MONUMENTAL FAVOUR
With time running out, a frantic businessman relies on a cab driver to reach the airport before his flight takes off.

A trip to the airport is always good grist for the story mill. Everything must be organized to military precision, from waking up to your alarm on time to organizing forgotten – or God forbid, lost passports – to making sure your baggage won’t tip the scales, to ticket confirmation and check-in. The crucial and all-important thing above all else however, is – getting to the airport on time. One false move, one hiccup or delay in proceedings could leave you stranded on the tarmac with nowhere to go and a hole burning in your pocket.

Colin Sharp’s, Monumental Favour opens on veteran taxi driver, Samir, waiting patiently for his delayed fare, Jim Denton, a Boston businessman desperate to make his interstate flight on time.

We get the feeling things usually run smoothly for Jim, but this morning is a whole different story. What is it with printers jamming just when you need them to spit out that all important document? – In this case Jim’s itinerary and ticket details.

After bundling his bags into the boot Jim relays his sorry start to the day to Samir and they finally set off – the problem is that printer malfunction has added a crucial fifteen minutes to the journey and Jim’s justifiably freaking out.

JIM
I’ve got a very important meeting.
A very important opportunity…

Sounds like it could be the opportunity of a lifetime…

Samir, ever the consummate driver offers Jim just the right amount of soothing consolation and vows that he will do everything in his power to get Jim to the airport on time.

The taxi weaves through steady traffic, that is until they hit the inevitable roadblock of early-morning commuters and one very pesky revolving red light.

In an effort to calm his passenger Samir regales Jim with a story about how he and his wife visited a tarot card reader over the weekend –

Jim’s expression tightens, signaling he’s not in the mood for the story – his focus fixed on the traffic ahead.

Samir admits he finds it all a bit fake too, but he continues with the tale regardless.

SAMIR
… Interestingly, this Tarot reader declared I would
do somebody a monumental favour in the coming week.

Jim suddenly sits up and takes notice.

 JIM
Get me to the airport in fifteen minutes and my God,
you’ll be doing me a monumental favour.

Famous last words unfortunately because things are about to go from bad to worse. As they barrel through the next amber light the car’s mechanical warning indicator comes on – monumental failure seems to be the more operative phrase at this point. The car’s gearbox has given up the ghost leaving Samir and Jim stranded. With a backup ride twenty minutes away, it doesn’t look like Jim will be going anywhere other than back home again.

Seems like even with the best laid plans, fate has intervened.

And that’s that.

End of story.

Except this isn’t the end of the story.

And we’re about to find out this is no ordinary day.

Colin Sharp has created a very clever narrative with Monumental Favour. At first it might appear that there’s not a lot happening in this slice of life story, dare I say some readers might find it a little pedestrian, but buckle your seatbelts and settle in for the ride, cause you’re about to discover this story has a twist in its tale guaranteed to touch even the most hardened of hearts. It hit me hard. As I’m sure it will you.

Do you want to kick-start your filmmaking career? Monumental Favour could be the perfect vehicle to get you off the starting blocks.

Read: Monumental Favour.

About the Writer: Colin Sharp  is an aspiring screenwriter whose lifelong love of film led him on to the road to writing his own stories. Whilst a fan of all genres of film, Colin primarily enjoys writing comedic tales but is also a sucker for romance and anything that will scare the bejesus out of him.

About the Reviewer: L. Chambers has been writing all her life – especially in her head, and on scraps of paper. It’s only in the last few years she began to get serious about screen-writing. Prior to this she worked in the Features Department for ABC TV as a Program Assistant, and trained as a FAD. She currently works as a freelance web-content editor and lives with her husband (also a screenwriter) in Sydney, Australia.

Congratulations to Paul Knauer – Writers’ Choice with Rocky Mountain High by Paul Knauer (pkcardinal) writing as M. Boulder
A man meets a boyhood idol after he leaves a family gathering to get high. (Short, Drama) pdf format

Talk about it on the Discussion Board

Read all of the scripts of the December One Week Challenge!

We have a logline.  We think.  At least a first draft of one.

Loglines are a pain in the ass to write. I’ll be the first to admit that, and some of the best writers I know stink I writing them.  Loglines require you to be concise and to basically come up with an overview to your entire movie usually in a single sentence.  But they are helpful to quickly explain to someone the essence of your movie.  If they get bored with that simple explanation, or don’t understand it, then it’s a pretty good sign you’d better go back to the drawing board.  Here’s a quick article on writing a good logline that might be worth reading: How to Write the Perfect Logline

For “Lake Regret,” we wanted to convey the sadly ironic situation that our protagonist found himself in, and create empathy for what he was going through so that you would pull for him from beginning to end.

