Genre: Romantic Comedy
Logline: A Paparazzi reporter posts a “sensitive” video of her ex-boyfriend, a professional mixed martial artist, days before the biggest fight of his life.
I wrote this script in one week for round 1 of the NYC Midnight Screenwriters Challenge (2011). The writers in my heat had to write a romantic comedy short featuring a professional athlete and the Internet.
I’m more of a genre guy. Give me sci-fi. Give me horror. I’m starting to suspect that NYC Midnight keeps throwing RomCom at me to give me a first person perspective of what it’s like to be in a horror film, to be unable to escape the one thing that scares you the most.
On the other hand, I did well with one of my previous RomCom subs (Nobody’s Perfect), so I put my fear aside and started writing. It turns out that the genre wasn’t my true enemy. Time itself had taken up arms against me.
I’m married. I have three beautiful, brilliant, ACTIVE children. I also recently changed jobs, taking a leadership position with an information security consulting company. Finding (making) the time to write this time around was much, MUCH harder.
But I’ve always had a hard time giving up.
I busted ass to get the script done, fifteen pages of RomCom sweetness, and I applied the finishing touches with two hours to spare. After I uploaded my script, I noticed that NYC Midnight had changed the rules. No fifteen page scripts this time around. Twelve pages, max. Anything over twelve pages was essentially dead in the water.
DAMMIT!
Two hours to cut three pages from a fifteen page script. For the other math geeks in the audience, that’s meant cutting 20% of a script that I struggled to get down to fifteen pages.
My initial reaction was to call it a night. The cards were stacked against me this time, and maybe it was best to just cut my losses and get a decent night’s sleep.
But I was lying to myself. I couldn’t just walk away, not with two hours left to play with.
So I cut, and I cut, and I cut. I got it down to twelve pages (on the button) and uploaded my revised script with a few minutes left.
It moves a little too quickly for me, but I have a hard time thinking of RomCom scripts as anything less than condensed features. No matter. It’s in the judges’ hands now, and I’ve got another script under my belt.
If you’d like to give Head Games a read, you can check it out below.
Download screenplay: Head Games
