Top 50 Features - 2023 JumpStart Writing Competition

Script Title

Writer(s)

Logline

AN ORPHAN'S PLAYLIST

Stephen Barber

When an adopted daughter loses the only parent she's known, she must do something unimaginable to shut the door on her lifelong shame and self-harming ways. She must change her habits once it's learned that she has more in common than not with the one person she hates.

AND HERE I GO 

Claire Utley

When a gig economy go-it-alone writer in LA is forced to move, she ends up relying on a coworker she barely knows.

BABY POOTY AND THE BEAR

Brian Tuttle

When Vladimir Putin's backup, backup, backup body double stationed in a remote farming town is finally called into action, Baby Pooty must take on politicians, assassins, and conniving hotel managers in order to make it out of the hinterlands alive.

BIOGRAPHY OF THE BONES

Stella Ruggiero & Heidi Dugan

After moving in with his dad, a down-and-out white man finds human remains buried under the family porch and becomes entwined in a mystery that’s haunted a troubled Black man for years.

BLACK DRAGON

Roy Hsu

After her Japanese-American lover is sent to the Internment camps during WWII, a half-Japanese woman passing as white joins a resistance in Seattle, covertly communicating with him to collect evidence of government corruption at the camps to bolster ACLU court cases to shut them down.

BLUE WINTER

Madison Sean Flannery

Upon learning of her estranged sister's disappearance, a woman struggling with mental illness journeys to her brother-in-law's remote mansion where she battles demons both real and imagined to uncover the truth.

BRIDE OR DIE

Anita Brandt Burgoyne

When a rogue wave slams into a cruise ship and a bachelorette posse is swept overboard, the five women miraculously wash up on a deserted tropical island, but then must figure out how to survive—life, and each other—and ultimately, how to rescue themselves.

BROKEN FIELD

John Washburn

After a hazing incident in rural Montana goes too far, a high school football coach and the quarterback’s girlfriend each must make difficult choices that could tear their town apart.

DAD ASSES

Michael Harris

Falling Down meets Dude, Where’s my Car? Over 24 hours, a recently divorced accountant loses his job, his Jeep, and accidentally, traffics Heroin. His only escape? Become a Beige Pants Bad Ass--aka a Dad Ass.

DAUNTLESS

Barry Leach

In WWII Britain, an evacuee escapes her abusive foster home and teams up with a fugitive to find her brother. However, her abuser pursues them to silence her and retrieve the incriminating camera film she took from him.

EPIC MELTDOWN

Andrea Lwin & Debbie Chesebro

Holidays… Family…. Dysfunction…… Christmas tree electrocution. Just the tip of the iceberg for second-generation siblings Wei, Dustin, and Brennan, as they reluctantly reunite to help pack and move their aging Chinese mother into a retirement community while (not) dealing with their own tumultuous personal lives, and hopefully not destroying the family.

FAKE-A-WISH

Colton Childs

Despite their forty-year age gap, and the cancer treatment confining them to their small Texas town, two gay men embark on a road trip to San Francisco to grant themselves the Make-A-Wish they're too old to receive.

FIELD DAY

Mackenzie Rohan

After being publicly cheated on, a lovable loser decides to transform her uncoordinated musical theater classmates into sports superstars in order to win their art high school’s most athletic competition of the year, Field Day.

FIGURE 8

Kendra Louka

After her newborn is taken by an alcoholic woman out for revenge, a diffident mother must maintain her own sobriety and face painful memories to find her baby before it’s too late.

FLYING BLIND

Scott Billings

When the pilots on a private jet suddenly drop dead, a hapless assistant DA has to overcome his paralyzing fear of flying to save himself and a government whistleblower he’s escorting to New York.

FORGET ME NOT 

Christine Shin

A precocious seven-year-old Korean immigrant girl grapples with her mother's Early-Onset Alzheimer's Disease while struggling to adjust to a new life in America.