I’m going to leave the logline here for you to read, and ask yourself whether you would want to read this script.  If so, why?  If not, what is it that doesn’t appeal to you?  This is the sixth or seventh draft of the logline, and we’re willing to write seven or eight more, but your feedback can help us refine it further.

LOGLINE – LAKE REGRET
A high school senior who accidentally caused the death of a popular student tries to deal with the emotional fall out at a lake house graduation party, and at the same time cut ties with the small town he desperately wants to leave behind.

In our next post, we’ll start pulling back some more of the curtain about developing the storyline, and how a couple of guys who collaborate so well still can get into disagreements over the tone and direction of the script.

Bookmark this site and keep reading!  Hope to hear from you!

_______________

The further adventures of the screenwriting and marketing process of Lake Regret wherein Gary Howell documents his and Rick Hansberry’s screenwriting adventures from concept, to the writing, to how they handle disagreements, to marketing the script. Reproduced with permission

WRITER’S NOTE: Rick and I are are struggling with the outline we started with on “Lake Regret”, and while we try to come up with another project, we are providing you with insight on our script “According to Plan” and how we went from concept to getting the project optioned, and the craziness that ensued afterwards.

My apologies for not posting here recently.  It’s been a crazy last couple of weeks where I’ve been approached about my pilot script “Bounty” — we’ll see where it goes but the conversations have definitely been interesting.

In our last post, we talked about how it took us 78 days to finish the 98 page script, but that couldn’t be the end of it.  We had to go back and edit the first draft, which is never going to be your best work, if you’re being honest about it (some of you even refer to that first draft as a “vomit draft”).  Now, you may remember that I said I would write a couple of pages and then Rick would edit and and send me back additional pages, and we went back and forth that way until we finished that first draft.  Now while we were editing along the way, it wasn’t the full-blown editing you’re probably used to.   We were just looking for misspellings, continuation issues, and so on.  The full re-write was still in front of us.

In addition to taking a critical eye to the writing, we were taking a look at some of the actual setup for the script.  Here’s an example:  This is a script that deals with early onset dementia and having a grandfather convince his grandson and one of his friends to drive him from St. Louis to New Orleans to recover a treasure he claims to have left there.  Now I originally imagined the family as being African-American.  This was an indie film and the black community is pretty underserved when it comes to that film segment.  Rick was against that idea, for a couple of reasons.  First, neither of us have the world view of what it is like to be African-American and we didn’t feel like we could adequately portray dialogue, lifestyles, customs, etc.  Second, if we made the characters non-race specific, it would open it up to more producers, who could choose how they wanted to approach it.

Another thing that we had to do was a make a change to a significant plot point.  The grandfather was originally going to be in an assisted living facility and the grandson and his friend were going to break him out of the facility and drive him to New Orleans.  The problems with that, we decided, were two-fold.  Breaking him out would immediately have legal authorities looking out for them, which might make it a bit interesting, but not make it very realistic.  Second, the grandfather only has early onset dementia, not full-scale Alzheimer’s (which would render him incapable of making any sort of coherent communication), and because of that he would likely not be in an assisted living facility.

So what to do in that case?  We reworked the plot so that the grandfather was at home, but there were instances that made it clear that he had some problems, such as wandering away from home, talking about a treasure that may or may not exist, and so on.  For a screenwriter, this is, I think, the most important job the writer has, which is finding the little inconsistencies and problems that your script has.   When you’re writing on your own I think finding those little problem areas are very difficult at times because a lot of writers have tunnel vision or they block out what might be a bad plot point or just plain bad writing because they are determined to wedge a plot point into their script.  If you’re not writing with someone, then at least find people to read your script after it’s done and give you an honest assessment of the writing.  And here’s something I’ve always done — I’ve always asked writers that are better than me to review my scripts and give me honest feedback.  SimplyScripts is one of those places where you can post your script and get those types of reviews.

So the second rewrite took us another three weeks, and when that rewrite was done, I still don’t think we were satisfied.  We took another swipe at it and finished that editing process in a couple of weeks.  Again, why would we do this?  Why wouldn’t we?  We wanted our script to be at its absolute best, and just taking the first draft was never going to cut it.

We’d finished the draft.  What now?  We’ll get into what we did with the script after we finished it in our next post.

The further adventures of the screenwriting and marketing process of Lake Regret wherein Gary Howell documents his and Rick Hansberry’s screenwriting adventures from concept, to the writing, to how they handle disagreements, to marketing the script. Reproduced with permission