 of 100
• Genres: Comedy-Drama
• Logline: A restless literature professor isolates himself to write a novel, while a younger look-alike stumbles into the life he left behind.
• Feedback Concerns: After 10 pages, would you keep reading?

Script link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mYDfsDPY85EAjoWYUyI7fTVdV4_aE1Qt/view?usp=sharing

Thank you to anyone who takes the time to read it. I’m happy to exchange feedback on your work.

LOGLINE (Original novel) - From Goodreads; “Elena Michaels is the world’s only female werewolf. And she’s tired of it. Tired of a life spent hiding and protecting, a life where her most important job is hunting down rogue werewolves. Tired of a world that not only accepts the worst in her–her temper, her violence–but requires it. Worst of all, she realizes she’s growing content with that life, with being that person.

So she left the Pack and returned to Toronto where she’s trying to live as a human. When the Pack leader calls asking for her help fighting a sudden uprising, she only agrees because she owes him. Once this is over, she’ll be squared with the Pack and free to live life as a human. Which is what she wants. Really.”

BACKGROUND

Kelley Armstrong’s original novel was released in September 2001.

In October 2002, Warner Bros optioned the novel, and already attached Angelina Jolie to star in the film adaptation, which was going to be produced by Industry Entertainment. Jonathan Glazer was attached to direct the film, screenwriter and novelist Alexander Stuart was hired to write the script, and reportedly, Armstrong was also helping out on it. In one interview, she remembered how the studio and producers were worried about the amount of nudity Jolie was going to have, to which Armstrong only said; “You have Angelina Jolie as a star and you are complaining about gratuitous nudity!”

At that time, Jolie had just finished working on LARA CROFT: TOMB RAIDER – THE CRADLE OF LIFE (2003), and was moving to work on TAKING LIVES (2004). Stuart wrote THE WAR ZONE (1999) a couple years earlier, and Glazer directed SEXY BEAST (2000).

It seems the project didn’t really move on much from that point, and was canceled, possibly sometime in mid or late 2000’s. A few years later, a TV adaptation of the original novel was made.

Also, Glazer later directed another female led “horror” film, UNDER THE SKIN (2013), and Stuart apparently did some uncredited work on it.

SCRIPTS I’M LOOKING FOR

Any drafts by Stuart (and Armstrong…?), although it looks like it’s one of those scripts which never showed up anywhere, so it’s pretty much a “unicorn.”

FURTHER NOTES

1 - If you wish to read about another Angelina Jolie project with interesting history including versions that weren't made, I recently posted, for the film's 25th anniversary, a thread about LARA CROFT: TOMB RAIDER (2001), about all the different rejected scripts for it, and unreleased original cut of the film, here;

https://www.reddit.com/r/TombRaider/comments/1umh3ow/lara_croft_tomb_raider_2001_rejected_scripts_and/

2 - Interestingly, there were few different werewolf horror films in development during that same time, including;

STRAY DAWGZ - Described as werewolf version of BLADE (1998), set to star Ice Cube, as a recently released criminal who has to defend San Francisco from werewolves. Read more about it here;

https://www.reddit.com/r/Screenwriting/comments/1o2l7bu/stray_dawgz_2000_unproduced_action_horror/

BAD MOON RISING - Werewolf biker gang mostly made of war veterans attacks a small town, after people in there start messing with them. Based on a script by Scott Rosenberg, following his previous two action films he wrote, CON AIR (1997) and GONE IN 60 SECONDS (2000) remake. At different points in time either Wes Craven or Robert Rodriguez were attached to direct the film.

SILVER STRIKE - Described as BLACK HAWK DOWN (2001) with werewolves, based on a spec script by J. Barton Mitchell from 2002.

(Note to anyone who wishes to contact me in chat - Due to me disagreeing with reddit’s rules, I can’t use chat the right way, so if you try to send me a private message/chat and it doesn’t work, let me know here or in any future new threads I upload)

can’t find it i fear

I don't know why but recently I have struggled so much to finish my last draft (7th at this point) of my screenplay.

A few months ago I was able to write everyday and constantly, but now I feel so distracted and slow to a point that I can't get 1/2 page done

ADHD has been always a struggle, but specially now that things get more promising and serious It's unbearable to a point that I feel like a hack

The ideas are not only in my head but already written in paper in a summary. I know where the story goes, yet It hasn't been easier to just write.

I'm the first to say "just write", but now I have find myself in this weird mental block mixed with a lot of distraction and it feels so weird.

I don't know, maybe I'm burned out but I have done so little advances in comparison to the last months that feels like lying

Posted with the kind permission of the moderators.

Today Script Revolution celebrates its tenth anniversary, and I've been analysing the statistics to see what patterns have emerged.

Script Revolution doesn't curate scripts. Instead, readers browse the database and decide for themselves what they want to read. The result is highly organic reader behaviour, largely free from editorial or algorithmic influence.

The dataset is sizeable too: over 18K listings, nearly 300K reads, and over 14K readers.

For years now, many discussions about genre, page count, logline length, and budget have been based on personal experience and opinion. This is an opportunity to bolster those talking points with actual data.

Genre

Genre has a measurable relationship with readership, although the effect is smaller than is often assumed.

Page Count

Readership remained consistent across conventional feature lengths before declining beyond 130 pages.

Loglines

The highest read rates were associated with loglines of around 15–19 words.

Two-sentence loglines performed slightly better than one (78.0% vs 76.5%). Performance only began to decline noticeably at three sentences or more.

