June 22, 2021

Good morning! Waking up at 6:30am in order to get into the office on time is going to be a challenge. Waking up at 7:30 this morning was a struggle for me.  But what fun would life be without challenges? No fun. Is what. 

I got some feedback from the Slamdance script competition. They send their feedback far ahead of the actual competition results, which is kind of nice. Here's what I got for my screenplays: 

TITLE OF SCREENPLAY: Hell House

GENRE: Horror

LOGLINE: When a strict evangelical Christian woman's marriage falls apart, she takes it upon herself to protect her sheltered daughter's virtue while forcing her to commit acts of arson.

SHORT FEEDBACK: This is a vividly drawn mother-daughter story with themes reminiscent of "Carrie" and "Saint Maud". The dialogue is sharp and the characters are clear and compelling. One opportunity for clarity is in the marriage and events leading up to Teresa killing her husband. It's not told to us until later in the script that Sean is the influence behind Teresa's strict religiosity. A stifled marriage and divorce request causes the "car accident" very abruptly on a narrative and character level, but that can be rectified by the escalation of Teresa witnessing Sean disregarding his own religious beliefs over time.

And...

TITLE OF SCREENPLAY: Breaking Up Is Easy

GENRE: Black Comedy

LOGLINE: A woman decides the nightmare dinner party she is trapped at is the perfect place to get her boyfriend back, dead bodies be damned.

SHORT FEEDBACK: The script was a fun read with some great black humor and quick, snappy writing. However, the story doesn’t really get going until about halfway through and the final act feels rushed. As fun as it was to read, I’d recommend cutting down some of the character/dinner party set up you’ve written in the first half and have the group discover Helen’s body earlier in the script (perhaps Henry could show up earlier as well) so that you can further flesh out the drama. You might do this by having Addie slowly take down more characters in her quest to get Adam alone/get him back or by having Henry slowly torture the group as he hunts for Helen’s killer (either of these options could also make the script read more as a horror movie; right now, it reads as a black comedy). You could even have them team up, each seeing the chance to get what they want by working with the other person. Also, be careful to stick to the rules you’ve set for yourself regarding the sleeping pills. If they knock out Helen and Uncle Roy right away, they should also knock out whoever drinks them in the tiki drink right away, too, and if they kill (or at least appear to kill) Helen because she was given a dosage too high for her body weight, than whoever drinks the tiki drink should also be killed (or seemingly killed) for the same reason since Henry appears to be a much bigger guy than the rest of the group and the dosage was supposed to be to take him out.

I appreciate that they write their own loglines for my thing. I've submitted these to a bunch of places, so I'd like to collect all their loglines and see if I want to update the ones I gave them. (Oof, what a sentence.) This is the first time I've submitted to Slamdance, and based on their short feedback I'd say they have decent readers, which is great. 

I'm supposed to be learning HTML to be better at managing the Teitell Lab website. Maybe I can play around with it on here! This is a website, and I can change it over to HTML view. Time to make this shit look weird! (That could be fun.) 

TVlog Time! 

BROOKLYN NINE-NINE

Season 1, Episode 1 – “Pilot” 

Written by: Dan Goor & Michael Schur

Directed by: Phil Lord & Christopher Miller 

Watched: 6/21/21

We meet the team: Jake Peralta, a talented but childish detective, and his partner Amy Santiago who takes her job very seriously and wants to climb the ranks. Santiago is also competitive and wants to prove that she belongs in a man’s world. There are detectives Rosa Diaz who’s tough, quiet, and kind of scary and Charles Boyle who’s hard-working, sweet, and clumsy. The civilian administrator is sarcastic and, while not mean, also not very nice. We learn all this from the perspective of Sergeant Jeffords who’s suffering from some PTSD and just wants a safe desk job. He’s informing the new captain, Raymond Holt. Who’s deadpan and a hard-ass because he’s the first openly gay captain and his captain-hood has been long delayed. He wants to make his team great. The team is trying to solve a murder involving the theft of a very expensive ham. Jake gets put on duty in records because he refuses to wear a tie, but he finds a clue in records. The team converges on the perp in a storage facility. Jake gets a gun pulled on him, but his team has his back. He sees Holt’s point of view, and the team gets their guy. 

We learn a lot of ongoing dynamics in this pilot. Conflict between Jake and Amy – they’re in a competition for who can get the most arrests. If Jake wins, Amy has to go on a date with him. Charles is trying to ask Rosa out, but he’s also scared of her. We get the impression that there’s going to be a case of the week, but whatever the case is isn’t going to matter really at all. It’ll just be the set dressing for the characters’ conflicts with one another. I loved the ending. The show has eschewed the drama and excitement of the police procedural up until that point, but at the very end, Amy takes the bad guy out at the knees with her baton. And it’s genuinely badass. The writers saved it for the right moment. Textbook. 

Rating: ★★★★★