GRITTY

Gregory Wakeman

Desperate to increase their popularity, the Philadelphia Flyers hire a scientist to create a sentient mascot Gritty. But when the creature starts to wreak havoc, they must decide whether to alter his personality or just let Gritty be Gritty. Think, Frankenstein and Paddington meets Rocky.

HI, LIBIDO

Farook Qais

On her journey into adulthood, a devout Muslim woman navigates the delicate balance between her family's expectations, sexual fulfillment, and the idea of marrying for love.

I GOT YOU, BABE

Tamra Teig & Timoteo Camponeschi

A downtrodden musician must choose between turning drag queen to save his mom from nursing home eviction, or being his authentic straight self to win the woman he loves.

I, BROWNIE!

Stanislav Rubakhin

A disobedient boy, who made friends with a cunning house creature called Brownie and swapped bodies with him, must change back before the next new moon to avoid becoming a Brownie forever.

ICE CREAM DON'T MELT IN ENGLEWOOD

Richard Ehrenreich

When a prominent African-American businessman witnesses a police-involved shooting, powerful people attempt to bribe him to corroborate the police department’s version of events. 

IZETTA

Tamara Steren

In 1917, after using her husband’s political connections to further her suffrage agenda, a renowned stage actress and the National Woman’s Party are unlawfully incarcerated, tortured, beaten and force-fed, as they fight to win women’s right to vote.

KEEPER

R.L. Hooker

Two teenage girls innocently take a tour of an abandoned juvenile penitentiary; but when the caretaker lures them into the basement vault, they unknowingly become pawns in a twenty-year old unsolved mystery. Inspired by true events. 

MAGNET SCHOOL

Reuben Guberek

An ambitious high school senior runs for student council vice president to pad his college resume, but his people-pleasing tendencies could make him lose his best friend forever.

MALCOLM & MAY

Marcus Crawford Guy

Malcolm is tortured knowing that he may never serve King and Country and become a village hero, so when a sharp-tongued dreamer, dares him to take her to see the Eiffel Tower, Malcolm spies his chance to impress. But the foolish decision to take his brother’s uniform leads Malcolm into a lie of stolen valor, forcing him to reckon with the fact that men can fall from grace without being soldiers or heroes. Such a fall might just be what Malcolm needs in order to break the curse of being an obedient family man.

MAMINKA

Natalka Burian

With the help of a mail order bride scheme, a U.S-obsessed mother-daughter duo flee their cracked-in-half country for all of the promises America has to offer. Think Eastern European Gilmore Girls if Lorelei was a mail order bride.

MY MAINE MAN CHRISTMAS

Dan Loschack

A sprained ankle forces a single mother to hire an irritating co-worker to drive her and her seven year old daughter home to Maine for Christmas where the magic of the holdiay creates an unexpeted scenario.

NOBODY'S HEROES

Michael Elliott

A disillusioned Vietnam combat vet defies the FBI to help a notorious antiwar activist escape to Canada.

POD 6

Kevin M. Jones

When her father is critically injured during a deep-water expedition in the Farallon Trench, a young geophysicist is forced to travel to the bottom of the ocean in order to save him. In doing so, she discovers a conspiracy that could ruin the world.

POLLY

Ryan Jackson

A married couple explores the thrill of being in a throuple until they realize their girlfriend is a homicidal psychopath.

PRESS JUNKET HEIST

Chris Logan

When a zealous publicist is blackmailed during the most important press junket of his career -- a heist movie starring a reclusive A-lister -- he must pull off a heist of his own to save his job. It's a heist movie...set during a press junket...promoting a heist movie.

RK-182

B. Isabella Bodnar

When a 16 year-old humanoid robot finally “comes out" and begins to navigate his high school life as his authentic self, he's immediately faced with an existential crisis after a man-made kill code causes robots to commit terrorist acts around the globe.

ROCKPAW

Nora Delyra

Sixteen year old Noah Rockford, a southpaw and top MLB pitching prospect, has his life uprooted after the tragic death of his mother at the hands of his abusive father, and must battle through the tragedy to find his way back to the game he was born to play.