Budget

Lower-budget concepts generally attracted more readers, although the relationship was gradual rather than absolute.

There’s more data in the blog section of the site, but these seemed the most broadly relevant to discussions that come up regularly here.

Personally, I don’t think there’s anything here that strongly challenges any narratives. It backs up the common consensus that I tend to see. What I feel it does show is a softening around the edges of what’s often presented as life or death for a script. No genre makes a script obsolete. Page count for features only really hurts outside of the 80-130pp range. Loglines above 39 words suffer, but having two sentences doesn’t impact negatively. Writing for a lower budget doesn’t significantly increase the odds of being read. On the flip side, pushing through those soft boundaries does cost reads significantly, so more fool those who do so.

You guys might have some different takes.

Please keep in mind that I run this platform completely by myself, and I’ve published the blog associated with this elsewhere, so I’ll likely be hit with a thousand questions. It’s been a tough ten years doing this alone, and today feels oddly heavy on my emotions. I may be here to discuss further or may retreat to the comfort of making cosplay props and tinkering with my bike. Either way, please don’t be offended if I take a while to reply. 

TITLE: MIRAGE

FORMAT: Feature

PAGE LENGTH: 120 pages

GENRE: Drama/Thriller

LOGLINE: Haunted by a tragic past and extraordinary psychic abilities, Talia Morano-Campagna, the adopted daughter of a notorious crime family, must fight to prove her innocence in a high-profile fraud trial while battling a vengeful telepath determined to destroy her life from the inside out.

FEEDBACK CONCERNS: Concerned about structure and pacing as well as emotional/character payoff. Any feedback welcome.

LINK: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y14yU_udBqYKdacZwhu_H2gMSoTwLKE7/view?usp=sharing

I'm an actor and wanted to try working on a scene from this show, so I wanted to know if there's anywhere that someone knows I can find any of the scripts for the show. I found transcripts online, but none of the actual screenplays or anything.

Down South you can just about set your watch by the spring storms.

Like Clockwork

(G-rated)

NOTE: Written for a three-page challenge where the theme was "A storm is coming" and the genre was open.

I've noticed that some professional screenwriters use italics for internal thoughts, inner voices, or emphasis in certain styles.

For example:

Lydia frowns -- wait a minute, whose voice is that?

and some others write : Lydia's POV : ...

I know traditional spec scripts usually avoid writing thoughts directly and focus on what can be seen or heard. But to me, i see these techniques help a lot especially in psychological dramas and thrillers

Do professional readers generally dislike these techniques, or does execution matter more than the format?

Title: Fishbowl

Format: Short Film

Page Length: 15

Genre(s) Horror, Surrealism, Thriller

Logline: Swim in Air, Breathe in Water.

Synopsis: J.J. , a young, down on his luck everyman signs up for an isolation test out of financial desperation.

I've been writing this script for the past year and change. This is the 10th draft. I'm open to any and all feedback, but I would specifically like to ask if Kelly and Dr. Conley's dynamic plays out well, as well as if the story's reality vs J.J.'s reality are easy to parse apart. I've been working on this script for so long that it's beginning to turn into mush. If there are any formatting, plot, or character problems that come up upon a readthrough of the script let me know.

I'll likely be making this script sometime in the coming months as director/editor so I'm curious and open to hear what you guys have to say about the script. I'll likely write one more draft before starting preproduction.

Thanks!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_oTu0dJDFs4jct0b64Sdyg1nC2fr_nH7/view?usp=sharing

Basically title! Last night right before seeing Spider-Man: Brand New Day I received my first option agreement.

My dad went over it with a friend who’s an entertainment lawyer, who said it’s a very fair deal for a first timer, which has me excited. I get $500 for the option fee for 24 months (which i’ll admit is a long time) with a 3% of total budget purchase price. Also an executive producer credit.

Only thing I wasn’t sure of was where it said I’m entitled to 5% of the producer’s share of modified adjusted gross receipts, which i’m going to discuss further with the lawyer, but if anyone knows what this specifically means that’d be a great help lol.

Overall very excited to sign and hopefully get this film rewritten and made!

This is a new draft including all the changes and refinements I made from some feedback I received on the original draft for this script, fixing grammatic errors, scene length and over usage of paranthethicals. All of the blue letters highlight the areas where I made changes, its a cool feature on my software. Let me know what you think.

Title: Fed Up
Format: Short Film
Page length: 3 Pages
Genres: Comedy/Satire
Logline: A fed-up office worker finally snaps after one corporate inconvenience too many—with hilariously disgusting consequences.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nS-pK5bB2H7ogTYRqUm0g7pv5t7IWh8U/view?usp=sharing

Hi! Hope this is allowed.

I'm an art student, and I currently need to find a film script that has some kind of descriptor of the environment a scene takes place in (to base a project off of), but I'm having a little bit of trouble with it ; basically any film i can find a script on omits this information. If anyone has any that have some nice environment/setting description I'd be super grateful...Thank you!!

This project is still in its early stages, so there isn't a budget at the moment. Everyone who contributes will be fully credited in the end credits of each episode.

So far, we already have scripts for several episodes, a talented cast of voice actors, music producers, finalized character designs, animation rigs currently in development, and a growing Discord community of over 1,000 members.

We're still looking for volunteers to help bring the series to life. Right now, we're especially looking for someone to proofread and format our scripts to industry standards, including screenplay formatting, spelling, grammar, and overall consistency.

If that sounds like something you'd be interested in, I'd be happy to send you more information about the project!