SAIGON DOLL 

In the final chaotic hours of the US exodus from Saigon, a grieving Marine struggles against enemy soldiers — some of whom share his uniform — in order to shepherd an orphaned 8-year-old Vietnamese girl to the American embassy.

SIBERIA

Jeff Hindenach

A US spy disarming nuclear warheads in the wilderness of Siberia has his life of solitude upended when he finds love within a welcoming Russian family. 

SINK

Kyle Jutkiewicz & Alexander Seltzer 

A closed-off young woman returns home to the remote Canadian Oil Sands to bury her estranged father, but when his bitter legacy resurfaces as an ancient evil that feeds on trauma, she must finally confront her past… or drown in it.

SKINDIGO

Matthew Kunkel

A grieving local sheriff investigates a strange missing persons case, which leads him into the Utah mountains only to uncover shape-shifting creatures and an alien conspiracy to abduct children en masse.

SNATCHING ST. NICK

Meemee Taylor

When one of his classmates bets there’s no way Cooper will get the super-hot Christmas toy given solely to those on Santa’s Nice List, a desperate Cooper has only one option to win the bet: kidnap Santa and hold him for ransom! COMPS: HOME ALONE meets THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS with a touch of ARTEMIS FOWL.

SPRINGTIME FOR MASHINSKY

Joshua Jashinski

After the death of his Holocaust-survivor father, a young man with Nazi-centric neuroses struggles to come to terms with having a German girlfriend whose grandfather he believes is an at-large Third-Reich war criminal.

SUPERLAME

Darren Moran

A middle-aged slacker desperate for respect takes a formula that gives him special powers, which he must use to save his hypercritical father from a Canadian supervillain. The only problem? The powers suck.

THE ESCAPIST 

Rudi O'Meara

In a bid to survive WWII without firing a shot, a naive, young, jazz-obsessed musician joins the Musikkorps Leibstandarte-SS (Hitler's personal orchestra) and soon finds himself thrust into some of the fiercest fighting of the war.

THE GARDEN

Nathan Patton

When humanity becomes immune to death, a frantic mother must traverse a dangerous and unstable country to find a mysterious medical facility before her diabetic daughter slips into a permanent coma.

THE INHERITANCE

Doug Dilg

A young heir to a fortune, framed for murder, flees the country and enters a world of double identities and dual motives under the control of the very people who framed him. 

TRAGIC BEAUTY

Jace Serrano

The story of Donyale Luna, who before tragically succumbing to heroin addiction, rose to the height of fame as the world’s first Black supermodel.

TRANSFERENCE

Johnny Gilligan

A non-confrontational neuroscientist wakes up in the body of a murderer and fights to stop her US military owners from weaponizing her. Think EX-MACHINA meets THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT.

TWO KGS OF MARMALADE

Megan Mazer

In German occupied Poland, following the erection of the Warsaw Ghetto, a Polish youth establishes the Jewish Fighting Organization with his brother and their friends to resist the Nazi rule. 

WILDING

Denise Papas Meechan & Victoria Augustine

Three toddlers are found slaughtered at the same time wolves are rewilded into the Scottish Highlands, leaving the three moms to deal with their grief differently– one declares war on the wolves; one’s convinced it’s the curse of the supernatural Wulver; and one must overcome her discontent with life in order to unearth the unbelievable, harrowing truth. 

WITCH HUNT

Valerie Burnham

In the 1980s, a decorated Naval officer falsely accused of a "sexual deviant" act faces a relentless investigator, a homophobic captain, and a prejudiced culture, as she fights to prove her innocence and avoid imprisonment in a society where homosexuality is criminalized.

WRIGHTSBOROUGH

Mahonri Stewart

A Quaker family is divided during the Revolutionary War in Georgia as their ideals of pacifism and abolitionism bring them in direct conflict with their slaveholding neighbors.